The Poems Without Lines

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British Prose Poetry
 Jane Monson
Editor

British Prose Poetry

The Poems Without Lines
Editor
Jane Monson
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-77862-4 ISBN 978-3-319-77863-1  (eBook)

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 Preface

In 2002, N. Santilli published the first full-length critical study of the

British prose poem with the telling title: Such Rare Citings: The Prose
Poem in English Literature. Today, the book is still unique: although it is
in good company with other exemplary critical texts on prose poetry—
among the authors of which are Margueritte S. Murphy, Mary Ann
Caws, Hermine Riffaterre, Stephen Fredman, Michel Delville, Tzvetan
Todorov, Steven Monte, Marjorie Perloff and Ron Silliman—it remains
the only book that homes in on the prose poem in English Literature,
rather than that of France or America. Since Santilli’s publication, there
has been an outpouring of British prose poetry in terms of creative texts,
anthologies and solo collections alike, but a comparative dearth of critical
material, especially collated, on the British prose poem.
British Prose Poetry: Poems Without Lines is assembled to address this
imbalance between critical material and the creative output/practice of
the form, and to provide the first single volume of essays on the form
and genre, paying particular attention to its narrative and role within
British Literature (poetry and also prose) since the nineteenth century
through to the twenty-first. While the essays are predominantly critical,
I have included a couple of more pedagogical and biographical essays as
part of conveying a necessary and interdisciplinary story of the British
prose poem. The fluid movement of the essays, and of the book as a
whole, between genres, forms, research, theory, practice, pedagogy,
methodology and experience, is fundamental to the unique approach of
the essayists towards the topic. Indeed, these precise conversations and

v
vi    Preface

conscious efforts to combine all of these disciplines are vital to under-

standing the entire narrative of the British prose poem, and also the rea-
son it has undergone a resurgence in British literature in recent decades.
In keeping with the focus, each contributor to this book has been cho-
sen for the significance of their critical and creative output towards the
genre; they have all published leading articles and books on the prose
poem, edited anthologies, or had volumes of their own published by
both mainstream and independent presses.
This book of essays is an opportunity not only for the reader to
understand more about the British prose poem—what it is, how it
emerged, why its acceptance has fluctuated so much in the UK—but
also to learn more about the story of the prose poem from its contro-
versial beginnings in the nineteenth century to its notable burgeoning
in the twenty-first via ebbs and flows in the last century. In terms of the
book’s focus on British prose poetry, there is a distinction to be made
here between British and English literature. The background to this vol-
ume’s understanding of the prose poem in Britain is the prose poem in
English literature, which is prose poetry written in the English language
anywhere in the world. The prose poetry of the English Canon, in this
respect, is represented in the translated and American examples that fea-
ture in many of the essays. But what takes place once the historical over-
view has been established is a dedicated study of prose poetry produced
by both British and international writers based in the UK. It is this more
recent interest, practice, production, teaching and performance of the
prose poem in the UK itself that the essays individually and together seek
to question and understand. Further to this, there are numerous and
diverse examples of prose poetry in English and several other languages,
but why in the UK is the recognition and acceptance of prose poetry so
much more recent—and, yet more recent still, the public emergence of
international UK-based prose poets? This question is driven by an over-
arching positive approach towards what is happening now—celebrating
the augmentation of the contemporary British prose poem and the inter-
national and global influences that are an intrinsic part of its complex
role and status.
As part of a more general1 and academic recognition of the British
prose poem, there have naturally been questions, conversations, debates

1By general, I mean that the prose poem is now being taken more seriously by main-

stream publishers, as well as established independent presses.

 Preface    vii

and a variety of readers and writers doing their best to work out what it
is, why it is, how it is and where it is. The ‘where’ of these questions is
important and the one I want to address here, first, while the others are
examined in the rest of the volume. In his 2012 essay for A Companion
to Poetic Genre, Andy Brown (one of this book’s contributors) begins the
‘where’ conversation by stating:

Work [has begun] on the widespread appearance of the prose poem in

mainstream British poetry. Just as with the critical fixation on Aloysius
Bertrand as the ‘originator’ of the form, I believe we need to move on
from the avant-garde appropriation of the prose poem as a vehicle of ‘radi-
cal’ expression—the appearance of prose poetry in mainstream British writ-
ing is a welcome development of its traditions.
In 1971 Geoffrey Hill published Mercian Hymns, a book that has
become, perhaps, the most celebrated example of the British prose poem.
Shortly afterward Seamus Heaney published Stations, a series of autobio-
graphical prose poems some of which are still included in his Selected and
Collected Poems. In fact Heaney continues to write prose poetry, with sev-
eral examples appearing in his recent collection District and Circle. Faber
& Faber continue to champion the prose poem—from its early appear-
ance in T. S. Eliot’s oeuvre (‘Hysteria’ in Prufrock) through to the work
of Maurice Riordan (The Holy Land is comprised of over half prose poetry)
and Alice Oswald, whose acclaimed bookwork Dart blends prose, poetry,
documentary, and interview into one of the most radical reworkings of
poetry of place. We can clearly see that the ‘radical’ boundary is simply no
longer helpful.
Nor does it stop there. Mainstream British publishers Jonathan
Cape champion the work of John Burnside; the editor at Cape, Robin
Robertson, also writes and publishes prose poetry in his acclaimed books
for Picador.2

This book supports Brown’s assertion and reviews the possibility

that Britain, the very place that has had a nonplussed, hostile, question-
ing and undiscerning view of the prose poem, is now potentially the
very place where it will flourish. As part of this review, each writer here
considers the broader context of literary traditions and rules, question-
ing and probing the tradition of great English poets who have upheld

2Andy Brown, “The Emergent Prose Poem” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik

Martiny (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 2012), 327–328.

viii    Preface

and exemplified the time-honoured valued unit and basis of poetry, the
line—and, in turn, the break and the stanza. These writers ask directly
and indirectly: what place is there for ‘poetry’ that refutes the line-break
and takes in hand the sentence and, in turn, the paragraph? Is poetry
still poetry when it uses the sentence, rather than the line, as its basic
unit? In the twenty-first century, what has been happening is that the
practitioners themselves have long since started and continue to develop
these conversations proactively in critical and pedagogical contexts,
among them leading authors of the form: Carrie Etter, Ian Seed, Patricia
Debney, Lucy Hamilton, Michael Rosen, Andy Brown, George Szirtes,
Linda Black, Jeff Hilson, Luke Kennard, Geraldine Monk and Ágnes
Lehóczky.
In its embracing of both the practice and research of prose poetry, the
book aims to appeal as much to Creative Writing students and research-
ers as it does to dedicated practitioners of the prose poem wanting to
understand more about the history, theory and nature of the form. It
will appeal to those asking questions about the British prose poem: its
origins, influences, impact and relationship with other similar genres or
forms. This book aims not only to provide a useful single text to gain
more insight and advance understanding of the topic—for both tutor
and student, but also to provide the opportunity to enjoy the prose
poem more widely while regarding its historical narrative, and consid-
ering its relevance and possibilities in British literature today. It is not
common knowledge that many of the writers explored here—T. S. Eliot,
Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Seamus Heaney, David Gascoyne and
Roy Fisher—produced prose poems, as well as wrote about this area.
Neither is it common knowledge that their work on prose poetry and
reconfigurations of the divide between poetry and prose continues to
inform and inspire contemporary prose poets in Britain and all over the
world. This volume aims to appeal to and encourage writers and readers
of poetry, prose poetry and poetics who wish to understand, as well as
to try out or continue to practice, this alluring and elusive thing called
the prose poem. While this title is the first of its kind, the long-term view
of creative and critical conversations around the prose poem is quite the
opposite—we look forward to starting some new discussions and contin-
uing others.

Cambridge, UK Jane Monson

 Acknowledgements

I would like to give my ongoing appreciation and gratitude to the fol-

lowing friends, family, peers and colleagues for their unwavering support.
Invaluable suggestions, time, constructive advice, encouragement and
clear perspectives throughout the years have been put into this volume
by the following: Cassandra Atherton, Hugues Azérad, Kaddy Benyon,
Linda Bree, Cambridge University Press Bookshop, Anthony Cummins,
Patricia Debney, Jane de Lozey, Eileen Fursland, Lindsay Fursland, Una
McCormack, the Monson family, Lilleith Morrison, Catherine Paterson,
Nikki Santilli, the Sotudeh family, Ben Walker, Ann Walsh, Neil Wenborn
and Anne Wilson. I extend particular thanks to Patricia Debney for her
constant support, belief when momentum was a bit frayed and, as impor-
tantly, her dedicated fine-tuning of the Introduction. Huge amounts of
appreciation for the advice, patience and extra miles go to my editors at
Palgrave: Allie Bochicchio, Rachel Jacobe, Emily Janakiram and, from
the early days, Brigitte Shull and Paloma Yannakakis. Warm gratitude
for the criticism, suggestions, belief and appreciation of every reader and
peer reviewer. Particular and absolute admiration and heartfelt thanks
go to all nineteen contributors for the steadfast ways—against quite a
few odds—you’ve approached and connected with the whole project,
as well as for your individual essays. I won’t forget your support and
encouragement along the way, and I hope the next stage serves you
all well. It’s been a journey of many human tales and utterly motivat-
ing through some of the bleaker hours. Finally, and eternally, love and
appreciation are extended to Niki Sotudeh and Sylvie Monson Sotudeh,

ix
x    Acknowledgements

whose calmness, wit and daily inspiration are essential to every one of
my undertakings. To the readers of this book: thank you for every bor-
row, purchase, glance, dive, foray, discussion and prose poem these essays
hope to inspire.
 Copyright Acknowledgements

With thanks to John Wiley & Sons Ltd for the use of excerpts taken
from Andy Brown’s essay ‘The Emergent Prose Poem’, in A Companion
to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2012), 327–
328. This edition was first published in 2012 (© 2012 John Wiley &
Sons Ltd). The right of Erik Martiny to be identified as the author of
the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with
the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sys-
tem, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission
of the publisher.
With thanks to David Caddy for permission to use ‘Hidden Form:
The Prose Poem in English Poetry’, previously published in Stress
Fractures: Essays on Poetry, ed. Tom Chivers (Penned in the Margins,
2010), 103–113. Permission by the author to use with any necessary
editing has been granted.
With thanks to Elisabeth Bletsoe for the use of the extract of ‘Heyrun,
Heron (Ardea cinerea)’, in Birds of the Sherborne Missal, in Landscape
from a Dream (Exeter: Shearsman, 2008), and to Vahni Capildeo for
use of the extract from ‘Person Animal Figure’, in Undraining Sea
(Norwich: Egg Box, 2009).
With thanks to Louis Armand and Clare Wallace for Michel Delville,
‘James Joyce and the Prose Poem’, which appeared as a much longer

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xii    Copyright Acknowledgements

(and alternative version) in Giacomo Joyce: Envoys of the Other (eds. Louis
Armand and Clare Wallace, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2007). This ver-
sion is printed here with kind permission of Litteraria Pragensia.
Thanks to Faber & Faber Ltd for permission to use ‘Hysteria’, in T.S.
Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 2002). With thanks
also to Faber & Faber Ltd and Coffee House Press for permission to
use ‘The Death of Hart Crane’ by Mark Ford, in Six Children (London:
Faber & Faber, 2011).
With thanks to Ian Seed for ‘Nonsense and Wonder: The Prose Poems
of Jeremy Over’, which appeared as a much shorter, earlier version in the
journal Tears in the Fence, 63 (April 2016). Permission granted by the
author, also the editor of Tears in the Fence. With thanks also to Carcanet
Press for kind permission to use extracts from Jeremy Over’s first collec-
tion, A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)
and Over’s second collection, Deceiving Wild Creatures (Manchester:
Carcanet, 2009).
With thanks to the publisher at The Figures for permission to use
Tom Raworth’s poem, ‘Proust From The Bottom Up’ in Tottering State:
Selected and New Poems (New Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1984).
Thanks to the Estate of Roy Fisher and to Bloodaxe Books Ltd for
all primary materials cited in Peter Robinson’s essay ‘Roy Fisher’s
Musicians’. Thanks also to Peter Robinson, Executor of the Fisher
Estate.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Jane Monson

Part I  The Story of the British Prose Poem

2 ‘Hidden’ Form: The Prose Poem in English Poetry 19

David Caddy

3 The British Prose Poem and ‘Poetry’

in Early Modernism 29
Margueritte S. Murphy

4 The Flourishing of the Prose Poem in America and

Britain 47
Robert Vas Dias

Part II  The Early Narrators

5 The Marvellous Clouds: Reflections on the Prose

Poetry of Woolf, Baudelaire and Williams 73
Michael O’Neill

xiii
xiv    Contents

6 ‘I Grow More & More Poetic’: Virginia Woolf

and Prose Poetry 91
Jane Goldman

7 James Joyce and the Prose Poem 117

Michel Delville

8 T.S. Eliot’s Prose (Poetry) 133

Vidyan Ravinthiran

9 A Weakening Syntax: How It Is with Samuel Beckett’s

Prose Poetry 149
Scott Annett

Part III  By Name or by Nature?

10 Questioning the Prose Poem: Thoughts on Geoffrey

Hill’s Mercian Hymns 167
Alan Wall

11 ‘I Went Disguised in It’: Re-evaluating Seamus Heaney’s

Stations 177
Andy Brown

12 The Letter-Poem and Its Literary Affect: Mark Ford’s

‘The Death of Hart Crane’ 193
Anthony Caleshu

13 ‘Immeasurable as One’: Vahni Capildeo’s Prose Poetics 211

Jeremy Noel-Tod

14 The Successful Prose Poem Leaves Behind Its Name 227

Owen Bullock
 Contents    xv

Part IV  Other Voices, Other Forms

15 ‘Man and Nature In and Out of Order’: The Surrealist

Prose Poetry of David Gascoyne 249
Luke Kennard

16 Nonsense and Wonder: An Exploration of the Prose

Poems of Jeremy Over 265
Ian Seed

17 Prose Poetry and the Spirit of Jazz 279

N. Santilli

18 Roy Fisher’s Musicians 299

Peter Robinson

Part V  Thinking Back, Writing Forward

19 Wrestling with Angels: The Pedagogy of the Prose Poem 319

Patricia Debney

20 Life, Death and the Prose Poem 331

Michael Rosen

Index 337
 Notes on Contributors

Scott Annett  is a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Robinson

College, University of Cambridge. He has recently completed a project
on Samuel Beckett’s poetic experimentation, attending to Beckett’s read-
ings of Dante’s Commedia. Annett has also written on Dante’s poetry,
including his Latin Eclogues. He teaches regularly for the Faculty of
English, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, and the Faculty
of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He is currently working on
translations and transitions between Virgilian ‘pietas’, Dantean ‘pietà’
and Chaucerian ‘pitee’ in the Medieval period.
Andy Brown is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at
Exeter University. He recently co-edited A Body of Work: An Anthology of
Poetry and Medicine, with Corinna Wagner (Bloomsbury, 2016). He also
edited and contributed to the critical book of essays and interviews The
Writing Occurs as Song: A Kelvin Corcoran Reader (Shearsman, 2014).
His many poetry books include Medicine to the Dead (Worple, 2018);
Watersong (Shearsman, 2016); Exurbia (Worple, 2015), The Fool and the
Physician (Salt, 2014), Goose Music (with John Burnside) (Salt, 2008)
and Fall of the Rebel Angels: Poems 1996–2006 (Salt, 2006).
Owen Bullock has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University
of Canberra, where he currently teaches, and is a member of the Prose
Poetry Project, hosted by the International Poetry Studies Institute. His
research interests are semiotics and poetry, prose poetry, collaboration
and haikai literature. His scholarly work has appeared in Antipodes, Axon:

xvii
xviii    Notes on Contributors

Creative Explorations, Journal of New Zealand Literature, Ka Mate Ka

Ora, New Writing, Qualitative Inquiry and TEXT. His creative publi-
cations include Semi (2017), River’s Edge (2016) and A Cornish Story
(2010). He has edited a number of journals and anthologies, including
Poetry New Zealand.
David Caddy is a critically acclaimed British poet, essayist, critic and
literary sociologist. He has edited the international and independent
literary journal Tears in the Fence since 1984, and directs the Tears in
the Fence annual poetry festival. Caddy founded and organised the East
Street Poets, the UK’s largest rural poetry group from 1985 to 2001,
and directed the legendary Wessex Poetry Festival from 1995 to 2001.
He co-wrote a literary companion to London in 2006, has written and
edited drama scripts and podcasts, and regularly contributes essays, arti-
cles and reviews to books and journals.
Anthony Caleshu  is Professor of Poetry at University of Plymouth. He
is the author of three books of poetry—most recently, The Victor Poems
(Shearsman, 2015), and three books of criticism—most recently as edi-
tor of In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan University
Press, 2018).
Patricia Debney  is a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent.
Her most recent collection, Baby (Liquorice Fish Books, 2016), moves
between prose poem and free verse, while two earlier collections, Littoral
(Shearsman Books, 2013), and How to Be a Dragonfly (Smith/Doorstop
Books, 2005) consist entirely of prose poems. Other recent work includes
Gestation (Shearsman Chapbooks, 2014), and she has appeared in Tears
in the Fence, Best British Poetry 2015, The Forward Book of Poetry 2014 and
The Sunday Times. She has also published a novel (bluechrome, 2007) and
written libretti for opera, chamber groups and solo voices.
Michel Delville teaches English literature, American literature and
comparative literature at the University of Liège, where he directs the
Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. He is the author of The
American Prose Poem (1998), J. G. Ballard (1998), Hamlet & Co (with
Pierre Michel) (2001), Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret
History of Maximalism (with Andrew Norris) (2005), Food, Poetry, and
the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde (2009), Crossroads
Poetics: Text, Image, Music, Film and Beyond (2013), The Politics of
 Notes on Contributors    xix

Hunger and Disgust: Perspectives on the Dark Grotesque (with Andrew

Norris) (2016) and ———-
Undoing Art (with Mary Ann Caws) (2017). He has
also co-edited several volumes of essays on contemporary poetics.
Jane Goldman Reader in English at Glasgow University, is a General
Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. Her
books include The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf (1998), The
Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (2006), and ‘With You in the
Hebrides’: Virginia Woolf and Scotland (2013). She is also a poet, pub-
lished in Gutter, Blackbox Manifold, Tender and elsewhere. Her first
volume is Border Thoughts (Leamington Books, 2014), ‘a little theat-
rical box of spectacle and light […] the living underworld of Brecht’s
Threepenny Opera translated into raucous girlish post-war wayward
ways’ (Hix Eros).
Luke Kennard  is a poet, novelist and academic who holds a Ph.D. from
the University of Exeter and lectures English and Creative Writing at the
University of Birmingham. His latest collection of poetry, Cain (Penned
in the Margins, 2016) was shortlisted for the 2017 International Dylan
Thomas Prize and his first novel, The Transition (4th Estate, 2017), was
longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction.
Jane Monson is a poet and academic based in Cambridge. She works
as a Mentor at the University of Cambridge and was Associate Lecturer
in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. She edited the first
anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry, This Line is Not for
Turning (Cinnamon Press, 2011), praised by Pascale Petit as ‘neces-
sary and ground-breaking’, and has two collections of prose poetry
Speaking Without Tongues (Cinnamon Press, 2010) and The Shared
Surface (Cinnamon Press, 2013). Her Ph.D., Crossed Tongues: The Crisis
of Speech in the Prose Poems of Francis Ponge (Cardiff University, 2008),
focused on Modernism and the French prose poem.
Margueritte S. Murphy Hobart and William Smith Colleges, USA, is
author of Material Figures: Political Economy, Commercial Culture, and
the Aesthetic Sensibility of Charles Baudelaire (2012) and A Tradition
of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (1992),
and co-editor (with Samir Dayal) of Global Babel: Questions of Discourse
and Communication in a Time of Globalization (2007). She has pub-
lished broadly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and fiction,
xx    Notes on Contributors

on literature and economics, and most recently on community-based

learning. At Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she currently serves as
advisor/faculty liaison to the Center for Community Engagement and
Service-Learning.
Jeremy Noel-Tod  is Senior Lecturer in the School of Literature, Drama
and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia . His poetry criti-
cism has been widely published and, since 2013, he has been the poetry
critic for The Sunday Times. His publications as an editor are The Oxford
Companion to Modern Poetry (2nd edn, 2013), the Complete Poems of R.
F. Langley (2015) and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018).
Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at Durham University. Recent
books include (with Madeleine Callaghan) The Romantic Poetry
Handbook (Wiley Blackwell, 2017) and, as editor, John Keats in Context
(Cambridge University Press, 2017). His third volume of poetry, Gangs of
Shadow, was published by Arc in 2014 and Return of the Gift (Arc, 2018).
Vidyan Ravinthiran teaches at Birmingham University. He is the
author of Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014), shortlisted for several first
collection prizes, including the Forward; and Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic
(Bucknell, 2015), winner of both the University English Prize and the
Warren-Brooks Award for Literary Criticism. He is an editor at Prac Crit
and also an author of fiction, represented by the Wylie Agency. His lit-
erary journalism has appeared in Poetry, the Times Literary Supplement,
and The London Review of Books, among other publications.
Peter Robinson  is Professor of English and American Literature at the
University of Reading, an award-winning poet, short story writer, trans-
lator from the Italian, and literary editor for Two Rivers Press. His recent
publications include The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba
(2007), winner of the John Florio Prize; The Returning Sky (2012), a
Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Foreigners, Drunks and Babies:
Eleven Stories (2013); The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and
Irish Poetry (2013, paperback 2016); and September in the Rain: A Novel
(2016). His Collected Poems 1976–2016 appeared in 2017.
Michael Rosen is Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmith’s,
London, and a former Children’s Laureate. He went to state primary
and grammar schools, tried doing Medicine for two years before stud-
ying English Literature at Wadham College, Oxford. Rosen worked at
the BBC and since then as a freelance writer, performer and broadcaster.
 Notes on Contributors    xxi

He wrote We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (with Helen Oxenbury), Quick

Let’s Get Out of Here and Sad Book (both with Quentin Blake). His prose
poetry memoirs include Carrying the Elephant (Penguin, 2002) and In
the Colonie (Penguin, 2005). He presents the BBC 4 Radio programme
Word of Mouth.
N. Santilli was awarded a Ph.D. (Kings College London) for her
research on the prose poem. Subsequently published as Such Rare
Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature (2003), it remains the only
full-length treatment of the subject. She was invited to edit collections
of contemporary British prose poems by ‘SENTENCE’ (2005) and
Poetry International (2006). Nikki is an independent scholar and vernac-
ular jazz dancer/teacher in London, with a rich, eclectic, portfolio from
scriptwriting to electronic text editing and dancing to poetry.
Ian Seed is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the
University of Chester and author. Seed’s books of prose poems include
Identity Papers (2016) and Makers of Empty Dreams (2014), both pub-
lished by Shearsman. They were featured on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. He
translated The Thief of Talant (2016), the first translation into English of
Pierre Reverdy’s innovative Le Voleur de Talan (Wakefield Press).
Robert Vas Dias is a tutor at the Poetry School, London, and has
published fifteen collections in the UK and USA, the most recent of
which are a collaborative artist’s book with the Portuguese artist Teresa
Gonçalves Lobo, Unstill/Inquieto (Permanent, 2017), Black Book, with
Julia Farrer (Shearsman, 2016) and Arrivals & Departures: Prose Poems
(Shearsman, 2014): ‘necessary reading for anyone following contempo-
rary developments in the prose poem’ (David Caddy). His poetry and
criticism have appeared in over one hundred magazines, journals, and
anthologies in both countries. He was General Secretary of The Poetry
Society in the mid-1970s.
Alan Wall is Professor of Writing and Literature at the University of
Chester and RLF Co-ordinator. He is the author of novels, poetry and
books of essays, and his work has been translated into ten languages. His
most recent novel was Badmouth (Harbour Books, 2014), and his most
recent book of essays was Labyrinths and Clues (Fortnightly Review,
2014). Wall’s book Jacob, written in verse and prose, was shortlisted for
the Hawthornden Prize and Endtimes (Shearsman, 2013) was launched
at Swedenborg House in London to considerable acclaim. He was
elected a Fellow of the English Association in 2012.
 List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Virginia Woolf, ‘BLUE & GREEN.’, Monday or Tuesday

(London: Hogarth, 1921) 101
Fig. 16.1 From ‘Wunderkammern’ 275

xxiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Jane Monson

While examples of prose and poetry merging in English literature—or,

at the very least, the two genres occupying the same space—can date
back as far as the tenth century,1 we have to wait until the nineteenth
century for a more notable fusion of the two forms and the twenty-first
for the prose poem in name and practice to be positively recognised
in Britain. This book aims to look at the form’s narrative between the
examples of prose poetry (as opposed to poetic prose) in nineteenth-­
century English literature and the current century’s resurgence of British
prose poetry. A question underlying the leaps in time between prose
poetry (and, indeed, poetic prose) found in widespread English liter-
ature and prose poetry written and produced in Britain, is, of course:
why English Literature first and Britain later? By way of background,

1 See, for example, The Vercelli Book—one of four keystone old English manuscripts,

Vercelli was composed in England, but not discovered until centuries later in Italy, where its
existence was made public in 1824. Vercelli features 6 poems and 23 prose Homilies, and
the consensus is that, while many of the pieces can be dated to the tenth century, others are
harder to determine, but were possibly composed even earlier.

J. Monson (*) 
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 1

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_1
2  J. MONSON

the historical timeline tends to follow a particular narrative,2 more or

less between Baudelaire, via the Decadent and Symbolist movements
through to modernist writers of poetry and prose in America, Europe
and the UK, and landing in a host of contemporary writers of prose and
poetry—all genders, all races, all classes, both traditional and experimen-
tal, among them the writers listed earlier, but with many more emerg-
ing.3 In the twenty-first century, prose poets are indebted not only to
current writers and academics working in this field, but also to a range
of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and their incisive question-
ing of conventional ideas of prose and poetry. Crucial to the shifting or

2 The prose poem was introduced to the UK during the fin de siècle through the

Decadent literature of Ernest Dowson, William Sharp and Oscar Wilde, and, in turn,
to them by an English translation of Stuart Merrill’s anthology of French Prose Poems,
Pastels in Prose, 1890. Demonstrated most prominently at Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trials with
his so-called obscene letter to Alfred Douglas that Wilde wrote and defended in court as
a “prose poem”, the form for the mainstream Victorian audience was deemed distasteful,
subversive and ostentatious, and thereby associated with all the un-restraints of French dec-
adence. In 1917, T.S. Eliot wrote and had published one of his very few prose poems,
“Hysteria”; then, in the same year, he issued “The Borderline of Prose”, a damning arti-
cle on mixed genres, defaming the genre as “unmasculine”. During the early part of the
twentieth century, lesser-known poets had prose poems published in the “little magazines”,
which were essential, independent publications for experimental work that gave major
modernists their first print opportunity. They were published in the UK and America, and
in America—partly through their distribution—from the mid-twentieth century onwards,
the prose poem had a relative surge of recognition, practiced and published by poets such
as Ginsberg, Ashbery, Simic, Wright and Edson. In the UK, the uptake has been slower
and—outside of the negative influences/associations of Wilde, Eliot, British traditional
values of prose and poetry, and the marketing challenges the form poses—we are still
­examining why.
3 I am aware of the absence of many of these emerging British writers, including from

Scotland, but space is restricted and often, too, there is not enough critical material on
which to base an essay. I am also aware of the sweeping and conservative mainstream
nature of this oft-repeated timeline of the British prose poem up until the present cen-
tury. It is one which very much assumes a conservative British reading public governed by
Victorian sensibilities that, in turn, were a leading part of a filter-system as far as what was
written, published and read was concerned. However, the summary does convey some of
what the prose poem faced regarding association with the “purple prose” of Decadence and
Aestheticism. If—again, as common knowledge would have it—prose during the Victorian
Era was the most popular genre among the reading public and poetry was deemed as “high
art” through which the reader could derive some moral lesson, what place was there for
a form that crossed genres, combined opposites and was associated with a dissident and
marginalised society? See Murphy’s Tradition of Subversion, for an illuminating contextual
exploration of the prose poem during this era and afterwards.
 1 INTRODUCTION  3

blurring of boundaries so central to the prose poem’s identity or reputa-

tion, we are finally acting upon assertions and questions that have long
ago been raised by and between key English authors. Wordsworth and
Coleridge4 most notably provided the reader with the earliest, most per-
suasive examples of critical responses by and between poets exploring how
and why prose and poetry can be seen at all as two distinct, separate genres
and languages. These crucial debates helped break down boundary lines,
or at least change and disseminate entrenched understandings of generic
boundary lines. Their questions brought about changes to how both
reader and writer alike can approach a piece of literature. Underneath these
changes, the prose poem continued to evolve through experiment, but was
not recognised definitely and clearly as the ‘prose poem’ in the works of
several modernists—among them Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude
Stein, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. They wrote short prose, plays, prose
lyrics and lyric essays and, above all, consciously and critically drew atten-
tion to the fluid correspondence between poetry and prose in their texts,
coming close to producing what we now regard as prose poetry, or at the
very least helping us recognise what it is and what it can do.
In the twenty-first century, we have gained an unprecedented appe-
tite for short forms, on- and off-screen, and arguably the prose poem
can be read with greater frequency and in far more congenial territory
than was offered in the past. It appears that both British writers and crit-
ics alike are beginning to appreciate the possibilities of this hybrid form
with increasing rigour and focus—that the prose poet’s distillation and
organisation of music, image, metaphor, and complex but economical
use of juxtaposition merged with aspects of narrative technique, dia-
logue, point-of-view and even plot and character are particular crafts
in and unique to the prose poem. Further to this, that the prose poem

4 See Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria,

for a defining argument in English Literature debating the essential differences between
prose and poetry, and the non-sense as much as the sense behind these formal divides.
As much as the apparent differing views of the poets, both texts are helpful for framing
further debates around the prose poem’s complex role and identity in English and British
literature. Of particular relevance when considering critical and creative manifestations of
the prose poem is where Wordsworth famously said in Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that
“there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and
metrical composition”, and Coleridge responded that ‘a poem contains the same elements
as a prose composition, but “the difference … must consist in a different combination of
them”.
4  J. MONSON

can become a genre in itself in British literature is finally being acknowl-

edged—at least in terms of digital and print exposure, where it is being
published, taught and discussed steadily in the independent streams, and
more frequently recognised by centrally established authors, publishers,
panels and judges.
With the presence, rather than absence, of the prose poem very much
in mind throughout this book, the complex backstory to the prose poem
in the UK, where it could have disappeared entirely, seems all the more
important to remember. Many critics place T.S. Eliot in the frame when
it comes to compounding the damage done during the prose poem’s
association with Wilde and Decadence. I quote from one of this vol-
ume’s contributor’s, Michel Delville, in the introduction to his seminal
book on the American prose poem, The American Prose Poem: Poetic
Form and the Boundaries of Genre, to put this point and Eliot’s criticism
in context:

One of the first critical responses to such a conception of the prose poem
as a piece of stylized and ‘poeticized’ prose (Ernest Dowson’s 1899 collec-
tion of prose poems was quite appropriately named Decorations in Prose)
was voiced by T.S. Eliot in 1917. In an essay entitled ‘The Borderline
of Prose,’ Eliot reacted against the prose poems of Richard Aldington,
which he saw as a disguised attempt to revive the stylistic preciousness and
technical ‘charlatanism’ of the Decadents (‘Borderline’ 158). In contrast
with the prose poems of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen and the ‘pure prose’ of
Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which he admired, Aldington’s hybrid prose
poems were condemned by Eliot on the ground that they ‘seem[ed] to
hesitate between two media’ (159). As became clear in a second essay on
the subject, published in 1921, Eliot did not object so much to the prose
poets’ endeavors to create a hybrid genre as to the terms ‘prose poem’ and
‘prose poetry’ themselves, to which he preferred the more neutral expres-
sion ‘short prose’ (‘Prose and Verse’ 6).
That Eliot’s fierce condemnation of the formal hybridity of the prose
poem did a lot to discourage other early modernist poets from even trying
their hands at the genre is beyond any doubt—if Eliot had been the lesser
poet, and Aldington one of the most respected and influential men of let-
ters of his time, the history of the contemporary prose poem in English
may have taken a totally different turn.5

5 Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre

(Florida: University Press of Florida, 1998), 5–6.

 1 INTRODUCTION  5

In many ways, this volume is a response to two things that T.S. Eliot
said at the beginning of the twentieth century in one of the earliest
published examples of a poet and essayist critiquing the British prose
poem. Eliot’s first opinion more or less condemned or heavily refuted
the prose poem; the second implied that the prose poem might do better
were it regarded as short prose, rather than a prose poem. While these
questions of form and identity are addressed, what emerges through
these essays is that, as part of tracing the prose poem’s story in Britain,
we need to turn as much towards the UK itself as outwards towards
other literary, cultural and societal values in which the prose poem has
been able to play a more readily and naturally accepted role in education,
publishing, literature and performance. Throughout the world there are
examples of prose poets in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa, the
Caribbean, Russia, Japan, China, Syria, Portugal, Germany, Scandinavia,
Poland, Spain and Greece, and it appears that the form—or at the very
least the blending of poetry and prose—is far more stitched into their
mainstream literatures and curricula. It is for another editor and writer
to produce a literature survey of prose poetry across the globe and go
much further towards ascertaining the manifold traditions, rules and
approaches towards poetry and prose, and how they have governed the
prose poem’s role and status accordingly.
Through acknowledging and being aware of the international differ-
ences as far as the status of the prose poem is concerned, the contribu-
tors here focus on writers based in the UK who have globally and locally
influenced and developed the prose poem, through dedicated prac-
tice—raising its profile in teaching, publishing, performance and public
debates. As a result of this creative and professional momentum coor-
dinated to encourage a correspondence between conventionally separate
disciplines, forms and contexts, the British prose poem is thriving.
And yet, in spite of this resurgence, there is still criticism and confu-
sion reminiscent of Eliot’s questioning. What are we marketing? What is
this form? What defines the prose poem? How would we recognise one?
It is still in many ways the ‘impossible genre’ in spite of its recent suc-
cess. While it has been defined, within that definition (or definitions),
practitioners have had their own idea of what constitutes prose poetry,
from length to use of sentence, look and sound. In a handful of critical
texts—notably Jonathan Monroe, A Poverty of Objects (1987); Stephen
Fredman, Poet’s Prose (1990); Margueritte S. Murphy, A Tradition of
Subversion (1992); Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem (1998);
6  J. MONSON

and Steven Monte, Invisible Fences (2000)—there are some definitions,

many of which are useful and directive. More significantly, however,
these writers’ texts raise discussions around definition and the various
takes on what a prose poem is or is not, as well as ask: to what extent
is a definition helpful and to what extent is it pointless, or even detri-
mental, to a form that is so closely associated with so many other terms
and forms? There are, of course, many examples of prose poems given in
this volume but, if we work with the most recognised characteristic of a
prose poem—which is that the sentence is used as the unit, rather than
the line—can we then see the examples all falling into the same genre?
Clearly not. So, how do we commonly account for what they are; what
they are doing with language, image, thought, rhythm and form? For
an important essay on questioning the prose poem with astute reference
to Geoffrey Hill, see Alan Wall’s essay in this volume. Among Wall’s
questions, he asks of a passage from Dickens’ Bleak House: is this a prose
poem? In language, turn of phrase, focus and density, this is a hall-mark
prose poem, he acknowledges, but, as Wall concludes, it is not a prose
poem, because it is an intrinsic part of a larger piece of fiction. This begs
another question: is there room in the genre for found prose poetry, or
is the prose poem a prose poem because it works in a far more self-con-
tained and autonomous manner? This essay raises and draws attention
to ongoing arguments and opinions around definition that, to a point,
pitch against some of the views in other essays and certainly will con-
tinue debate in the poetry and prose poetry communities. It is essential
that questions about, as well as common understandings of, prose poetry
are represented here in order to reflect today’s mix of contradictory and
broad takes on the prose poem. Its exposure and survival is dependent
on these articulated differences; they are an essential part of the ques-
tions that need to happen around the prose poem, not only to gain more
of a critical understanding of the genre and variations of the form within
that genre, but also to gauge whether the prose poem is a form that
opens up more opportunities for new forms within other genres. Can it
exist, for example, as embedded and waiting to be found within larger
works of fiction as much as be created according to its own rules?
For the purposes of at least having a foundation on which to stand or
leave and to help answer these questions, one of the more useful work-
ing definitions and important synoptic accounts which both practitioners
and critics have been able to draw on is to be found in the Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics:
 1 INTRODUCTION  7

PROSE POEM (poem in prose). A composition able to have any or all

features of the lyric, except that it is put on the page—though not con-
ceived of—as prose. It differs from poetic prose in that it is short and
compact, from free verse in that it has no line breaks, from a short prose
passage in that it has, usually, more pronounced rhythm, sonorous effects,
imagery, and density of expression. It may contain even inner rhyme and
metrical runs. Its length, generally, is from half a page (one or two para-
graphs) to three or four pages, i.e., of the average lyrical poem. If it is any
longer, the tensions and impact are forfeited, and it becomes—more or less
poetic-prose.6

Characteristic of many definitions, while it gives a good idea of the prose

poem—as opposed to poetic prose—this is as prescriptive as it is safe:
‘usually’ ‘may’ and ‘generally’ draw attention to the fact that the prose
poem is hard to summarise precisely and that there are other definitions
or interpretations within what constitutes a prose poem itself. Some
writers avoid definition for this reason and prefer to speak more broadly
about the relationship between the two genres. Peter Riley puts it well,
simply saying he is interested in ‘prose as a support to poetry’.7 Likewise,
it is helpful to keep in mind Russell Edson’s aim to seek ‘a poetry freed
from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of fic-
tion’8 in order to even entertain the idea that a third form is possible
when the two genres merge.
Of equal significance when thinking about the formation and defi-
nition of the prose poem are influences from other disciplines outside
of poetry. The prose poem is not only at the behest of changing atti-
tudes and ideas of what constitutes prose and poetry, but also part of
experiments in architecture, urban environments, technology, photogra-
phy, painting, advertising, journalism, social media and digitalised ways
of communicating more generally. So, for example, if we focus here on
the digital or physical frame/box-like shape that many of these differ-
ent forms inhabit, aesthetically and stylistically—given the prose poem’s

6 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke and

O.B. Hardison, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 664.

