"Goodtime" Jesus and Other Sort-of Prose Poems.

I suspect the reason I can't remember my first encounter with the prose poem has a great deal to do with the fact that when I came of age as a poet, my teachers didn't think of the prose poem as exotic or strange or even particularly sexy. Interestingly, I can remember the first time I read James Tate's "Goodtime Jesus," a prose poem that appears in his book Riven Doggeries, published in 1979, when I was nineteen:

   Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been
   dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A
   nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back,
   skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful
   day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride
   on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

Like a lot of undergraduates of my generation, being assigned Tate in a poetry workshop was a rite of passage and a wake-up call, a little like hearing "London Calling" (which was also released in 1979) for the first time. Tate was funny and strange and maybe even a little dangerous; the fact that he often wrote prose poems seemed incidental. In all honesty it still does. I often can't discern a specific or verifiable difference between Tate's poems in lines and those in prose. (This is especially true recently, when his work seems written for the most part in lined blocks.) I don't doubt that Tate has very good reasons for writing some poems in lines, some in prose, but I can't imagine they'd matter much to the reader.

This leads me to a scandalous assertion (not really, but let's make believe something is really at stake here): I'm not sure it matters all that much whether some poems are lined or not. This isn't to say that free verse poetry lacks rhythmic integrity and/or music, that its relation to the line is random or convenient; for tired arguments on the essential slackness of a free verse line, one should consult The New Criterion. In fact, I'm arguing the opposite. It seems to me that many, many prose poems read like lined verse with the breaks removed. This is true of Baudelaire (in many translations), Rilke, Neruda, Simic and any number of wonderfully fluent poets who move back and forth from line breaks to margins. Each of these poets has a sensibility that is recognizable from across the room. Each has a way of inhabiting language that no amount of density is going to mask. When these poets banish the line break, the language retains its essential poetry; in other words, the character of the image and the coordination of phrases (the musical interaction of syntactical units) remain in effect regardless of the poem's "look." Here is "Pocket Theatre" from Simic's book A Wedding in Hell, a collection that mixes poetry in prose and poetry in lines:

   Fingers in an overcoat pocket. Fingers sticking out of a black
   leather glove. The nails chewed raw. One play is called "Thieves'
   Market," another "Night in a Dime Museum." The fingers when they
   strip are like bewitching nude bathers or the fake wooden limbs in
   a cripple factory. No one ever sees the play: you put your hand in
   somebody else's pocket on the street and feel the action.

The language retains the plain-spoken matter-of-factness that most Simic poems feature, and the poem emphasizes the softly surreal imagery that has always made him such an original. But when I compare it to a lined poem from the same book, I'm not sure I hear a different enactment of sound or rhythm. Here, for instance, is the first stanza of "The Clocks of the Dead":

   One night I went to keep the clock company.
   It had a loud tick after midnight
   As if it were uncommonly afraid.
   It's like whistling past the graveyard,
   I explained.
   In any case, I told him I understood.

To clarify this a bit (at the risk of running the ship right up the cul-de-sac), let's return to Tate. What makes his poetry distinctive has more to do with the way he occupies space and time than it does with lineation. His prose poems assert a postmodern relationship to everyday life (without acceding to the existence of anything remotely or theoretically postmodern) in exactly the same way his lined poems do. "Goodtime Jesus" presumes a world in which a historical figure famous for riding a donkey and privileging love (at his own expense) is as prone to ghoulish nightmares as the rest of us, and requires the same sort of caffeinated jolt in the morning as we all do, regardless of whether or not such a beverage even existed during his historical epoch. Tate's poems have always anachronistically and surrealistically leveled high and low culture, not so much to critique either but to embrace a larger sense of reality, one that acknowledges the complex intersection of conscious and unconscious states, the real and the imagined. Tate's postmodernism is a lifestyle, not a theory. And for him, prose seems an opportunity to do something different with the shape of the vessel that holds the language, not so much with the texture of the language itself. Tate is interested in how we as readers encounter phrases, and how our expectations are undermined and exploited by extending the horizontal momentum of the language while suspending the vertical. But that's just Tate. And that's why reading "Goodtime Jesus" for the first time in 1979 didn't register as anything more remarkable than reading another cool James Tate poem, though it was, in all likelihood, the first, or one of the first, prose poems I ever read (which says something about my undergraduate education: Baudelaire who?).

