David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

Physical dimensions of The Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal anthology in cm: 15 × 22.5 × 2.

Weight of anthology in grams: 419.

Total # of words in anthology: 85,667.

Total # of words devoted to actual prose poems: 69,986.

Rain Taxi ’s length-limit for review of Best of The P.P.: 1,000 words.

Form of review: indexical/statistical/schematic.

Official name of this new, transgeneric critical form: the Indexical Book Review.

Tactical reason for review form: The words preceding each item’s colon technically constitute neither subjective complement nor appositive nor really any recognized grammatical unit at all; hence none of these antecolonic words should count against R.T. ’s rigid 1,000-word limit.

Other, better-known and/or currently fashionable transgeneric literary forms: the Nonfiction Novel, the Prose Poem, the Lyric Essay, etc.

Basic aesthetic/ideological raison d’être of the above forms: to comment on, complicate, subvert, defamiliarize, transgress against, or otherwise fuck with received ideas of genre, category, and (especially) formal conventions/constraints. (See by analogy the historical progression rhymed accentual-syllabic verse → blank verse → vers libre, etc.)

Big paradox/oxymoron behind this raison and the current trendiness of transgeneric forms: In fact, these putatively “transgressive” forms depend heavily on received ideas of genre, category, and formal conventions, since without such an established context there’s nothing much to transgress against. Transgeneric forms are therefore most viable — most interesting, least fatuous — during eras when literary genres themselves are relatively stable and their conventions well-established and — codified and no one seems much disposed to fuck with them. And ours is not such an era.

From eminent prose poet Russell Edson’s definition of “Prose Poem” in a famous essay on the form called “Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas or Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems”: “A poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of fiction; a personal form disciplined not by other literature but by unhappiness; thus a way to be happy.”

From C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon’s A Handbook to Literature, Sixth Edition ’s definition of “Prose Poem”: “A poem printed as prose, with both margins justified.”

Obvious but crucial distinction: between a prose poem as an individual artwork and the Prose Poem as an actual literary genre.

Signs that some person/persons are trying to elevate a certain transgressive literary form or hybrid into an actual genre: Literary journals start having special issues devoted to the form, then whole new journals exclusively devoted to the form spring up (often with the form’s name somewhere in their titles), and various “Best of” anthologies from these new journals begin hitting the market. A critical literature starts to assemble itself around the form, much of that criticism consisting in apologiae, encomiums, and (paradoxically) definitions, codifications, and lists of formal characteristics (→ conventions). Some writers start identifying themselves professionally as practitioners of the form. Finally, the form begins to get treated as a separate/special category for the purposes of book publishing, prizes and awards, academic appointments, etc.

Within pages of Best of The P.P., total number of ads for, references to, and lists of other journals/ collections/ articles/ anthologies/ presses devoted to the Prose Poem: 78.

Bio-note on anthology’s editor: “Peter Johnson is founder and editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal. His latest books of prose poems are Pretty Happy! (White Pine Press, 1997) and Love Poems for the Millennium (Quale Press, 1998). He received an NEA for Creative Writing in 1999.”

From bio-notes on random Best of The P.P. contributors: “Ellen McGrath Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in literature at Duquesne University, where she is completing a doctoral dissertation that deals with the American prose poem”; “Mark Vinz is the author of… a book of prose poems, Late Night Calls . He is also co-editor of The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry, published by New Rivers Press.”

First sentence of Peter Johnson’s Introduction to anthology: “In editing The Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, I feel humble and defensive at the same time.”

Total # of pages in anthology, including editor’s Intro, prenominate p.p. ads and lists, and bio-notes on contributors: 288.

Total # of pages devoted to actual prose poems: 227.

Total # of prose poems in anthology: 204.

Arrangement of constituent p.p.’s: alphabetical by author.

Average number of words in a constituent p.p.: 342.3 (mean), 309 (median).

Longest p.p. in anthology: John Yau’s “The Newly Renovated Opera House on Gilligan’s Island,” 1,049 words.

Shortest p.p. in anthology: G. Chambers & R. Federman’s “A Little Request,” 53 words.

Constituent p.p.’s that, like “The Newly Renovated Opera House on Gilligan’s Island,” have titles that turn out to be way more interesting than the poems themselves: “T. S. Eliot Was a Negro,” “That UFO That Picked on Us,” “The Big Deep Voice of God,” “The Prodiga cTemsl Son Is Spotted on the Grassy Knoll,” “Lullaby for the Elderly,” “The Leopard’s Mouth Is Dry and Cold Inside.”

Some random relevant questions: Are the pieces in, e.g., Lydia Davis’s Break It Down or Diane Williams’s Excitability prose poems? Is Eliot’s “Hysteria” a prose poem? What about the three long prose pieces in Ashbery’s Three Poems ? Are the little italicized entr’actes in Hemingway’s In Our Time prose poems? Are Kawabata’s “Palm-of-the-Hand Stories”? Is Kafka’s “A Little Fable”? What about Cormac McCarthy’s dreamy, anapestic prologue to Suttree ? What about the innumerable ¶s in Faulkner that scan perfectly as iambic-pentameter sonnets? Why are so many tiny and self-consciously lyrical stories published these days as “short-shorts” or “flash fictions” and not as prose poems?

Approximate % of Best of The P.P. ’s 9-page Introduction that Peter Johnson spends talking about how fiendishly difficult he finds it to define “Prose Poem”: 75+.

Representative excerpts from this discussion: “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels”; “When I first began writing prose poems and consciously considering prose poetry as a distinct genre, I thought of the platypus, that lovable yet homely Tasmanian hybrid, but then came to see the weakness of that comparison. The platypus’s genetic code is predetermined. It can’t all of a sudden grow an elephant’s trunk out of its backside.”

From Holman and Harmon’s Handbook to Literature ’s definition of “Prose Poem”: “The point seems to be that a writing in prose, even the most prosaic, 1is a poem if the author says so.”

From anthology’s bio-notes on contributors: (1) “Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841) has sometimes been called ‘The Father of the Modern Prose Poem,’ though he never used the term to describe his own work”; (2) “Barry Silesky is the author of One Thing That Can Save Us, prose poems (called short-short fiction by Coffee House Press).”

Of the 144 contributors to Best of The P.P., total # who are, like M. Aloysius Bertrand, now dead: 14.