The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson

by Jeremy Noel-Tod

How, then, to define the prose poem? After reading so many, I can only offer the simplest common denominator: a prose poem is a poem without line breaks.

Surveying the 175 years of poetry represented here, what emerges for me is the prose poem’s wayward relationship to its own form – and it is this, I believe, that makes it the defining poetic invention of modernity. In an age of mass literacy, our daily lives are enmeshed in networks of sentences and paragraphs as extensive as any urban grid. The prose poem drives the reading mind beyond the city limits.

But our habitual expectation when we see a passage of prose is that it will explain, not sing.

The rhythm of prose, believed the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, contributes to the ‘automatizing’ of perception, which the images and rhythms of poetry work to disrupt – a theory that his friend the poet Velimir Khlebnikov illustrates in ‘Menagerie’ (here), with its startling pen-portraits of the animals of Moscow zoo, often dashed off in a single sentence.6 Poetry, we might say, bends the bars of the prose cage.

The prose of information, we begin to realize, comes in many forms, and all have the potential for poetry to be injected, like coloured ink, into their ostensibly transparent sentences.

The freedom of the prose poem to follow the unmetrical pathways of thought can also take it in the opposite direction, towards a plainer style, imitative of speech.

The prose poem’s tendency to dwell on image over narrative begins with the curious book that Baudelaire acknowledged as his model: Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit (1842), a collection of historical vignettes offered to the reader as the vision of an old man who may be the Devil.

Without the visual architecture of verse, the prose poem is not immediately identifiable on the page. When read aloud, however, it is often characterized by the kind of echoic patterning that we associate with verse, arriving at its conclusion with a resonant neatness – what Amy Lowell, writing in defence of her own ‘polyphonic prose’, called the ‘spherical effect’ of poetic form.

The challenge for the prose poet is to undo the distinction: to make the prosaic poetic, so that it expands a powerful feeling without dissipating its force.

Metonymy is the preferred trope of the prose writer because it is unobtrusive and efficient, a shorthand that assumes the reader’s understanding of an abbreviated meaning. And because metonymy leads the mind by meaning rather than metre, it subordinates the sound of words in order to streamline the flow of sense – thus making it the ideal figure of speech for news reports, legal documents, and realist novels.

The Milky Way My mother taught me that every night a procession of junks carrying lanterns moves silently across the sky, and the water sprinkled from their paddles falls to the earth in the form of dew. I no longer believe that the stars are junks carrying lanterns, no longer that the dew is shaken from their oars. Allen Upward (1913)

Painting Let some one fasten this piece of silk by the four corners for me, and I shall not put the sky upon it. The sea and its shores, the forest and the mountains, do not tempt my art. But from the top to the bottom and from one side to the other, as between new horizons, with an artless hand I shall paint the Earth. The limits of communities, the divisions of fields, will be exactly outlined, – those that are already plowed, those where the battalions of sheaves still stand. I shall not fail to count each tree. The smallest house will be represented with an ingenuous industry. Looking closely, you may distinguish the people; he who crosses an arched bridge of stone, parasol in hand; he who washes buckets at a pond; the litter traveling on the shoulders of two porters, and the patient laborer who plows a new furrow the length of the old. A long road bordered with a double row of skiffs crosses the picture from one corner to the other, and in one of the circular moats can be seen, in a scrap of azure for water, three quarters of a slightly yellow moon. Paul Claudel (1900), translated from the French by Teresa Frances and William Rose Benét

from By the Waters of Babylon Little Poems in Prose

I. The Exodus (August 3, 1492) 1. The Spanish noon is a blaze of azure fire, and the dusty pilgrims crawl like an endless serpent along treeless plains and bleached highroads, through rock-split ravines and castellated, cathedral-shadowed towns.

2. The hoary patriarch, wrinkled as an almond shell, bows painfully upon his staff. The beautiful young mother, ivory-pale, well-nigh swoons beneath her burden; in her large enfolding arms nestles her sleeping babe, round her knees flock her little one...

3. The youth with Christ-like countenance speaks comfortably to father and brother, to maiden and wife. In his ...

4. The halt, the blind, are amid the train. Sturdy pack-horses laboriously drag the tented wagons wherein l...

5. The panting mules are urged forward with spur and goad; stuffed are the heavy saddlebags with ...

The Stranger ‘Whom lovest thou the best, enigmatical man, say, thy father, thy mother, thy sister, or thy brother?’ ‘I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.’ ‘Thy friends?’ ‘You use there a word whose sense has to this day remained unknown to me.’ ‘Thy fatherland?’ ‘I know not in what latitude it is situated.’ ‘Beauty?’ ‘I would fain love it, godlike and immortal.’ ‘Gold?’ ‘I hate it as you hate God.’ ‘Eh? What lovest thou, then, extraordinary stranger?’ ‘I love the clouds … the clouds that pass … over there … the marvellous clouds!’ Charles Baudelaire (1869), translated from the French by Stuart Merrill

Windows He who looks in through an open window never sees so many things as he who looks at a shut window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more fertile, more gloomy, or more dazzling, than a window lighted by a candle. What we can see in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind the panes of a window. In that dark or luminous hollow, life lives, life dreams, life suffers. Across the waves of roofs, I can see a woman of middle age, wrinkled, poor, who is always leaning over something, and who never goes out. Out of her face, out of her dress, out of her attitude, out of nothing almost, I have made up the woman’s story, and sometimes I say it over to myself with tears. If it had been a poor old man, I could have made up his just as easily. And I go to bed, proud of having lived and suffered in others. Perhaps you will say to me: ‘Are you sure that it is the real story?’ What does it matter, what does any reality outside of myself matter, if it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am? Charles Baudelaire (1869), translated from the French by Arthur Symons

The Madman One carolous coin; or, if you would like, a golden lamb. – MS in the King’s Library The moon was grooming her hair with an ebony comb, sprinkling the hills, the meadows, and the woods with fireflies like pieces of silver. Scarbo, gnome sated with treasures, was up on my roof, and, to the crow of the weathercock, was winnowing his loot, separating the ducats and florins, which jingled in cadence, from the counterfeit coins, which showered over the street. How the madman laughed, mockingly, as each night he wandered about the deserted city, his one eye on the moon and the other – burned out! ‘Wealth of the moon,’ he muttered. ‘Scraping together these devil’s tokens, I shall buy a pillory where I may warm myself in the sun.’ But, as always, there was the moon, the moon going down – and concealed in my cellar, Scarbo was turning out more ducats and florins with each echoing strike of his press. Meantime, its two horns waving ahead, a snail, which must have been confused by the night, was pushing its way across my glistening windowpane. Aloysius Bertrand (1842), translated from the French by Thomas Ligotti