Still, other poets take advantage of the prose poem to radically change their use of language. As Robert Hass has suggested, the tonal qualities of a sentence are very different from those of a line or phrase; and perhaps the sentence allows us as poets to remain a bit more outside of or external to the language we're using; we're not constantly being seduced by the complexifying nature of line breaks, the way they create their own meaning, their own elegance and/or ugliness. In an interview that appeared in Iowa Review, Hass comments, "I unconsciously started writing prose to avoid the stricter demands of incantation." In other words, there were some things going on in his life that he wanted to avoid in his work; incantation would have led him straight to these things.

And thank goodness he decided to avoid lyric disclosure for a while. After all, most of us do remember encountering Human Wishes, that godsend of a book that did more for prose poetry than any collection in recent memory. I'm mindful of the many prose poetry aficionados who find Human Wishes somewhat blasphemous, since Hass quite assertively rejects a certain model of the prose poem, what he calls "a kind of wacky surrealist work," which was, in fact, the version of the form that had come to dominate American prose poetry in the seventies and eighties. (See Russell Edson and his crew--Benedikt, Tate, Knott, Simic, and the rest, each of them wonderful in his own way.) Hass is one poet who quite clearly uses language differently in prose poems, and has discussed at length the distinctions between story and song, why we need them both and how they require very different things from us as poets. He enacts these differences vividly in his poem "My Mother's Nipples" from Sun Under Wood. The poem moves tensely between psychologically fraught passages of prose recollection and more descriptive and incantatory stanzas that seem interested primarily in transformation and connection (not so much in recording memory as in finding a place for it in the world). In the following passage, he addresses and enacts this notion of what "song" provides and how crucial a role the poet (in the Emersonian sense--the remembrancer) plays in a culture lacking in this sort of music. He then shifts into a plainspoken voice (in prose) that focuses on recollection:

   What we've never had is a song
   and what we've really had is a song.
   Sweet smell of timothy in the meadow.
   Clouds massing east above the ridge in a sky
   as blue as mountain lakes,
   so there are places on this earth clear all the way up
   and all the way down
   and in between a various blossoming,
   the many seed shapes of the many things
   finding their way into flower or not,
   that the wind scatters.

   There are all kinds of emptiness and fullness
   that sing and do not sing.

   I said: you are her singing.

   I came home from school and she was gone. I don't know what
   instinct sent me to the park. I suppose it was the only place I
   could think of where someone might hide: she had passed out under
   an orange tree, curled up. Her face, flushed, eyelids swollen, was
   a ruin.

   Though I needed urgently to know whatever was in it, I
   could hardly bear to look. When I couldn't wake her, I decided to
   sit with her until she woke up. I must have been ten years old: I
   suppose I wanted for us to look like a son and a mother who had
   been picnicking, like a mother who had fallen asleep in the warm
   light and scent of orange blossoms and a boy who was sitting beside
   her daydreaming, not thinking about anything in particular.

Clearly the effort to create distance from the painful memories via prose only serves to underscore the need to limit the emotional toll such memories exact; so much for the less exacting demands of prose. But it's not just the sonic and song-like qualities of lyric poetry that are allowed to recede a bit into the background in the prose poems of poets like Hass and his contemporary James McMichael (and, a generation before, James Wright and Richard Hugo). The character of the image is clearly different; there is far less resonance, less investment in the silence surrounding concrete details. When I read Hass's prose poems I think of the way Tomas Transtromer made the transition from deep imagery to a more discursive (and powerful) poetic vernacular, how he began in the early seventies to experiment with prose poems that, at first, retained their gorgeously strange and transforming metaphorical images but allowed more room for talk, more of his coy, conversational idiom. Then, slowly, the poems stretched out and moved toward naturalism. Here is his poem "The Cuckoo" in its entirety:

   A cuckoo sat hoo-hooing in the birch just north of the house. It
   was so loud that at first I thought it was an opera singer
   imitating a cuckoo. I looked at the bird in surprise. Its tail
   feathers moved up and down to each note like a pump handle. The
   bird was bouncing on both feet, turning round, and screaming toward
   every point of the compass. Then it took off, muttering, flew over
   the house away to the west ... Summer is growing old and everything
   is flowing into a single melancholy murmur. Cuculus canorus will
   return to the tropics. Its time in Sweden is over. Its time here
   was not long! In fact the cuckoo is a citizen of Zaire ... I am no
   longer so fond of making journeys. But the journey visits me. Now
   when I am more and more pushed into a corner, when the annual
   growth rings multiply, when I need reading glasses. Always there is
   much more happening than we can bear. There is nothing to be
   surprised at. These thoughts bear me as faithfully as Susi and
   Chuma bore Livingstone's embalmed body right through Africa.