7 Peter Riley in conversation with Keith Tuma: http://jacketmagazine.com/11/riley-iv-

by-tuma.html. See further discussion of this idea in the Riley section of Owen Bullock’s
essay in this volume.
8 Russell Edson interviewed by Mark Tursi in Double Room, 4 (Spring/Summer 2004),

http://www.webdelsol.com/Double_Room/issue_four/Russell_Edson.html.
8  J. MONSON

material also being created, organised and presented within a square-

ish frame or border—is the prose poem the literary equivalent of the
(short) film, the photo, the painting, the post-war building? Recently,
the BBC had one of this volume’s contributors, Ian Seed, on their Radio
3 programme The Verb, where he gave a memorable reading of his prose
poetry and discussed the form in relation to the development of new
towns in postwar Britain. Seed aptly compared the prose poem to urban
architecture—blocks on the outside, concentrated and distinct homes
and lives on the inside. In the poet’s own words:

Each prose poem is like a little block … like houses all the same on the
surface, but if you go behind the walls, the doors and the windows, each
house will have its own world. So these prose poems might look quite sim-
ilar on the page – little square blocks, rectangular blocks – but if you go
inside, each one has its own world, but that world might be quite a frag-
mented, subjective world, it could be quite an atomised world and often I
think of these prose poems actually as being kind of atoms and the atoms
come together in an accumulative effect, if you take the trouble to go and
look at them and see what is there behind the doors …9

The subsequent comparison by the interviewer, Ian McMillan, of a prose

poem (from a distance) to a ‘slab’, a ‘brick’, a ‘breezeblock’, until you
get close enough to examine differences and details, does highlight the
issue of the prose poem’s reception and acceptance as poetry, in that it
does not immediately look like poetry; the reader has to advance sev-
eral steps closer before even considering the fact that poetry might be
in there somewhere. In other words, we first approach the prose poem
either as brief prose or as something else entirely.
Approaching the prose poem through doors other than poetry, how-
ever, is useful thinking that has been discussed before in relation to the
prose poem in Russia, via the term Minimalism. In Adrian Wanner’s
book Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story (2003),
minimalism was used most fashionably during the 1960s in relation to
the plastic arts created by New York artists, among them Carl Andre,
Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. The point of Wanner’s discussion of
minimalism when applied to both the plastic arts and poetry is not so

9 Ian Seed in discussion with Ian McMillan, “New Towns”, The Verb, BBC Radio 3,

March 2016.
 1 INTRODUCTION  9

much to do with the potential similarities between minimal concrete and

abstract forms in art and literature, but that minimalism when applied to
texts forces us to revisit our assumptions about genre:

Minimalist texts defy traditional generic expectations, constituting them-

selves as literature by fiat rather than by adhering to any received literary
assumptions. By doing so, they force the reader to revisit personal assump-
tions of generic classification.10

Wanner goes on to illustrate this point with reference to the American

poet, art critic and curator John Perreault who describes ‘the generic
shifts produced by minimal art forms’ (6) in a way that is reminiscent of
McMillan’s discussion of Ian Seed’s blocks of prose:

Paradoxically the closer an artist gets to the mythological ‘essence’ of his

particular medium the faster his medium becomes something else. Frank
Stella’s shaped canvases become a kind of flat sculpture for the wall. Cage’s
‘music’ becomes theatre. Concretist poems become graphic art. Prose
becomes poetry or music.11

Perreault’s particular angle on the transformative nature and implied

fluidity between forms—where poetry can become prose under what
Wanner calls ‘conditions of extreme brevity’ (6)—is another helpful way
of understanding the prose poem and accepting it as much for what it
is as what it is not. Keeping Wanner’s ‘conditions of extreme brevity’ in
mind, the essays in this book also help us review the prose poem not only
in relation to various takes on prose poetry, but also in relation to short/
compressed prose and the experiments of prose writers reconfiguring
borders between genres.
For some, a radical approach to the prose poem has been far more
in keeping with its nature and story in Britain. Take the view, for exam-
ple, of documentary maker Humphrey Jennings and poet Charles
Madge whose prose poems during their establishment of the twentieth-­
century British Mass-Observation movement openly rejected generic
categorization. Extrapolating from Eliot’s condemnation of the prose

10 Adrian Wanner, Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-story

(Northwestern University Press, 2003), 5–6.

11 John Perreault, in Russian Minimalism, 6.
10  J. MONSON

poem in ‘The Borderline of Prose’ (1917) where ‘poetry is written in

verse and prose is written in prose,’ in the 1930s Madge and Jennings
worked together to collate three pieces of prose from novel extracts into
reports.12 One of this volume’s contributors, Jeremy Noel-Tod, has writ-
ten an article on the Mass-Observation movement and prose poetry,
called ‘Mass illuminations: Jennings, Madge, Rimbaud and the ‘popular’
prose poem’. The article gives the reader another context and perspective
towards understanding the role of poetry and the prose poem in British
society, and helps us think about the possibilities of the prose poem
when found in prose and literally extracted from the every-day, rather
than written within recognisable poetic parameters by a poet:

For the left-wing Madge and Jennings, though, the idea of a poetry
­liberated from the restraints of verse form, lyric voice and logical argument
had opened up the possibility of democratically transcribing, rather than
authorially ‘inscrib[ing]’, the poetic consciousness of a people. In ‘Poetic
Description and Mass-Observation’, Madge presented three pieces of
prose ‘collected’ by Jennings – an extract from a novel, a Pandaemonium-
style account of an industrial discovery, and a Mass-Observer’s report –
and made his case for the latter as a method that produced ‘a poetry which
is not, as at present, restricted to a handful of esoteric performers.’13

Irrespective of whether we are or are not in agreement that scientific, jour-

nalistic or narrative-based writing can be guiding disciplines towards prose
poetry, what we can take from Noel-Tod’s article is the significance of a
social movement in Britain that helped re-shuffle categorical rules used to
organise and separate genres. As a social experiment collecting every-day
details of people’s lives in Britain, rendering them in the form of short pieces
and presenting them as ‘reports’ otherwise considered prose poems, the
Mass-Observation movement sheds a unique light on the story of British

12 “Jennings actually planned to call a volume of his poems of the 1930s that never came

out, Popular Narratives, and in any case he habitually ascribed his prose poems of the
1930s to the genre of ‘reports’. The notion of the poem as ‘report’ and of the poet as
‘reporter’ is one of the things that links Madge’s and Jennings’s procedures as Surrealist
writers with their activities as Mass-Observers.” Extract from: Bourgeois News: Humphrey
Jennings and Charles Madge, Rod Mengham. This piece first appeared in New Formations,
44 (Autumn 2001): 26–33.
13 Jeremy Noel-Tod, “Mass Illuminations: Jennings, Madge, Rimbaud and the ‘Popular’

Prose Poem,” Critical Quarterly, 57 (2015): 51–65, https://doi:10.1111/criq.12209.

 1 INTRODUCTION  11

prose poetry. Indeed, I would recommend any student or researcher of

prose poetry to read the ‘reports’ of Madge and Jennings, as part of a con-
textual understanding of defining moments and influences in the history
of the British prose poem. Their approach, in turn, helps us continue to
question the accepted terms around distinctions between prose and poetry:
namely, sentence and paragraph or line, metre and stanza.14
Whatever your understanding of the prose poem’s nature or forma-
tion, it is important to understand that the prose poem does not just
cross literary boundaries, and neither is it simply a meeting between one
genre and the next; it is a dialogue between a host of other disciplines
and recognised polarities. The genre-breaking or blending is a natural
result of the form’s relationship with its content, whether it is science
meets art, journalism meets essay, dream meets reality, politics meets
every-day bus-stop conversation, object meets thought, animal, human,
space, landscape and so on.
Perhaps because there are so many ways of regarding the prose poem
and the processes by which the prose poem can be made, the form defies
a single, satisfying definition. Although it seems entirely appropriate to
think about it from all of these different angles, thoughts and disciplines,
would it be enough simply to call it a poem in sentences, without the
use of the traditional poetic line and line-breaks? Or, as many understand
it, short prose? This latter comparison is not just particular to British

14 See Simon Armitage’s online discussion, “Where is British poetry today? British

Academy Literature Week 2013”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LchDRe8HF40.

Armitage outlines what goes on behind the scenes of poetry competitions and mainstream
poetry publishers in the UK, and how dated, entrenched rules of poetry are homogenising
rather than reflecting the diversity of contemporary British poetry. Armitage says: “Poetry
prizes are not always a good indicator or barometer of the current trends and many voices
and styles that are being practiced in British poetry today … Winning poems and non-win-
ning poems according to Forward, Eliot, Costa and UK’s main individual poetry prizes,
tend to conform to a kind of industry standard over the last couple of decades, outlined
recently by Nick Laird in a comment piece in The Guardian. Essentially he disparaged
poems with: Illuminated initial letters in the shape of herons, poems in italics or capitals,
handwritten poems, poems in any ink other than black, poems centrally justified, poems
about pets, poems printed on top of photographs of pets, and so on and so forth. By exten-
sion, winning poems would be those clinging to the left hand margin like a non-swimmer
at the side of the baths with stanzas in either military or dance troupe formation using
recognised systems of punctuation and grammar.” He continues: “what we find however, if
we widen the lens, is a poetic landscape far more varied and divergent than those prizes and
the five mainstream poetry publishers would have us believe”.
12  J. MONSON

prose poetry, but also applies to the prose poem across many borders: in
Japan, through its kinship with haibun and haiku; in Russia, through the
short parables of the anti-story and Russian Minimalism; through to the
short prose of key European and English Modernists. It could be argued
that, even today, the prose poem is more popular now due in part to the
rise of the short form—flash fiction, short prose, micro-fiction, the short-
short, the six word story—rather than due to any fundamental or rigid
proximity to poetry.
Whether viewed through a prosaic or poetic lens, this book is far
more interested in the prose poem’s existence—the form’s prevalence in
Britain—rather than in its absence or misconstrued identity. As a result,
the book moves definitely and clearly towards where we can find prose
poetry, and engages with the impetus of contemporary prose poets.
Beginning in the nineteenth century and moving through to the twenty-­
first, the contributors examine the story and history of the British prose
poem and how the contexts in which it has appeared, and the individuals
who have praised or defamed it, have served to disable and, more impor-
tantly, enable its popularity.
The book is divided into five parts. In Part I, The Story of the British
Prose Poem, three essays set the stage. The contributors discuss the
prose poem’s overarching story and history from the nineteenth century
through to today, and how, as David Caddy reflects, the prose poem has
gone from a debatably ‘hidden’ form in English poetry to a significantly
emerging one. Caddy’s opening essay is, in many ways, a preview of the
entire book and a follow-on from this Introduction. It mirrors the arc
of the book’s narrative, reflecting on the compromised identity and role
of the prose poem in English literature and ends with the resurgence of
British prose poetry. Margueritte Murphy’s crucial essay then places the
beginnings of the British prose poem in the context of early modernism
and opens up questions of the prose poem’s possibilities and relevance
within modern advances in technology, thinking and expression. Robert
Vas Dias offers a lucid, detailed narrative and bridging history of the
form’s travels between significant transatlantic figures and movements in
modernist and contemporary literature.
Part II, The Story’s Early Narrators, focuses ever more closely on par-
ticular modernists in fiction and drama. Michael O’Neill takes us back
to go forward by examining Virginia Woolf, Charles Baudelaire and
William Carlos Williams. His essay enables the reader to view the British
prose poem succinctly through three of its most significant influences
 1 INTRODUCTION  13

in French, American and English literature. Jane Goldman focuses on

Virginia Woolf, whose short fictions are discussed for their c­ ommonality
with prose poetry. Here, Goldman crucially examines the aesthetic
and political stakes in claiming Woolf as a poet in prose, rather than as
a poetic novelist. Next, Michel Delville eloquently illuminates a little-­
known but significant corner of Joyce, while Vidyan Ravinthiran
refreshes our reading of Eliot and ‘Hysteria’, and raises critical ques-
tions around the prose poem’s form in relation to content and around
gender in relation to form. Finally, Scott Annett re-examines Beckett’s
short prose piece How it is, focusing on Beckett’s ‘syntax of weakness’,
and offering the reader an original perspective on one of modernism’s
most intensely regarded and scrutinised figures. If Part II examines the
pivotal role these well-known authors played within the prose poem’s
development within modernism, Part III, By Name or by Nature?, inves-
tigates further twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers and figures
who have fundamentally influenced its prevalence in modern British lit-
erature, including Seamus Heaney, Mark Ford, Geoffrey Hill, Claudia
Rankine, Peter Riley, Simon Armitage and Vahni Capildeo. The success
of their influence has not been without questions and misunderstand-
ings over the name and nature of the work itself, however. These nec-
essary and incisive essays by Alan Wall, Andy Brown, Anthony Caleshu,
Jeremy Noel-Tod and Owen Bullock reframe, challenge and resitu-
ate our understanding or assumptions about the form, the name, the
poets, the works, the criticism around the works, and the form’s rela-
tion to broader questions of diversity and boundaries. Their ques-
tions, their particular references to counter-forms, identity, genre,
divisions, race, sex, place, culture and society, expand our knowledge
of the prose poem, refresh preconceptions about the work of these
authors and encourage us to revisit past and contemporary writers. In
Part IV, Other Voices, Other Forms, Luke Kennard compels us towards
Surrealist prose poetry and dynamically revisits David Gascoyne’s rep-
ertoire, while Ian Seed delves into the nonsense and wonder of Jeremy
Over, offering not only a rare discussion of Over’s work in this context,
but also usefully including an interview with Over himself. In this sec-
tion, too, Nikki Santilli and Peter Robinson explore the role of music
and the prose poem. Santilli contributes an unprecedented essay on
jazz and the prose poem, pointedly illustrated with prose poems by Roy
Fisher and Patience Agbabi, while Peter Robinson focuses exclusively
on Fisher’s The Ship’s Orchestra to give a detailed and inspired essay
in which writer and reader alike can appreciate this work specifically
14  J. MONSON

in the context of British prose poetry. These two essays also pair well in
their direct and indirect respect for Baudelaire’s famous ambition for the
prose poem—now almost a mantra in the form’s archives—of a ‘poetic
prose that is musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato
enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of
dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness’.15 Part V, Thinking Back,
Writing Forward, is the book’s pedagogical and biographical section in
which Patricia Debney and Michael Rosen conclude with material that is
moving, useful and motivating. Between them, they afford the reader the
opportunity to think specifically about the form in relation to mortal-
ity, trauma, change and education—to consider the next generation and
the prose poem, while reflecting on their own personal experience. In
the twenty-first century we have teachers, critics, students, future voices
and writers combining to explore its potential and raise awareness of its
relevance. Debney currently teaches a dedicated prose poetry module at
BA level; this is unique in the UK. Rosen writes prose poetry for both
children and adults; his recognisable output and reach to both audiences
is an unusual and important chapter in the story of the prose poem. This
section concludes the underlying movement of the book—reaching back
into the prose poem’s past to understand, recognise and celebrate its
present and future.
Indeed, the subjects of this book, as well as the essayists themselves,
are writers who have practiced, or continue to practice, teach, edit, criti-
cise, promote, market and publish the prose poem. The shift in the prose
poem’s increasing acceptance is at the hands of all of them. In other
words, the pedagogical debates are inseparable from the decisions made in
publishing and the critical, academic and biographical conversations. Prose
poetry is making a slow, but encouraging appearance at all levels of edu-
cation and it is as important for the genre to be given room pedagogically
and through practice as it is to be given more space in literary criticism.
This turn in attitude or approach to the prose poem has been aided
by several important moments in its recent history. Notably, in 2015 the
Forward Prize was awarded to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American
Lyric, interchangeably referred to as a lyric essay, a prose poem, or, at

15 Indeed, many of the essayists in the book reference Baudelaire, still widely considered

the pioneer of the prose poem in nineteenth-century France, and it is important to think
again about a “pioneer” of the form and where that remains useful or misleading in our
understanding of how it functions within literature today.
 1 INTRODUCTION  15

least, boundary-bending and positively celebrated for its straddling

of forms, rather than criticised for not knowing where to put its feet.
Citizen was also short-listed for the T.S. Eliot prize; through this level
of exposure, yet more conversations about prose poetry have continued
and started. Simon Armitage’s collection, Seeing Stars (Faber & Faber
2010) was discussed and reviewed as either prose poetry or story poems
on many occasions; the author himself did not categorize the book as
such, but it is significant that so many readers did and still do.
In summary, while the tentative beginnings of prose poetry in
English Literature can date back as far as Anglo-Saxon literature, the
actual story and history of the British Prose Poem only starts surfacing
from the nineteenth-century onwards through the creative and criti-
cal work of the Romantics, Decadents and Symbolists, Modernists and
Surrealists then experimenting with the form. Throughout, writers began
consciously to address the borders and futile distinctions between prose
and poetry and to start the necessary conversations around hybrid or
blended genres and interdisciplinary methods. Today, writers and critics
focus these ideas around fusion, crossover, mergence and shifting bor-
ders, and put them into unprecedented practice—consequently, the British
prose poem today is comfortably at its most successfully marginal. The
necessary questions and experiments in poetry and prose fashioned by
the previous century’s writers continue to play their part in diversifying
voices, styles and genres within British literature generally. We acknowl-
edge those writers as a fundamental part of the prose poem’s successes:
whether writing ‘prose poems’ in name, these writers’ supple and sharp-
eyed movements between poetry and prose have taught us how to go one
stage further, and have helped establish the prose poem as a genre and
form in its own right. Poetic prose, flash fiction and short prose may con-
tinue to be part of the way we try and understand the prose poem, but
the rise of the contemporary British prose poem in practice and critique is
making these comparisons less engaging and relevant as we gather increas-
ingly diverse examples within prose poetry itself and appreciate what it is
doing differently. Significantly, the prose poem—as a form which natu-
rally opens up discussions around fusion, division, boundaries, migration,
in-between places, cross-gender and a host of related terms and subjects—
is being ­discovered as an increasingly pertinent and manageable container
in which to explore and probe ongoing and complex issues and themes.
Indeed, the rapidly growing archives, as well as the rise in current debates
and performances of prose poetry, cannot but help shore up our ideas and
questions around the British prose poem when it comes to questions of
16  J. MONSON

identity, form and status—for now and the future. To this end, the essays
in this collection are not only a narrative map of the British prose poem
and its vibrant existence in this country, but a sustained dialogue with its
relevant and indispensable global heritage.
 PART I

The Story of the British Prose Poem

 CHAPTER 2

‘Hidden’ Form: The Prose Poem in English

Poetry

David Caddy

The view that prose poetry evolved through French poetry is a partial
one.1 Such a perspective doubtless has its origins in the impact of that
evolution on American, Polish and other traditions. Certainly, there is
a distinct line of development through Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de
la Nuit (1842), Charles Baudelaire’s immensely popular Petits Poèmes
en prose (1869), and on through Rimbaud, Laforgue, Mallarmé to
Gertrude Stein, the Surrealists—especially Francis Ponge and Max Jacob,
all of whom found it a useful tool in the quest for imaginative libera-
tion. These modernist poets have their equivalents in the German and
Spanish traditions, as well as later examples in Greek, Russian, English
and Japanese. Early English modernists appear to have followed T.S.
Eliot’s view that this was a no man’s land for the aspiring poet, who
should be concerned with formal verse. An alternative viewpoint had

1 David Caddy, “Hidden Form: The Prose Poem in English Poetry.” Previously pub-

lished in Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry, ed. Tom Chivers (Penned in the Margins, 2010),
103–13. Permission by the author to use with any necessary editing has been granted.

D. Caddy (*) 
Portman Lodge, Durweston, Blandford Forum, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 19

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_2
20  D. CADDY

been suggested by Shelley’s observation that the King James Bible was
an example of prose as poetry. Indeed, English mainstream poets seem
to have regarded the prose poem as a peculiarly foreign affair and one
to be avoided, apart from those times when there was a public question-
ing of identity and language. I do not think that we would have seen
a prose poem such as Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I
Sat Down and Wept (1945) published, for example, in 1925 or 1955,
when the literary establishment and publishers were less open and firmly
anti-internationalist. Indeed, Smart’s work, reissued in 1966, became a
classic in the 1960s and 1970s when it was possible to read the prose
poems of Baudelaire, Neruda, Paz, Kenneth Patchen, the Surrealists
and the Beats, as well as the open-field poetics of Charles Olson. There
was also interest in the work of David Jones, and his epic prose poem
about the First World War, In Parenthesis (1937), at this time. It is this
re-emergence of the prose poem, and its possibilities, into English poetry
that I wish to discuss.
The prose poem can be seen as a site of struggle and potential sub-
version within an evolving and shifting variety of poetic forms and dis-
cussion of those forms. It is part of a counter-discourse through its lack
of general visibility within mainstream English poetry. There are very
few histories of the English prose poem, and a relative lack of essays and
journals devoted to the subject. Yet, it has been a constant that has been
seemingly re-discovered and developed by individual late modernist and
avant-garde poets and writers.
The origin of that struggle can be traced from Oscar Wilde’s descrip-
tion of his so-called ‘obscene’ letter to Lord Alfred Douglas as a ‘prose
poem’ in 1893 and subsequent association with French decadence,
­sexual deviance and immodesty in the mind of the English reading pub-
lic. This was reinforced and clarified by T.S. Eliot’s 1917 essay, ‘The
Borderline of Prose,’2 based upon his criticism of Richard Aldington’s
The Love of Myrrhine and Konallis and other Prose Poems (1917). The
essay essentially concerns definition and possibility. More generally, it can
be linked to his aversion to Ernest Dowson and Oscar Wilde’s appropria-
tion of French symbolism. Eliot recognised the ‘unexplored possibilities’
of both poetry and prose, but urged writers to write one or the other

2 See also T.S. Eliot’s 1917 essay “Reflections on Vers Libre” and 1936 introduction to

Djuna Barnes’ poetic novel, Nightwood, which he claimed was not poetic prose as it did not
have sufficient rhythm and music.
 2  ‘HIDDEN’ FORM: THE PROSE POEM IN ENGLISH POETRY  21

and not mix them. What constitutes the borderline and boundaries of
poetry and prose thus became, and remains, a continuing debate.
The prose poem substantially entered English poetry through the
impact of French symbolism and early modernism. I recall my own dis-
covery of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen translated by Louis Varése (New
Directions, 1970) in 1975, tracking down his Wine and Hashish poems,
and my fascination with this alien genre.3 There has been a continuous
interaction since then as English poets have fed off and entered into sub-
sequent French poetic discourse, and French translations have arrived in
England. A partial list since Dowson and Wilde would include Samuel
Beckett, David Gascoyne, Norman Cameron, Charles Tomlinson,
Roy Fisher, Peter Redgrove, Lee Harwood and John Ash. The prose
poem—often associated with the modern world, unofficial language and
thought—can, through its hybrid nature, present unsettling and unfamil-
iar aspects of that world, which these poets have seized upon.
The prose poem, seen here as a poem without line-breaks, retains
the tension between line and sentence structure without the use of
line-endings. It has the potential to build pace, rhythm and music, and
to produce meaning as much as free verse, only it has to generate ten-
sion, drama and crises through sentence structure, relationship and lan-
guage use alone. It is, in a sense, a freedom to open possibilities and to
move away from a stultifying rigidity and closure. Eliot objected to the
pseudo-archaic style of the Decadent prose poem and, by implication,
indicated that the prose poem could not rely upon only emulating the
musicality of verse in one narrative. Alternatives needed to be found. His
own effort, the prose poem ‘Hysteria’, does show the way towards fabu-
lism in its use of burlesque and fantasy. Notwithstanding, Eliot’s censure,
the apparent failure of the Decadent prose poem, led to clear thresholds
in English poetry in the 1920s and 1930s. Clearly, later, the Movement
and their successors have a dualistic attitude to the questions of identity
and the formal constraints of language and verse that runs counter to an
opening up of the world and a discovery of variance through language.
Don Paterson’s T.S. Eliot Lecture, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’ (2004), is

3 For an interesting discussion of the impact of Thomas De Quincey on Baudelaire and

the development of the prose poem, see N. Santilli, Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in
English Literature (USA: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 87–97.
22  D. CADDY

shot through with it: ‘Only plumbers can plumb, roofers roof and drum-
mers drum; only poets can write poetry.’4
I mentioned that the prose poem is part of a counter-discourse.
I think that this can be seen, in part, in the criticism of Roy Fisher and
his prose poem The Ship’s Orchestra (1966).5 Up until recently (and
­including this volume), there has been limited attention paid to Fisher’s
poem in light of prose poetry. In the critical volume on Fisher edited by
John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson, Robert Sheppard in his essay refers
to the work as ‘the nearest Fisher has approached to prose fiction’.6
Similarly, Robert Sheppard in his study The Poetry Of Saying neglects to
include this major work in his discussion of Fisher.7 There is no men-
tion in Sean O’Brien’s The Deregulated Muse,8 or by Andrew Duncan in
Origins of the Underground.9 Santilli and Robinson both invaluably dis-
cuss the poem in the tradition of prose poetry later in this volume but,
here, I want briefly to highlight the key qualities that render it as a classic
of its kind within prose poetry. There is a high degree of poetic tech-
nique in the form of rhythmic compression and musicality in sentences
of varying length with considerable tension, drama and varying thematic
repetition. It has a narrative symmetry that prompts memories of reading
Kafka and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. There is, for example, pressure
from the narrator to find unity and to become another: ‘To be somebody
else: to be Amy’, and ‘If only we could all play together on one single
instrument!’10 The exact location of the musicians within the ship narra-
tive is a state of mind. All the action takes place in the mind of a flexible
character that has authentic piano player indeterminacy. He is a drinker,
seer, liar, slacker, trying to find his place as a musician at sea in a band

4 Don Paterson, “The Dark Art of Poetry,” T.S. Eliot Lecture, 2004, https://www.poet-

rylibrary.org.uk/news/poetryscene/?id=20.
5 Roy Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra (London: Fulcrum Press, 1966).

6 Robert Sheppard, “Making Forms with Remarks: The Prose,” in The Thing about Roy

Fisher, ed. John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2000), 134.
7 Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents 1950–2000

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 77–102.

8 Sean O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British & Irish Poetry

(Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1998), 112–22.

9 Andrew Duncan, Origins of the Underground: British Poetry between Apocryphon and

Incident Light 1933–79 (Cambridge: Salt, 2008), 62–70.

10 Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra, 43, 44.
 2  ‘HIDDEN’ FORM: THE PROSE POEM IN ENGLISH POETRY  23

that is not allowed to play. His view is partial, cubist. It is at once bohe-
mian, quirky and in the twilight of sensory perception:

Think of what all the people you see taste like and you’d go mad: all those
leaping, billowing tastes through the world, like a cemetery turned sud-
denly into damp bedsheets with the wind under them. So the possible taste
of a person is a small thing, just a flicker of salt, putrescence, potatoes, old
cardboard across the mind, behind the words, behind the manners. And
the actual taste, if you go after it, is something that’s always retreating;
even if it overwhelms, there’s an enormous stretch of meaninglessness in
it, like the smell of the anaesthetist’s rubber mask in the first moments – it
ought to mean, it ought to mean; but how can anything mean that? There
must be a taste about me that could be sensed by others. Somebody as
skilled as a dog could recognise it as mine; yet I cannot. If I try to get it
from myself I just get the double feeling of tasting and being tasted all in
one, like being in a room with an important wall missing. Hold hands with
myself as with another person; the hands disappear from my jurisdiction.
Looking down, I see moving effigies; the hands that feel are some way off,
invisible. There is an image of me that I can never know, held in common
by certain dogs.11

It is intensely physical and shot through with poetic externalisations.

Thus, Merrett’s saxophone is a husk and Amy’s trombone is an axe.12 In
essence, the poetry and prose are woven together through the mutability
of the narrator seeing from ‘far down’ the ship’s superstructure and see-
ing the world of the ship ‘like cake’. He gets drunk, vomits, sees a mer-
maid, hears Amy play the trombone, and sees the ship as a structural and
purposive unity proceeded with music. However, that is not how it is.
The musicians do not play and the ship is not a unity, and the musicians
sink further into themselves and into a world of claustrophobia and para-
noia. The ship becomes a symbol of societal constraint and the musicians
clearly want to break free and play.13 Again, the poetry bursts through
the prose as fine-tuned externalisations of inner emotions. The narrator
is ‘something that has been pushed out of Amy’s body’, with ‘no legs’,
‘no arms or hands’, and ‘pushed out of Merrett’s body in his sleep’ with

11 Ibid., 11–12.
12 Ibid., 8.
13 Ibid., 39.
24  D. CADDY

‘no head’ and thinks he is yellow.14 He contracts to this limbless crea-

ture that can journey between ‘Amy’s breasts by caterpillar tractor.’15
The heightened poetic language serves to subvert the prose through the
mutable and refractive narrative producing, at once, a shocking and sur-
realistic poem.
Prose poetry seems to have evolved out of sentence structure long
before it was designated as such and interrogated by Eliot’s either/or
thinking. The Surrealists and Ethnopoets seem to have no trouble open-
ing the reader to new possibility. As an early example of this trend, con-
sider the poem The Nine Herbs Charm, featured in Jerome Rothenberg’s
1968 anthology Technicians of the Sacred (347–349) as a poem.16 This
tenth-century Anglo-Saxon magic text, with ingredients from and par-
allels in German and Norse, has been translated with and without line
breaks. It relates to paganism and mythology, and doubtless has been
subjected to Christian interference; it takes the reader into another world
and has power as poetry when chanted aloud. It is this quality that marks
it as one of the earliest prose poems and reminds us of the potential con-
nection and connotation that a prose poem can muster:

A worm came creeping, he tore a man in two, then Woden took nine
Glory-Twigs, then struck the adder, that it flew apart into nine bits.
… Woden established the nine herbs and sent them into the seven worlds,
for the poor and the rich, a remedy for all, it stands against pain, it fights
against poison, it avails against three and against thirty, against foe’s hand
and against noble scheming, against enchantment of vile creatures.17

Prose poetry was certainly formed as a hybrid to shock and innovate

against poetic tradition. Once the idea of introducing non-literary prose
into poetry had been accepted as a form of modernist subversion, then
the genre spread as a strategy and innovation kicked into the extent that,

14 Ibid., 46.
15 Ibid., 50.
16 Bill Griffiths’ version of the The Nine Herbs Charm (Tern Press, 1981) emphasises its

sound and prose qualities. Moreover, Griffiths’ Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic (Anglo-Saxon
Books, 1996) makes a case for many Old English texts as list poems that can be translated
with or without line breaks. Griffiths, of course, was a poet intensely concerned with ques-
tions of identity, language and power.
17 https://www.wapedia.mobi/en/Anglo-Saxon_paganism.
 2  ‘HIDDEN’ FORM: THE PROSE POEM IN ENGLISH POETRY  25

by the 1980s, it became a growth area; by the 1990s, it was an estab-

lished way of writing poetry in American poetry.
The prose poem in England has never really disappeared. However,
it is currently enjoying a renaissance in Britain, with expansion of pos-
sibilities and recognition. Younger poets such as Luke Kennard, Vahni
Capildeo, Patricia Debney and Elisabeth Bletsoe have joined older poets
such as Gavin Selerie, Elizabeth Cook, Peter Riley, Brian Catling, Martin
Stannard, Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey in this revival. Kennard won
an Eric Gregory Award for his prose poem collection The Solex Brothers
(Stride, 2005) and his second book, The Harbour Beyond The Movie
(Salt, 2007), was nominated for the 2007 Forward Poetry Prize. His
third collection of prose poems, The Migraine Hotel (Salt, 2009), has
seen Kennard gain more critical recognition. Todd Swift, for example, in
Poetry London 65, credits Kennard with introducing ‘an entirely new and
distinct style to poetry in the UK—one capable … of handling any sub-
ject or language it wants to’.18 While it is not entirely new, one immedi-
ately thinks of Martin Stannard’s deadpan humour and wide range, and
Gary Boswell’s idiosyncratic comic monologues, as well as many others,
as being precursors; it is clearly distinct and seemingly more acceptable.
Kennard has successfully applied French and American prose poem strat-
egies into an English idiom. Here is the beginning of ‘A Dog Descends’:

Before I was born the seer predicted, ‘You will be inaudible in the laughter
of many doctors.’
When I was born they tied a red ribbon around my ankle and glued fur
onto my back so that my blind father could tell the difference between me
and the dog – a hairless breed. This didn’t work as the fur just wouldn’t
stay on, so I had to learn to touch-type whilst drinking from a dog bowl
and sleeping amid the scraps. Mother kept saying, ‘Father knows best.’
When I protested, father would scream, ‘WILL SOMEONE SHUT UP
THAT INFERNAL TALKING DOG?’ When the dog barked my father
would shout, ‘WILL SOMEONE TEACH THAT INFERNAL BOY TO
SPEAK?’19

This combines fable and narrative into tight comic lines that are
self-contained and engaging. Kennard can be overtly self-conscious and

18 Todd Swift, “Catering to the Perfumed Cannibal,” Poetry London 65 (Spring 2010).
19 Luke Kennard, The Migraine Hotel (Cambridge: Salt, 2009), 48.
26  D. CADDY

self-deprecating in the manner of Dave Allen or Gerald Locklin and, like

them, can be very funny.
The prose poem is susceptible to a wide range of strategies, as shown
by Brian Clements and Janey Dunham’s Introduction to the Prose Poem.
This American anthology, with English contributors such as Rupert
Loydell, Geraldine Monk and Gavin Selerie, identifies twenty-four strat-
egies ranging from anecdote, object, image, aphorism, list, repetition,
fable and on, to surreal imagery/narration, rant, essay, epistle, mono-
logue, dialogue, hybrid, sequence and so on. It also shows in the struc-
tural analogue strategy section how the prose poem can absorb a wide
range of discourse.20
English poets today are grasping the possibilities that the prose poem
offers and the form shows little sign of disappearing in the UK, or any-
where else. On this note, I will end the essay with two examples by
writers carrying the form forward in this country and abroad, as well as
taking it in new directions. The first is from Elisabeth Bletsoe’s ‘Birds of
the Sherborne Missal’ sequence in her Landscape from a Dream collec-
tion,21 which has been anthologised in Carrie Etter’s Infinite Difference
anthology.22 Bletsoe’s narratives weave around the Sherborne Missal’s
marginalia of birds employing religious iconography and local observa-
tion in short and very short vibrant sentences. The second is from Vahni
Capildeo’s ‘Person Animal Figure’ featured in her Undraining Sea col-
lection and the dramatic interior monologues render the world in a
fresh and exciting way, managing to be simultaneously breathtaking and
mildly disturbing. Bletsoe and Capildeo herald the form as a genre in its
own right, while retaining a respectful nod to its relationship with other
forms; it is this fittingly dualistic approach that may well be key to ensur-
ing a secure place for the prose poem in British literature:

20 Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham, eds., An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Western

Connecticut State University, Firewheel Editions, 2009), 233–54.

