poem#11: EKPHRASTIC PROSEPOEM

PROSEPOEM

Michael Benedikt’s “working definition” of the prose poem: “A genre of poetry, self -consciously written in prose, characterized by the intense use of virtually all the devices of poetry…”

Charles Simic has defined the prose poem as “the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does. This is the sole instance we have of squaring the circle.”  He calls the prose poem, “a veritable literary hybrid” this “impossible amalgamation of lyric poetry, anecdote, fairy tale, allegory, joke, journal entry, and many other kinds of prose.”

EKPHRASIS

The word comes from the Greek ek and phrasis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name.

Be Drunk
by Charles Baudelaire translated by Louis Simpson
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

The List of Famous Hats
by James Tate
Napoleon's hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous hat, but that's not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all honesty wasn't much different than the one any jerk might buy at a corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The first one isn't even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up--well, he didn't really grow that much, but his head did: He was a pinhead at birth, and he used, until his death really, the same little tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn bathing cap. Scholars like to make a lot out of this, and it would be easy to do. My theory is simple-minded to be sure: that beneath his public head there was another head and it was a pyramid or something.

SO... What is a genre that does not claim for itself a new space, but sets itself on the borderlands between two well-navigated spaces?  Must such a genre be a “veritable literary hybrid”?  A nomad?  A beast?  A monstrous coyote or hyena roaming the edges of the city, scavenging and cackling?  Will that form have identity other than that of trickster-courier, go-between, the lesser god, the Hermetic prince-of-thieves?  I can tell you, if that form were my child, I would cradle it.  Counting its fingers and toes, I would cry out in delight at its “impossible amalgamation”—at every extra digit, every unexpected and/or borrowed and/or seemingly useless appendage.  I would want for that child to grow and grow and grow. 

Baudelaire described the properties of his little monster (which are at the same time the properties involved in its composition and the reader’s experience of it) in his introduction to Paris Spleen in 1869: “We can cut it wherever we please, I my dreaming, you your manuscript, the reader his reading… ”  At what is widely recognized as its inception, the father of the beast proposes experiments on the child.  Fit it into a circle, dismember it, throw pieces of it to the wind—it will survive, he says.  And so it has, but it has survived in America with American poets as an animal fit for experimentation, as a place—a body—in which to Frankenstein together humor and horror and close attention and the surreal (not to mention the ingredients of the absurd… never an American favorite).  

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

Write a prose poem in response to some other work of art. Prose poems always end up as questions about form--so you will use them to illuminate some other art process from this unstable light box -- you can continue working on something from class or do an entirely new poem.  Due Thursday.