Though they never abandon those interior spaces that the early work seemed intent on finding with a flashlight, Transtromer's prose poems are far more accessible at the level of the voice. Reading early Transtromer is like privately looking at a photo album of someone's dreams; the later work features the dreamer, who walks us around the dream pointing out the places in the ceiling where a waking consciousness is leaking in.

Like Transtromer, Hass is not as interested in the story per se as he is conscious of the way story organizes experience (interior or exterior), how it shapes reality into paving stones that, sequentially arranged, resemble the paths we walk in everyday life. This resemblance allows for all sorts of things to take place in language that seem less crucial to the lyric temperament of compressed and lineated poems, not least of which is the psychological acuity of plain speech finding its way toward articulation and sense.

Certainly, plainspoken narrative poems work wonderfully in lines, but here's the rub: lined narrative poetry often seems to work in opposition to compression, and the danger of flatness is extreme. The prose poem, on the other hand, is ever mindful of compression: it may look like prose but it's trying like hell to be short, to not resemble a story or an essay. I suppose there's an irony here: in attempting to overcome the limitations of line and lyric length, the lined narrative poem often tends to slackness; in risking the relative slackness of expository language, the prose poem tends toward tightness, toward concision.

There's also something in between, a prose poem like Killarney Clary's, or Ales Debeljak's, a poem that seems impossible to categorize, whose textures and rhythms are utterly specific to that misty region between poetry and prose: I can't imagine these poems in lines, but they evoke a consciousness that is not easily framed by the sentence. Clary's work, for instance, is gorgeously atmospheric and meditative, yet through discursiveness it resists incantation: the poems often sound like very ambitious conversations, and they are nearly always spoken to an unidentified other (which also takes the incantatory edge off the language):

   On the hot streets of Altadena, black boys shouted, watched. Birds
   waited. Ages shifted in the air. If the trees seemed unsettled
   maybe they too wondered how they had come to be in place. "I
   should've married him," she finally said. The light was exhausted
   but still warm in the yellow grass. Secret in the hills behind us,
   all we should have done. And we mistook our separate questions for
   parts of the turning-quiet, yet hoped that mistakes could be
   repaired. I am sorry.

I've always felt that line breaks would utterly destroy the drifting and circular intelligence of these poems, the way they move through thought and into silence, from rumination to description and back again: for lack of a better term, they feel horizontal in their rhetorical designs, like waves rushing up the beach, slowly flattening out into foam and a thin sheet of water, then receding back to the depths.

Clary's work never seems as though it could exist in any other form. But Hass talks about beginning to write prose poems this way: he couldn't get certain poems to work so he wrote them out in prose and, what do you know? they gelled. For many of us, prose poetry is a way of solving the problem of how to write the poem, how to find its best shape and expression. We're just casting around for the right vessel to pour the poem into. Which is why, when I read prose poetry these days, I find myself returning again and again to my not-so-scandalous notion that so very much of it would work just as well in lines, and might, in fact, be improved by the demands of lineation. Since the Modernists, issues of form seem motivated as much by fashion and politics as by aesthetics. This has been good for the prose poem, which is certainly not the maligned and misunderstood stepchild of verse that it seemed to be back in 1989, when Louis Simpson complained (a polite word for it) that Charles Simic's Pulitzer Prize winning collection, The World Doesn't End, was not, in fact, poetry. In all honesty, his argument seemed silly even then. I remember thinking at the time, Sorry, Louis, that ship has sailed.

But maybe the question should have been whether Simic was really writing prose poetry or simply removing his line breaks? In Simic's case, it's a tough call, and I'm not sure it matters; I certainly don't think it needed to be anything that the Pulitzer committee considered. The poems are beautiful, and I return to them again and again. In fact, reading his astonishing book about Joseph Cornell (Dime-Store Alchemy), ostensibly a collection of non-fiction considerations of Cornell's work, it's clear how gifted Simic is at encapsulating imagistic shards of awareness in linguistic boxes. His poems, in fact, rival Cornell's boxes for narrative brilliance (via juxtaposition) and sheer beauty. Clearly the book is more prose poetry than art criticism, but who cares?

When it comes down to it, the prose poem seems simply to add to our choices, to give us another option when we can't figure out how to make the damn thing work. And we should all probably admit that those choices are often arbitrary, just a way of keeping us engaged and curious. It seems like hokum to believe that there's an inevitability to a particular poem and its particular form. Still, perhaps I really did encounter the real thing, the authentic prose poem, in 1980 when I read Killarney Clary's By Me, By Many, Can and Can't Be Done, which seemed unquestionably correct and true. So much for "Goodtime Jesus" in 1979. Whatever the case, I'm a devoted reader of the form to this day. Thankfully, my skepticism doesn't keep me from enjoying it.