21 Elisabeth Bletsoe, Landscape from a Dream (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008), 49–57.

22 Carrie Etter, ed., Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (Exeter:

Shearsman Books, 2010), 85–86. Mentioned here as an important and complementary

resource to this volume, in terms of other exemplary female writers practising prose poetry
and experimental poetry in the UK.
 2  ‘HIDDEN’ FORM: THE PROSE POEM IN ENGLISH POETRY  27

From ‘Birds from the Sherborne Missal’:

VIII.
‘Heyrun, Heron (Ardea cinerea)’
A page that encompasses the whole sky folds down to the shape of a
heron, flying. Avian blood-cells a reliquary from cretaceous days; the
serpentine throat, the gist of reptile. Pterodactylar span devouring land
gifted by Athelstan as barter for the soul’s yearly mass; to Aenna’s Pool,
the Coombe of the Pigsty, Ecgulf’s Tree, Aetta’s Dean, ‘for all time’.
Pastures garlanded with wire & electricity. Barbed & tanged. Bird flesh
that waxes & wanes in lunar synchrony with the lady’s smock, vacilla-
tory cress-hordes at the margins of the parish water-meadow. Fons limpi-
dus. River-ephemera gather at Smear’s Bridge: pollen spicules, florets of
eltrot, a meniscoid bulging. The circumspect gaze; irides chrome-yellow,
orbits naked, livid. From the banks of the Yeo, a stone frieze of three
Magi, one bearing a­ pparently a head, severed. A boy bringing to school
a heron killed while attempting to swallow a live vole; the children of
Bradford Abbas being “deeply interested in this riverside tragedy.”

water glancing light;

the long patience.23

*
From ‘Person Animal Figure’
The animal who kisses persistently is much to be avoided. The more
it is avoided, the more it comes back. It will seek out its prey in the
middle of dreams about castles in nowhere, and make its catch before
the staircase in the upper servants’ hall. The animal is known to feel like
a peach that has been rained on. It carpets itself and plasters itself but
insists that it does not cling. The degree of wildness that characterizes
this animal has yet to be ascertained. It announces itself with popping
sounds like a champagne bottle being opened on the roof. To deter-
mine the whereabouts of this animal, it is advised to make a fresh cup
of tea and leave it about as if forgotten. With a loud slurp the top of the
tea will be taken off. A second slurp, if permitted – and it seldom can
be avoided – will put away half the cup. That is the way that the animal
who kisses persistently strengthens itself in preparation for the attack.24

23 Elisabeth Bletsoe, “Birds of the Sherborne Missal,” in Landscape from a Dream

(Exeter: Shearsman, 2008). This extract from Etter, Infinite Difference, 85–86.
24 Vahni Capildeo, “Person Animal Figure,” in Undraining Sea (Norwich: Egg Box,

2009), 57.
28  D. CADDY

Works Cited
Bertrand, Aloysius, and Jean Palou. Gaspard de la nuit: fantaisies à la manière de
Callot et Rembrandt. Paris: La Colombe, 1962.
Bletsoe, Elisabeth. Landscape from a Dream. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008.
Capildeo, Vahni. Undraining Sea. Norwich: Egg Box, 2009.
Charles, Baudelaire 1821–1867. Petits poëmes en prose / [by] Charles Baudelaire.
Robert KoppÉd. critique / par Robert Kopp. Paris: Librarie J. Corti, 1969.
Clements, Brian, and Jamey Dunham, eds. An Introduction to the Prose Poem.
Danbury: Western Connecticut State University, Firewheel Editions, 2009.
Duncan, Andrew. Origins of the Underground: British Poetry between Apocryphon
and Incident Light 1933–79. Cambridge: Salt, 2008.
Etter, Carrie, ed. Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets. Exeter:
Shearsman Books, 2010.
Fisher, Roy. The Ship’s Orchestra. London: Fulcrum Press, 1966.
Kennard, Luke. The Migraine Hotel. Cambridge: Salt, 2009.
O’Brien, Sean. The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British & Irish
Poetry. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1998.
Santilli, N. Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem English Literature. Madison:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.
Sheppard, Robert. “Making Forms with Remarks: The Prose.” In The Thing
about Roy Fisher, edited by John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson. Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2000.
———. The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents 1950–2000.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.
Swift, Todd. “Catering to the Perfumed Cannibal.” Poetry London 65
(Spring 2010), http://www.poetrylondon.co.uk/magazines/65/article/
catering-to-the-perfumed-cannibal.
 CHAPTER 3

The British Prose Poem and ‘Poetry’

in Early Modernism

Margueritte S. Murphy

In ‘Songs of London,’ Mr. Furst has quite a personal note; he is caustic

and humorous, gay, grave and sentimental, and can be read with pleasure.
Most of his sketches would read better if they had been written as little
sketches in prose. In Paris this is an art by itself.
—F.S. Flint, ‘Recent Verse,’ The New Age, February 11, 1909

I open with this quotation from the English Imagist poet F.S. Flint,
regarding a now forgotten work, as a telling remark about a role the
prose poem could play at this time. Flint sees a revisionary function for
these ‘little sketches’, a re-creation through casting off versification.
There is also the intimation in ‘sketch’ that the work has a close rep-
resentational relationship with a subject. Flint, like many poets and critics
unhappy with the current state of poetry, saw a need to depart radically
from the vague and sentimental verse of the late Victorians, and to revi-
talize English poetry as he reviewed ‘Recent Verse’ in issue after issue
in The New Age. The prose poem became one vehicle for such reform
that, with vers libre, put the entire notion of what constitutes poetry in
question.

M. S. Murphy (*) 
Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY, USA

© The Author(s) 2018 29

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_3
30  M. S. MURPHY

Although the prose poem in Great Britain first came into ­prominence
during the fin de siècle, the form takes on a more experimentalist, avant-
garde cast with the next generation, especially with poets whose work
appears in the little magazines of the first two decades of the t­wentieth-­
century. As the genre raised questions about the very nature of ‘poetry’,
consequent re-definitions opened the way to further innovation. Thus,
the modernist prose poem would serve not only as a vehicle of formal
experiments, but afforded the exploration of what would constitute
‘poetry’ for the new century as writers strove to represent a new ‘real’ in
a manner informed by twentieth-century sensations and sensibilities, and
the experience of urban modernity.
The early twentieth-century prose poem in England had a legacy
that perhaps was more of an obstacle to further development than an
encouragement. As I discuss in A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose
Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery, the prose poem in English in
the 1890s often relied on archaic diction, conjuring past eras for poetic
effect, and borrowed Baudelairean themes like ennui, escapism through
drugs, and the lure of the exotic. Unlike Baudelaire’s prose poems,
however, the British prose poems of this era were rarely reflections of
urban modernity and did not employ the resources of contemporary
speech. Perhaps even more damning was the reputation of the prose
poem in the wake of Oscar Wilde’s trials. At all three, a letter to Alfred
Douglas was presented as evidence; Wilde defended it as a ‘prose poem’
and his conviction exposed the rift between the hegemonic prosaic cul-
ture of late nineteenth-century Britain, that of legal briefs and business
letters, and the aesthetic productions of Wilde and his circle. Hybrid
genres such as the prose poem came under attack; Irving Babbitt con-
demned them as ‘unmasculine’ for blurring ‘firm distinctions’ in The
New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (1910). T.S. Eliot
was among Babbitt’s students at Harvard, and the conclusion of
Babbitt’s book was delivered to his students during the time that Eliot
attended Harvard and studied under Babbitt. Eliot himself composed
two prose poems but, in 1917, published an attack on the genre, ‘The
Borderline of Prose’, in The New Statesman. While Eliot did admire
Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and later translated St.-John Perse’s
long prose poem Anabase into English, he never took up the form again
as a creative writer.
Although no major British poet lent prestige to the form in the
early twentieth century, many lesser-known poets did write prose
 3  THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM  31

poems, many of which appeared in the little magazines of that era. As

Julia Nelsen documents, ‘[b]etween 1910 and 1930, the prose poem
found a home on the pages of nearly all the “major” little magazines in
Britain and the United States’ while few collections of prose poetry in
book form were published.1 Such publication suggests alliances with the
artistic circles and movements affiliated with the journals. They are not
always called ‘prose poems’—indeed, they seldom are. Nelsen observes:

Perhaps one of the reasons why many critics have claimed that the form
went missing in the early 1900s is because the term prose poem itself largely
disappeared. Those writing prose poems for the little magazines rarely
employed that label, preferring more ambiguous, inclusive terms to set
their texts apart from the poème en prose and reflect the pluralistic artistic
possibilities of the medium. The titles of the vast majority of prose poems
appearing in modernist journals evoke other forms of the language arts,
as well as painting and music: Fragments, Impressions, Sketches, Etchings,
Prints, Notes, Improvisations.2

Yet, the comparison of prose poems to other art forms dates back to
its first appearance as a genre with Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la
nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, the work that
Baudelaire claimed as his model in the dedication of Le Spleen de Paris:
Petits poèmes en prose. Rimbaud famously referred to his Illuminations
as ‘coloured plates’, according to Paul Verlaine.3 The first major collec-
tion of French prose poems translated into English by Stuart Merrill was
titled Pastels in Prose, appearing in New York in 1890. Clearly, as many
critics have noted, parallels with the other arts, especially the visual arts,
have been part of the prose poem’s self-definition from the start and
indicate a particular claim to pictorial representation. Such freedom in
labelling, such self-definition and departure from generic identification,
also implies a role in literary experimentation.
In this essay, I will explore that role. During this time of dissatisfac-
tion with the legacy of the previous century, the prose poem as ‘poetry’

1 Julia Nelsen, “Modernist Laboratories: The Prose Poem and the Little Magazines,”

Letteratura e letterature 4 (2010): 49. See Nelsen, 49–53, for an enormously helpful over-
view of this production and its context in the little magazines of Modernism.
2 Nelsen, “Modernist Laboratories,” 59.

3 See Suzanne Bernard, “Notice,” Illuminations, by Arthur Rimbaud in Oeuvres (Paris:

Garnier, 1960), 246.

32  M. S. MURPHY

in prose brought the opposition of poetry to prose to the fore, fuelling

speculation about what each meant in this new century. The form pro-
vided a space for the exploration and production of ‘poetry’ unmoored
from the constraints of versification, a capacity it shared with free verse.
Further, ‘poetry’ in prose form offered a vehicle for capturing the sen-
sation of the modern that seemed to fit the accelerated pace and frag-
mented sensations of the early twentieth-century city.
First, how did discussion of the nature of poetry, much of which
revolved around the introduction of vers libre, reflect upon the prose
poem? Lines are often drawn between poetry and prose to demonstrate
that free verse is poetry, not prose, although the meaning of the distinc-
tion varies. T.E. Hulme’s ‘Lecture on Poetry’, given in 1908 to The
Poets’ Club in London, provides an influential example of a lecture often
deemed foundational to the emergence of Imagism:

To test the question of whether it is possible to have poetry written with-

out a regular metre I propose to pick out one great difference between
the two. I don’t profess to give an infallible test that would enable anyone
to at once say: ‘This is, or is not, true poetry’, but it will be sufficient for
the purposes of this paper. It is this: that there are, roughly speaking, two
methods of communication, a direct, and a conventional language. The
direct language is poetry, it is direct because it deals in images. The indi-
rect language is prose, because it uses images that have died and become
figures of speech.
The difference between the two is, roughly, this: that while one arrests
your mind all the time with a picture, the other allows the mind to run
along with the least possible effort to a conclusion.4

So, the immediacy of language, its capacity to evoke things directly, is at

stake, and Hulme proposes that the vivid, direct image signals poetry as
opposed to the dead metaphors of prose. A similar distinction appears
in Rhythm, the little magazine edited by John Middleton Murry, in
the opening piece of the Spring 1912 issue, ‘The Return to Poetry’ by
Laurence Binyon: ‘Prose accepts, poetry rebels. In the prose view of
the world all is fixed, matter is finality; in the poetic view, all is energy,

4 T.E. Hulme, “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” in The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme,

ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994), 55.
 3  THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM  33

relation, change. Prose observes, poetry divines.’5 Here, prose is aligned

not only with a static use of language, but also a conventional perspective
on the world, even a different epistemology from poetry. As the same
issue includes two prose poems in French (‘Voyage’ and ‘Une Vie’ by
Claudien), clearly Binyon’s ‘prose’ does not include the prose poem,
but the prose of the world, for instance, the journalism that Murry and
Katherine Mansfield excoriate in the next issue: ‘The journalist himself
cannot even dream of freedom, for he is the slave of the unreality of his
own making.’6 So, ‘poetry’ in prose implies writing in prose form that
incorporates the qualities of poetry: ‘direct language’ with ‘arrest[ing]’
images (Hulme); a dynamic, energized and relational take on the ‘world’
(Binyon).
Of course, these were not the only re-definitions. Another way to
understand differences among definitions is to separate the camps rede-
fining ‘poetry’ according to the other art form that would serve as
model: music (emphasis on rhythm, metricality, recalling Pater’s ‘All art
constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ from The School of
Giorgione) or painting (emphasis on image and picture). Undoubtedly,
such a division risks oversimplification. After all, even Ezra Pound’s
‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’ in Poetry (March 1913) addresses both
image and rhythm, or, as F.S. Flint summarizes in the essay that precedes
Pound’s in the volume: ‘Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether sub-
jective or objective’, and ‘As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence
of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.’7 But, for
some practitioners and critics, the musicality of poetic prose was defi-
nitional as opposed to an unmediated presentation of modern life. The
American poet Amy Lowell’s ‘polyphonic prose’ is a case in point. In
‘Miss Lowell’s Discovery: Polyphonic Prose’, John Gould Fletcher
praises the ‘orchestral quality’ of her work, concluding that ‘it seems fit-
ting that a new name should be given to these poems of hers, which,
printed as prose, or as prose and verse interspersed, display all the colors
of the chromatic palette.’8 Other critics were less convinced; Harriet

5 Laurence Binyon, “The Return to Poetry,” Rhythm 1.4 (Spring 1912): 1.

6 John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, “The Meaning of Rhythm,” Rhythm
2.5 (June 1912): 19.
7 F.S. Flint, “Imagisme,” Poetry 1.6 (March 1913): 199.

8 John Gould Fletcher, “Miss Lowell’s Discovery: Polyphonic Prose,” Poetry 6.1 (April

1915): 35.
34  M. S. MURPHY

Monroe, in reviewing the second Imagist collection, Some Imagist

Poets—An Anthology, remarks that ‘Miss Lowell’s “polyphonic prose” in
The Bombardment remains for me scientific and artificial, an interesting
experiment rather than a new poetic form.’9 Lowell herself attempts dis-
tinctions, noting that ‘it is the fashion today to call everything which is
without metre vers libre.’ She answers any confusion of verse and prose
(of which Fletcher’s remark is an instance) with such a metrical approach,
mapping a spectrum of rhythmic distinctions with ‘pure prose and pure
poetry’ as the extremes, and ‘metrical prose’ and ‘vers libre’ as ‘steps’
in between.10 In the end, her divisions are at best tendencies: ‘Now as
prose is a long curve with very little return, and poetry is a much shorter
curve with a very sharp return; so metrical prose may be considered as a
slightly more curved line than is usual in prose, with a return beginning
to be felt, and vers libre as curving still more markedly, and the return
becoming pronounced.’11 T.S. Eliot, in ‘The Borderline of Prose’, takes
a similar tack in criticizing Richard Aldington’s prose poems as failures
in that they incorporate both prose and verse rhythms. Eliot quotes a
passage from a prose poem by Aldington, then critiques the opening
phrases: ‘For my sake Eos, in a cloudless sky, gliding from the many-­
isled sea, must be more tender and more thrilling.’ Eliot objects to the
difference between the verse rhythms of ‘For my sake Eos, in a cloud-
less sky, gliding from the many-isled sea’ and the prose of ‘must be more
tender and more thrilling.’ Eliot’s distinctions are even less defined than
Lowell’s; he simply labels what are prose rhythms and what are verse to
his ear.12
Defining the prose poem according to its rhythms reflects a strain
of Modernism that turned its critical focus onto the formal aspects of
literature.13 It is telling to what degree these sorts of distinctions are a
dead end for the Modernist prose poem. In this brief example, Aldington
seems to seek poeticity through heightened rhythms and refrain, and

9 Harriet Monroe, Review of Some Imagist Poets—An Anthology, Poetry 6.3 (June 1915):

152.
10 Amy Lowell, “Vers libre and Metrical Prose,” Poetry 3.6 (March 1914): 213.

11 Lowell, “Vers libre and Metrical Prose,” 216.

12 T.S. Eliot, “The Borderline of Prose,” The New Statesman, May 19, 1917, 158.

13 I refer here to a focus directly on literary form itself, not more complex formalisms

in which, for instance, the text is seen as ultimately autoreferential, although the impulse
towards sequestration of the literary from other writing is shared in these approaches.
 3  THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM  35

through an archaic idiom suited to such rhythms.14 After noting the

­relegation of the previous wave of prose poems to the dustbins of the fin
de siècle, Eliot intones:

I have remarked recently a recrudescence of the poem in prose—not only

in France, but in England; not only in England, but in America; not only
in America, England, and France, for the tide of civilization may now have
carried it in the wake of Strindberg and Ibsen to the shores of Japan. It is
noticeable that poetry which looks like prose, and prose which sounds like
poetry, are assured of a certain degree of odium and success.15

What does it mean for prose to ‘sound like’ poetry? This is, in part, the
question Eliot raises in quoting the passage by Aldington, although he
leaves it unsettled. Eliot does praise Rimbaud’s Illuminations, while call-
ing them ‘in form, pure prose’: ‘The Illuminations attain their effect by
an instant and simple impression, a unity all the more convincing because
of the apparent incongruity of images.’16 The emphasis on the instan-
taneous recalls Pound’s definition of an image: ‘that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.’ But Rimbaud’s
prose poems are the only examples that Eliot singles out for praise and,
as ‘pure prose’, he seems to imply that they are positioned more as an
outlier than a model for a burgeoning genre. In other words, prose
‘which sounds like poetry’ may well deserve ‘a certain degree of odium’
in Eliot’s estimation.
Clearly, it is the imagistic effects of Rimbaud’s Illuminations that draw
Eliot’s commendation, not their form per se. Amy Lowell was, of course,

14 Contemporary critics of using bygone language to invoke poeticity include Ford

Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford). In “Impressionism—Some Speculations,” Poetry

2.5 (August 1913), he is critical of ‘literary jargon’ in England which limits vocabulary or
diction (178), calling instead for the rendering of modern life in modern terms: “I may
really say that, for a quarter of a century, I have kept before me one unflinching aim—to
register my own times in terms of my own time, and still more to urge those who are better
poets and better prose-writers than myself to have the same aim” (179). Although he is
not referring specifically to prose poems, his attack on the hackneyed and the sentimental is
apposite to the prose by Aldington that Eliot quotes.
15 Eliot, “Borderline,” 158.

16 Ibid. As Nelsen points out (“Modernist Laboratories,” 49–50), Helen Rootham’s

translations of The Illuminations appeared in several little magazines between 1916 and
1919, so Rimbaud’s prose poems could well serve as examples for poets experimenting
with the genre in English.
36  M. S. MURPHY

a prominent Imagist, and Aldington finds similar strengths in her work:

in his words, she is ‘a modern poet, … she simply records, “presents”
as accurately and as precisely as she knows how, the most interesting
moods, the most emotional moments, the most poignant observations
of her life, and in doing so she unconsciously records for us her world,
etches for us her personality.’17 (Aldington goes on to quote from and
particularly praise her prose poem, ‘The Bath.’) My point is that, at a
time when the nature of ‘poetry’ itself was being contested and rede-
fined, the ‘prose poem’ served as one point of contestation and, in the
process, was redefined as prose in which ‘poetry’—newly defined—
appeared. The view that poetry should be composed of images evoking
discrete moments and emotional states with utmost directness was in
accord with challenges to make modern life the stuff of modern liter-
ature. To seek musical qualities in prose complicated the incorporation
of contemporary speech into this new poetry. And as the prose poem
found its greatest resources in the play with and against other forms of
prose,18 metrical or musical qualities were hardly definitional and were
merely a way for some practitioners of the form to assert a traditional
notion of poeticity. Here, we might return to Hulme’s early lecture.
When speaking of the prose of dead metaphors, Hulme clearly does not
have the prose poem in mind. Rather, it is conventional prose, prose dis-
course that the prose poem may mimic and subvert. To be ‘poetry’, in
Hulme’s terms, ‘[t]his new verse resembles sculpture rather than music;
it appeals to the eye rather than to the ear. It has to mould images, a
kind of spiritual clay, into definite shapes.’19 This is a Modernist aes-
thetic, focused on the verbal as visual object, to which this short prose
form could also aspire.
Indeed, if we frame the British prose poem of Modernism within a
broader trend of urban writing, reasons for the valuing of image over
sound become clearer, as does the jarring effect of an archaic language
that borrows its diction from earlier poetic traditions instead of contem-
porary speech. Andreas Huyssen, in Miniature Metropolis: Literature
in an Age of Photography and Film, describes a genre formation that
emerges from the specific conditions of modernity, especially the ‘crisis

17 RichardAldington, “The Poetry of Amy Lowell,” The Egoist, July 1, 1915: 110.
18 The argument of A Tradition of Subversion, as well as Richard Terdiman’s and
Jonathan Monroe’s studies.
19 Hulme, “Modern Poetry,” 56.
 3  THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM  37

of perception and experience’ in rapidly modernizing cities, new read-

ing practices with the growth of newspapers, specifically the feuilleton
form, and new technologies that compete with literature—photography
and cinema. The ‘metropolitan miniature’ is ‘a paradigmatic modernist
form that sought to capture the fleeting and fragmentary experiences
of metropolitan life, emphasizing both their transitory variety and their
simultaneous ossification.’20 Huyssen sets Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris:
Petits poèmes en prose as the point of departure for this genre as a trans-
formation of the ‘impressionistic and discursive urban sketch in the tra-
dition of Mercier’s Tableau de Paris.’21 Huyssen envisions, however, a
form that exceeds the poème en prose tradition and encompasses texts by
Bloch, Benjamin, Kracauer and Adorno, as well as overtly literary writing
by Rilke, Kafka, Benn, Musil and others. Huyssen notes how many of
these writers were at a loss to name the form, which ‘emerged as anti-
form, then, resistant to the laws of genre as much as to systemic phi-
losophy or urban sociology, crossing the boundaries between poetry,
fiction, and philosophy, between commentary and interpretation, and,
centrally, between the verbal and the visual.’22 This ‘instability of genre’,
Huyssen proposes, is due to ‘remediation in reverse’; that is, the reas-
sertion of an older medium (literature) before the challenge of a new
technology (e.g. photography and film in the Modernist period) by ‘crit-
ically working through what the new medium does and does not do.’23
Hence the prominence of the visual in these short texts, which reveals a
representational lack: ‘On the one hand the miniature reflected on the
prevalence of the new visual media; but on the other it recognized the
visual media’s mimetic insufficiency and lack, which it tried to transcend
literarily in images made up of words.’24 This tension brings us squarely
into the aspirations of Imagism, and how short prose pieces wrestle with
mimetic possibility and insufficiency.

20 Andreas Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 3, 5.

21 Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis, 23.

22 Ibid., 11. Like Franco Moretti’s “modern epic,” Huyssen’s “metropolitan miniature”

is a “genre” understood only in hindsight, the product of specific historical conditions,

practices, perspectives, epistemologies, and institutions.
23 Ibid., 8.

24 Ibid., 17.
38  M. S. MURPHY

Jessie Dismorr, a visual artist and poet, represents well a practitioner

of the prose poem influenced by a visual aesthetic and committed to
avant-garde experimentation. Affiliated first with Murry’s Rhythm, she
later signed the Vorticist manifesto. To the second number of BLAST,
she contributed both prints (‘The Engine’ and ‘Design’) and prose
poems, informed by a Vorticist aesthetic with attention to angles and
exaggerated perspectives. Her ‘London Notes’ fits Huyssen’s ‘metropoli-
tan miniature’ quite literally, as it is composed of several short paragraphs
designating different places in the city: ‘In Park Lane’, ‘Hyde Park’, ‘The
British Museum’, ‘Egyptian Gallery’, ‘The Reading Room’, (the last two
as if moving into The British Museum for interior shots), ‘Piccadilly’,
‘Fleet Street.’ It mimics a series of postcards from a day’s excursion with
the title replicating the role of photo caption, but the views are hardly
conventional. These short prose pieces evoke discrete places from a par-
ticular perspective, snapshots from an unusual angle, urban fragments.
Here are three of the ‘notes’, the first, the second, and the seventh and
final:
IN PARK LANE.
Long necked feminine structures support almost without grimacing the ele-
gant discomfort of restricted elbows.

HYDE PARK.
Commonplace, titanic figures with a splendid motion stride across the
parched plateau of grass, little London houses only a foot high huddle at their
heels.
Under trees all the morning women sit sewing and knitting, their monoto-
nous occupation accompanying the agreable muddle of their thoughts.
In the Row. Vitality civilized to a needles-point; highly-bred men and horses
pass swiftly in useless delightful motion; women walk enamoured of their own
accomplished movements.
…

FLEET STREET.
Precious slips of houses, packed like books on a shelf, are littered all over with
signs and letters.
A dark, agitated stream struggles turbulently along the channel bottom;
clouds race overhead.
Curiously exciting are so many perspective lines, withdrawing, converging;
they indicate evidently something of importance beyond the limits of sight.25
25 Jessie Dismorr, “London Notes,” BLAST 2, July 1915 “War Number,” 66.
 3  THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM  39

In the first ‘note’, architecture and women meld suggesting buildings

as confined as women, women rigid as architecture, and necks below
elbows to render a distorting perspective. The tension of holding a pose
is associated with disguised pain. There is also an insinuation of a shifting
dimension: are these buildings reduced to the scale of the feminine body,
or are they women blown up to the size of palatial buildings? The second
piece, ‘Hyde Park’, begins with a close-up on people that renders the
buildings drastically reduced in scale. Yet, the second paragraph returns
to a sadly human scale with women seated ‘under trees’ at a ‘monoto-
nous occupation.’ The third paragraph begins with a sentence fragment,
‘In the Row’, suggesting a pivoting to another view. Comically insin-
uating that the breeding of men and of horses are on a par, this third
part focuses again on movement. The overall structure is a descriptive
sandwich of motion–stasis–motion, with the feminist subtext of the static
reducing women, figuratively, and perhaps literally, to an ‘occupation’,
sewing and knitting, that supports the ‘muddl[ing]’ of ‘their thoughts.’
The sequence of ‘cuts’ suggests a filmic medium.
In the final ‘note’, ‘Fleet Street’, miniaturization occurs through com-
parison of houses to ‘books on a shelf’, and the framing or containment
of a scene by a stream at the bottom and clouds on top, both in motion
as if racing against one another, a pattern which repeats the motion–­
stasis tension of ‘Hyde Park.’ The houses are ‘littered all over with signs
and letters’, a sense of how the city is already ‘written’ with the words of
advertisements (evocative of Cubist collage). The third paragraph makes
evident the tie to the visual arts, with ‘so many perspective lines, with-
drawing, converging’ to draw the eye outside this scene, a dynamism that
would transcend the pictorial.26
Dismorr’s ‘London Notes’ are not only miniature in form, but a fore-
shortened perspective is also part of the perceptual experience of the
passer-by in the city that she evokes. London houses are miniaturized
both through the perspective taken and through simile, a shelf of books
to be read, with the words of advertisement diverting the reader from

26 Nelsen, “Modernist Laboratories,” discerns here an “ekphrasis of a Vorticist painting” (63).

40  M. S. MURPHY

other meanings. That the ‘commonplace’ is also ‘titanic’ betrays a secret

of the city: the everyday constitutes the new colossus; yet, at the same
time, size does not necessarily signify importance. The viewer should
mistrust not only the words she reads, but also the apparent dimensions
she views. And yet it is the visible through which the city is available for
interpretation; the artist/prose poet may tilt the perspective to plumb its
realities, read its pain and anxieties, and suggest takes on the city beyond
the conventional.
The next prose poem in this issue, ‘June Night’, also records
moments and scenes in the city, but perceived during a bus ride with a
lover.27 Here, the narrator, as if strangely separate from herself and inten-
tionally resisting emotion, observes her own reactions minutely. Again,
the commodified city is literally highlighted by the bus’s illuminated
advertisements28:

No 43 bus; its advertisements all lit from within, floats towards us like a
luminous balloon. We cling to it and climb to the top. Towards the red glare
of the illuminated city we race through interminable suburbs. These are the bare
wings and corridors that give on to the stage. Swiftness at least is e­ xquisite. But it
makes me too emotional. Amazing, these gymnastic agitations of the heart! Your
blindness, my friend Rodengo, is your most intelligent attribute.

The narrator is exhilarated by the speed of the ride, yet resists emotions
that accelerate apace. The literal speed slows as the bus makes its stops:

27 Peter Brooker, Nelsen, and Miranda Hickman all provide astute feminist readings.

Brooker finds urban landscapes that are a combination of “modernist form with more
overt expressions of female sexuality;” see “‘Our London, My London, Your London’: The
Modernist Moment in the Metropolis,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century
English Literature, ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 125. Nelsen sees a women artist finding her voice (“Modernist
Laboratories,” 56–57). Hickman, too, reads the prose poem as an allegory of Dismorr’s
vocation in choosing Vorticism in order to reject a “debilitating” form of femininity; see
“The Gender of Vorticism: Jessie Dismorr, Helen Saunders, and Vorticist Feminism,” in
Vorticism: New Perspectives, ed. Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 128.
28 The prose poem covers a page and a half in BLAST 2. I quote only sections and

phrases here.
 3  THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM  41

We stop for passengers at Regent’s Corner. Here crowds swarm under

green electric globes. Now we stop every moment, the little red staircase
is besieged. The bus is really too top-heavy. It must look like a great nodding
­bouquet, made up of absurd flowers and moths and birds with sharp beaks. I want
to escape; but Rodengo is lazy and will not stop warbling his infuriating lovesongs.
Ribbons of silver fire start into the air, and twist themselves into enormous bows
with fringes of tiny dropping stars. Everybody stands up and screams…

The bus as ‘a great nodding bouquet, made up of absurd flowers and

moths and birds with sharp beaks’ is comically reduced, but its energy
has the capacity to frighten its passengers. Affected by the throb of the
vehicle and of her lover’s voice, she flees the bus, seeking ‘[c]ool nor-
mality and classicalism.’ The speeding bus on a hot June night and an
operatic lover figure as romanticism, while choosing to walk alone on
‘spacious streets of pale houses’ is the classical: ‘Surely I have had enough
of romantics! their temperature is always above 98½, and the acceler-
ated pulse throbs in their touch.’ With her lens on own emotions, she
rejects the romantic for the classical, deploying Hulme’s binary from
‘Romanticism and Classicism.’ But, by 1915, and this is the ‘war num-
ber’, romanticism has been associated with German culture,29 and thus
a strain of thought or cultural movement that eventually led to war. Is
emotional restraint an effect of war, a way of saving her integrity as she
is besieged by an overly eager lover, an aesthetic choice, or a separation
from the crowd who makes the bus ridiculous? In ‘the precincts of stately
urban houses’ she chooses prose over ‘poetics’ and ‘restraint’ takes on
a positive connotation in association with buildings that she deems ‘the
last word of prose’ and ‘inanimate’ teachers. Eventually, she realizes how
she does not belong in these quiet precincts:

Now the pool of silence reaches unplumbable depths. My dropping

f­ootsteps create widening circles of alarm. After all, I do not know why I
should be here, I am a strayed Bohemian, a villa-resident, a native of con-
ditions, half-sordid, half-fantastic. I am the style of a feuilleton cherishing a
hopeless passion for Latin prose. This is an interlude of high love-making.
I must get back to the life of the thoroughfares to which I belong.

29 The lead “Editorial” in this number, for instance, states “Germany has stood for the

old Poetry, for Romance, more stedfastly [sic] and profoundly than any other people in
Europe,” followed by an explanation of what this means. See BLAST 2 (July 1915): 5.
42  M. S. MURPHY

Referencing the feuilleton brings in the relationship with the journalistic:

the feuilleton is the space of faits divers and serialized novels. She desires,
however, ‘Latin prose’, an ironic double-entendre as she has fled her
Latin lover.30 While she identifies with ‘the style of the feuilleton’, this is
the story of an abandoned romance, not ‘high love-making’ and she feels
called ‘back to the life of the thoroughfares to which I belong.’ In other
words, this writing, parrying the insipid feuilleton against a high Latinate
style, is finally a prose poetry of the urban streets, a record of disjointed
moments and scenes.
In Dismorr’s ‘Matinee’, published in The Little Review in 1918, there
is again a sense of ars poetica as she claims the dynamic, the in-motion,
‘The static cannot claim my approval. I live in the act of departure.’
She turns her lens on the microscopic, values ‘pattern’ and ‘detail’, and
compares this writing to the telegram: ‘I spell happiness out of dots and
dashes; a ray, a tone, the insignificance of a dangling leaf.’ An instance
of Huyssen’s ‘remediation in reverse’, the prose fills out the telegraphic
code with words that denote image and sound (‘a ray, a tone, the insig-
nificance of a dangling leaf’), inscribing a fleeting moment defined by
‘departure’, the movement from one insight or brief scene to the next,
simulating the flickering succession of scenes and images of cinema. In
the end, however, she admits the possibility of ossification of even this
dynamic art: ‘I proclaim life to the end a piece of artistry, essentially
idle and exquisite. The trinkets stored within my coffin shall outlast my
dust.’31
The power of this fragmentary writing is tied to new sensations in
the city and consequent anxieties, and even informs prose poems set
elsewhere. John Rodker’s ‘Three Nightpieces’, published in The Little
Review in July 1917, depicts three discrete episodes at different moments
in the night. The first ‘nightpiece’ has a somewhat hallucinatory natu-
ral setting as the narrator ‘leav[es] the room rapidly’ to ‘go out on the
terrace of the house and look over the weald.’ He recalls his youth and
‘wrongs done to this one and that one’ in a confessional tone reminis-
cent of Baudelaire’s ‘À Une Heure du Matin’ from Le Spleen de Paris.32

30 It is worth noting that some of the translations of “the Latin poets of the Italian

Renaissance” by Aldington appeared in prose form in The New Age in the November 28,
1912 and January 9, 1913 issues.
31 Dismorr, “Matinee,” The Little Review 4.11 (March 1918): 31–32.

32 John Rodker, “Three Nightpieces,” The Little Review 4.3 (July 1917): 16.
 3  THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM  43

The subject of the pieces is his marital relationship and, in the first, at
eight in the evening he wants distance in reaction to extreme ­bodily
closeness (the closeness made visceral through evocation of his own
body odour shifting to an awareness of her scent). Vision fails, how-
ever, outside where finally ‘there is only the dark’ and a cacophonous
wilderness.33 The second scene takes place in bed as he awakens to his
wife shrieking at about two o’clock in the morning from a nightmare
that, when told, accuses him of ‘devilry’ that creates in him a sense of
‘loathing’ for her.34 The third is a narrative of his nightmare on another
night, after he ate cucumber at supper. Although the setting of these
prose poems is not urban, the experience conveyed feels anxious, frag-
mentary, with a focus on immediacy, discrete moments, and the narra-
tor’s raw reactions and heightened emotional state. As with Dismorr’s
prose poems, there is an observation of emotion that seeks to reject
emotion because it is so alarming: ‘my heart thumps louder in my breast
and my pulses throb like a tide thundering and sucking at some crum-
bling jetty. I gulp deep breaths of air to steady myself, but it is of no
good.’35 Rodker employs a contemporary vocabulary of nerves and met-
aphors of war: waking as if ‘shot by a cannon’, followed by ‘after-waves
of the shriek’ still ringing in his ears.36 Although the narrator of ‘Three
Nightpieces’ is shell-shocked by love, not war, the impact of the Great
War and its technologies reverberate, coupled with the investigation of
the unconscious, dreams, and emotional life as a code to be read by the
suffering subject. Huyssen notes that it is Baudelaire’s prose poems that
introduced ‘jolts of consciousness’ that ‘escalate into terror’, influencing
works by ‘Rilke, Kafka, Jünger.’37 Rodker’s ‘Three Nightpieces’ strive to
produce such an effect out of interpersonal crisis and the reaction of the
unconscious reflected in the disturbing medium of dream.
In The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson describes a dialectic of
‘sources’ of realism and their temporalities: between récit, the ‘narrative
impulse’, with a temporality of past–present–future, and the ‘present of
consciousness’, the realm of affect, ‘the body’s present’, or the ‘scenic
present.’ The first constructs an individual as a character with a destiny,

33 Rodker, “Three Nightpieces,” 17.

34 Ibid., 18.
35 Ibid., 16.

36 Ibid., 17.

37 Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis, 24.

44  M. S. MURPHY

while the latter is ‘impersonal’, existing in an ‘eternal present’, ‘singl[ing]

out a painterly moment in which the onward drive of narrative is checked
if not suspended altogether’, as he puts it.38 While Jameson’s focus is the
nineteenth-century novel, he posits a full swing towards an impersonal
present of affect in modernism. The focus on ‘the body’s present’ or the
‘scenic present’ is central to these prose poems, as the writers strive to
present the new ‘real’ and its impact on the subject as directly as possi-
ble, tracing an affective experience of yet unnamed emotions. Like the
novelistic experiments of modernism by Woolf, Joyce and Proust, these
texts explore new modes of seeing, incorporate ways of viewing informed
by new technologies and means of transportation, and new modes of
feeling. But from the perspective of the early twentieth-century, these
texts also participate in a redefinition of ‘poetry’ as the medium for the
presentation of lived fragments, of direct emotion, and of images whose
newness resides in a dynamic take on modernity rendered in contempo-
rary language.

Acknowledgments   I am indebted to the Modernist Journals Project of Brown

University and the University of Tulsa for access to digital copies of BLAST, The
Egoist, The Little Review, Poetry and Rhythm; all citations from these journals may
be found at http://www.modjourn.org/journals.html.

Works Cited
Aldington, Richard. “The Poetry of Amy Lowell.” The Egoist (July 1, 1915):
109–110.
Bernard, Suzanne. “Notice.” Illuminations, by Arthur Rimbaud in Oeuvres.
Paris: Garnier, 1960.
Binyon, Laurence. “The Return to Poetry.” Rhythm 1.4 (Spring 1912): 1–2.
Brooker, Peter. “‘Our London, My London, Your London’: The Modernist
Moment in the Metropolis.” In The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century
English Literature, edited by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, 117–131.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Dismorr, Jessie. “June Night.” BLAST 2 (July 1915a): 67–68.
———. “London Notes.” BLAST 2 (July 1915b): 66.
———. “Matinee.” The Little Review 4.11 (March 1918): 31–32.
Editorial. BLAST 2 (July 1915): 5–6.

38 Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 8.

 3  THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM  45

Eliot, T. S. “The Borderline of Prose.” The New Statesman (May 19, 1917):
157–159.
Fletcher, John Gould. “Miss Lowell’s Discovery: Polyphonic Prose.” Poetry 6.1
(April 1915): 32–36.
Flint, F. S. “Imagisme.” Poetry 1.6 (March 1913): 198–200.
Hickman, Miranda. “The Gender of Vorticism: Jessie Dismorr, Helen Saunders,
and Vorticist Feminism.” In Vorticism: New Perspectives, edited by Mark
Antliff and Scott W. Klein, 119–136. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
2013.
Hueffer, Ford Madox (Ford Madox Ford). “Impressionism—Some
Speculations.” Poetry 2.5 (August 1913): 177–187.
Hulme, T. E. “A Lecture on Modern Poetry.” In The Collected Writings of T.
E. Hulme, edited by Karen Csengeri, 49–56. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 1994.
Huyssen, Andreas. Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and
Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013.
Lowell, Amy. “Vers libre and Metrical Prose.” Poetry 3.6 (March 1914):
213–220.
Monroe, Harriet. Review of Some Imagist Poets—An Anthology. Poetry 6.3 (June
1915): 150–153.
Monroe, Jonathan. A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Murphy, Margueritte S. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English
from Wilde to Ashbery. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Murry, John Middleton, and Katherine Mansfield. “The Meaning of Rhythm.”
Rhythm 2.5 (June 1912): 18–20.
Nelsen, Julia. “Modernist Laboratories: The Prose Poem and the Little
Magazines.” Letteratura e letterature 4 (2010): 47–65.
Rodker, John. “Three Nightpieces.” The Little Review 4.3 (July 1917): 16–18.
Terdiman, Richard. Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of
Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1985.
 CHAPTER 4

The Flourishing of the Prose Poem

in America and Britain

Robert Vas Dias

Un peu de ciel bleuit au versant de nos ongles.

St.-John Perse.

In recognition of the modernist prose poem in English originating with

the avant-garde writers of the early 1920s, this essay follows on from
Murphy’s discussion of key British influences during this time, and draws
attention to transatlantic figures and influences. Prominent among the
poets I discuss are Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy,
Lee Harwood, Roy Fisher, Gael Turnbull and several others.1 Beginning

1 An important precursor, the Nobel Prizewinner St.-John Perse (1887–1975), wrote
the prose-poem work Éloges [Praises] in French in 1911; it was translated into English by
Eugène Jolas in 1927 but didn’t attain wider recognition in English until Louise Varèse’s
translation (New York: Norton, 1944); Bollingen Series LV (New York: Pantheon, 1956).
Louise Norton, as she then was, and her husband Allan, edited the little magazine Rogue,
published in New York from March to September 1915; it contained the work of Mina
Loy, q.v., among others.

R. Vas Dias (*) 
Poetry School, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 47

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_4
48  R. VAS DIAS

with Stein, in her influential essay, Narration: Lecture 2 (1935), she

describes one of the characteristics of modernist writing and discusses
the place of prose poetry. Stein begins by referring to a sign she read
‘as we rode on a train from Atlanta to Birmingham’: ‘Let’s make our
flour meal and meat in Georgia’, and asking herself, ‘Is that prose or
poetry and why.’2 She concludes, ‘Well believe it or not it is very dif-
ficult to know whether that is prose or poetry and does it really make
any difference if you do or do not know. This.’3 One might be forgiven
for thinking that this is either a refusal to grapple with that thorny ques-
tion, or a justification of her own method of writing. I think the latter
is more pertinent. Using the example of the Old Testament, she points
out, ‘In the beginning there really was no difference between poetry
and prose in the beginning of writing in the beginning of talking in the
beginning of hearing anything about anything.’4 She rejects the idea of
writing necessarily having a beginning, middle and end: ‘Sentences are
contained within themselves and anything really contained within itself
has no beginning or middle or ending’5 and, by extension, she rejects
a binary difference between prose and poetry. Referring to the Making
of Americans, she writes: ‘I called it this and this is what is happening,
American writing has been an escaping not an escaping but an existing
without the necessary feeling of one thing succeeding another thing of
anything having a beginning and a middle and an ending.’6
It is this reiteration which hearkens back to Mallarmé’s prose poetry
(‘I want, with only myself in mind, to write as it struck my poet’s eye, one
Anecdote, before it is disclosed by reporters jockeying to assign to each
thing its common character.’)7 that prefigures the theories and practice
of the open-form poetry of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and others of
the Black Mountain and New York schools; the work of the Language
poets is hardly conceivable without Stein’s influence. The British poet
and artist Mina Loy said of Stein’s reiterative method: ‘Gertrude Stein

2 Gertrude Stein, Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald M. Allen and Warren

Tallman (New York: Grove, 1973), 104.

3 Stein, Poetics of the New, 114.

4 Ibid., 112.

5 Ibid., 107.

6 Ibid., 111.

7 “Introduction,” Mallarmé: The Poems, trans. Keith Bosley (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1977), 39.
 4  THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN  49

was making a statement, a reiterative statement…basic and bare…a state-

ment reiterate ad absurdum, were it not for the interposing finger of cre-
ation.’8 Concepts such as the non-linear, non-hierarchical development of
the poem/prose poem, a preference for open-ended writing rather than
an obvious closure, the use of counter-expectation or absurd, subversive
propositions, and a dissociative, discontinuous structure, all are charac-
teristic of much contemporary and post-modernist prose poetry. David
Lehman, editor of Great American Prose Poems, quotes the critic Marjorie
Perloff on works by several contemporary prose poetry writers: ‘In these
prose compositions, a given sentence, far from following its predeces-
sor or preparing the way for the sentence that follows, remains relatively
autonomous, continuity being provided by word and sound repetition as
well as by semantic transfer, in what the Russian Formalists called the ‘ori-
entation toward the neighboring word.’9
Deservingly, Lehman calls Stein ‘the mother of the American prose
poem’ and the following examples from Tender Buttons (1914) are indic-
ative of features such as dissociative, discontinuous structure, c­ounter-
expectation, and non-linear, open-ended development, which have influ-
enced the composition of many contemporary American and British
prose poems.
From Objects:

NOTHING ELEGANT
A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a
gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then
certainly something is upright. It is earnest.10

This prose poem’s opening proposition goes against expectations,

as does the first part of the second (‘If the red is rose…’); ‘a gate sur-
rounding it’ at first seems counter-factual (a gate is an opening, a fence

8 “Gertrude Stein,” in The Last Lunar Baedecker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Highlands:

Jargon, 1982), 289.

9 David Lehman, ed., Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (New York:

Scribner Poetry, 2003), 21.

10 Gertrude Stein, “The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tender Buttons, by Gertrude

Stein,” last modified March 17, 2005, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15396/15396-h/

15396.
50  R. VAS DIAS

or wall surrounds something) unless one considers a gate as a potential

to allow something in, or out (‘if inside is let in’): isn’t ‘inside’ already
‘in’? But ‘inside’ has mysteriously changed; perhaps it’s inside the house,
inside one’s consciousness. ‘Places’, that is, a garden, the house, one’s
perception, change, and the result is a judgment of the colour red’s value
in ethical and behavioural terms, as distinct from the doubtful value of
‘charm’. The poem ascribes a different value to the perception of colour
than one would expect; theories of colour psychology account for cul-
tural and individual variations in responses to colour, and Stein’s highly
individualistic responses to everything anything everywhere could well be
the subject of psychological analysis, which is beyond the scope of this
paper.11

A FEATHER
A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and
the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted
reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

Instead of the feather used as trim, commonly on women’s hats (e.g. the
cartwheel) in the period leading up to the First World War, Stein reverses
the idea to visualize the feather itself as being ‘trimmed’ in various ways,
including by its appearance on the headgear of cavalry parading to brass
bands (‘loud volumes’). The word ‘cohesive’ can refer to its function
in making a costume cohere, or to an object that itself displays coher-
ence. (I think of Mallarmé’s objective in his prose poetry, to counter the
‘reporter’s’ need to ‘assign to each thing its common character.’)
From Food:
ROASTBEEF
There is no use there is no use at all in smell, in taste, in teeth, in
toast, in anything, there is no use at all and the respect is mutual.12

Monte refers to the development of the prose poem in late nine-

teenth-century France as ‘a covert attack on “authoritative” prose

11 See, for example, the impressive prose poem “Color,” by Barbara Guest, in Great

American Prose Poems, 73.

12 Gertrude Stein, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15396/15396-h/15396.
 4  THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN  51

discourses’,13 and this prose poem, in its series of outrageous asser-

tions, certainly illustrates that feature; it’s also a good example of Stein’s
humour, displayed throughout Tender Buttons. I will return to this fea-
ture when later I consider the work of Lydia Davis.
As, if not more, influential on later generations of writers—the Black
Mountain poets, Ginsberg, and the British poets Tom Raworth, Gael
Turnbull, Roy Fisher, and Adrian Henri, who will be discussed later—
was William Carlos Williams, who experimented with the prose poem in
Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920, 1957). Since Stein’s work was l­ittle-­
known outside avant-garde circles at that time, and the prose poem in
English equally so, Williams was diffident about the form, as well he
might have been (bear in mind, too, that Joyce was just putting the fin-
ishing touches to Ulysses, 1922):

But what was such a form to be called? I was familiar with the typically
French prose poem, its pace was not the same as my own compositions.
What I had permitted myself could not by any stretch of the imagination
be called verse. Nothing to do but put it down as it stood, trusting to the
generous spirit of the age to find a place for it.14

Much of Kora is characterized by intuitive or associative ‘jumps’ and par-

ataxis—the juxtaposition of dissimilar or disparate images without obvi-
ous coordination or subordination, often based on immediate personal
association—as in the following:

XXVII, 3
Sooner or later as with the leaves forgotten the swinging
branch long since and summer : they scurry before a wind on the
frost-baked ground—have no place to rest—somehow invoke a burst
of warm days not of the past nothing decayed : crisp summer !—
neither a copse for resurrected frost eaters but a summer removed
undestroyed a summer of dried leaves scurrying with a screech, to
and fro in the half dark—twittering, chattering, scraping. Hagh !15

13 Steven Monte, Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska, 2000), 89.

14 William Carlos Williams, Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1970), 29.

15 Williams, Kora in Hell: Improvisations (Boston: Four Seas, 1920), 85. California

Digital Library—digitized by the Internet Archive, 2007. https://archive.org/stream/

korainhellimpro00willrich#page/84/mode/2up.
52  R. VAS DIAS

Most of the prose poems were followed by prose commentaries explain-

ing their origin or intention, since Williams felt they would otherwise be
misunderstood or obscure. It took a later generation to ‘find a place for
it’ in the USA, a generation stimulated by the example of the French
Cubists, Surrealists, Dadaists and the Russian Futurists, and by the writ-
ing of Stein, Borges and Beckett.
The poetic reputation of Mina Loy (1882–1966) has grown remark-
ably in recent years as studies and critical appreciation have proliferated.
Now recognized as one of the pioneering Modernists, she was born in
London but spent most of her life in Paris, Florence and New York;
she died in Aspen, Colorado, a year after Paul Blackburn and I inter-
viewed her.16 In the interview, which was taped, she read a number of
her poems, but no prose poems. Nevertheless, the originality of her lan-
guage and her approach—her polysyllabic diction, precise description,
collage composition, and phrasal development—make her inclusion here
imperative, all the more so because her contemporaries (including Ezra
Pound) admired her extravagant poetry and daring poetics. In the sec-
tion ‘Satires: 1914–1923’, of The Last Lunar Baedecker is the following,
from ‘Summer Night in a Florentine Slum’.

I have a woman at home with four children—and she is big again. A hair-
strewn fury—swished down past them—accusing with a back-flung ges-
ture—purest operatic—a hungry tram conductor—expecting supper—of
being unfaithful—‘By God the executioner!—I’ll eat your heart.’17

This extract displays acute, quick observation, dialogue, parataxis, and

collage; of Stein, Loy observed: ‘It has become the custom to say of her
that she has done in words what Picasso has done with form. There is
certainly in her work an interpenetration of dimensions analogous to
Cubism.’18 The same can be said of Loy’s own work.
It is puzzling why the prose poem in Britain did not achieve visibil-
ity until the 1960s under the impetus of American exports, given the

16 Mina Loy, “Interview with Paul Blackburn and Robert Vas Dias,” in Mina Loy: Woman

and Poet, ed. Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma. Introduction by Carolyn Burke (Orono:
National Poetry Foundation, 1998), 205–243.
17 Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Highlands: Jargon Society,

1982), 81.
18 Loy, Last Lunar Baedeker, 291.
 4  THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN  53

brilliant example of David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937), which combines

poems, prose poems and expository prose. A reason often adduced is
that his reputation as a visual artist eclipsed that as a poet; the British are
ambivalent about artists who are accomplished in more than one field
(e.g. witness critical reaction to the writing of another early modernist
artist, Wyndham Lewis). Another reason is that Jones’s poetry developed
a reputation as being difficult, hardly the case with In Parenthesis, as the
following indicates; the scene describes Jones’ (in the person of his alter-
ego John Ball) first experience of war’s destructive power:

He stood alone on the stones, his mess-tin spilled at his feet. Out of the
vortex, rifling the air it came—bright, brass-shod, Pandoran; with all-filling
screaming the howling crescendo’s up piling snapt. The universal world,
breath held, one half second, a bludgeoned stillness. Then the pent vio-
lence released a consummation of all burstings out; all sudden up-­rendings
and rivings-through—all taking-out of vents—all barrier-breaking—all
unmaking. Pernitric begetting—the dissolving and splitting of solid things.
In which unearthing aftermath, John Ball picked up his mess-tin and hur-
ried within; ashen, huddled, waited in the dismal straw. Behind ‘E’ Battery,
fifty yards down the road, a great many mangolds uprooted, pulped, con-
gealed with chemical earth, spattered and made slippery the rigid boards
leading to the emplacement. The sap of vegetables slobbered the spotless
breech-block of No. 3 gun.19

The impressive originality of language and image-making in this

excerpt from Part 2 of the work are informed by the acute visual sense
of an artist and transforms into memorable prose poetry what in other
hands might be a futile attempt to describe an artillery bombardment.
Whatever the reason for the non-recognition of Jones as a powerful
prose-poem progenitor in English, clearly a critical study needs to be
done on his prose poetry and how it works in tandem with his poetry in
this ‘work of genius’, as T.S. Eliot called it.
In many ways, the contemporary prose poem in English can be said to
have received its post-Second World War imprimatur more directly from
the surreal writing of Kafka and from Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s work
crosses boundaries, as prose poetry typically does, however one looks
at it; his extraordinary concentration, even obsession, on the quotidian,

19 David Jones, Arduity, “In Parenthesis: Pts 1–4: Part Two, Chambers Go Off,

Corporals Stay,” http://www.arduity.com/poets/jones/inparenthesis.html.

54  R. VAS DIAS

and his orchestration of the sound qualities of language is most evident

when one reads the work aloud. His notorious love of minute particu-
lars (‘Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars’—
Blake, and ‘Close inspection namely detail all over to add up finally to
this whole not still at all but trembling all over’20—Beckett), his rhyth-
mical variation of words and sounds, and his use of silences were hugely
influential, not only in his dramatic works but on literary writing gener-
ally. The following is the beginning of the long prose poem ‘Still’; when
reading it aloud, it is best to build in silences after the full-stops:

Still
Bright at last close of a dark day the sun shines out at last and goes
down. Sitting quite still at valley window normally turn head now
and see it the sun low in the southwest sinking. Even get up certain
moods and go stand by western window quite still watching it sink
and then the afterglow. Always quite still some reason some time
past this hour at open window facing south in small upright wicker
chair with armrests. Eyes stare out unseeing till first movement some
time past close though unseeing still while still light. Quite still again
then all quite quiet apparently till eyes open again while still light
though less. Normally turn head now ninety degrees to watch sun
which if already gone then fading afterglow.21

Although the piece is called ‘Still,’ it is characterized by a subtle, discrete,

‘trembling’ movement, which the critic Professor Peter Murphy expands on:

The tremulous equilibrium into which hand and head are brought in the
second half of ‘Still’ is not merely self-reflexive, but rather a recognition of
the need for a connection between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ worlds. The
self must come face to face with its bodily reality and with the world of
nature outside the ‘open window.’ Even in the dark the self cannot avoid
seeing itself: there is no refuge from the ‘suffering that opens a window on

20 Peter Murphy, “Orpheus Returning: The Nature of Myth in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Still’

Trilogy,” The International Fiction Review, 11.2 (1984): 110, https://journals.lib.unb.ca/

index.php/IFR/article/viewFile/13704/14786.
21 Samuel Beckett, “Still,” in Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950–1976

(London: Faber, 2010), 155.

 4  THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN  55

the real, and is the main condition of the artistic experience,’ as Beckett
asserted in his early study of Proust.22

But, all this said, there are some key writers that bridge the gap between
the Beckettian influence and the Steinian one: most crucially, Lydia
Davis. An American writer of short fiction (and prose poems), Davis
clearly displays affinities with Stein’s and Beckett’s work in their con-
centration on detail and play of language and, in the case of Stein, her
humour (rather than the dark comedy of Beckett):

From: ‘A Mown Lawn’

She hated a mown lawn… A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a
long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan… Lawn also con-
tained the letters of law… Law and order could be seen as starting from
lawn order, valued by so many Americans… Did more lawn in America
make more lawmen in America?… So often, she said, Americans wanted
more mown lawn. All of America might be one long mown lawn… Let the
lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.23

Arranged as a prose paragraph, ‘A Mown Lawn’ displays many of the

characteristics of poetry: its play on words, its sound correspondences,
or internal rhymes, based on extending, reversing, and riffing on the ini-
tial phrase, ‘mown lawn’. The humour and irony result from a deliber-
ate conflation of terms (‘Law and order could be seen as starting from
lawn order, valued by so many Americans.’); it employs personification
(‘a mown lawn made a long moan’), synecdoche (‘All of America might
be one long mown lawn’), and repetition. This prose poem is typically
short, economical, and makes its impact by means of its poetic use of
language and its subtly subversive point of view—a critique of contempo-
rary American conventional mores.
Along with Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, through the translations of
Norman Thomas Di Giovanni and others, was responsible for a growing
awareness of the possibilities of the prose poem in English, particularly

22 Murphy, “Orpheus Returning,” 110.

23 Lydia Davis, From “A Mown Lawn,” in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 314.
56  R. VAS DIAS

its surrealistic character, in 1960s America and Britain. Borges was

part of the surrealist zeitgeist of the early and mid-twentieth century
and was the forerunner of the Latin American magical realists Gabriel
García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Julio Cortázar (also translated by Paul
Blackburn) and Alejo Carpentier. The British poet Lee Harwood (1939–
2015) acknowledged Borges as having been particularly important to his
development as a poet when he learned the ‘complexities of language’
and ways of ‘mapping it out’ when just out of his teens.24 Harwood also
translated the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara. The first work in his Collected
Poems is a prose poem, ‘Cable Street’ (1964)—actually, a sort of hybrid
haibun comprising ‘straight’ prose, prose poems, poetry, quotations
from newspapers and the London County Council, and erotic lyrics to
his lover. Harwood wrote prose poems, including found passages, quota-
tions and definitions throughout his work. He is renowned for his literal,
descriptive, deceptively straightforward style, and accounts of his travels
and celebrations of domestic scenes:

From, ‘The Beginning of the Story: Questions, iii’

Late on a summer evening we find ourselves in the leafy suburban
streets of some small town whose name we don’t as yet know. There
is a velvet darkness that brushes our lips and cheeks with great sen-
suality. This darkness is only broken by the vague pyramids of white
light around the rare street lamps, and the opaque yellow glow from
some curtained windows where people are still about. The silence
hisses and crackles, it is so near complete.25

Harwood is arguably one of the pivotal figures in the development of

the prose poem in Britain; Collected Poems contains a large variety of
them, many of which were generated by collaborative exchanges with
friends of postcards, photographs and wine labels. In his young adult-
hood, he spent time in the USA, where he came under the influence of
John Ashbery and other writers of the New York School, such as James
Schuyler and Frank O’Hara. Most critics have viewed him as having been
a follower of Ashbery, but Mark Ford points out that Harwood’s work

24 Lee Harwood, foreword to Collected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman, 2004), 12.

25 Harwood, Collected Poems, 290.
 4  THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN  57

bears a close affinity with that of James Schuyler;26 ‘A Vermont Diary’,

for example, which combines poetry and prose poetry, abounds in closely
observed, sometimes homely detail in the American’s account of walks in
the November countryside:

November 6
Another right-hand turn there, through the hamlet, past the school
and Marian Anderson the postmistress’s house and the dairy farm
and its close-cropped, stony, uphill pastures. Two shaggy horses
with heavy rumps were standing around looking solemn, and a
lot of long clouds like old-fashioned trolley cars were going along
overhead, some kind of osier was a vineyard beside the road and I
thought, I wouldn’t want anything to be different about this day—a
sudden wonderful feeling of accepting things as they are, even the
things you don’t like…27

‘Accepting things as they are’ could be said to be a distinguishing mark

of Harwood’s poetry, along with the almost literal descriptive and
straightforward narrative style; there is little evidence of Ashbery’s quirky
stylistic bravado.
Harwood was very much part of what was, at first, a counter-­
cultural movement of British poetry in the 1960s, the ‘British Poetry
Renaissance’, what the poet and publisher Ken Edwards once termed
the ‘parallel tradition’: its various formations in the UK being the
British Poetry Revival (Eric Mottram’s term), the Cambridge diaspora,
and what has sometimes been called ‘linguistically innovative’ poetry—
all overlapping categories. There was also a common interest in post-
New American Poetry, Language Writing and related North American
fields.’28 While it’s true to say that the American counter-culture, espe-
cially the Beat poets, at first in the person of Allen Ginsberg, quickly
fed into the British scene—Michael Horovitz’s International Poetry
Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall took place in 1965, and the first

26 Mark Ford, “Emerging Glorious from the Clouds,” review of Collected Poems, by Lee

Harwood, Guardian Review, September 18, 2004, 25.

27 James Schuyler, “Vermont Diary,” in The Crystal Lithium (New York: Random House,

1972), 55.
28 Ken Edwards, “Valediction,” under Reality Street, July 12, 2016, http://www.reali-

tystreet.co.uk/reality-street-blog/valediction.
58  R. VAS DIAS

edition of The Mersey Sound poets Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and
Brian Patten was first published in 1967—by the end of the decade the
work of the New American Poetry poets was being disseminated by a
number of British poet-publishers. Gael Turnbull started Migrant29 as
early as 1957; Tom Raworth started Matrix Press in 1961, publishing the
work of Black Mountain poets such as Edward Dorn, as well as the Beats
and New York poets, and, with Barry Hall, he co-founded Goliard Press
in 1964, publishing Olson’s work for the first time in Britain; Nathaniel
Tarn took over Goliard in 1967 as Cape Goliard Press under the aegis of
Jonathan Cape; Asa Benveniste (an American) co-founded Trigram Press
with his wife Pip in 1965; Andrew Crozier started Ferry Press in 1964,
whose first book was by the Black Mountain writer Fielding Dawson;
and Stuart Montgomery published many of the new American poets in
the finely produced books of his Fulcrum Press starting in 1965. The
King’s College London American Studies scholar, poet, and academic
Eric Mottram took over the editorship of Poetry Review in 1971, pub-
lishing the work of the British Poetry Revival poets as well as many
American poets.
This publishing phenomenon—and it was phenomenal, given the
conventional poetry publishing programs of mainstream publishers—
was instrumental in getting the work of mould-breaking British and
American writers circulated, though it must be said that it took many
years for these British writers to become widely known; the exceptions
were the Liverpool poets, and Roy Fisher and Basil Bunting—the latter,
even today, relatively neglected (and I will discuss these later).
Gael Turnbull (1928–2004), another pivotal figure, was one of the
earliest poets responsible for the introduction in Britain of the new post-
war American writing. He had moved back-and-forth between Canada,
Britain and the USA during and after the war, and after qualifying as
an anaesthetist at the University of Pennsylvania, he moved to Canada
where the American poet and editor of Origin, Cid Corman, met him.
Origin30 was one of the most influential little magazines of The New

29 An eye-opening comprehensive exhibition, Migrant and the Poetry of Possibility, was

curated by the poet Richard Price in 2007 in the Folio Gallery, The British Library.
30 See Cid Corman, ed., The Gist of Origin: 1951–1971: An Anthology Edited by Cid

Corman (New York: Grossman, 1975).

 4  THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN  59

American Poetry before that ground-breaking anthology, publishing

Olson in its first series, as well as British poets, Turnbull among them
in 1954. Corman was a far-sighted, if eccentric, editor who promoted
the work of the Black Mountain poets. A good case can be made that
Turnbull, an early practitioner of the prose poem, was encouraged by the
example of Olson, whose work combined a variety of material includ-
ing prose passages; before him, of course, was the example of Pound’s
Cantos. The following is from Turnbull’s long prose poem ‘Twenty
Words: Twenty Days’, which begins with a quotation from a letter, and is
arranged in prose lines interrupted by extra spacing:

VIII
described by Miss Ann Dart, as he was visiting Bristol,
while still a youth: Turner—
“…not like other young
people but singular and very silent…no facility for
friendship but never other than pleasant…seemed
uneducated, difficult to understand…sometimes going
out sketching before breakfast and again after supper…
desirous of nothing but improvement in his art…”

a VALENCY—
defined as: an expression in terms of
small digits of an ability to unite with other like integers—

a ratio, denoting a specificity, an exaction—

and at
approximately 4:45 p.m. a child brought into the hospital
that had tripped, struck her head—
not much more than
dazed at first, then slowly lapsing, until rapidly depressed,
the breathing almost arrested—
“linear fracture of the skull
in the left temporo-parietal area”31

31 Gael Turnbull, From “Twenty Words: Twenty Days: A Sketchbook & a Morula,” in A

Gathering of Poems 1950–1980 (London: Anvil, 1983), 69–70.

60  R. VAS DIAS

The combination of quotation, precise definition and personal experi-

ence is characteristic of the kind of prose poem being written in America
at that time by Olson (the poem dates from the end of 1963). The word
‘VALENCY’ was the word Turnbull selected by chance from the diction-
ary for that day; it also has the meaning, in physics, of ‘energy, active
force’ (The Shorter Oxford Dictionary) which, of course, can apply to
Turner, or any committed artist, as well as to a highly competent profes-
sional, which Turnbull was.
The third pivotal figure was the late Tom Raworth (1938–2017), who
was ‘instrumental in bringing an entire tradition of American poetry
to English [read ‘British’] readers’,32 mainly the work of the Black
Mountain poets. He was visiting lecturer at the University of Texas-
Austin and the University of California-San Diego before moving back
to England in 1977.

From No + On = Noon (Except When Reflected)

window stops at the edge of window and door at the edge of the door:
the observer shuts his eyes and continues the journey. memories eat away
at the idea. wall runs into ceiling runs into flex runs into bulb runs into
light. already the morning screams come from other rooms. dreadful as it
may be it is not so. dreams are sellotaped loosely on to the ten pictures of
‘loved by children’ characters, all of whom look the same way. Chummily,
their eyeballs roll towards you. It splits like slate or mica: or a thin sheet of
dream takes the place of a feather in a golden oval. how to see people with-
out their clothes.33

We see in this poem not only the figure of Beckett lurking in the back-
ground, but also the Surrealists and Dadaists. The structure of Raworth’s
poetry became increasingly disjunctive and prefigured the Language
poets though, as Marjorie Perloff points out, ‘He is, for example, much
more allusive, more “literary,” than the U.S. language poets.’34
The other major figure of this ‘first generation’ of poets who featured
the prose poem in their work was the late Roy Fisher (1930–2017).

32 “Tom Raworth,” The Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/

poems-and-poets/poets/detail/tom-raworth.
33 Tom Raworth, Act (London: Trigram, 1973), [unpaginated].

34 Marjorie Perloff, Review of Collected Poems, by Tom Raworth, Times Literary

Supplement, May 30, 2003, http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/articles/raworth.pdf.

 4  THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN  61

In his Collected Poems 1968 is a poem called City, which is composed

of both poems and prose-poem sections, and was originally published
by Gael Turnbull’s Migrant Press in 1961. Turnbull, who was invited
to guest-edit a British number of Origin, had originally asked Fisher
for poems to be included in the magazine, and this led to a life-long
friendship. The indeterminate, open-ended form is a prominent fea-
ture of Surrealist writers of the prose poem, as are many of Fisher’s. Of
City, he wrote that Michael Shayer, partner with Turnbull in Migrant,
‘looked at my great heaving mass of odds and ends that I was writing
about Birmingham, which was Rimbaud at one end, and, say, hard prose
at the other, and saw that this material could be used as a kind of collage
work; which he could see, and I couldn’t.’35 Collage, of course, is a typi-
cal surrealist technique, evident in literary work that reflects the methods
of Cubism. Fisher’s later work becomes more experimental, depend-
ing more on parataxis in its structure than the relatively straightforward
description and observation that characterizes City. The prose poem Also
(with Derrick Greaves) is a good example of the latter:

also there was another story/ a bird suddenly crossing a frame of sky to
alter/ I had no window, the darkness moulded me/ it said the messages
were settled/ we must be crossing a frame of sleep, the sunlit screen over
the matted shadow where the cloud had fallen and gone down lost among
the folds/ and searching for loss more faint than the first loss/ and then
to alter everything by passing it by, asking nothing, expecting nothing to
alter/ alter/ / also there.36

This poem’s use of the forward stroke, and the use of spacing to indi-
cate pauses and syntactical units, derives from the practice of some of
the Black Mountain poets and Paul Blackburn (who always maintained
he was not a Black Mountain poet, though for a time he was New York
editor of The Black Mountain Review). Fisher talks about coming into
contact with these poets and was struck by their ‘demanding aesthetic’,
though ‘I didn’t particularly want to follow the patterns they were

35 Roy Fisher, Interviews Through Time & Selected Prose, ed. Tony Frazer (Kentisbeare:

Shearsman, 2000), 47.

36 Roy Fisher, Poems 1955–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 100.
62  R. VAS DIAS

working on. I certainly didn’t want to follow the mannerisms.’37 The

poem is also one among a number of collaborations with artists, includ-
ing Ian Tyson (Tetrad) and, notably, Ron King (Circle Press).
Much more can be said about Fisher’s prose poetry—see Peter
Robinson’s essay in this book—so, rather than devote more space to
Fisher, I shall proceed to a poet who is equally noted as an innovator but
in an entirely different aesthetic than the previous four.
The poets of The Mersey Sound—Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and
Brian Patten—arrived on the scene at the beginning of the 1960s, before
that famous anthology (1967), and they came from a different place aes-
thetically and geographically than the preceding four poets. Though they
can be considered as part of the British Poetry Revival, they reached a
much wider audience through performances and through the anthology,
which sold over 500,000 copies in its many editions. As Eric Mottram
wrote, the performances ‘showed that there could be an audience for
poetry outside the study, the university and the tradition-bound class-
room’.38 The conventional explanation of the origin of their aesthetic is
the American Beat poets, particularly Allen Ginsberg, but it is also true
to say the fact that they came from a different place is equally significant:
Henri wrote, ‘I cannot imagine what it would have been like to be a poet
and not live here; or, indeed, whether I would have become a poet at
all.’39 Henri refers here to Liverpool 8, a centre of the physical and musi-
cal environment for these poets.
The Beats can be said to contribute two main ideas to the
‘Merseybeat’ poets: first, as Helen Louise Taylor writes, ‘seeing a move-
ment so firmly based in the recording of experience and the importance
of the everyday, it made it acceptable for these Liverpool poets to do
the same thing with their own lives’.40 This approach not only charac-
terized the Beats such as Ginsberg and Michael McClure, but others of
The New American Poetry (1960), such as the West Coast poets, prom-
inent among them Gary Snyder, and the New York poets, mainly Frank

37 Fisher,
Interviews, 46–47.
38 Helen Louise Taylor, “Adrian Henri and the Merseybeat Movement: Performance,
Poetry, and Public in the Liverpool Scene of the 1960s.” PhD dissertation, Royal
Holloway, University of London, 2013, https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/
files/17852529/2013TaylorHLPhD.pdf, 12
39 Taylor, “Adrian Henri,” 47.
40 Ibid., 60–61.
 4  THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN  63

O’Hara. The anthology was as much a revelatory handbook for the

Liverpool poets as it was for American writers. It should also be said that
Henri was at pains to insist that the Mersey poets ‘didn’t do it like the
Americans did it, you did it like you would do it; so you didn’t pretend
you were coming from San Francisco or New Jersey, when you actually
came from Birkenhead or Bootle. So you did it with your own voice, not
theirs. And that was the great breakthrough.’41 The following example of
one of Henri’s prose poems called ‘City’ illustrates well the ‘voice’ of the
Merseyside poet:

Walking through dead leaves in Falkner Square going to the Pakistani shop
with Tony in the October afternoon sunlight thinking of you being woken
up in the two a.m. Blue Angel rock‘n’roll darkness by Carl who I hadn’t
heard singing thinking of you thinking of you drinking in the Saturday
night everyone waiting no party pub walking with another girl holding
cold hands in the autumn park thinking of you walking home everynight
in Blackburne Place twilight thinking of you thinking of you.42

‘City’ displays a number of features of Henri’s writing: the musicality of

the language—each phrase could be a line (or a title) of a pop song lyric;
the flowing of one thought-image immediately into another, recapitulat-
ing stream-of-consciousness (and illustrating one of Olson’s precepts in
‘Projective Verse’ (1950): ‘one perception must immediately and directly
lead to a further perception’); and the repetition of words and phrases,
like a refrain, making this an ideal performance piece. ‘In ‘Notes on
Painting and Poetry,’ from Tonight at Noon, published in 1968, Henri
directly cites Ginsberg as one of the poets whom he admired, who used
‘a repeating or running phrase to link an image-sequence’43 (‘thinking of
you’ in the above prose poem). The prose poem ‘Without You’44 is also
a typical example.
The second main contribution of the Beats to the style of the
Liverpool poets was the long or paragraphic line—derived ultimately

41 Ibid.,12.
42 Ibid.,57.
43 “Extracts from Adrian Henri, Notes on Painting and Poetry (1968),” http://www.

adrianhenri.com/writer-ah-extracts-notes-painting-poetry.html.
44 In The Mersey Sound, Penguin Modern Poets 10, Revised and enlarged edition

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 29–30.

64  R. VAS DIAS

from Whitman via Ginsberg—and composition by breath-unit, exempli-

fied by the poetry of Olson and William Carlos Williams. ‘The “breath-
and-speech measure” is particularly relevant for a poet for whom
performance was so important.’45 Here, there is a fascinating corol-
lary to Ginsberg’s poetics that relates to the prose poem: Taylor notes
that the ‘paragraphic feel of the text was crucial to the experience’ of
Ginsberg’s influence; she goes on to quote from a letter Ginsberg sent
to Ferlinghetti on 3 July 1956 complaining that the printer of the first
printing of ‘Howl’ re-lineated the lines: ‘The one element of order and
prearrangement I did pay care to was arrangement into prose-­paragraph
strophes: each one definite unified long line. So any doubt about irreg-
ularity of right hand margin will be sure to confuse critical reader about
intention of prosody. Therefore I’ve got to change it so it’s right.’46
Even a cursory glance at ‘Howl’ reveals the nature of the ‘prose-­
paragraph strophes,’ whose indented lines (after the first flush-left line
of each paragraph) are justified. ‘Howl’ is, in effect, an early postwar
American prose poem. Equally, it should be noted here that not all the
lines of prose poems must be justified: there are plenty of prose poems
whose lines are ‘ragged’ at the right-hand margin.
I will conclude with three poets who could be called the ‘second gen-
eration’ of twentieth-century British poets who significantly advanced
the concept of the prose poem and in many ways raised its profile as a
genre in its own right: Peter Riley, David Chaloner and Gavin Selerie.
Peter Riley (1940–) is identified with that loose grouping of poets
around Cambridge which, of course, is called the Cambridge School,
whose chief proponent is J.H. Prynne. Riley was the co-editor (with
Andrew Crozier and others) of the important poetry/poetics journal The
English Intelligencer (1965–1968). His meditative and descriptive writ-
ing is largely concerned with the English landscape, and with peoples
and geographies of other countries in which he has travelled.

This hollow globe is incapable of

inaccuracy. Reward lines it. And at once
the closed landscape wrapped in tough
grass held tightly to the earth, our

45 Taylor, “Adrian Henri,” 84.

46 Ibid., 82.
 4  THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN  65

single star, is held among us as it slowly

dawns on us, our prize is the earth.47

The next prose poem, as Riley writes, is from a collection of ‘180

prose poems with a lot of quoted text from nineteenth-century reports
of the excavation of prehistoric burial mounds in the north of England,
set intermittently against fragments of old (mostly fifteenth and sixteenth
Century) love songs and other ancestral texts. Meditations among [in]
graves.’
From Excavations

10/273
Red in a white matrix the fire stars, lives rendered to a point and
sealed in the blue clay dome, to hover over the theatre of memory
a finely ground and polished plate of almost transparent flint in front
of the face My feerfull dreme / falling angels, hands in front of
faces swirling into darkness / to where no earth or sky or any mortal
claim has any place nevyr forgete can I love’s harm.48

A wide frame of reference, woven into the fabric of his texts, together
with the intensity of inward reflections, informs Riley’s poems, as in
Excavations. Riley is a major innovator of the prose poem in our time.
David Chaloner (1944–2010), whose untimely death cut short bril-
liant careers as both poet and designer, received early publication by
Andrew Crozier’s Ferry Press and was included in Michael Horovitz’s
Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969). The
outstanding feature of his poetry and prose poems is their language: its
precise nature recapitulates a literal reality that shades into the hyper-real
and abstract:

Once the decision is formulated you prepare to establish the means by

which you will gain favour in order to carry out the plan to its full extent.
But it is this very purpose, so fresh and exact, deters your impulse for

47 Peter Riley, “(prose poem),” The Derbyshire Poems (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010),
45.
48 Riley, “10/73,” Excavations (Hastings: Reality Street, 2004), http://www.aprileye.

co.uk/books.html.
66  R. VAS DIAS

action. What is needed is … The truth of your action lies in the … A safe
distance must be maintained between … Whoever appears first shall have
the full benefit of … The locality has since become far too public and will
require … Motives are an essay in the … Hot flushes damage the cool scene
and … For this reason we are not at liberty to divulge the source of our
information, but can say… Having approached the problem thus far you
reach for an enlightened … Displaced yet eradicating confidence that …49

Here, Chaloner employs the language, the diction, of bureaucracy and

memoranda to obfuscate rather than clarify, becoming meaningless filler.
Phrases begin a thought and do not complete it. The passage depends on
irony and satire, and also humour: the sentence, ‘Hot flushes damage the
cool scene and…’ is thrown into the mix to hilarious effect. Chaloner’s
language in his poetry and prose poems is curiously formal, expositorially
correct and seemingly logical, yet the end result of many of his pieces,
as in this one, is that you have arrived at an end that is not an end; that
the words don’t add up to a conventionally coherent work. In this sense,
Chaloner is a highly original writer, one who uses the everyday language
of business, government and academia to wriggle and confuse—some-
thing with which we are all too depressingly familiar.
Gavin Selerie (1949–), who was also a prime mover in the British
Poetry Revival, is a leading British writer of the book-length poem; these
include Roxy (1996), Le Fanu’s Ghost (2006), and his latest, Hariot
Double, with Alan Halsey (2016), on which he worked for ten years. In
the words of the poet and critic Robert Hampson, Selerie is ‘probably
one of the most obviously scholarly of contemporary British poets’ and a
poet of ‘constant formal inventiveness’.50
Selerie has written on several American poets in the Riverside
Interview series, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Gregory Corso and Jerome Rothenberg. The following prose poem is
from Strip Signals:

Acquired stock electronically configured, a generating station, night and

day a furious courier, a lottery of upstart authority with sweat appraisal.

49 David Chaloner, “Risks,” Fading Into Brilliance (London: Oasis, 1978), 24; reprinted

in Collected Poems (Cambridge: Salt, 2005), 176–177.

50 Robert Hampson, “Gavin Selerie’s ‘Roxy’ and ‘Le Fanu’s Ghost’.” Jacket Magazine

36, 2008, http://jacketmagazine.com/36/r-selerie-rb-hampson.html.

 4  THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN  67

The city’s golden boy, doubling values in an information stream as peo-

ple with carrier bags over their heads yell at traffic. A jobber’s notebook
filled with strange characters: Mzazo Ozlacim, Ozazm Micalzo. 30 calls yet
to come. Cross-match, convert to yield. By suppression or removal these
fragments will speak, marble, agate under dust. Wake Cleopatra to force
out spoil, outperform the index. Shush-ort hedge bet placed ticktack. A
toolbox of derivatives, solids thinner than air with the glint of arrival. Bang
on target, just hang in to force-connect and quit. Hide any strong seething
over terms or partner pitch.51

In this prose poem, Selerie conveys a specific contemporary language—

here, that of trading and finance—by means of noun phrases and verbs
in the imperative, to create a matrix of language as it is spoken by repre-
sentative specialists of our culture: but the more formal constructs segue
into witty descriptive sentences that underscore the irony and satire.
Selerie is a modern master of this kind of text.
As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, we find
the prose poem in rude health, thanks in part to the work of preceding
generations. Notable British prose poetry writers of the ‘new’ generation
include Luke Kennard, Linda Black, Lucy Hamilton and Ian Seed. It will
be noticed that most of the books in the twentieth-century which con-
tain prose poems were published by the so-called ‘alternative’, or small,
presses. This is not surprising when considering that the poets who wrote
prose poems were generally of the British Poetry Revival. Nowadays, it
appears that the major trade publishers, who publish very little poetry
anyway (as is the case in the USA), still leave it to the small presses to
disseminate prose poetry. It is also true that, since the early days of the
British Poetry Revival, some of these small presses have become much
larger ones, their books relatively widely distributed. Perhaps the form
still makes trade publishers in Britain nervous; in the USA, a book such
as Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (published by the
independent, non-profit Graywolf Press), was picked up by Penguin
Random House in the UK after it won an impressive array of awards,
including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward

51 Gavin Selerie, Strip Signals (Newcastle upon Tyne: Galloping Dog, 1986), 14;

reprinted in Music’s Duel: New and Selected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009), 124.
68  R. VAS DIAS

Prize. Perhaps we shouldn’t complain: dozens of small presses and many

periodicals in both countries are publishing prose poems and, as far as
practice is concerned, it stands as a flourishing contemporary form.52

Works Cited
Allen, Donald M., and Warren Tallmann, eds. The Poetics of the New American
Poetry. New York: Grove Press, 1973.
Beckett, Samuel. “Still.” In Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950–
1976. London: Faber, 2010.
Chaloner, David. “Risks.” Fading into Brilliance. London: Oasis, 1978.
Reprinted in Collected Poems. Cambridge: Salt, 2005.
Corman, Cid, ed. The Gist of Origin: 1951–1971: An Anthology. Edited by Cid
Corman. New York: Grossman, 1975.
Critchley, Emily, ed. Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by
Women in North America & the UK. Hastings: Reality Street, 2015.
Davis, Lydia. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2009.
Edwards, Ken. “Valediction,” under Reality Street, July 12, 2016. http://www.
realitystreet.co.uk/reality-street-blog/valediction.
Fisher, Roy. Poems 1955–1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
———. Interviews Through Time & Selected Prose. Edited by Tony Frazer.
Kentisbeare: Shearsman, 2000.
Ford, Mark. “Emerging Glorious from the Clouds.” Review of Collected Poems,
by Lee Harwood, Guardian Review. September 18, 2004.
Hampson, Robert. “Gavin Selerie’s ‘Roxy’ and ‘Le Fanu’s Ghost’.” Jacket
Magazine 36, 2008. http://jacketmagazine.com/36/r-selerie-rb-hampson.
html.
Harwood, Lee. Foreword to Collected Poems. Exeter: Shearsman, 2004.
Henri, Adrian. “Extracts from Adrian Henri, Notes on Painting and Poetry
(1968).” http://www.adrianhenri.com/writer-ah-extracts-notes-painting-po-
etry.html.
———. The Mersey Sound, Penguin Modern Poets 10. Revised and Enlarged
Edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

52 See, for example, two contemporary anthologies: the impressive Out of Everywhere

2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK, ed., Emily
Critchley (Hastings: Reality Street, 2015), in which no less than 20 of its 44 contributors
are represented by prose poems or pieces that combine poems and prose poems; and Short:
An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays,
and Other Short Prose Forms, ed. Alan Ziegler (New York: Persea, 2014).
 4  THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN  69

Jones, David. “In Parenthesis: Pts 1–4: Part Two, Chambers Go Off, Corporals
Stay,” 1937. http://www.arduity.com/poets/jones/inparenthesis.html.
Lehman, David, ed. Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. New
York: Scribner Poetry, 2003.
Loy, Mina. “Gertrude Stein.” In The Last Lunar Baedecker, edited by Roger L.
Conover. Highlands: Jargon, 1982.
———. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Edited by Roger L. Conover. Highlands:
Jargon Society, 1982.
———. “Interview with Paul Blackburn and Robert Vas Dias.” In Mina Loy:
Woman and Poet, edited by Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma. Introduction
by Carolyn Burke. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1998, 205–43.
Mallarme, Stéphane. “Introduction.” In Mallarmé: The Poems, translated by
Keith Bosley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
Monte, Steven. Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2000.
Murphy, Peter. “Orpheus Returning: The Nature of Myth in Samuel Beckett’s
‘Still’ Trilogy.” The International Fiction Review, 11.2 (1984): 110. https://
journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/viewFile/13704/14786.
Perloff, Marjorie. Review of Collected Poems, by Tom Raworth, Times Literary
Supplement, May 30, 2003. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/arti-
cles/raworth.pdf.
Perse, St.-John. “Éloges” in Éloges and Other Poems. Translated by Louise Varèse.
New York: Pantheon, 1956.
The Poetry Foundation. “Tom Raworth.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/
poems-and-poets/poets/detail/tom-raworth.
Price, Richard, curator. Migrant and the Poetry of Possibility. Folio Gallery, The
British Library, 2007.
Raworth, Tom. Act. London: Trigram, 1973.
Riley, Peter. “10/73.” Excavations. Hastings: Reality Street, 2004. http://www.
aprileye.co.uk/books.html.
———. “(prose poem).” The Derbyshire Poems. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010.
Schuyler, James. “Vermont Diary.” In The Crystal Lithium. New York: Random
House, 1972.
Selerie, Gavin. Strip Signals. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Galloping Dog, 1986.
Reprinted in Music’s Duel: New and Selected Poems. Exeter: Shearsman
Books, 2009.
Stein, Gertrude. Poetics of the New American Poetry. Edited by Donald M. Allen
and Warren Tallman. New York: Grove, 1973.
———. “The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein.”
Last modified March 17, 2005, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15396/15
396-h/15396.
70  R. VAS DIAS

Taylor, Helen Louise. “Adrian Henri and the Merseybeat Movement:

Performance, Poetry, and Public in the Liverpool Scene of the 1960s.” PhD
dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2013, https://pure.roy-
alholloway.ac.uk/portal/files/17852529/2013TaylorHLPhD.pdf.
Turnbull, Gael. A Gathering of Poems 1950–1980. London: Anvil, 1983.
Williams, Carlos William. Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1970.
———. Kora in Hell: Improvisations. Boston: The Fours Seas Company, 1920.
California Digital Library. Digitized by the Internet Archive, 2007. https://
archive.org/stream/korainhellimpro00willrich#page/84/mode/2up.
Ziegler, Alan, ed. Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-
Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms. New York:
Persea, 2014.
 PART II

The Early Narrators

 CHAPTER 5

The Marvellous Clouds: Reflections

on the Prose Poetry of Woolf, Baudelaire
and Williams

Michael O’Neill

Historically, the prose poem has been considered or ignored as a

­chimera, even a fabulous unicorn among literary forms; neither anecdo-
tal fish nor symbolic fowl, but a new species; neither parable nor fable,
though it may offer some of the fleeting gestures towards insight and
story offered by those genres; neither aphorism nor pensée, though there
are moments when Pascal, Rousseau, Nietszche and Wilde seem to antic-
ipate or shadow forth or complement its possibilities. Pascal writes:

As I write down my thought it sometimes escapes me, but that reminds me

of my weakness, which I am always forgetting, and teaches me as much as
my forgotten thought, for I care only about knowing that I am nothing…1

1 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. with intro. A.J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1966), no. 656, 240.

M. O’Neill (*) 
Durham University, Durham, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 73

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_5
74  M. O’NEILL

When he does so, he brings us close to the quick of a quirk of thought,

its simultaneous ability and inability to inhabit the moment at which it
occurs. The reflection turns on itself as it pivots on ideas of memory and
forgetting; it has a reflexive rapidity as it speaks to and emerges from the
flow of consciousness which is observed, rather than arrested. It trembles
on the verge of being a prose poem, but it stays within the precincts of
the aphorism—partly because, in the end, it is less the creative fact than
the philosophical or theological meaning of the utterance which has pri-
ority. The prose poem proper, if one dare risk such an assertion, is more
continuously interested in language’s unfolding of its own experiential
life and of its capacity for embodying perception. It is, as Margueritte
S. Murphy remarks, ‘associated with an aesthetic that valued shock and
innovation over tradition and convention’.2 And yet its finest effects call
into question the absolute validity of that tempting opposition, reliant, as
the prose poem is, on ‘traditions that it subsequently disrupts’.3

1
Given the form’s interest in the ghostlier demarcations of genre, it may
be suitably—rather than merely—perverse to open reflections on the
prose poem by looking at the practice of a writer, Virginia Woolf, nor-
mally associated with the novel, albeit the novel handled with experimen-
tal urgency and brio. Towards the end of Woolf’s The Waves, Bernard
asserts: ‘I rose and walked away—I, I, I; not Byron, Shelley, Dostoievsky,
but I, Bernard. I even repeated my own name once or twice’.4 That
sense of ‘I’ as what Bernard goes on to call ‘the inheritor’, ‘the contin-
uer’, is one of the energies that drives the prose poem where that form is
a means of conveying the immediacy of subjective experience.
One notes that Bernard includes among his discarded cloak-selves
two British Romantic poets and one Russian novelist, as though he and
his creator were indifferent to generic bifurcations. Certainly, prose for
Woolf’s Bernard takes on a hardy, quicksilver life as it responds to the
fact or impression (the two words melt into one another in the book)

2 Margueritte Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to

Ashbery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 2–3.

3 Murphy, Tradition of Subversion, 67.

4 Virginia Woolf, The Waves, intro. Jeanette Winterson and Gillian Beer (London:

Vintage, 2004), 169.

 5  THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY …  75

that ‘I took the blow; the mixed sensations; the complex and disturb-
ing and utterly unprepared for impacts of life all over, in all places at the
same time’.5 The Woolfian punctuation of pausings and turnings, sig-
nalled by the semicolons and comma, communicates a rueful semblance
of pride here.
Such pride invested in the ‘I’ in prose poetry precedes a self-­lacerating
fall that may also be a stay against self-contempt. A good example is
offered by the contemporary writer John Freeman. Freeman finishes one
prose poem, ‘Dissent’, with a turn in which the speaker finds fault with
an egotistical ‘famous novelist and theorist’ who compares his ‘depress-
ing short story’ with Middlemarch:

Your story is very bad, I said. Withdraw, murmured my shocked col-

leagues. I couldn’t, for the sake of everything I believed in. But I sat help-
less, hearing what I had said through their ears.6

That is too disconcertingly raw for the novel, which has to have some
posture of judgement towards a speaker, and too fast moving, even in
its shocked stillness, for the poem. The clause ‘hearing what I had said
through their ears’ might occur in a poem, but placed as it is it works to
spark off the sensation, the frisson of quotidian epiphany as only a prose
poem can. There are subtleties of cadence and sound here: the move-
ment from ‘story’ to ‘withdraw’ and then to ‘hearing’ and ‘ears’; the
balance between principled resistance in the penultimate sentence and
involuntary acquiescence in the last. But these effects, though observable
in the poem or fictional story, take on a different tone, life and nuance
in the space of the prose poem, unmoored as that is from the constraints
of conventional narrative or from the demands of a form that seems in
some way to jostle, often productively, with the matter, as in a poem.
If the prose poem obeys the behests of the first person pronoun, this
pronoun is often perplexed about its identity, the relationship of self to
others, of self to itself. The Waves, Woolf’s ‘playpoem’, of which Stella
McNichol writes, that ‘She has so saturated the novel with poetry that it
almost ceases to be a novel’, springs from her wish to present a vision ‘of

5 Woolf,The Waves, 170.

6 John Freeman, “Dissent,” in This Line Is Not for Turning: An Anthology of
Contemporary British Prose Poetry, ed. Jane Monson (Blaenau Ffestiniog: Cinnamon,
2011), 67. Qtd. with permission of author, editor and publisher.
76  M. O’NEILL

life, itself’, in McNicol’s words, ‘the great universal which contains and
sustains the individual’.7 The six individual voices to whom we listen at
various stages of their lives are figured as petals on a single flower.8 But
no simplistic mystic oneness is insisted on or offered. The italicised inter-
ludes describing the rise and setting of the sun imply a vast amplitude
of natural harmonies and dissonances. They operate as keen observation
(‘Meanwhile the concussion of the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds,
like logs falling, on the shore’) that suggests an irresistible impulse to rein-
terpret the world figuratively: here the waves, in their sounds, sound like
solid things, ‘like logs falling’.9 They also intimate an overarching back-
drop against which the individual lives voice their apprehensions and
perceptions. Through cunningly simple devices such as statement piled
on statement, Woolf depicts the natural world as blending massive solid-
ity with tremulous process, as when she writes, in the same passage, that
‘the dew dancing on the tips of the flowers and leaves made the garden like
a mosaic of single sparks not yet formed into one whole’.10 There, the lan-
guage sways to and fro—between the hard, worked surface of ‘mosaic’
and the suggestions of quasi-Shelleyan ‘single sparks’, if one thinks of the
‘Ashes and sparks’ (67) to which Shelley compares his scattered words
towards the close of ‘Ode to the West Wind’.11
The final phrase, ‘not yet formed into one whole’, suggests how, in her
‘playpoem’, Woolf wants to, and does not, turn experience into ‘one
whole’, delighting in and absorbed by what is ‘not yet formed’. It is as
though, for Woolf, the poetic prose of her great work expresses contin-
ually and with supple fluidity two contrary impulses or meanings: that
language needs to be at its most subtle and creative to convey the liv-
ing immediacy of what it is to be, to possess or be possessed by a sub-
jective experience; and that language needs, too, to be aware that there
is a pattern, or shape, or order, or design, to which, at its most fulfill-
ing, subjective experience belongs. Phrases build on phrases with com-
plicated results as, asking ‘how to describe the world seen without a

7 Stella McNichol, Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990),

119, 125.
8 See McNichol, Virginia Woolf, 127.

9 Woolf, The Waves, 16.

10 Ibid.

11 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

 5  THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY …  77

self?’,12 Bernard contrives a thought-experiment (a term which might be

a synonym for many prose poems) in pursuit of ‘voiceless, characterless
expression’13:

There are no words. Blue, red – even they distract, even they hide with
darkness instead of letting the light through. How describe or say any-
thing in articulate words again?—save that it fades, saves that it undergoes
a gradual transformation, becomes, even in the course of one short walk,
habitual – this scene also. Blindness returns as one moves and one leaf
repeats another. Loveliness returns as one looks, with all its train of phan-
tom phrases.14

Words are alien to this world from which the self seeks to banish itself,
and yet they register that feeling of alienation, too. The moment of
habituation is turned uncannily inside out, so that it breathes a fresh
newness. What ‘returns’ and ‘repeats’ seems to present itself for the
first time, and the very seductiveness of the phrasing both concedes and
belies its allegedly ‘phantom’ status.
A bravura rush of awareness in a preceding passage makes of Bernard
experiencer and analyst, sufferer and recorder. Woolf uses the resources
of poetic prose to convey Bernard’s sense of having reached a terminus,
a point at which he feels that ‘Life has destroyed me’, that he is ‘A man
without a self’, both a being and identity-less, part of a dreary totality
uncharged by meaning, a parody of some ultimate unity, one in which
all adds up to ‘clouds and phantoms made of dust’.15 But, in that very
wording, in the cadencing of the writing, Woolf draws attention to the
perilous recompense offered by the words that Bernard professes to mis-
trust. Those clouds, for instance, quickly gain in the act of losing, or
as they ‘lose and gain and take gold or red and lose their summits and

12 Woolf, The Waves, 192.

13 Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 87. My thanks to my colleague Patricia
Waugh for drawing my attention to this work and other relevant critical studies of Woolf.
I disagree with Hussey that The Waves is a “failure” which he says “is partly due to” its
“inwardness” (88); it is that inwardness, its way of working so that, in James Naremore’s
words, “the reader almost drowns in the language” (qtd. Hussey, 92), which makes it
exciting as an extended prose poem.
14 Woolf, The Waves, 192–93.

15 Ibid., 190–91.
78  M. O’NEILL

billow this way and that, mutable, vain’. The last word crosses notions of
emptiness with suggestions of writerly vanity, yet the passage as a whole
manages to fascinate and absorb us in the task undertaken by ‘a shadow
… sedulous to take note of shadows’.16
The prose poem seems peculiarly attuned to what in one mood
seems ‘mutable, vain’ and in another processes that ‘lose and gain and
take gold or red.’ With a peculiar urgency, it pits words against silence,
what is living and changing against what is finished, over. Recognising
this fight, the final sentence of Bernard’s last speech advocates in its very
syntax a hurling of the self against a force continually held at bay in the
prose poem: ‘Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyield-
ing, O Death!’17 Here, a near-chiastic sound patterning—‘Against’ and
‘Death’ as the off-rhyming A-terms, ‘fling’ and ‘unyielding’ composing
the sandwiched B-terms—suggests the courage and the possibly unavail-
ing nature of that ‘flinging’. The next and final sentence of the book, the
last in the set of italicised interludes, reads ‘The waves broke’,18 stamping
the novel with a seal of finality, the dubious rapture of possible rupture.
Woolf is a crucial practitioner because she places the prose poem at
the heart of the novel, inviting us to see as culturally central a form that
can parade a near-dandified eccentricity. What is central? What is periph-
eral? The questions are posed by the prose poem as it flaunts its affinity
with and difference from the passage of heightened prose or the poem
that wears its studied arrangements like a flamboyant cloak or even, in
the case of vers libre, a flesh-coloured body stocking. More than this,
Woolf recovers a sense of connection with the Romantics who call
into question simple distinctions between prose and poetry. In a diary
entry of 1940, she expresses her admiration for Coleridge and Shelley
in a sentence whose changing, supple lights and shades shape prose into
poetry: ‘How lightly and firmly they put down their feet, and how they
sing; and how they compact; and fuse, and deepen’.19 In A Defence of
Poetry, Shelley, referred to on many occasions in The Waves, especially
in Rhoda’s use of his poetry as what Woolf calls ‘an amulet against

16 Ibid., 191.
17 Ibid., 199.
18 Ibid.

19 Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (San Diego: Harcourt, 1981), 324.
 5  THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY …  79

disaster’,20 writes: ‘The distinction between poets and prose writers

is a vulgar error’ and that ‘Plato was essentially a poet’ who ‘sought to
kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action’, and ‘for-
bore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under
determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style’.21 The Waves is a dis-
tant but significant heir of this proclamation, and Woolf’s acknowledge-
ment of a Romantic lineage is present, too, in her powerful if guarded
tribute to De Quincey in her ‘Impassioned Prose’. Here, Woolf admires
De Quincey’s capacity to take prose away from ‘facts’ and provide, in
Suspiria de Profundis, ‘descriptions of states of mind in which, often,
time is miraculously prolonged and space miraculously expanded’: a mir-
acle her own prose contrives, through its prolongations and expansions,
to reproduce.22

2
Baudelaire, in his Petits Poèmes en prose, has influenced the prose poem
as practised in the UK in innumerable ways. This section returns to his
example and practice in an attempt to single out features of his work
which, in the present author’s judgement, have shaped and might con-
tinue to inspire the work of many writers of prose poems in English. The
great French poet voices the hope shared by many practitioners of the
prose poem when he asks famously:

Quel est celui de nous qui n’a pas, dans ses jours d’ambition, rêvé le mir-
acle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez sou-
ple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux
ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience?
[Which of us has never imagined, in his more ambitious moments,
the miracle of a poetic prose, musical though rhythmless and rhymeless,

20 Qtd. in Jane de Gay, Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 164. This book contains a helpful discussion of
Woolf’s use of Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley in The Waves.
21 Leader and O’Neill, Shelley, 679.

22 Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, ed. with intro. and notes David Bradshaw (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2008), 56, 61.

80  M. O’NEILL

flexible yet strong enough to identify with the lyrical impulses of the soul,
the ebbs and flows of revery, the pangs of conscience?]23

Francis Scarfe’s serviceable translation, given in brackets above, misses

the beat-skipping speed of ‘musicale sans rythme et sans rimes’, where
the French certainly has its own swaying rhythm even as it eschews
rhyme, avoiding the clunky ‘though’ which the translation adds. And
‘ebb and flow’ is less nuanced than the French ‘ondulations’, which
manages to be simultaneously ebb and flow. Yet, we note Baudelaire’s
emphasis on the prose poem’s sensitivity to the vagaries of conscious-
ness, to the graph traced by ‘the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs
and flows of revery’. We note, too, as Sonya Stephens has pointed out,
the fascination with the city, expressed in the same letter, and the abiding
concern of the prose poems, in keeping with the fact that they have what
Stephens calls ‘an oxymoron for a name’, with opposites. Everywhere the
poems are built out of ‘doubling’, ‘polarity’ and ‘dualities’, as the same
critic observes.24
Baudelaire’s prose poems negotiate between self and world, and
reflect on the nature of their own discourse in a way that the prose poem
seems peculiarly suited to doing, holding before its reader the fact of
itself, as though it were both a text and a lamp lighting up its identity as
a lamp. Stephens speaks of the opening piece, ‘L’Étranger’, as involving a
rejection by the stranger of ‘an ideological, and by extension, a discursive
system’.25 Here is the work:

Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis? ton père, ta mère, ta

soeur ou ton frère?
– Je n’ai ni père, ni mère, ni soeur, ni frère.
– Tes amis?
– Vous vous servez là d’une arole dont le sens m’est resté jusqu’à ce jour
inconnu.
– Ta patrie?
– J’ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située.

23 The Poems in Prose with “La Fanfarlo”: Baudelaire, vol. 2, ed. intro. and trans. Francis

Scarfe (London: Anvil, 1989), 25 (French phrases on p. 24).

24 Sonya Stephens, “The Prose Poems,” in The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, ed.

Rosemary Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 72, 74.

25 Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1999), 16.

 5  THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY …  81

– La beauté?
– Je l’aimerais volontiers déesse et immortelle.
– L’or?
– Je le hais comme vous haissez Dieu.
– Eh! qu’aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger?
– J’aime les nuages … les nuages qui passent … là-bas … là-bas … les
merveilleux nuages!26

The to-and-fro of this heterodox catechism is a tribute to the speaker’s

slantingly wistful individuality and refusal to conform (and we observe,
not for the only time in Baudelaire, the jab at secular progressivist com-
placencies in ‘Je le hais comme vous haissez Dieu’). Immensely beguiled
by the original, the present author found himself versioning this prose
poem into something more regularly versified and came up with the
following:

The Stranger
(After Baudelaire)
‘Whom do you love most –
Your father, mother, sister, or your brother?’
‘I have no father, mother sister, brother.’
‘All right, which friend do you like best?’
‘You use a word whose sense
remains a riddle to me to this day.’
‘Does your country tug your heartstrings then?’
‘Where such a place might be I couldn’t say.’
‘Do you love beauty best?’ ‘I’d love her
if she were divine and real.’
‘Money?’ ‘Fills me with a fervour
of hate – the way you hate God.’
‘So what do you love, you peculiar stranger?’
‘I love clouds … the clouds that move … there
and there … each magnificent cloud.’

26 Baudelaire, Poems in Prose, 29.

82  M. O’NEILL

This process of versioning suggested to me how closely aligned the

prose poem is with the poetic shapes it spurns. Baudelaire’s original
tempts translation into lines through elements of repetition, through its
sardonic parody of near-liturgical or catechistic question and response.
It manages to be edgy and abrupt, through the switch between tu and
vous, the stranger always employing the distancing latter,27 and through
the brevity of the questions: ‘Tes amis?’, for example. I found in produc-
ing my version that I wanted to amplify, make less terse the question-
ing attack of the original speaker as I sought to bring the original closer
to an English couplet poem that swirled round an iambic design and a
set of near-rhymes, leaving one word ostentatiously unrhymed, the word
‘real’, my downplayed equivalent to ‘immortelle’. My intuition was that
Baudelaire had shaped a form that consciously reminded one of a tradi-
tional poetic shape, even as it astringently eschewed such a shape, and my
enjoyably self-defeating task was to remind myself of his extraordinary
achievement by converting it into something more manageable for my
own ear and sense of rhythm and sound.
This is to stray dangerously close to narcissistic reflection on the
pleasures and perils of translation and versioning. But it’s intended to
suggest how the prose poem contains within itself the ghost of a more
evidently rule-governed poetry in the process of freeing itself from tra-
ditional forms. And the effort made me highly conscious of the unique,
unparaphrasable nature of the original; the sharply antagonistic answers
break free from their sardonic cover yet confirm their hostility to the
questioner’s conventional values as, self-mockingly, they utter praise of
‘les nuages’, placed in that tantalising space that the Baudelairean prose
poem opens up, somewhere, ironically, ‘là-bas … là-bas’. The exhilara-
tion derives from the sudden outpouring, broken by suspension poems,
of the final utterance. The appeal of the clouds lies in their opposition
to what’s preceded them, their swoopingly assertive proof of the prose
poet’s ability to summon ‘merveilleux’ images to his mind’s eye.
The prose poem, in Baudelaire’s hands, can turn anecdote into witty
or melancholy parable, as in ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, or statement of poet-
ics into self-mocking exhibitionism, as in ‘Le Confiteor de l’artiste’, or
awareness of duality into brilliant Manichean meditation, as in ‘La
Chambre Double’. All three poems display the possibilities of the form.

27 See Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, 17.

 5  THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY …  83

In ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, Baudelaire offers his own conduct towards the
glazier as an example of finding a maniac epiphany, a way of divining
‘dans une seconde l’infini de la jouissance’ (infinite pleasure in a split sec-
ond)28; he asks him to bring his ‘fragile merchandise’ (fragile merchan-
dise) up flights of rickety stairs, only to reject him for having no ‘vitres
qui fassent voir la vie en beau’ (tinted glass that makes life look more
beautiful), before destroying his glass ware by throwing a ‘petit pot de
fleurs’ (small flower-pot) from his window.29 The poem works like a
cross between a mock-erudite fable and a shaggy dog story, and it crys-
tallises its effect through rapid juxtapositions of tone and perspective,
and a memorable summary. The poem offers a brief equivalent to a sec-
ond’s experience of ‘jouissance’. Long before Roland Barthes pointed
up the word’s explosive power in Le Plaisir du texte, Baudelaire makes
‘jouissance’ a focal point of creative energy.30 Evading the novel’s love of
rational disentangling of motive or the poem’s constructed and carefully
formulated insight, the prose poem rides the current of its own being;
the very randomness of experience finds an appropriate form in the scin-
tillating, self-saddened prose.
In ‘Le Confiteor de l’artiste’ Baudelaire evokes and deconstructs a
seemingly ardent experience of ‘certaines sensations délicieuses’ (certain
delicious sensations). Irony and aesthetic rapture entwine round one
another in the original, single-sentence paragraph, before a Romantic yet
post-Romantic celebration of ‘Solitude, silence’ follows, sublime encoun-
ters in which ‘toutes ces choses pensent par moi, ou je pense par elles
(car dans la grandeur de la rêverie, le moi se perd vite!)’ (all these things
think through me, or else I think through them—for the ego is very
soon lost in the vastness of revery). The verbs turn in imitation of the
reflexive sense that the self may be medium as much as origin. And the
recognition that it can be overwhelmed by ‘un malaise et une souffrance
positive’ (discomfort and positive suffering) emerges in the third section,
until, in the final section, the defeat of the artist by nature takes over.
Yet, the defeat is a form of dialectical victory as the prose poem yields a
formulation that feels unavailable in any other mode ‘L’étude du beau
est un duel où l’artiste crie de frayeur avant d’être vaincu’ (The study

28 Baudelaire,
Poems in Prose, 51.
29 Ibid.,49–50.
30 Borrowing is noted by Helen Vendler in The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets,

Critics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 19.

84  M. O’NEILL

of the beautiful is a duel, in which the artist protests in terror, before

defeat). The prose poem itself ‘crie de frayeur’, then enacts through its
glissade into the final phrase recognition of being ‘vaincu’, the last syl-
lable recalling ironically the same sound running through ‘étude’ and
‘duel’.31
In this piece, one senses, as often in Baudelaire’s prose poems, a ves-
tigial trace of the Petrarchan sonnet, with its four units; elsewhere, the
volta typical of the sonnet form finds expression. Such a turn can be far
more lingeringly imminent in the prose poem than the fourteen-line
sonnet, as is shown by ‘La Chambre Double’, which takes a whole page
(in Scarfe’s edition) before the inevitable reversal: ‘Mais un coup terri-
ble, lourd, a retenti à la porte’ (But suddenly a terrible, heavy thump
resounded on the door).32 At this point, the fantasy world in which the
room is ‘véritablement spirituelle’ (truly spiritual) and in which ‘L’âme
… prend un bain de pareses’ (the soul enjoys a bath of stillness) gives
way to the erasures and cancellations, and anxieties of everyday life,
including in one haunting moment that takes one into the artist’s atel-
ier, ‘les manuscrits, raturés ou incomplets’ (the manuscripts riddled with
cross-outs or left half done).33 The prose poem, one might say, allows
for more attention to the erasures and incompletions involved in the
artistic prose than is often found in the novel or the poem. Moreover,
in this poem the attention given to each syllable means we feel inside
our listening skulls the inexorable ticking away of the ‘secondes … for-
tement et solennellement accentuées’ (Seconds … powerfully and sol-
emnly stressed) that dominate the writer’s imagination at the poem’s
close. Baudelaire delights in staging a prolonged descent into disillu-
sioned diminuendo as crude reality obliterates the world of dreams.
As he itemises this obliteration, in effect, however, he explains why the
world of fantasy came into existence in the first place: what he calls ‘ce
parfum d’un autre monde’ (that otherworld perfume) could not have
pervaded the opening paragraphs with such sensuous luxuriance, the
reader realises, unless there was a ‘fétide odeur de tabac mêlée à je ne sais
quelle nauséabonde moisissure’ (fetid stench of tobacco blending with

31 Baudelaire, Poems in Prose, 32–33.

32 Ibid., 38–39.
33 Ibid.
 5  THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY …  85

a nauseating stink of damp).34 The very nostril-quiver of disgust there

in ‘je ne sais’, omitted by Scarfe in his translation, sings with an artful
yet idiomatic trill; it takes us to the impulse that quickens imaginings of
escape.

3
Baudelaire is very much the artist in his superb prose poems: exulting,
despairing, the subject and medium of reverie, the coiner of images, the
designer of scenarios, the shaper of proto-Calvino-esque structures of
imagination. The American writer William Carlos Williams appears to
react against the poet as aesthetic hero in his attempt to question tradi-
tional understandings of the roles played by poetry and prose: ‘appears
to react’ because he is as preoccupied in his way with the poet’s function
and status as Baudelaire is in his. Williams at once plays up and down
the difference and connection between imaginative modes. His poetry
is more than half in love with mannerisms associated with prose; it repu-
diates ‘crude symbolism’, the distortions attendant on rhyme, and what,
in Spring and All, his wildly eccentric, modernist equivalent to Dante’s
Vita Nuova in its mix of poetry and accompanying prose, he calls ‘layers
of demoded words and shapes’.35 And yet it asserts, through its preoccu-
pation with the line and line-endings, a belief in forms of poetic control
not readily available to the user of prose.
Already, in Kora in Hell: Improvisations, Williams had experimented
with a mode of prose poetry that combined a trust in whatever emerged
through improvisatory uses of language and an impulse, both quali-
fied and respected in the final work, ‘to adjoin to each improvisation a
more or less opaque commentary’.36 The interplay between ‘improvisa-
tion’ and ‘commentary’ suggests Williams’s double interest in the prose
poem as a mode of evocation and a vehicle for meta-creative reflection.
Section XX summons up a farm-scene, but does so in a way that defies
the reader’s sense of perspective; as often in the sequence, we are thrust
up against the grain of things (‘so much bulls’ fodder’) only to discover

34 Ibid.

35 William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, https://archive.org/stream/spring_

and_all#page/n23.
36 Williams, Kora in Hell: Improvisations, https://archive.org/stream/korainhellim-

prov00willrich#page/19. Further page references will be given in the text.

86  M. O’NEILL

we’re inhabiting a mischievous parable that won’t yield up its meaning,

a parable in which we’re climbing a wall that’s no longer there towards
a sky that hardly exists, for all the narrator’s insouciant assurance: ‘(Au
moins, you cannot deny you have the clouds to grasp now, mon ami!)’
(73). The playful tone includes, in its use of French, a witty suggestion
that Williams has absorbed the lessons of Rimbaud and others, whilst
subliminally mocking any imaginative flights of transcendence in, say,
Illuminations.
This teasing mock-parable is followed by two others: all three receive
the following po-faced comment: ‘A poem can be made out of anything.
This is a portrait of a disreputable farm hand made out of the stuff of
his own disreputable environment’ (73). This is comically reductive as a
modernist ‘moral’ or meaning, and incites us to look back at the way
the poem has been ‘made of anything’. Williams cunningly subverts
the didactic form he adopts: of evocation followed by commentary.
He encourages the reader, rather, to interweave the two modes of dis-
course, until they seem cut from the same ‘disreputable’ cloth of puck-
ish, free-flowing imaginings. Indeed, to avoid being ‘mechanical’, in his
Prologue he inserts passages of commentary before we have read the
improvisation (19). In one case at least, relating to ‘VI. No. 1’, this pro-
cess involves two versions of the same improvisation (23). In the improv-
isation proper, Williams begins with his conclusion: ‘Of course history
is an attempt to make the past seem stable and of course it’s a lie’, the
weary rightness of the insight confirmed by the repeated use of ‘of
course’. He goes on to note that ‘though killies have green backs and
white bellies, zut! for the bass and hawks!’ (44). The suggestion here is
of an inevitably predatory use of power.
In the Prologue, where we find a commentary on this passage,
Williams gives a measured reworking in which a ‘young man’ is shown
‘Observing’ the ‘barren truth’ that the colouring of a fish allows it to
swim ‘about in safety’. This observation stimulates less a meditative dis-
covery than a rejection of ‘barren truth’, as the young man ‘rejects with
scorn the parochial deductions of history and as scornfully asserts his
defiance’ (20–21). Such rejections and assertions galvanise the verbal and
conceptual life of Kora in Hell, making it one of the most original twen-
tieth-century examples of the prose poem sequence.
 5  THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY …  87

When Williams concludes his poem V (‘Black winds from the north’)
of Spring and All with the lines:

How easy to slip

into the old mode, how hard to
cling firmly to the advance—37

his lineation is central to his meaning, its way of heightening attention

to its own verbal comportment. The ease of the slipping, the hardness
of clinging firmly: each action of the poem is, in no mechanically deter-
mined way, carried into the consciousness of the reader through the dar-
ingly well-judged line-breaks typical of Williams. Yet, the poems are part
of a work that is also prose and prose poetry. ‘There is no point in trying
to classify the book’, writes Webster Schott, since, as he goes on, ‘It is
neither fiction, criticism, poetry nor fact.’ But his subsequent assertion,
‘It is all—or parts of all’, shows how hard it is wholly to dispense with
generic descriptors.38
Williams’s prose sections in Spring and All participate in the work’s
overall creative impact—and they do so as more than commentary, exe-
gesis, or poetics, though they contain ‘parts of all’ these things. The
ability of the prose poem to serve a self-reflexive function, noted in
the previous sections on Woolf and Baudelaire, is central to the entire
Romantic and post-Romantic tradition of the prose poem. Evident
in Shelley’s evocation, in a passage that earns the title of prose poetry
through its richness of imagery and cadence, of the ways in which the
meanings of ‘A great Poem’ go on ‘overflowing with the waters of wis-
dom and delight’,39 it is apparent, too, in Williams’s wittily paradox-
ical celebration of ‘the imagination’ as ‘drunk with prohibitions’: ‘Yes,
the imagination, drunk with prohibitions, has destroyed and recreated
everything afresh in the likeness of that which it was. Now indeed men
look about in amazement at each other with a full realization of the

37 Williams, Spring and All, https://archive.org/stream/spring_and_all#page/n29/

mode/2up, 24. Further page references will be given in the text.

38 Webster Schott, intro. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott

(New York: New Directions Publishing, 1971), 86. For valuable discussion of another
work by Williams, Kora in Hell, as prose poem, see Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion,
chapter 3, 96–136.
39 Leader and O’Neill, Shelley, 693.
88  M. O’NEILL

meaning of “art’”. (9). That final phrase alludes deftly to the close of
Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, and the excitement
registered by the Romantic poet about stumbling on to a new way of
viewing reality finds its way into the American modernist’s prose. The
imagination is ‘drunk with prohibitions’ rather than inspirations. It is
as though Williams is taking heed of Baudelaire’s advice to ‘get drunk’
in ‘Enivrez-Vous’ and is seizing on the possibilities present in ‘prohi-
bitions’. Incited to do new things as an artist by being told not to do
them, he fools round with non-sequential chapter numbers, unfinished
sentences, illicit typographical flourishes, interrupting exclamations
(‘Good God!’), a recklessly joyous use for secular purposes of a born-
again, apocalyptic language (8):

Now at last that process of miraculous verisimilitude, that grate

c­opying which evolution has followed, repeating move for move every
move that it made in the past — is approaching the end.
Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD IS NEW. (11)

The effect may, superficially, be one of blustering assertion. But Williams

enacts sinuously and with comic gusto the termination of a time when
‘evolution’ (poetic as well as biological) was ‘repeating move for move
every move that it made in the past’. If the conclusion is mere fiat, it
reminds us that will can go hand-in-hand with the unleashing of new
energies, delighted, fresh discoveries. In part, the passage works as a
prose poem because it reaps the fruits of the previous images—time as
‘a wild horse’ finally reduced to ‘a heap of skin, bones and ragged hoofs’
(where a Pan-like image just lurks in the background)—and syntacti-
cal enactments of a stilled, kinetic ‘progress’ (11). Its use of repetition
with difference is an instance of a comparable technique: ‘is approach-
ing the end’ picks up and builds on and extends the previous phrase, ‘at
last SPRING is approaching’ (11). In the work of Williams, as of Woolf
and Baudelaire, the prose poem is a locus where new meaning is always
sensed as ‘approaching’.

Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. The Poems in Prose with “La Fanfarlo”: Baudelaire, vol. 2.
Edited with introduction and translated by Francis Scarfe. London: Anvil,
1989.
 5  THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY …  89

de Gay, Jane. Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Freeman, John. “Dissent.” In This Line Is Not for Turning: An Anthology
of Contemporary British Prose Poetry, edited by Jane Monson. Blaenau
Ffestiniog: Cinnamon, 2011.
Hussey, Mark. The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s
Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986.
McNichol, Stella. Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction. London: Routledge,
1990.
Murphy, Margueritte S. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English
from Wilde to Ashbery. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translated with introduction by A. J. Krailsheimer.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Major Works. Edited by Zachary Leader and Michael
O’Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Stephens, Sonya. Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
———. “The Prose Poems.” In The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, edited
by Rosemary Lloyd, 69–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Vendler, Helen. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Williams, William Carlos. Imaginations: “Kora in Hell,” “The Great American
Novel,” “Spring and All,” “A Novelette and Other Prose,” “The Descent of
Winter.” Edited by Webster Schott. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1970.
———. Kora in Hell: Improvisations. https://archive.org/stream/korainhellimprov
00willrich.
———. Spring and All. https://archive.org/stream/spring_and_all.
 CHAPTER 6

‘I Grow More & More Poetic’: Virginia

Woolf and Prose Poetry

Jane Goldman

Did Virginia Woolf ‘grow more & more poetic’ in the course of her
writing career? In June 1924, having published her ground-breaking
experimental novel, Jacob’s Room (1922) and composing her next, Mrs.
Dalloway (1925), she records that she at least thinks she is doing so, as
she takes stock of her own ambitions in comparison with her friend E.M.
Forster’s on the publication of his novel Howards End (1924):

What was I going to say? Something about the violent moods of my soul.
How describe them, even with a waking mind? I think I grow more &
more poetic. Perhaps I restrained it, & now, like a plant in a pot, it begins
to crack the earthenware. Often I feel the different aspects of life burst-
ing my mind asunder. Morgan [E.M. Forster] is too restrained in his new
book perhaps. I mean, what’s the use of facts at our time of life? Why build
these careful cocoons: why not say straight out—yes, but what?1

1 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf (hereafter D), ed. Anne Olivier Bell,

assisted by Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977–1984), vol. 2,
304.

J. Goldman (*) 
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland

© The Author(s) 2018 91

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_6
92  J. GOLDMAN

Elsewhere, Woolf metonymically associates the earthenware pot with

the fact-based realism of the founding novelist in English, Daniel Defoe:
‘There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul.
There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large
earthenware pot.’2 She seems to be describing an impulse toward lyric
prose, in not wishing to fashion any more such self-contained, or con-
taining, factual earthenware pots; she wants to crack them open, to
admit ‘the violent moods of my soul’ which require her to become
‘poetic’, admitting, too, ‘the different aspects of life bursting [her] mind
asunder’.
The discourse of feeling, mood, mind and the soul suggests a defini-
tion of poetry not connected to strict poetic form (presumably another
restrictive kind of pot). Such a definition is in keeping perhaps with Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s dictum, in ‘The Poet’ (1844), ‘it is not metres, but a
metre-making argument, that makes a poem’.3 But is Woolf, here, fol-
lowing Emerson’s connected assertion that ‘the thought is prior to the
form’?4 Her reflection closes with a question, itself framed as a lyric out-
burst: ‘why not say straight out—yes, but what?’ The buckled syntax
of this exclamatory question challenges any such notion of thought or
content prior to language and form. If ‘why not say straight out’ sug-
gests a desire for a transparent linguistic signifier to express content prior
to language with as little opacity as possible (the language of informa-
tion), the syntax of the clause that this question inaugurates is skew-
ered at the very point of the message it is to deliver, by the long dash
intervening with that affirmatory, contradictory ‘—yes, but what?’ The
concreteness of language itself is thereby exposed on the very cusp of
its own utterance. The medium becomes the message with ‘—yes, but
what?’; to ‘say straight out—yes, but what’ may therefore be understood,
not as the desire to make language transparent, but to make it all too
apparent, opaque and concrete. The very quiddity of poetry may be in
that, perhaps incidentally, iambic utterance inscribed as it is in mono-
syllabic words in a private diary entry and only posthumously published
(accented syllable of each iamb is in bold): ‘why not/ say straight/

2 Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf (hereafter E), 6 vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie

(vols. 1–4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5–6) (London: Hogarth, 1986–2011), vol. 5, 379.
3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” (1844), The Norton Anthology of Theory and

Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2010), 623.
4 Emerson, “The Poet,” 623.
 6  ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY  93

out—yes,/ but what?’ Returning to the first clause of the sentence,

‘Why build/ these care/ful coc/oons:’, we may read it as a catalectic
trochaic tetrameter (although there is a case for the whole line as iambic).
If the accent falls on the ‘ful’ of ‘careful’, the sense of words as themselves
vessels of meaning is ironically enhanced, and a sense of this word con-
taining ‘care’ as both artifice and feeling is also foregrounded along with
a sense of containment to brimming plenitude (care full). The accent fall-
ing on the word ‘these’, in the previous foot, enhances the crisis of the
deictic—does ‘these’ apply back to Forster’s ‘new book’, or to this very
word ‘these’, and these very words? But is it only by our formal abstrac-
tion from its prosaic ground and its ‘careful’ arrangement into two lines
of poetry that this found utterance in autobiographical prose becomes
poetic, or ‘more poetic’?

Why build these careful cocoons:

Why not say straight out—yes, but what?

In thus abstracting and arranging, we may be potting and contain-

ing and diminishing Woolf’s lyric prose; paradoxically, doing blunt,
un-lyric, violence to the very ‘violence of my soul’ she so carefully seeks
to express. On the other hand, to attempt such liberties with Woolf’s
prose may be the very form of active, creative reading and research that
her dialogical writing seems to demand, for she understands the reader
to be the ‘fellow-worker and accomplice’ of the writer. The ‘quickest way
to understand […] what a novelist is doing is not to read’, she advises in
‘How Should One Read a Book?’ (1926), ‘but to write; to make your
own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words’ (E5 574);
and ‘the time to read poetry’, she recognizes, is ‘when we are almost
able to write it’ (E5 577). Her reader, encouraged by the very questions
the writing poses, is obliged to pause and attend to the form of that writ-
ing, to experiment with that writing, pulling it out of shape in order to
appreciate more fully the shape it is in: ‘Why build these careful cocoons:
why not say straight out—yes, but what?’ Is this sentence said more
‘straight out’ in prose or poetry? Or is it always and already poetry, even
in prose form, strung between the chance fluidity of prose margins, and
in original context? Are the two tetrameters above somehow actually the
less poetic in forcing the sentence to obey the one margin, the regulatory
meter, of a set poetic form?
94  J. GOLDMAN

This essay begins by considering how we might claim Woolf as a poet

in prose and a writer of prose poetry, prose poems, of poet-prose books,
rather than as a poetic novelist, and it closes with a poem sourced in her
numerous journal and diary entries on poets, poetry and poetics.5 One
thing evidenced by this poem’s systematic, chronological, harvesting
of her every utterance on poetry in her journal and diary is that Woolf
did ‘grow more & more poetic’. She acknowledged a growing need for
poetry, to read and to write, or at least to infuse into her writing, as she
matured, declaring in 1924, at the age of 42: ‘By the way, why is poetry
wholly an elderly taste? [….] It is poetry that I want now—long poems.
[…] I want the concentration and the romance, & the words all glued
together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose. [….]
Now it is poetry I want, so I repeat like a tipsy sailor in front of a pub-
lic house’ (D2 310). And the greatest accolade a reviewer could pay her
experimental prose was to deem it poetry: ‘[Time and Tide] says I’m a
first rate novelist & a great lyrical poet’ (D5 67).
From childhood, Woolf was a voracious reader of poetry as well as
prose. In adulthood, she became a pioneer publisher of modern poetry
and famously set the type for the Hogarth Press edition of T.S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land. She also published the Hogarth Living Poets Series One
and Two, the Hogarth anthologies, and the Hogarth Essays series. In
these appeared work by Hope Mirrlees, Gertrude Stein, Robert Graves,
John Crowe Ransom, Vita Sackville-West, Nancy Cunard, Edwin Muir,
Edith Sitwell, C. Day Lewis, Rainer Maria Rilke, Michael Roberts,
Dorothy Wellesley, Stephen Spender, Frances Cornford and many others.
Her novels, To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), were
conceived by her as a new form of lyric—indeed, elegiac—writing, and
were received as such by numerous critics and readers. Her fiction and
essays, and autobiographical writings, are all a-shimmer with a rich poetic
allusiveness, and evidence her deep and sustained reading in, and min-
ing of, poetry, both canonical and contemporary. Her archives contain
a few sparse attempts at conventional poetry; and many of her influen-
tial modernist and feminist manifestos and essays reflect on the techni-
cal differences between and functions of poetry and prose. Although,
in conversation with poets, she often insists on distinguishing herself

5 Jane Goldman, “Poetry Woolf” (2016), in Appendix below. This poem is one of a series

of Woolf poems, the first of which is “Discovery Woolf,” in The Voyage Out: An Anthology,
ed. Kirsty Gunn and Gail Low (Dundee: The Voyage Out Press, 2016).
 6  ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY  95

from them as a writer of prose, she nevertheless clearly harbours ambi-

tions to transmute the two genres in her practice: ‘It may be possible
that prose is going to take over – has, indeed, taken over – some of the
duties which were once discharged by poetry’ (E4 434). In preparing her
final novel, the posthumously published Between the Acts (1941), for the
composition of which she drafted a series of lyric poems, Woolf discloses
her plans to ‘dream a poet-prose book’ (D5 276). We might speculate
on what form of prose-poetry this entails. Is she planning an extended,
book-length, prose poem (a contradiction in terms, perhaps, given the
short lyric qualities of that genre), a further finesse of or departure from
the lyric novels for which she had become critically acclaimed?
‘Some prose writers are to be read as poets’ (E4 324), Woolf observes
on dipping into Charles Lamb’s Letters for her essay ‘On Being Ill’ (1926).
How far might we think of Woolf herself as a poet, of her writing as poetry,
or prose poetry? And what did she understand by the term ‘prose poem’?
‘The term “prose poem” has been applied irresponsibly’, according to the
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, ‘to anything from the Bible to a novel
by [William] Faulkner, but should be used only to designate a highly con-
scious (sometimes even self-conscious) artform.’6 Strictly speaking, then, a
prose poem ‘differs from poetic prose in that it is short and compact, from
free verse in that it has no line breaks, from a short prose passage in that it
has, usually, more pronounced rhythm, sonorous effects, imagery, and den-
sity of expression. It may contain even inner rhyme and metrical runs.’ 7
On the other hand, any example of ‘fine writing in excelsis’, accord-
ing to Walter de la Mare’s published lecture Poetry in Prose (1935), may
be deemed ‘prose poetry’, its dreaded nemesis being the ‘purple patch’.8
Rhian Williams has helpfully reflected on the ‘confusion as much as defi-
nition’ inherent in such attempts to categorize prose poetry, marking de
la Mare’s contempt for ‘the examples of “prose poetry” he finds in the
excesses of women’s fashion magazines or wine-tasting notes’.9 In these
cases, the prose poem has become the eyesore of the ‘purple patch’.

6 Alex Preminger, ed., Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, enlarged edition (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1974), 664.

7 Preminger, Encyclopedia, 664.

8 Walter de la Mare, Poetry in Prose: Warton Lecture on Poetry (London: British Academy,

1935), cited Rhian Williams, The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry, 2nd
ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 130.
9 Williams, Poetry Toolkit, 129, 130.
96  J. GOLDMAN

Woolf, too, shows a certain disdain, or at least ambivalence, for

v­entures into prose poetry and the purple patch. ‘It is true that prose
writers are daring; they are constantly forcing their instrument to make
the attempt’, she remarks in one of her key essays examining and compar-
ing the capacities of poetry and prose, ‘Poetry, Fiction, and the Future’
(1927; also known as ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’). ‘But one always has a
feeling of discomfort in the presence of the purple patch or prose poem’
(E4 437). Comparing the ‘amateur’ prose style of her friend Roger Fry,
Bloomsbury visual artist and formalist critic, for example, with that of
the great aesthetes Arthur Symonds and Walter Pater, she notes that his
lack of ‘instinctive affection’ for the writer’s ‘medium’—that is for writ-
ing itself—meant ‘he was saved some of their temptations. He was not
led away to write prose poems.’10 If Woolf scorned the prose poem and
the purple patch, what are we to make of those italicized interludes in
The Waves, short passages of highly poetic language that punctuate the
series of highly stylized, equally poetically saturated soliloquies that form
the main bulk of the work? The only instances of the old-fashioned work
of narrative occur in the connecting ‘said Bernard’, ‘said Rhoda’, and so
on, marking out the juxtaposed speeches of the six directly voiced charac-
ters. Differently textured, differently structured, they may be, it is difficult
to argue that one is more poem or purple patch than the other. Even the
prosaic ‘said’s become poetic in the repetition. Compare, for example, the
first couple of lines of the opening interlude—‘The blind stirred slightly,
but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank mel-
ody outside.’11—with the first words of the opening soliloquy that follows
after a blank space, on a fresh page: ‘I see a ring’, said Bernard, ‘hanging
above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light’ (W 7).
But, to be clear, Woolf’s ‘objection to the purple patch, however, is
not that it is purple but that it is a patch’ (E4 437). She wants a sus-
tained, book-length purple patch, then, an extended prose poem. She
finds her model in the work of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ‘a
book full of poetry, but we never notice it; it is a book stained deep pur-
ple, which is yet never patchy’, in which one sees ‘poetry changing eas-
ily and naturally into prose, prose into poetry’ (E4 438). This sort of
sustained fusion means that ‘some renunciation is necessary’, and Sterne
‘forfeits his right to the more substantial vegetables that grow on the

10 Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (hereafter RF) (London: Hogarth), 106.

11 The Waves (hereafter W) (London: Hogarth, 1931), 6.
 6  ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY  97

ground’, for it is not possible to ‘cross the narrow bridge of art carrying
all its tools in your hands’ (E4 438).
Composing poetry using Woolf’s texts as source may cause a con-
verse ‘purple patch’ effect whereby poetry takes back some of its tools, or
extracts the (or a) poetry from the poetry-infused yet not quite unpoetic
prose, turning it back to the prosaic foil of the new poetic blade. Does
such a gesture imply that the new poem throws into relief its source
as not yet a poem? Conversely, it may even make the most radical and
experimental of such sourced poetry look old-fashioned in some respects.
Jackson Mac Low’s ‘Ridiculous in Piccadilly’ (1985), for example, is cer-
tainly avant-garde in its ‘diastic’ compositional methodology of drawing
on Woolf’s The Waves:

After finding the title phrase in line 4, p.88, of the first American edition
[…] I drew one word for each of its letters. Beginning with the phrase
itself, I culled only words in which the letters occupied corresponding posi-
tions (I disregarded hyphens): ‘ridiculous Piccadilly.//end stain/book-
case,/reassuring brutally/eating-house.//eating-house.//waitresses […]
Having spelled the phrase out once, I began again, & did so repeatedly12

Mac Low’s scrupulously aleatory numerology generates a series of eleven

short lyric poems that is ‘spelled out’ from an apparently random selec-
tion of Woolf’s words in The Waves. This work is, in fact, as (if not more)
strictly ordered and organized into lines and stanzas as any poetry adher-
ing to traditional, fixed metrical or stanzaic form. As her ‘fellow-worker
and accomplice’, Mac Low takes Woolf’s advice to make one’s ‘own
experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words’ to virtuoso heights.
Yet, the poems are also somewhat conservative in their adherence to poet-
ry’s traditional left-hand margin, whereas the source text, The Waves, itself
is already testing much more provocatively the fluid margins of prose into
poetry. The first of Mac Low’s poems, described above, begins thus:

Ridiculous
Piccadilly.

12 Jackson Mac Low, The Virginia Woolf Poems (Providence: Burning Deck Press,

1985), 162.
98  J. GOLDMAN

end stain
bookcase,
reassuring brutally
eating-house.

eating house.
waitresses,
in and plates right
included.

We might compare this with Yeats’s treatment of Pater’s prose in The

Renaissance (1873) by which he renders the opening of Pater’s essay on
the ‘Mona Lisa’ into a free verse poem, making variegated poetic lines
of clauses and phrases. The resultant poem is his opening work for The
Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (1936):

She is older than the rocks among which she sits;

Like the Vampire,
She has been dead many times,
And learned the secrets of the grave13

‘Which is the prose, which the poem and which the “prose poem” is
muddied in such a treatment’, Williams rightly observes: ‘Yeats implies
the existence of prose poetry (he chooses a piece of prose when pick-
ing a piece for a verse anthology) and yet denies it (he “turns it into” a
free verse poem).’14 Yet, as well as opening up debates about categoriza-
tion of prose and poetry, encouraging writers and readers to inhabit new
generic borderlands and ever more precariously built bridges between
them, Yeats’s exercise in found poetry is also encouraging actively, atten-
tive and creative methods of reader response to writing of any sort (as
well as to the rest of the contents in his modern anthology).
‘Time Passes’, the middle section of To the Lighthouse, was early
understood as a series of ‘prose poems […] like those of [Stéphane]
Mallarmé, grotesque, fantastic or romantic, pervaded with a delicate
mingling of irony and melancholy.’15 And, indeed, Woolf read Mallarmé
13 William Butler Yeats, ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (1936), cited

Williams, 131.
14 Williams, Poetic Toolkit, 131.

15 B.G. Brooks, “Review Article,” in Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robin

Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (London: Routledge, 1975), 457.

 6  ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY  99

in French, and was intimately acquainted over many years with Fry’s sus-
tained project to translate Mallarmé’s poetry, which she understood as
characteristic of Fry’s interdisciplinary practice of ‘making raids across
the boundaries’ (RF 239–240). She also read the great leading practi-
tioners of the prose poem, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud.
When Fry’s translations of Mallarmé were eventually published, however,
none of the prose poems were included.16 The tendency to raid is some-
thing she also admired in the painter Walter Sickert, one of those artists
‘always making raids into the lands of others’ (E6 45). An advocate of
such raiding, Woolf herself has been celebrated as ‘a hybrid writer who
raided the other arts’.17 ‘Woolf is also a raider’, Diane Filby Gillespie
insists. ‘So is the novel as she redefines it.’18 Yet, some of her writing
might be snatched even from the very maw of the protean raider-novel,
that ‘cannibal […] which has devoured so many forms of art’ (E4 435).
The publication of a draft of the prose-poetic ‘Time Passes’ in Charles
Mauron’s French translation, ‘Le Temps Passe’ (1926) (in the French
Symbolist magazine, Commerce), prior to its appearance in revised form
in To the Lighthouse, might suggest her novel’s partial or difficult diges-
tion of French symbolist prose-poetry. Unlike the short pieces composed
in relation to her previous novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) (some before,
some after its publication), ‘Time Passes’ has not been collected in The
Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, or elsewhere since, as a ‘short
story’—neither in its English typescript draft, nor in its French version. Is
it excluded on grounds of being an avant-texte to the novel? If so, then
why include ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, also published in a magazine
(the Dial in 1923) prior to the novel that reworks it?
On the other hand, what is the precise literary genre of the eight
short prose pieces Woolf published under the title Monday or Tuesday
(1921), the ‘only volume of stories and sketches’ published in her

16 Stéphane Mallarmé, Poems, trans. Roger Fry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936), a

copy of which is in Woolf’s library (Washington State University Library). So, too, is a copy
of Mallarmé, Poésies, 5. éd. (Paris: La Nouvelle revue française, 1915), which is inscribed
to Leonard Woolf from Roger Fry, and accompanied by a translation of Mallarmé’s poem
“A la nue accablante tu” by Roger Fry, beginning “To the overwhelming bleakness, thou”.
17 Diane F. Gillespie, “Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Painting,” in The Edinburgh

Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. Maggie Humm (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2010), 136.
18 Diane F. Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and

Vanessa Bell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 1.

100  J. GOLDMAN

lifetime?19 While the eighth of these, ‘The Mark on the Wall’, was first
published as one of Two Stories in 1919, the Hogarth Press’ first pub-
lication, there is no such obvious or easy generic identification of the
contents of Monday or Tuesday, which Eliot for one approvingly termed
‘experimental prose’.20 Might this highly stylized hand-printed book,
sporting no actual list of contents but set with distinctively experimental
woodcut images by Vanessa Bell, the avant-garde artist and the author’s
sister, be a volume of prose poems? Certainly ‘BLUE & GREEN.’, com-
prising two paragraphs of densely imagistic prose, arranged in reversed
order, ‘GREEN.’ and ‘BLUE.’, on facing pages in the first British edi-
tion is a contender (Fig. 6.1).21
As much a celebration of the visual pleasure of the roughly hand-
set print medium itself—see, for example, the stylized use of full-stops
in the title and subtitles—as of colour and light in abstraction, ‘BLUE
& GREEN.’ playfully draws attention to the mirroring effect of the
facing pages, intruding between ‘A String Quartet’ (MT 59–65) and
‘Kew Gardens’ (MT 68–78), whose titles suggest (music and greenery)
the synaesthetic stimuli of sound and vision at play in the ‘harsh cries’
of painterly ‘parakeets’ among ‘green needles’ of ‘GREEN.’ and the
‘slushing’ of the ‘water’ ‘dowsing’ the prose ‘blue’ in ‘BLUE.’ Perhaps
this piece owes something to the play of light, colour, land and seascape
of Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘Venus and the Fool’, in which: ‘It seems as
though an ever-waning light makes all objects glimmer more and more,
as though the excited flowers burn with a desire to rival the blue of the
sky by the vividness of their colours; as though the heat, making per-
fumes visible, drives them in vapour towards their star.’ Perhaps it nods
to his ‘superb country of Cockaigne’ in ‘Invitation to Voyage’, or to
Mallarmé’s ‘Winter Shivers’ and ‘White Water Lily’. Yet, in many respects
it seems to resemble not so much any of Mallarmé’s prose poems but,
rather, to constitute a vivifying and infusing, erupting chromatic response
to the monochrome lyric, his short lyric poem on an eclipsing ‘blackness’
and a ‘sepulchral shipwreck’, translated by Roger Fry as:

19 Susan Dick, “Introduction,” in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf

(London: Hogarth, 1985), 2.

20 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth, 1972), 88, cited

Dick, 3.
21 Woolf, Monday or Tuesday (hereafter MT) (London: Hogarth, 1921), 66–67.
 6  ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY  101

Fig. 6.1  Virginia Woolf, ‘BLUE & GREEN.’, Monday or Tuesday (London:

Hogarth, 1921)

TO THE OVERWHELMING BLACKNESS HUSHT:

To the overwhelming blackness husht

Base of lava and basalt
Up to the echoes enslaved
By a virtueless trump
What sepulchral shipwreck (you
Know it, foam, but only slaver)
Supreme one among the flotsam
Abolished the disclad mast
Or that which furious (in default
Of some high perdition
With all the vain abyss let loose)
In the so white dragging hair
Will have drowned in niggard wise
Some young siren’s infant flank.22
22 Mallarmé, Poems, trans. Fry, 282.
102  J. GOLDMAN

Woolf’s ‘Blue.’ seems to disgorge a chimaeric male sea creature, part

sailor, part siren (‘Thrown up on the beach he lies, blunt, obtuse, shed-
ding dry blue scales’), perhaps in response to the ‘young siren’ destined
to drown at the close of Mallarmé’s poem. The menacing indifference of
her ‘cold’ ‘cathedral’, ‘incense laden faint blue with the veils of madon-
nas’, seems to be casting a mocking veil of matriarchal colour (blue is
the symbolic colour of the Madonna) over Mallarmé’s monochrome
‘Sepulchral shipwreck’. His shipwreck is reduced to her ‘wrecked row-
ing boat’. Not only is his restricted palette exploded by Woolf, so, too,
his containing poetic line is ‘let loose’ into the motile prose margins of
her ‘BLUE & GREEN.’, nevertheless rendered, of course, in the black
and white of her printed book. Unlike those active accomplice read-
ers/writers, such as Yeats and Mac Low, Woolf is here trafficking in the
other direction between poetry and prose. Yet, however we choose to
label her writing it seems itself to be insisting itself, as Mallarmé’s does
even in its most pioneering experimental form, to be poetry. For exam-
ple, his more famous ‘shipwreck’ poem, perhaps itself disgorged by
his ‘overwhelming blackness husht’, and which is known usually by its
subtitle—‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’—is, in fact, more
properly titled ‘POÈME’ (1897, 1914).23 First published in book form
in 1914, POÈME: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, may well
inform Woolf’s increasing ambition to become ‘more poetic’ in this
modern, concrete sense, to ‘dream a poet-prose book’.
Recognizing in Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s long poem ‘Aurora
Leigh’ (1856), in an essay of the same title (1931), ‘a brilliance and a
continuity, owing to the compressions and elisions of poetry, which
mock the prose writer and his slow accumulations of careful detail’,
Woolf finds that ‘if we compare the prose novel and the novel-poem the
triumphs are by no means all to the credit of prose’ (E5 266); and she
wonders ‘why it has left no successors’ (E5 267). On the other hand,
Woolf, the advocate of thinking ‘poetically and prosaically at one and the
same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact […] but not losing sight
of fiction either’,24 understands that such a line continues not in poems

23 Mallarmé, POÈME: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (Paris: La Nouvelle

Revue Francais, 1914), https://math.dartmouth.edu/~doyle/docs/coup/scan/coup.pdf.

24 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (hereafter AROO) (London: Hogarth, 1929), 56–57.
 6  ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY  103

that take on the work of prose, but vice versa, in novels that take up
poetry’s tools. Notice how ‘fiction’ here is aligned with poetry against
‘fact’, the essential work of prose as writing in the language of informa-
tion. And this is the main thrust of her feminist manifesto, A Room of
One’s Own (1929), which sets out a materialist argument for the coming
of the messianic ‘Shakespeare’s sister’, that is, a woman poet to rival the
poetic calibre of Shakespeare. The character ‘Mary Carmichael’, is one
of those who is ‘work[ing] for’ the arrival of Shakespeare’s sister: ‘She
will be a poet, I said, putting Life’s Adventure, by Mary Carmichael, at
the end of the shelf, in another hundred years’ time’ (AROO 142), a
somewhat cruel joke at the expense of the pioneer scientist of birth con-
trol Marie Stopes, whose similarly titled Love’s Creation (1928) was pub-
lished under the nom de plume Marie Carmichael and who was, in fact,
already a published poet. The narrator does not favour ‘the less inter-
esting branch of the species’, as she calls Mary Carmichael ‘the natural-
ist-novelist, and not the contemplative’ (AROO 132–133). Given the
envisioned genesis of a new feminist poetics from the grounds of prose,
the poetry of Shakespeare’s sister will presumably not take the traditional
form of poetry that hugs the left-hand margin.
This evolutionary arc of progress from prose to poetry, applied to
women’s writing in A Room of One’s Own, is also traced and applied
more generally to the progress of the novel itself in a substantial essay
Woolf published the same year, ‘Phases of Fiction’ (1929). The first of
the not entirely distinct or chronological phases is that of ‘The Truth-
Tellers’ such as ‘[Daniel] Defoe, [Jonathan] Swift, [Anthony] Trollope’
et al. (E5 42–49); the second phase, ‘The Romantics’, such as Walter
Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Ann Radcliffe (E5 49–55); the third
phase, ‘The Character-Mongers and Comedians’, such as Jane Austen,
Charles Dickens and George Eliot (E5 55–63); the fourth phase, ‘The
Psychologists’, such as Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoevski and Henry
James (E5 63–71); the fifth phase, ‘The Satirists and Fantastics’, such
as Thomas Love Peacock and Laurence Sterne (E5 71–76); the sixth
and final phase is that of ‘The Poets’, including Sterne (again), Tolstoy,
George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë, Herman Melville and
(again) Proust (E5 76–84).
In this final section, Woolf puts forward different kinds and modes of
poetry in the novel. In Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, Tolstoy’s
War and Peace and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, it is a kind of quietist
poetry:
104  J. GOLDMAN

the poetry of situation rather than of language, the poetry we perceive

when Catherine […] pulls the feathers from the pillow; when Oak watches
the sheep by night; when Natasha […] looks out at the stars. And it is sig-
nificant that we recall this poetry, not as we recall it in verse, by the words,
but by the scene. The prose remains casual and quiet enough so that to
quote it is to do little or nothing to explain its effect. Often we have to go
far back and read a chapter or more before we can come by the impression
of beauty or intensity that possessed us. (E5 77)

In formalist terms, ‘the poetry of situation’ resides in the ‘fabula’ of

these novels; that is, the events of the story and its other ‘products’, and
not in the ‘sujet’ of the story, its concretely arranged verbal representa-
tion, the actual ‘words’, its precise linguistic shape, which constitute the
poetry ‘of language’, a quality more frequently associated with strikingly
quotable verse. We might distinguish the ‘poetry of situation’ from the
‘poetry of language’ as that of the signified distinguished from that of
the signifier. This classification extends back to traditional (including
verse) poetry itself, in which ‘situation’ or ‘language’ may dominate, as
well as to prose poems.
Woolf identifies a poetry of ‘whole mood and temper’ in Wuthering
Heights or Moby Dick (E5 78–79), but in Proust’s work, however, she
finds a ‘poetry of a different kind’, which ‘comes, not in the situation,
which is too fretted and voluminous for such an effect, but in those fre-
quent passages of elaborate metaphor, which spring out of the rock of
thought like fountains of sweet water and serve as translations from one
language to another’ (E5 79). This metaphoric prose is closer to the
novel’s ‘poetry of language’ than ‘poetry of situation’ since it openly,
or self-consciously, displays its metaphoricity, acknowledging the literary
device that communicates itself as a concrete language that presents itself
as both vehicle and tenor, signifier and signified. Woolf’s examination of
Proust in these terms takes us to the brink of glimpsing a new kind of
literature. A prose poem sustained as a novel of book length that fore-
grounds itself in the mode of the signifier (as also its own signified) and
breaks open its own metaphoricity, celebrating the opacity of the vehic-
ular, would be a work of pure ‘poetry of language’, rather than ‘of situa-
tion’, recalled not ‘by the scene’ but ‘by the words’.
If it is the case that Woolf’s writing becomes ‘more & more poetic’,
then, it is in this aspect, as ‘poetry of language’ recalled ‘by the words’.
In extending the prose poem—or, indeed, ‘purple patch’—to book
 6  ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY  105

length form (in at least every novel from Jacob’s Room to Between the
Acts),25 a form of unpatching the purple patch, she has redefined both
poetry and prose. Her journals and diaries record a lifetime of reflections
on her compositional processes, and offer considerable evidence to sup-
port the idea of such a trajectory. As a form of research by creative prac-
tice, and in keeping with Woolf’s preferred reader as ‘fellow-worker and
accomplice’, I have composed the poem, ‘Poetry Woolf’ (2016),26 by
taking a line of flight through these documents, using a search engine
to record every instance of her usage of ‘poet’, ‘poetry’ and ‘poetics’. I
have thus traced that trajectory, and anchored it neither in poetry’s left-
hand margin nor in prose’s fluid double margin, instead aligning those
cognate terms vertically through the poem in chronological order of
appearance. And every instance that I have plucked ‘by the words’ from
her journals and diaries, I made sure to trail with it an enclosing ring of
language on each lateral line. The poem voyages from first mention by
Virginia Stephen, aged fifteen, in the early journal of 1897 to final men-
tion by the fifty-nine-year-old Virginia Woolf in her diary of 1941:

Finished & despatched Dorethea’s poems

pillars of smoke—One ought to be a poet
No one—save a poet—can express
***
‘genius’. Had we read his poems?
I think I grow more & more poetic
It is poetry that I want now—long poems.
re-reading her poem to choose a title
***
I’ll also dream a poet-prose book
(there are the poems in MS all waiting)
Tom’s last poem “didactic”, & he left
Hot, I repeat, & doubt if I’m a poet.
proving their existence as poets

Here, we see crystallized a young woman’s recognition of her own

poetic potential, fired both by early exposure to poetry through a

25 Woolf’s ten novels are: The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room

(1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), The
Waves (1931), Flush: A Biography (1933), The Years (1937), Between the Acts (1941).
26 See Appendix.
106  J. GOLDMAN

father line (Lowell)27 and by secretarial apprenticeship in a mother line

(Dorothea).28 This erupts into a sustained, markedly feminist impetus
to forge a new gender-sensitive poetics (‘his poems’/‘her poem’).29 At
the other end of her career, shortly before her death, Woolf envisions a
universalist ‘poet-prose book’ (D5 276) while also defecting from clear
identification as ‘a poet’ and abdicating from a still dominant patriar-
chal poetry made by others, perhaps including ‘Tom’ (T.S. Eliot),30 still
‘proving their existence as poets’ (D5 355).31 She performs a startling,
new feminist poetics, paradoxically emphatic in a declarative utterance
of heated emotion yet trembling at the very edge of disavowal: ‘Hot, I
repeat, & doubt if I’m a poet’ (D5 315). How those dental fricatives
ricochet in this pentameter trouvé. How the passions and intellect dance
among phonemes from the violent moody trochaic, ‘Hot, I’, via the ‘eat’
of ‘repeat’ and the ‘out’ of that assertive ‘doubt’ before landing so gen-
tly, yet so assuredly, on ‘poet’. These gleaned lines I hope give insight
into Woolf’s lifelong engagement with poetry and poets, and poetics in
prose.

27 The poet and critic James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) was a close friend to Woolf’s

father, Leslie Stephen, who made him her ‘sponsor’, a secular or quasi-godfather. See
Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, ed. Mitchell Leaska (London: Hogarth,
1990), 50.
28 In fact, Dorothea Fitzjames Stephen (1871–1965) was Woolf’s cousin on her paternal

side. See Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice, 102.

29 The “genius” poet in question (“his poems”) is, in fact, Edmund Charles Blunden

(1896–1974) (D2 297); and “her poems” (D2 297) refers in this instance to Nancy
Cunard (1896–1965), whose long poem entitled Parallax was published by Woolf’s
Hogarth Press in 1925.
30 The diary entry refers to an exchange with Professor Bonamy Dobrée (1891–1974),

for whom Eliot’s poem East Coker (1940) is “didactic” (D5 278).
31 In fact, Woolf’s diary entry is on the successful libel case brought by the sibling poets

the Sitwells (Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell) against a hostile reviewer in February 1941
(D5 355–356).
6  ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY  107

Appendix

Poetry Woolf
(I Grow More & More Poetic)

1.
Father gave me Mr Lowell’s poems—
exciting and splendid. If I was a poet
I type wrote Dorothea’s poems
Finished & despatched Dorothea’s poems
pillars of smoke—One ought to be a poet
No one—save a poet—can express
Cowper’s poems, all bescrawled & underlined
all the world is mind. Then I read a poem
central meaning of the world, & all these poets
a bit of Aristotle, the poetics
read the poetics all the morning
bought James Thomsons poems on the way
finished my Aristotle poetics this morning
words of the poets begin to sing
& embody themselves
Greek things— poems, & temples & statues
the simple word Devon is better than a poem
sent her the poems which much to his surprise
against the embellishments of the poets
Once, no doubt, she was a poetess,
& trod the fields of Parnassus
108  J. GOLDMAN

2.
Hardy’s poems which she can’t re-read
his voice alone would dull the fieriest poesy
in the world. Nor does he deal in fiery poems
thanking him for his poem about Father
about Shelley, & poets & their immorality
I like the poetic side of L.
what I said or didn’t say about Arnold’s poems about nature
to be a poet & an eccentricity
Hardy’s new poems, but lent them to Philip
quite a big boy—with a poetic side
She read us a poem called The Old Way
for a poet we needn’t complain
poetry: “a good
commonplace poet”
Cecil’s poems, which we have offered to print
Cecil’s poems this afternoon. They’re not good
The poet Hogben was also there
I making rather a mess of the poems
The poem which ends “what man has made
of man”
books in Hiskoke’s. I bought Collins’poems
the young poets & painters drift up
the poems of Heredia
& the poems of Laforgue
Her poems are soon coming out.
a born poet, as she seems to have known
Childe Harold was the best poem ever
never as young man believed in his poetry
most readable poem of its length ever
He wasn’t committed to be poetical
“The finest poem in the language too.”
Last night, L. read Hardy’s poems aloud.
extreme difference between this poem & any other
6  ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY  109

Has any great poem ever let in so little light?

strong & elaborate it all is! What poetry!
Review by me of Edith Sitwell’s poems
strong views of his own, & a poetic creed
great poets, or in the current phrase
“very interesting”
He produced 3 or 4 poems for us
highly organized framework of poetic belief
this new poetry flower on the stem of the oldest
that remark at the end of a poem
Murry’s poem which I found hard to read
a plethora of words; his poem
short poems of his are to be printed, beautifully
do what we like with Murry’s long poem. He asks £4.10
see more of, owing to his poems
coming to the end of Eliot’s poems
a poet who surrounds herself with sketches
a long poem which she wants us to consider
“She is a poet—
certainly a poet”
his poetry,
& his standing as a poet
Eliot’s poems—our best work so far
Murry’s poem with such blots & blurs
he is well cropped & brown for a poet
A poem is a very sensitive part
brought her sister—“the poet”—to dinner
I don’t suspect her a poet
whether or not to read her poems
Stokoe’s poems before Miss Green arrives
110  J. GOLDMAN

3.
Four poets are chosen; she’s one of them
Paris, a Poem, by Hope Mirrlees
We got on to the Poetic Drama
confidence in the poetic drama
Eliot has sent me his Poems
I find he thinks himself a Poet
The poetess came in—poor hard boiled egg
This surly poet, so we judged him
(and his Poetry
is Squire’s poetry)
Anything would be better than a poet—
than one of Squire’s Poets
Clive proposes we should bring out his private poems. Morgan goes to India
That little man postpones his Poems
the old word shop of the minor Poets
make out that this is passion & Poetry
—a very bad poet from Hounslow
Jack Squire in a poetical villa
within a hundred yards
Rodmell is a colony for Georgian Poets
Clive’s poems have gone today to the Reviewers
drowned. & Lord Houghton wrote a poem about em
He has written a poem of 40 pages
Eliot dined last night & read his poem.
Mrs Shanks (so they say) has left the Georgian Poet
one must now be a very first rate Poet
to be a poet at all: when there
were great poets, the little ones caught some of the glow
Now there’s no great poet. When was the last?
not as a philosopher or poet. He wanted
Shelley’s poems, & not Shelley the man!
describing Edith Sitwell’s poems, but
Tennyson is a great poet.
Certainly he’s a poet,
not a great poet.
I’ve been setting up your poem.
It's a good Poem
a damned good poem did you say?
Well, you’ve improved what I
said.
But it is a damned good poem.
But to continue. The poet Rylands was there
The old poets were right. They made people think
an editor to print his poems
poets only. I said it should be for critics.
‘genius’. Had we read his poems?
I think I grow more & more poetic
It is poetry that I want now—long poems.
re-reading her poem to choose a title
 6  ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY  111

4.
poets use of words, how they fix on to a word
the new Chatto & Windus poetess
real poets.
I say poetry is defunct
little story about a man who wrote a poem
Waste Land & his other poems—a fact
How far will they make his poetry squint?
I read her poem; which is more compact
great philosophical poets, he says
the poet came; a lean boy, nervous, plaintive
I have no enormous opinion of her poetry
I should have been reading her poem tonight
all this goes out he said—his one poetical saying
to come again; would read me his poems
I said how much I liked his poems
not setting much stock by his poems either
Can you write poetry regularly? I asked
write poems at the same time as your novels
No. he said. I wrote a great many poems.
had liked some of his poems very much
begged him not to give up poetry,
“I’m afraid poetry is giving me up”
one cant write poetry if one sees people?
the doings of the younger poets
entirely new ‘a psychological poem’
I think Cowper is a good poet.
these serious poetic experimental books
very serious, mystical poetical work
her poems, but has no knowledge of human
nature, only these sudden intense poems
I dashed in here: the play-poem idea
a prize poem—that’s my fling at it
I can’t quite take the talk of poetry
& even great poetry seriously
her own poems which I promptly throw down the W.C.
procession to poets corner; dramatic
something abstract poetic next time
poem, without any trouble, save that of moving
112  J. GOLDMAN

my legs
poetry—by which I mean saturated?
poets succeeding by simplifying
Poor Tom—a true poet, I think
my regret that one ever saw poetesses
in the flesh. For she was a poetess too
one or two little poems will survive
he says her poems aren’t worth publishing.
—a less touchy poet never was. But
can a real poet be
an un-touchy poet?
he wrote little poems, about Eton
a poem about Eton—& then—clap
came the war
the man’s no poet & cant make one see
made out a list of Elizabethan poets
“beautiful”; like a great poet
rings to me truer, & is almost poetry
he sends me his poems. And I invent
greater range than the other poets
Julian’s poems are out, & I am relieved
love of country life, he is no poet
poems we could come back to unsated
Milton; it was latinised poetry
modern poetry, & the question of the spade
himself wrote “thumbnail” poems only
the steam roller. The great age of poetry
Poets can only write when they have symbols
can only write small fireside poems
poems he much admires, & I have never read
I vaguely remember in his poems. He said
all his systems, philosophies, poetics
anything I know, as good a poet
perhaps Dotty’s poem I heard a shop bell
 6  ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY  113

5.
Julian in a stew about his poems. And so
she longs for all poets in a garden
novels simply to express the general, the poetic
I set up some of Dadie’s poems in the new room
“thinnest wall between such a novel & poetry
speed of prose & the intensity of poetry”
inspired to write a Letter to Young poet
at Donne of a morning, & poems all about
me. I’ve come to read poetry with intensity
Miss Holtby says “It is a poem, more completely”
post comes in with Elizabethan poets
there’s my little letter to a poet
my Letter to a young poet I can take
a little book of poems by herself. Time
give her Johnson’s Lives of the poets
Dryden’s poems in double columns
a poem dedicated to John Penis
in the Mount of Venus
correct my Letter to a Young poet
read some hideously obscure poems
Lytton left masses of poems & unfinished plays
my poet letter passes unnoticed
Coleridge—one or two poems
thinks himself the greatest poet of all time
Oh & I shall write a poets book next.
Should I bring in a play, letters, poems?
introduce plays, poems, letters, dialogues
writing; reading, imperfectly, a poem
never to me interesting—no poet
He’s not a poet, no so what is he to do
“. . . That is poetry (written here by mistake—damn)”
happy sometimes. What a poem, for 10 minutes
a handsome poetic boy to look at
spruce as ever; & has left his poems
Mr Barker’s poems, chanting, intoning. Barker
right in his poem when he called me fortunate
poem, reality, comedy, play: narrative
“among the English poets after my death”
Julian’s poems. At once she ruffles
large faced pale faced man—our great poet.
And no fire burning in any of us.
Then Julian, with his poems, & Quentin.
She is a poet, & has won a medal
So he can’t be merely a poet, a writer
Read his speech. All poets are misfits
114  J. GOLDMAN

6.
cant swing from the real to the poetic
anthology of love poems. Isnt it odd?
a girl of 18 I read a poem
& thought I understood it all
the pose—show myself poetic & unworldly
depressed to feel I’m not a poet
Up & off again, like the gull in the poem.
beautiful if too conventionally poetic young man
“Mrs Woolf—you see, I feel youre a poetess”
a real novelist, I suspect; not a poet
first rate novelist & a great lyrical poet
poems are as near
poetry as anything I can stand
my best book: poetical in the right sense
one day in the winter & her poems
she’s fine drawn, wd. be poetic
too much poetic eloquence
3 Gs is poetic; profound; in my essayists
vein
poetry beautifully written & lucidly
argued
communicate rather than a poem
Also theres Vita & her poem
the moment, as now, lots of little poems
“Words” refers partly to Vita’s new poem
Dines out & goes to musical teas; reads poems
poems (in metre) run off the prose
lyric vein
That great thick long jowled poet
wrote to Desmond about his poetess
If a new poem, what should I say?
thinks me a poet-novelist, not a fraud
fertile. & I suppose poetical
his MSS poems—all repetitions
Tom sent me his cat poems today. A very wet day.
sly & grasping; yet poetic too. And a bore.
I’ll also dream a poet-prose book
(there are the poems in MS all waiting)
Tom’s last poem “didactic”, & he left
Hot, I repeat, & doubt if I’m a poet.
proving their existence as poets
 6  ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY  115

Works Cited
Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. London: Hogarth, 1972.
de la Mare, Walter. Poetry in Prose: Warton Lecture on Poetry. London: British
Academy, 1935.
Gillespie, Diane Filby. The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia
Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991.
Goldman, Jane. “Discovery Woolf.” In The Voyage Out: An Anthology, edited by
Kirsty Gunn and Gail Low. Dundee: The Voyage Out Press, 2016.
Mac Low, Jackson. The Virginia Woolf Poems. Providence: Burning Deck Press,
1985.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. POÈME: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard. Paris:
La Nouvelle Revue Francais, 1914. https://math.dartmouth.edu/~doyle/
docs/coup/scan/coup.pdf.
———. Poems. Translated by Roger Fry. London: Chatto & Windus, 1936.
Preminger, Alex, ed. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, Enlarged Edition.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974.
Williams, Rhian. The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry,
Second Edition. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Woolf, Virginia. Two Stories. London: Hogarth, 1919.
———. Monday or Tuesday. London: Hogarth, 1921.
———. Jacob’s Room. London: Hogarth, 1922.
———. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Hogarth, 1925.
———. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth, 1929.
———. The Waves. London: Hogarth, 1931.
———. Roger Fry: A Biography. London: Hogarth, 1940.
———. Between the Acts. London: Hogarth, 1941.
———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols.). Edited by Anne Olivier Bell and
Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth, 1977–1984.
———. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Susan Dick.
London: Hogarth, 1985.
———. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Andrew McNeillie (vols. 1–4) and
Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5–6). London: Hogarth, 1986–2011.
———. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals. Edited by Mitchell Leaska.
London: Hogarth, 1990.
 CHAPTER 7

James Joyce and the Prose Poem

Michel Delville

James Joyce’s first meeting with William Butler Yeats took place in early
October 1902 in the smoking room of a Dublin restaurant.1 According
to Yeats’ own account of the interview, Joyce, then a twenty-year-
old undergraduate, claimed to have ‘thrown over metrical form’ and
succeeded in creating ‘a form so fluent that it would respond to the
motions of the spirit’.2 That Joyce declined to call his prose sketches
prose poems is hardly surprising, considering his well-known reluctance
to be assimilated into any specific literary tradition. The term ‘prose
poem’ (which, in English literature, had so far been applied, somewhat
loosely, to a variety of neo-Ossianic eclogues and Wildean contes-poèmes)
probably appeared far too restrictive to the young man, whom Richard
Ellmann describes as already confident enough in his talents as a prose
writer ‘to feel he might outdo George Moore, Hardy, and Turgenev, if

1 A longer, alternative version of this essay was published in Giacomo Joyce: Envoys of the

Other, ed. Louis Armand and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2007). This ver-
sion is printed here with kind permission of Litteraria Pragensia.
2 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 102.

M. Delville (*) 
LLM, University of Liège, Liège, Liège, Belgium

© The Author(s) 2018 117

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_7
118  M. DELVILLE

not Tolstoy’.3 Be that as it may, Joyce’s description of the ‘epiphany’,

despite its claims to novelty, reads like a quasi-verbatim rerun of Charles
Baudelaire’s famous definition of the genre as ‘the miracle of a poetic
prose, musical though rhythmless and rhymeless, flexible yet rugged
enough to identify with the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs and
flows of revery, the pangs of conscience’.4 A second, even more striking
similarity between the Baudelairian prose poem and the Joycean epiph-
any lies in the capacity of both genres not only to render the fluidity of
mental states, but also to give shape to an essentially modern and urban
reality. Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, Stephen Daedalus likes to wander
through the streets of his native city, gleaning moments of poetic inspira-
tion from seemingly unimpressive and random events.
Most of the forty surviving epiphanies were later adapted and used
in Joyce’s more extended works of fiction.5 Many critics have there-
fore tended to consider them as merely preparatory material for Joyce’s
‘ambitious’ works. However, the neatly and carefully written manuscripts
Joyce left behind him—all of which seem to date from between 1902
and 1904—leave no reason to believe that he did not originally consider
them as literary achievements in their own right.6 Joyce even played for a
time with the idea of gathering them in a volume and, in a letter sent to
his brother Stanislaus in 1903, referred to them as a single work simply
entitled ‘Epiphany’.7 In a brief, self-mocking remembrance, Stephen’s
reincarnation in Ulysses later dismissed the project as the product of an
arrogant and immature mind: ‘Remember your epiphanies on green oval
leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries

3 Ellmann, Joyce, 83.

4 James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings (London: Faber, 1991), 25.
5 Morris Beja has found fourteen clear uses of the original epiphanies in Stephen Hero,

eleven in A Portrait, four in Ulysses, and one in Finnegans Wake (“Epiphany,” 712–713).
6 Twenty-two manuscripts of epiphanies—carefully written on separate sheets of ruled

paper by Joyce himself—are housed at the Poetry Collection at the State University of New
York at Buffalo. The twenty-five remaining manuscripts (7 of which are duplicates from
Buffalo) are at Cornell University. All but one of these are copies made by Stanislaus Joyce;
the remaining one (concerning Oliver Gogarty) is a rough draft in Joyce’s hand. The num-
bers ranging from 1 to 71 written on the back of the 22 holograph manuscripts currently
held at Buffalo suggest that the entire collection ran into the 70s, or more. For a detailed
account of the composition of the epiphanies and of the adaptation made by Joyce for his
novels, see Ellmann, 83–85, and Beja, 709–713, respectively.
7 James Joyce, Letters: Vol. I (London: Faber, 1957), 28.
 7  JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM  119

of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there

after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola
like.’8
Stephen Daedalus’ definition of the epiphany in Stephen Hero (the
earlier version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) as ‘a sudden
spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture
or in a memorable phase of the mind itself’ points to the existence of
two distinct epiphanic modes reflected in the extant manuscripts them-
selves: the one consists in a brief dramatic dialogue, the other in a short
descriptive or narrative sketch. While the ‘dramatic’ epiphanies (which
include Stephen’s description of an overheard conversation in the above
quoted passage) arising from ‘the vulgarity of speech or gesture’ are evi-
dently preparatory, the ‘lyric’ epiphanies9 are in the form of short but
relatively self-contained vignettes, often inspired by a dream.
Joyce’s early fascination with dreams, which he shared with a number
of other Dublin poets such as George Russell and Yeats, suggests that
at least one of the original impulses behind his short prose sketches was
quite independent from his project to incorporate them into a larger
narrative. Richard Ellmann is undoubtedly right in suggesting that,
although Freud’s Traumdeutung appeared in late 1899—that is, shortly
before Joyce wrote his first dream-epiphanies—Joyce’s interest in dreams
was pre-Freudian ‘in that it look[ed] for revelation, not scientific expla-
nation’.10 This is not to say, however, that Joyce was not interested in the
secret or latent meaning of the oneiric mind.11 As his brother Stanislaus
wrote, retrospectively, in My Brother’s Keeper, ‘there is no hint … that
[Joyce] considered dreams anything but an uncontrolled rehash of our
waking thoughts, though he may have hoped they would reveal things
our controlled thoughts unconsciously conceal’.12 Considering the

8 James Joyce, Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 41.

9 Robert E. Scholes and Richard M. Kain, eds., The Workshop of Daedalus (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1965), 3–4.
10 Ellmann, Joyce, 85. According to most critics, the 40 extant epiphanies were composed

in the years between 1900 and 1904 (Ellmann 83, Scholes and Kain 5, Beja 709, Mahaffey
190).
11 As Ellmann himself remarks, Joyce interpreted of one of his dream-epiphanies to be

about Ibsen (85).

12 Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years (New York: Viking,

1958), 127.
120  M. DELVILLE

revelatory quality Stephen consistently ascribes to the epiphany, it seems

very unlikely indeed that Joyce should have been interested solely in its
potential for reproducing the basic rhythms of the unconscious. Just like
the ‘dramatic’ epiphanies, the dream-narratives were supposed to deliver
one or several ‘evanescent’ moments of insight—the writer’s task was to
perceive and disclose their symbolic relevance in the outside world.
Epiphany #30 demonstrates quite clearly this dialogical process
between the waking and the unconscious mind. Joyce’s dream-vision
illustrates his conflicting feelings towards his mother country, as well as
his fear of spiritual imprisonment. More generally, it outlines the theme
of the relationship of the artist to his family, culture and race, which was
to preoccupy Joyce throughout the composition of Stephen Hero and A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man13:

The spell of arms and voices – the white arms of roads, their prom-
ise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against
the moon, their tales of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are
alone, – come. And the voices say with them, We are your people. And the
air is thick with their company as they call to me their kinsman, making
ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.14

If one refers to Yeats’ description of the epiphanies as ‘a beautiful though

immature and eccentric harmony of little prose descriptions and medi-
tations’,15 there is good reason to believe that all or most of the pieces
Joyce submitted to him belonged to the so-called ‘narrative’ or ‘lyric’
species. Considering Joyce’s own emphasis on the malleable fluency of
prose, the dream-narrative evidently corresponds to the Baudelairian
ideal of a form freed from the constraints of metrical verse, one which
is capable of reproducing the ‘actual’ movement of consciousness and
accommodating the capricious narrative logic of the dream mind.

13 “[The Spell of Arms and Voices]” appears in the final section of A Portrait of the

Artist as a Young Man (275), in the form of a journal entry written down 10 days before
Stephen’s resolution to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his]
race” (276).
14 Joyce, Poems, 190.

15 Ellmann, Joyce, 102.

 7  JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM  121

While some dream-epiphanies, such as ‘[The Spell of Arms of

Voices]’, are certainly imagined and visionary, others seem rooted in the
observation of an everyday incident:

Dull clouds have covered the sky. Where three roads meet before a swampy
beach a big dog is recumbent. From time to time he lifts his muzzle in the
air and utters a prolonged sorrowful howl. People stop to look at him and
pass on; some remain, arrested, it may be, by that lamentation in which
they seem to hear the utterance of their own sorrow that had once its voice
but is now voiceless, a servant of laborious days. Rain begins to fall.16

Virtually nothing distinguishes this piece from even a fairly ‘real-

ist’ passage excerpted from one of Joyce’s works of fiction. In ‘[The
Big Dog]’—which Joyce himself interpreted to be about his brother
Stanislaus17—the ‘dream-like’ quality of the vignette arises mainly from
the absence of contextual elements. Since Joyce’s ‘dreamscape’ appears
isolated and independent from a larger narrative or dramatic whole, the
type of reading it imposes on the reader is one which encourages what
Jonathan Culler has called ‘the expectation of totality or coherence’.18
In the same way as William Carlos Williams’ ‘This Is Just to Say’ turns
from a note left on a kitchen table into a self-contained poem as soon as
it is set down on the page as a poem, the intimidating margins of silence
which frame Joyce’s epiphanies (which were neatly and carefully cal-
ligraphed on separate sheets) invite a reading which urges us to assume
their inherent totality at the same time as it insists on their incomplete
and fragmentary nature.
‘Poems which succeed as fragments or as instances of incomplete
totality,’ Culler writes, ‘depend for their success on the fact that our drive
towards totality enables us to recognise their gaps and discontinuities and
to give them a thematic value.’19 As a result of Joyce’s emphasis on the
‘lyric’ quality of the piece, to the detriment of its narrative progress, the
reader has to rely almost exclusively on the (potentially) revelatory nature
of the epiphany in order to construe it into a self-contained whole.

16 Joyce, Poems, 168.

17 Stanislaus Joyce, Keeper, 136.
18 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of

Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 170.

19 Culler, Poetics, 170.
122  M. DELVILLE

In ‘[The Big Dog]’, this particular interpretive strategy is consolidated by

the intervention of an authorial voice, commenting, albeit tentatively, on
the reaction of the passers-by, and endowing the dreamscape with sym-
bolic value. More generally, the semi-allegorical significance of the dream
scene is best understood in the context of Stephen’s project to transmute
both the content of the subconscious mind and the raw material of ‘triv-
ial’ everyday experience (here reunited in a single dreamt ‘incident’) into
a spiritual ‘manifestation’; a moment of revelation or ‘inscape’ at which
the commonplace object delivers a sense of ‘sudden radiance’, which here
occurs when the passers-by begin to see in the howling dog an emblem
of their own sorrowful lives.20
Giacomo Joyce: Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse

I have the illusion to suppose that by breaking up my discourse I cease

to discourse in terms of the imaginary about myself, attenuating the risk
of transcendence; but since the fragment (haiku, maxime, pensée, journal
entry) is finally a rhetorical genre and since rhetoric is that layer of lan-
guage which best presents itself to interpretation, by supposing I disperse
myself I merely return, quite docilely, to the bed of the imaginary.
—Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

By translating the liturgical meaning of the term ‘epiphany’ into secu-

lar (though still Platonic and essentialist) terms, the young Joyce pur-
ported to redefine nothing less than the role of the modern artist, who
would henceforth seek to grasp, record and transcend the trivial, pro-
saic incidents and realities of everyday life into moments of extraordi-
nary aesthetic and spiritual significance. In Joyce’s writings, however, the
stress is often not so much on the moment of insight as such as on the
process of apprehension of the object by the individual consciousness.
The ‘apprehensive faculty’ of the artist is described by Stephen as ‘the
gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact
focus’.21 ‘The moment the focus is reached,’ Stephen adds, ‘the object is

20 Note that the term “epiphany”, in Joyce’s writings, variously refers to: (1) the “sudden

manifestation” itself; (2) the written record of the moment of revelation; and (3) the verbal
strategy used by the artist in order to find meaning in the seemingly insignificant.
21 James Joyce, Stephen Hero (London: New Directions, 1944), 189.
 7  JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM  123

epiphanised’—only then can the aesthete hope to recognise the thing in

itself, ‘its soul, its whatness’.22
This double process of aestheticisation and interpretation of the real
also lies at the heart of Giacomo Joyce, a series of prose sketches Joyce
wrote in Trieste between late 1911 and 1914, shortly before the pub-
lication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and at a time when
he had already started to work on Ulysses. The manuscript comprises
fifty fragments of variable length—ranging from a single line to a little
more than one page—painstakingly transcribed onto eight oversized
sheets of heavy sketching paper enclosed between the blue paper cov-
ers of a school notebook. When Joyce moved to Zurich in 1915, the
sketchbook, which bore the name ‘Giacomo Joyce’ on the front cover
in an unidentified handwriting, was left behind in the care of Joyce’s
brother Stanislaus.23 The small book remained unknown until 1956,
when Richard Ellmann discovered it among Stanislaus’ possessions.
Although Ellmann’s biography, published in 1959, featured a discussion
of Giacomo Joyce (including a significant portion of it), the book first
appeared in its entirety in an annotated edition issued by Viking Press in
1968.
Joyce never attempted to have his manuscript published, and the
fragments were ultimately ‘recycled’ to form pages of his longer works
of fiction: both A Portrait and Ulysses contain direct or paraphrased
borrowings from Giacomo Joyce. The amount of painstaking care
which went into the calligraphy of the manuscript, however, leaves no
room for doubt concerning its original status as an independent work.
Furthermore, Giacomo Joyce, unlike Stephen’s project of a ‘book of

22 Joyce, Stephen, 190.

23 Ellmann’s comments on the title of the manuscript are rather misleading. In his biog-
raphy of Joyce, he acknowledges that the name was inscribed ‘in another, unknown hand’,
but almost immediately adds that Joyce ‘was content to keep what he had written under
this heading’, for the title must have expressed ‘his sense of dépaysement as a Triestine
Dubliner pining for requital in two languages’ (342). Ellmann’s account, however, gives
us no reason to believe that the name was written before Joyce’s departure for Zurich
and, therefore, casts some doubts upon the validity of his interpretation. (Note that the
‘unknown hand’ which wrote the name ‘Giacomo Joyce’ on the sketchbook cover was
more than probably Italian, as suggested by the hesitant calligraphy of the letters ‘j’ and ‘y’,
which are nonexistent in the Italian alphabet.) For the purpose of clarity and consistency, I
shall nevertheless apply the name ‘Giacomo’ to the ‘poetic persona’ of the poem.
124  M. DELVILLE

epiphanies’,24 is not merely a florilegium of precious but disparate

moments of revelation. It is a collection of lyric and narrative fragments
all related to a single subject: Joyce’s infatuation with one of his girl stu-
dents in Trieste, whom Ellmann identifies as Amalia Popper, the daugh-
ter of a Triestine Jewish businessman. The explicitly autobiographical
character of the poem and the scabrousness of the subject eventually pre-
vented Joyce from publishing the work in its original form. Nevertheless,
other considerations of an aesthetic nature may have led Joyce to dis-
own a work whose inherent poetics were irreconcilable with his current
aesthetic development as a novelist. In other words, Joyce’s prose lyrics
may have been, as I will argue, aesthetically embarrassing, as well as bio-
graphically compromising. My second purpose is to re-examine the posi-
tion of Giacomo Joyce, within or outside the Joyce canon, in the context
of Joyce’s ongoing experimentations with both lyric and narrative form.
In order to do so, I propose to look first at a number of rhetorical and
phenomenological strategies as they operate in Joyce’s use of the frag-
ment, as well as in his changing conception of the lyric self. The generic
negotiations at work in Giacomo Joyce will also be given special atten-
tion as they account for the text’s ambivalent status as what Henriette
Lazaridis Power calls a ‘maggot’,25 a formally and thematically unstable
quirk whose hybrid poetics test the validity of our assumptions concern-
ing Joyce’s chief preoccupations as a poet and a novelist.

Who? A pale face surrounded by heavy odorous furs. Her movements are
shy and nervous. She uses quizzing-glasses.
Yes: a brief syllable. A brief laugh. A brief beat of the eyelids.26

The opening lines of Giacomo are representative of the phenomenologi-

cal premises of Joyce’s fragments, which often originate in the brief but
scrupulous observation of a specific part of the student’s body. This par-
ticular aspect of Joyce’s prose lyrics makes them akin to the epiphanies,
whose heuristic potential also results from the artist’s apprehension of a
given object or incident in its irreducible spatial and temporal particular-
ity. According to Stephen, the first stage of the epiphanisation of the real

24 Joyce,Stephen, 211.
25 LazaridisPowers, Henriette. ‘Incorporating Giacomo Joyce’, James Joyce Quarterly 28.3
(1991): 623.
26 James Joyce, Giacomo Joyce (London: Faber, 1968), 1.
 7  JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM  125

indeed consists in ‘divid[ing] the entire universe into two parts, the object,
and the void which is not the object’. The general presentation of the frag-
ments—a series of short blocks of prose surrounded by white space—is
particularly well-suited to Stephen’s desire to grasp the radical ‘integrity’ of
things for the sake of aesthetic illumination or Thomist claritas.27
There is no dearth of books and articles on the literary and philosoph-
ical origins of the Joycean epiphany. As Ashton Nichols and other crit-
ics have shown, its revelatory value originates in the nineteenth century,
notably in Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, Coleridge’s ‘flashes’, Shelley’s
‘best and happiest moments’ and Keats’ ‘fine isolated verisimilitude’,
all of which similarly revealed the mind’s ability to perceive the hidden
meaning of ordinary events and situations. Another possible influence,
that of Ignatius of Loyola, has, to my knowledge, escaped the attention
of critics. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, to whom Giacomo appeals for help
at the end of the thirteenth fragment,28 occupied a privileged position
in Joyce’s Jesuit education. One of his Spiritual Exercises, the ‘compo-
sition of place’, which is mentioned in the third chapter of A Portrait,29
recommends meditating upon a physical object as a prelude to the con-
templation of a spiritual truth. More than anything else, Loyola’s insist-
ence on the essential role played by the imagination in the self’s attempts
to recognise the heuristic potential of the physical world have probably
appealed to the young Joyce.
However that may be, Joyce’s concern with the self-contained whole-
ness of the beheld object is as much characteristic of Giacomo as it is
an essential element of Imagist poetry, a movement in which Joyce was
briefly involved and whose heyday roughly coincides with the composition
of the Giacomo manuscript.30 The Imagists’ belief in economy of language

27 Joyce, Stephen, 212.

28 Joyce, Giacomo, 5.
29 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1992), 137.

30 Imagism flourished between 1912 and 1917, from Ezra Pound’s first printed reference

to the Imagist ‘school’ in the appendix to Ripostes, to Amy Lowell’s unofficial dismantling
of the movement. The first Imagist anthology (Des Imagistes: An Anthology, 1914), edited
by Pound, featured Joyce’s ‘I Hear an Army’, which was later included in Chamber Music.
Note that ‘I Hear an Army’, which Pound included in his anthology on the grounds of its
uncompromising ‘objectivity’, is a far less ‘Imagist’ poem than the fragments of Giacomo
Joyce, even by Pound’s own standards. The brevity of treatment which characterises Joyce’s
fragments also echoes the brief juxtaposed ‘flashes of inspiration’, surrounded by blankness
126  M. DELVILLE

and brevity of treatment, as well as their penchant for short, single images
or objects presented for ‘direct apprehension’, may indeed have inspired
some of Joyce’s shorter fragments, which—had they been presented in a
versified form—would have fitted perfectly in an Imagist anthology:

A flower given by her to my daughter. Frail gift, frail giver, frail blue-
veined child.31
Great bows on her slim bronze shoes: spurs of a pampered fowl.32
My words in her mind:cold polished stones sinking through a
quagmire.33

The last two haiku-like fragments also bear a striking resemblance to

Ezra Pound’s 1913 ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (‘The apparition of these
faces in the crowd; /Petals on a wet, black bough’), which also results
from the juxtaposition of two images unconnected by any kind of com-
ment or explanation. The unmediated apprehension, ‘hard and clear,
never blurred or indefinite’, of images or objects which Giacomo shares
with Imagist poetry is made possible by the asyndetic dynamics of the
collection through which each single ‘image’ acquires irreducible auton-
omy and is framed in a particular lyric moment.
In the light of Giacomo’s ever-changing perceptions, Giacomo
Joyce, which Ellmann describes as ‘Joyce’s attempts at the education
of a dark lady’,34 would, instead, be more aptly characterised as a frag-
mented and tortured hymn to the meanders of a narcissistic self racked
by the all-powerful strategies of its imagination. However, the syn-
ecdochial strategies at work in Joyce’s vicarious celebration of the stu-
dent’s remote sensuousness do not serve merely to reflect the complexity
of Giacomo’s emotional turmoil. By placing the emphasis on the per-
ceiving consciousness and its attempts to fictionalise the real, the frag-
mented form of Joyce’s prose lyrics also entails a mise en abyme of the

and silence, of Italian Hermeticism, whose chief exponent, Giuseppe Ungaretti, published
his first collection, L’allegria, in 1914.
31 Joyce, Giacomo, 3.

32 Ibid., 8.

33 Ibid., 13.

34 Ibid., xi.
 7  JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM  127

fragmentariness and decenteredness of the lyric self, whose conflicting

feelings—just like the student’s body—are scattered amongst a number
of discrete, metonymically-linked ‘lyric units’. As a result of these mul-
tiple (self-)manipulations, Giacomo’s discourse disintegrates into a suc-
cession of euphemised moments and temporary resolutions, so that what
begins as a fairly coherent and credible first-person lyric narrative (the
‘I-persona,’ after all, is named Jim and has a wife named Nora) becomes
just another exercise in the transformation or ‘epiphanisation’ of the raw
material of personal experience into art. The issue of the fictionalisa-
tion of autobiographical material is raised several times in Giacomo Joyce,
notably by the student herself (or is she merely being cast as a mouth-
piece for Giacomo’s lack of self-confidence as a writer?), who, after hav-
ing ‘touched the pages, foul and fair, on which [his] shame shall glow for
ever’,35 expresses her misgivings about the moral and intellectual integ-
rity of Giacomo-Joyce’s writings. Typically, the student’s voice is inter-
rupted by Giacomo’s attempts to regain ironic control over his material:

She says that, had The Portrait of the Artist been frank only for frank-
ness’ sake, she would have asked why I had given it to her to read. O you
would, would you? A lady of letters.36

In the context of his own development as an artist, Joyce’s ambivalent

relationship with the lyric mode in Giacomo Joyce raises the issue of the
relationship between the fragments and the longer narrative productions
into which they were later incorporated. In this respect, the fragmentary
and paratactic dynamics of Joyce’s prose lyrics can be linked with Joyce’s
increasingly radical critique of the unified wholeness and linear dynam-
ics of the traditional nineteenth-century novel. As Vicki Mahaffey has
remarked, the structural premises of Joyce’s shorter works—his poems
and epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce, and Exiles—give us an outline of the basic
design of all of their longer and better-known counterparts. What Joyce’s
prose and verse lyrics share with his more extended works of fiction,
she writes, is ‘the strategy of producing a longer and more complicated
text by stringing together a series of formally self-­­contained units’.37

35 Ibid.,13.
36 Ibid.,12.
37 Vicky Mahaffey, “Giacomo Joyce,” in A Companion to Joyce Studies, ed. Zack Bowen

and James F. Carens (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984), 186.

128  M. DELVILLE

Therefore, she continues, ‘the minor works make it much more appar-
ent that Joyce’s technique—even in the longer texts—is in large part an
imagist one, adapted from poetry to narrative and massively elaborated
in the process’.38 In this respect, an interesting parallel can be drawn
between Joyce’s ‘novelistic’ prose lyrics and the definition of the prose
poem put forward by Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Huysmans’
A Rebours (1884). Des Esseintes, who sees the prose poem as ‘the con-
crete pith, the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art’, defines
the genre as a concentrated and supremely writerly avatar of the novel:
‘Then the words chosen would be so unpermutable as to substitute for
all the others; the adjective, placed in such an ingenious and so definitive
a way that it could not be legally divested of its position, would open
such perspectives that the reader could dream for weeks on end about
its meaning, at the same time fixed and multiple, could take note of the
present, reconstruct the past; could guess the future of the characters’
souls, revealed by the light of that unique epithet.’39
Despite its strong Decadent overtones (the emphasis on stylistic
refinement and semantic ingeniousness, in particular), Des Esseintes’
definition suggests that Huysmans, like Joyce, saw in the prose poem
the possibility of turning the concentrated brevity and semantic ambigu-
ity of poetic language into a means of expanding and complexifying the
creation of plot and character. In this perspective, also, the prose lyrics
of Giacomo Joyce enact the principle of contamination between narrative
linearity and poetic closure, poetic ambiguity and novelistic verisimili-
tude which characterises Joyce’s work and, more generally, the develop-
ment of a modern tradition of the prose poem. The specific nature of
the ‘elaboration’ of the isolated lyric moments of Giacomo Joyce and the
epiphanies into larger narrative units lies outside the scope of the pres-
ent chapter. Suffice it to say, at this stage, that what in Giacomo remains
primarily a means of articulating (albeit in a self-consciously manipu-
lative fashion) the sudden bursts of the lyric self subsists in Joyce’s fic-
tion within a larger referential system obeying its own internal logic and
in which the self tends to be engulfed in the more impersonal arts of
irony, satire, allusion, parody and pastiche. When Joyce left Trieste in
1915, leaving behind him the Giacomo manuscript, the fragment and the

38 Mahaffey, “Giacomo,” 186.

39 J.-K. Huysmans, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Crès, 1928), 320. My translation.
 7  JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM  129

aesthetics of the first person prose lyric had already been put aside to give
way to the luxuriant anonymity of the third person encyclopedic parody
of Ulysses.40
Significantly enough, the word epiphany which occurs at the most
crucial point of the discourse on aesthetics in Stephen Hero has disap-
peared altogether from Stephen’s theories in the Portrait. This is hardly
surprising since Stephen’s ‘lyric’ metaphor of the epiphany—which still
laid the emphasis on the artist’s personal apprehension, unmediated by
irony and dramatic distance, of the ‘whatness’ of a given object or inci-
dent—would have been inconsistent with Stephen’s own ‘impersonal’
theory (in the Portrait) of the progressive separation of the artist from
the lyric impulse. In view of the development of Joyce’s oeuvre as a
whole, one may reasonably argue that Stephen is, at least to some extent,
a fictional mouthpiece of the author’s younger self and of his aesthetic
convictions at the time. As suggested above, the lyric mode was grad-
ually abandoned by Joyce in the years that followed the publication of
Stephen’s three-form theory of genres. In the context of Stephen’s ‘three
forms progressing from one to the next’, it seems probable that Joyce’s
decision not to publish Giacomo was prompted by aesthetic as well as
personal reasons. In the same way as Stephen’s theory of the epiphany
was replaced, in A Portrait, by another theory concerning the devel-
opment of the poet away from the raw lyric impulse towards dramatic
objectivity, Giacomo’s lyric effusions—for all their paradoxical attempts
to enact the failure of the constitution of the lyric self—were soon dis-
carded in favour of the more controlled and detached mode of Ulysses,
whose parodic and ironic tenor indeed seems to correspond to Stephen’s
ideal of the artist-as-god, ‘refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his
fingernails’.
Thus, one way of approaching Giacomo Joyce is as an example of the
type of lyric epiphanies the Stephen of Stephen Hero and, indeed, the
young Joyce would have written and, by the time of Ulysses, abandoned.
In this respect, also, Giacomo Joyce and the prose lyric, which stand at

40 It would be tempting to see the sudden appearance of Molly Bloom’s interior mono-

logue at the end of Ulysses as something of a resurgence of the lyric repressed. Joyce, how-
ever, did not conceive of Molly’s monologue as a lyrical piece in the strict sense. In a letter
to Harriet Weaver, he commented that he had ‘rejected the usual interpretation of [Molly
Bloom] as a human apparition’ and had tried to depict nothing less than ‘the earth which is
prehuman and presumably posthuman’ (Letters 1: 160).
130  M. DELVILLE

the junction of a lyric discourse already on the wane and the genesis of
the ‘dramatic’ novel, mark a turning point in Joyce’s career. The very
title of the manuscript, itself a dichotomy, carries the implications of a
struggle between the lyrico-poetic writing of Joyce’s early work—with
its focus on the expression of transitory moods or momentary illumina-
tions—and the ambitions of the mature novelist. Yet, if Joyce progres-
sively moved away from lyric brevity towards the impersonality of the
monumental ‘dramatic’ novel, the fragments of Giacomo nevertheless
testify to the existence of an alternative undercurrent in Joyce’s poetics,
one in which the lyric epiphany no longer seems to mediate between the
mind and its object but is displaced onto the split consciousness of the
speaker. Joyce’s later return to poetry with Pomes Penyeach, a collection
of thirteen formally conventional and overtly sentimental poems in verse
published in 1927 (despite Ezra Pound’s claim that the poems were not
worth printing and belonged ‘in the Bible or in the family album with
the portraits’41), confirms that his oeuvre was never really immune to a
return of the lyric repressed.
In the course of his career as a novelist, Joyce tried to satisfy his pen-
chant for the musical aspects of the lyric through the medium of prose.
This tendency reaches a climax in Finnegans Wake, which Joyce—­
countering accusations of unnecessary obscurity—kept defending on the
grounds that it was ‘pure music’ and that the fact that it was ‘pleasing to
the ear’ was one of the book’s justifications.42 From this perspective, the
simple and nostalgic songs of Chamber Music and the sophisticated mul-
tilingual experiments of Finnegans Wake are not as diametrically opposed
to each other as they may seem, and it would be wrong to consider the
‘novelistic’ prose lyrics of Giacomo Joyce as so many lyric ‘snatches’ des-
tined to be recycled and in the increasingly complex narrative structures
of Joyce’s later works of fiction. As the preceding pages have shown,
however, Giacomo Joyce should not be considered solely as a ‘missing
link’ in the development of Joyce’s career as a novelist. By resisting the
pressures of narrative linearity and poetic closure, Joyce’s prose fragments
also emerge as a hybrid form of lyric discourse which seeks to embrace
the complex and discontinuous nature of experience and memory and,
eventually, offers itself up to the ludic authority of the reader’s desire.

41 Ellmann, Joyce, 591.

42 Ibid., 702–3.
 7  JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM  131

In this respect, the essentially paratactic relationships between and within

the prose blocks of Giacomo are once again reminiscent of Baudelaire’s
project of a ‘writerly’ text avant la letter—a literary work which, like the
prose poems of Paris Spleen, is ‘both head and tail, alternately and recip-
rocally’43 and in which both the writer and the reader are free to par-
ticipate in the construction and the dispersal of subjectivity, longing for
no other form of narrative coherence than that of the movements of the
mind itself.

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Poems in Prose. Edited and translated by Francis Scarfe.
London: Anvil Press, 1989.
Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1971.
———. “Epiphany and the Epiphanies.” In A Companion to Joyce Studies, edited
by Zack Bowen and James F. Carens. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of
Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Huysmans, J.-K. Œuvres complètes, Paris: Crès, 1928.
Jones, Peter, ed. Imagist Poetry. London: Penguin, 1972.
Joyce, James. Chamber Music (1907). London: Cape, 1971.
———. Dubliners (1914). London: Grafton, 1977.
———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). London: Penguin,
1992.
———. Ulysses (1922). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
———. Pomes Penyeach (1927). London: Faber, 1968.
———. Finnegans Wake (1939). London: Faber, 1964.
———. Stephen Hero. London: New Directions, 1944.
———. Epiphanies. Buffalo: University of Buffalo Press/Lockwood Memorial
Library, 1956.
———. Letters: Vol. I. Edited by Stuart Gilbert. London: Faber, 1957.
———. Giacomo Joyce. Edited by Richard Ellman. London: Faber, 1968.
———. Poems and Shorter Writings. Edited by Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz,
and John Whittier-Ferguson. London: Faber, 1991.
Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years. Edited by
Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1958.

43 Charles Baudelaire, The Poems in Prose (London: Anvil Press, 1989), 23.
132  M. DELVILLE

Lazaridis Powers, Henriette. “Incorporating Giacomo Joyce.” James Joyce

Quarterly 28.3 (1991): 623–30.
Mahaffey, Vicki. “Giacomo Joyce.” In A Companion to Joyce Studies, edited
by Zack Bowen and James F. Carens, 387–420. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1984.
———. “Joyce’s Shorter Works.” In The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce,
edited by Derek Attridge, 185–211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990.
Scholes, Robert E., and Richard M. Kain, eds. The Workshop of Daedalus.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965.
 CHAPTER 8

T.S. Eliot’s Prose (Poetry)

Vidyan Ravinthiran

In the New Statesman of 3 March 1917, T.S Eliot writes, by now

famously, that free verse is never free, but always in rhythmic dialogue
with form:

The most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language
has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pen-
tameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and
constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between
fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very
life of verse … We may therefore formulate as follows: the ghost of some
simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the ‘freest’ verse; to
advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse. Or, freedom is
only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial
limitation.1

Eliot’s critical prose touches on scientific registers. In Tradition and the

Individual Talent, for example, he provides as a ‘suggestive analogy’ for

1 T.S. Eliot, “Reflections on Vers Libre,” New Statesman 8 (March 3, 1917): 518–19;

repr. in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), 34–35.

V. Ravinthiran (*) 
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 133

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_8
134  V. RAVINTHIRAN

the process of artistic depersonalisation ‘the action which takes place

when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber con-
taining oxygen and sulphur dioxide’.2 This is a way of being modern,
up-to-date and impressively disinterested—I speak here of the tonal
authority of his critical voice. ‘We may therefore formulate as follows’ is
the relevant phrase from the passage above; it appears, for a moment,
to turn verse analysis into an exact science, before two references to
Hamlet—the ghost, and Polonius hid behind the arras—contribute their
imaginative suggestiveness, even ominousness. (The rhyme linking gently
through arras, verse, doze, and rouse is crucial to how the argument is
made.) Eliot describes the writing of ‘interesting verse’ as an experiment-
ing with available forms—the poet as scientist—yet, if we look closely, we
see that the language of ‘taking form’ was already ghostly. If this is verse
composition in a laboratory, it also has intimations of a séance.
Leaving the final sentence about ‘freedom’ in abeyance for the
moment, I wish to make a point here about what prose meant to Eliot.
It was authoritative because cautious, and offered a wondering music of
precision. There was an opportunity for a decisive break with the impres-
sionistic belle-lettrism of nineteenth-century criticism, and for the crea-
tion of a startling modern authority—an opportunity which no writer of
the early twentieth century seized quite like Eliot. Yet, there were also
qualities of that prior criticism which he wished to maintain. The voice
he came to concoct, and whose postures became defining for a genera-
tion of litterateurs, depended, in fact, just as he claims of verse form, on
a ‘contrast between fixity and flux’; an oscillation between bold assertion
and imaginative uncertainty. ‘Nothing has suffered more’, writes Adam
Phillips, ‘in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century,
than the idea of the real’, and the spectral scientism of Eliot’s critical
prose bespeaks this unsettling transition.3 As he considers, in this pas-
sage, how modern poetry should be written, he is also cognisant of the
literary form of prose—which isn’t always understood as such. Prose may
double as a crisper, sleeker, more curated version of the speaking voice
but, as I shall go on to discuss in this essay, Eliot also inherited a per-
spective which insisted on its structural uniqueness as both a vehicle of
thought and an artistic medium as complex as verse.

2 T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1999), 17.

3 Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis (London:
Faber, 2000), 270.
 8  T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY)  135

Eliot’s final sentence about ‘freedom’ resembles a sentence in one of

his few statements on prose—‘The Borderline of Prose’, also published
in the New Statesman, two months later. Here, he concludes that ‘poetry
is written in verse, and prose is written in prose; or, in other words, that
there is prose rhythm and verse rhythm’.4 It is that lively, s­pontaneous-
seeming ‘or’ which both passages have in common; which suggests
in its breeziness the limitations of what can be clearly stated about an
­elusive reality which must, instead, be experienced to be understood.
If Eliot is using prose, in these essays, as an analytic rather than a cre-
ative instrument—and insisting, thereby, on a modern style of liter-
ary criticism—then at such moments, when he reveals quite casually a
possible alternative to what he has already said, another way of putting
things, we witness the momentary collapse of that disinterested authority
into spoken intimacy. Prose appears, at these junctures, to admit that it
really is speech, edited and polished—a man talking, with an awareness of
the limits of both his and the auditor’s patience.
Although he came to write, in Four Quartets, a type of verse una-
fraid to be prosaic, to exploit the assertive tonalities of discursive prose,
Eliot published only one prose poem during his lifetime. ‘Hysteria’ first
appeared in Ezra Pound’s Catholic Anthology in 1915, following which it
was collected in Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917—the same year
in which these essays appeared in the New Statesman:

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and

being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for
squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary
recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple
of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly
spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table,
saying: ‘If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if
the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden …’ I decided
that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments
of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with
careful subtlety to this end.5

4 Eliot, “The Borderline of Prose,” New Statesman 9 (19 May 1917): 158.
5 Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 2002), 24.
136  V. RAVINTHIRAN

Hysteria is, of course, a gendered concept, and this is a poem with, inside
it, a deep fear of women, or one woman in particular. The speaker of
the poem is afraid of ‘becoming involved’ not just with the woman—this
has already, alas, occurred—but involved ‘in her laughter’, ‘in the dark
caverns of her throat’. Similar anxieties arise in the unpublished poem
‘In the Department Store’, in which the speaker remarks of ‘the lady of
the porcelain department’, who smiles ‘at the world through a set of false
teeth’, that it ‘is not possible for me to make her happy’.6
What interests me about gender in ‘Hysteria’ is, however, what it
tells us about Eliot’s thinking, at this time, about prose; and how we,
too, are implicated, for we continue to think about prose in terms of a
binary opposition between thought and emotion which this poem flags
up. Martin Scofield, for one, appears both to criticise the poem and to
read it very much on its own terms—repeating its conceptual division
between analysis and experience. Diagnosing an ‘engulfing sexuality’,
he locates ‘the concentrated detachment of the prose (which is far from
being a genuine artistic detachment, since one feels the note of desperate
stratagem)’ as ‘an attempt to escape this encroachment’; and says that:

What is unpleasant in the poem is the complete withdrawal of compassion

for the woman, and her fragmentation into physical items: the teeth, the
throat, the ‘shaking of her breasts.’ It is the fragmentation we have seen
in ‘Prufrock’ and elsewhere, but here turned deliberately into a defensive
(and offensive) weapon. The scrupulous balance of self-criticism which
is maintained, in the matter of relations between men and women, in
‘Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady,’ is here abandoned in favour of one-
sided irony and distaste, compounded by the chillingly clinical prose.7

I, too, feel Scofield’s distaste for Eliot’s distaste, and am struck by how it
is the form of the prose poem itself which appears to be described here as
not only ‘chillingly clinical’, but also a ‘defensive (and offensive) weapon’
turned upon the woman it describes. There is a question here about the
relationship between the speaker of the poem and its form. Is this prose
poem as a type of dramatic monologue? The speaker of Eliot’s poem may

6 Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. C. Ricks (San Diego, New

York, and London: Harvest, 1998), 56.

7 Martin Scofield, T.S. Eliot: The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),

67.
 8  T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY)  137

appear to enlist prose as a language of experimental detachment but, in

this case, the expertly stage-managed to and fro between authority and
uncertainty, assertion and feeling, which characterises Eliot’s literary crit-
icism is toppled by the emotional situation. Then it seeks a recovery.
The talk of weaponry might expand to include the woman’s teeth
‘with a talent for squad-drill’; the poem was published during the First
World War, and the military tinge to the first sentence is important:

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and

being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for
squad-drill.

‘Squad-drill’ is a matter of following commands within a designated

formation: the power-relationship between the man and the woman is
important. The speaker’s insistence on his own conscious awareness of
what’s going on is, indeed, a defensive action; the shift from ‘becoming’
to ‘being’ is disturbing, since it occurs rapidly, and his realising that he is
‘part’ of the woman’s laughter refers both to a type of, to him, ­terrifying
absorption, and the notion that she is laughing at him. But what I would
focus on here is the hinge, ‘until’, which compares with Eliot’s use of
the word ‘or’ in his critical prose. In both cases, the connection is neces-
sarily loose and aligned with orality; in the first, the critic dropped from
writing prose to speaking to us, and here the man’s self-consciousness
is overturned into poetic associativeness by the woman’s extreme laugh-
ter. Awareness ends at this point and the language of detachment is
replaced by evocative plurality—the value of the word ‘only’ is uncertain,
‘accidental stars’ is an almost teeth-grinding wordplay, and the ‘talent
for squad-drill’ is also a reaching towards a perception, rather than the
insight itself. There is also a hint of the dentist’s ‘drill’, as Eliot’s prose
doesn’t only describe a disordered imagination, it also gives voice to its
eerie slippages.
Scofield’s sense of prose detachment as a ‘desperate stratagem’ (on the
part of the speaker) is therefore closer to the truth than his final sum-
mation of Eliot’s ‘chillingly clinical prose’; the poem provides Eliot—is
this more important to him, even, than the emotional situation it both
describes and evokes?—with a place to think about prose, and the over-
lap between discursive and creative registers. Given Eliot’s deep interest
in French poetry, how he found in it the beginnings of his profoundly
138  V. RAVINTHIRAN

influential free verse, it’s natural to connect ‘Hysteria’ with the French
prose poem, and the much cited Baudelairean ideal of ‘poetic prose.’8
The ‘undulating rhythm’ that is part of this ideal is necessary to the
speaker’s conflicted imagining of himself within the woman’s mouth: ‘I
was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost
finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen
muscles.’ Here, the commas of the prose clauses have a fluidity differ-
ent to that of the verse line-break: they skilfully intimate a gradual and
seemingly inevitable annihilation. They are mimetic of the woman’s own
‘short gasps’, and once again reveal Eliot’s deconstruction of written
prose into a more formless and immediate—and, in this case, threaten-
ing rather than enabling—orality. At the same time, the writing responds
to Baudelaire’s formulation in that it carries detached thought beyond
itself, into reverie, guilt, despair.
Reviewing Arthur Symons’s translation of Baudelaire, Eliot touches
on the title of this poem and its organising concept. Symons, he insists, is
absolutely wrong to locate ‘hysteria’ as the French poet’s creative source.
‘Was any one ever less hysterical, more lucid than Baudelaire?’, asks Eliot.
‘There is a difference between hysteria and looking into the Shadow.’9
In this poem, the dichotomy between hysteria and the lucid examination
of it—the peering beyond individual trauma into a deeper, darker, more
aboriginal reality—is deeply unstable. And here I’d have us consider the
fact that this is the only prose poem Eliot ever published, which gives it
the quality of a one-off experiment. If a poet only writes one poem in
a particular form, then we might describe that poem as a meeting, an
encounter, a confrontation, with a terminal result. The man is terrified
by the woman, and would withdraw; Eliot tries a prose poem—he allows
the fragmentation of his rational style into reverie and association to go
further than possible in an essay—but never does so again. Marguerrite
Murphy describes the nineteenth-century works of Wilde and Dowson
as afflicting the form with ‘the stigma of effeminacy, of a lack of strength
and virility’; she relates this to Irving Babbitt’s condemnation of it
as a mixed genre; and notes that Babbitt was one of Eliot’s tutors at
Harvard—one of only two professors who, says Lyndall Gordon, ‘broke

8 Charles Baudelaire, “To Arsène Houssaye,” dedication of Le Spleen de Paris (Paris

Spleen), trans. Louise Varèse, ix–x.

9 ‘Poet and Saint…’, Dial 82 (May 1927), 427; cited by Ronald Schuchard in Eliot’s

Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14.
 8  T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY)  139

into his private world and touched a responsive growth’. Babbitt, in

‘assigning gender to aesthetic categories… clearly equates the mascu-
line with good art and ethical behaviour and the feminine with poor art
and lax morals’.10 That the analytical stance Eliot strikes in his critical
prose is also present in ‘Hysteria’—where sharp outlines contend with
an overwhelming feminine irrationality—places the poem within a debate
about the viability of the prose poem in English. It depicts a binary, but
turns, despite itself, hybrid—both analytical and emotional—in doing so,
and might therefore be understood as central to the emergence of the
­twentieth-century prose poem as an undecided and self-conscious genre.
Eliot did try to write other prose poems—but he never published
them. Christopher Ricks, as editor of The Inventions of the March Hare,
characterises two works from Eliot’s notebook as ‘prose poems’. One,
‘Introspection’, is a brief unlineated fragment. The other, ‘The Engine’,
is comparable to ‘Hysteria’—it confirms our notion that Eliot only had
one prose poem in him, and realised this.11 It is, in two parts, an affect-
less description of a train journey, and is remarkable for how its implaca-
ble vehicle—‘The machine was hard, deliberate, and alert; having chosen
with motives and ends unknown to cut through the fog it pursued its
course’—resembles the woman, and her hysteria, in the other poem. For,
in both cases, Eliot is fascinated by a force which does not explain itself,
and perhaps cannot be explained; which terrifies, for this reason. There
is the same attention to colour, the same exact description bordering on
the military:

Flat faces of American business men lay along the tiers of chairs in one
plane, broken only by the salient of a brown cigar and the red angle of a
six-penny magazine.

Citing the Oxford English Dictionary, Ricks observes that one meaning
of the word ‘salient’ concerns an area of land ‘held by a line of offence or
defence, as in trench-warfare’, and, in particular, ‘that at Ypres in western

10 I draw here on pages 48–49 of Murphy’s A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in

English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). Lyndall
Gordon makes this remark in Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977),
19.
11 These poems can be found in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, 60, 90.
140  V. RAVINTHIRAN

Belgium, the scene of severe fighting in the war of 1914–18’.12 This

oblique reference to the First World War is the equivalent in this poem
of the teeth with their ‘talent for squad-drill’ in ‘Hysteria’. There is also
comparable phrasing in the second part of the poem, where the speaker
contemplates, after the engine ceases, a spider on the wall, and compares
its immemorial activity with the ephemeral faces of the passengers: ‘I
tried to assemble these nebulae into one pattern. Failing, I roused myself
to hear the machine recommence, and then the music, and the feet upon
the deck.’ This closing stoicism is common to both prose poems, as is
the attempt on the speaker’s behalf to assemble, pattern and control his
surroundings.
What this suggests is another, counterbalancing force, deeply influ-
encing of Eliot, which co-exists alongside the French prose poem as an
emulable structure. Eliot may have been personally nervous of emo-
tional display but, in ‘Hysteria’, we witness a more than individual uncer-
tainty—an unsureness, really, about the nature of prose as a literary
form. Eliot was too invested in prose as an instrument of rational inves-
tigation—and the catalyst for an authoritative subjectivity—to entirely
throw over its integrity for the sake of ‘the lyrical impulses of the soul,
the undulations of reverie’. One reason for this may have to do with a
longstanding idea of prose as the manifestation of a cogent individuality:
an announcement of the value of the person, rather than a denial and
a disintegration. To understand this, we must rescue from critical obliv-
ion that understanding of prose suggested by the phrase ‘prose rhythm’,
which Eliot uses in the New Statesman. This concept, most extensively
articulated by the Victorian-Edwardian critic George Saintsbury in his
History of English Prose Rhythm, is positive rather than negative. That is,
it refers not only to the absence of verse rhythm, but the presence of
something else; precisely that form of positive order which the speaker of
‘Hysteria’ aspires to, yet cannot achieve.13
What comes up against the disorienting vagariousness of the prose
poem in French—we see this happening, as we read Eliot’s poem—is his
sense of a wider, and saner (and less hysterical) prose culture. By this I
don’t refer simply to a notion of prose as straightforwardly truth-telling
and fact-oriented; what we find, or hope to, in newspapers, or scientific

12 Ibid.,90 (the poem) and 290 (Ricks’s note).

13 See,for example, Saintsbury on ‘‘pure prose highly rhythmed,’’ in A History of English
Prose Rhythm (London and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 344.
 8  T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY)  141

literature. Rather, what is held in suspension within the poem is an idea

of prose as a clarified demonstration (to others, and to itself) of the
rounded literary intelligence. A form, then, which isn’t ‘chillingly clini-
cal’, as Scofield has it, but which already includes both thought and feel-
ing in harmonious suspension, and which provides Eliot’s criticism with
its much-imitated but, in fact, truly inimitable combination of imper-
sonal assertiveness and individual style. Eliot was closely acquainted with
two individuals who, as inheritors of this view of prose, would even-
tually author monographs about it: Bonamy Dobrée, who published
Modern Prose Style in 1934, and Herbert Read, whose English Prose Style
appeared in 1946. As editor of The Criterion, Eliot worked closely with
both men and, indeed, that magazine became a bastion of rational yet
stylish prose. ‘Hysteria’ predates both these books, and his editorship,
but is tinctured by an understanding of that medium which all three
writers carry out of Victorian and Edwardian criticism into modern let-
ters. They were interested in how models of prose which bespoke, and
reinforced, a secure pre-modern understanding of the human personality
could be maintained in the twentieth century, with its more fragmented
conception of personhood.
Both Dobrée and Read’s books are confident that prose—and with
it a secure authorial personality, communicable to the understanding
reader—does exist as an intelligible form, the rules for which they articu-
late with gusto. Here, for example, is Dobrée:

The question of words, however, is largely a matter of the mind; and the
mind, we know, is only a part of the personality. But what seems to be out-
side the control of the writer, or rather what he forges deliberately without
knowing why he does so, or should we say for the simple reason that it
pleases him better that way, is the phrasing, the rhythm, the general har-
mony of sounds. It is by these things that we recognize the voice, and with
some writers it is quite unmistakable. I suggested earlier that you could not
confuse Mr. Shaw’s prose with Dean Inge’s. Why? Is it the words they use?
or the things they discuss? Let us see.14

What I wish to bring into contrast with ‘Hysteria’—a poem in which

the personalities of two people become riskily ‘involved’, and in which
one seeks to protect his individuality from utter absorption—is Dobrée’s

14 Bonamy Dobrée, Modern Prose Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 11.
142  V. RAVINTHIRAN

confidence that the prose-personalities of different writers can be clearly

distinguished. He begins with a modern knowingness about the rela-
tionship of the ‘mind’ to more unconscious sectors of the personality,
and touches on ‘what seems to be outside the control of the writer’. Yet,
an ‘or’ clause rather like Eliot’s smoothes out and reassuringly clarifies.
We are not talking, it turns out, of external events, but of secretive inner
motions which, really, the author does organically control, for a paradox-
ical clause suggests what ‘he forges deliberately without knowing why he
does so’; before another ‘or’ clause risks diffusing the meaning of the
sentence entirely. This abandonment of meaning is very different to
what happens in Eliot’s prose poem. It is, rather, a casualness as to sense,
and how it is made, which is designed to reinforce, with its spoken ease,
the very idea of the individual ‘voice’ it’s at pains to more concretely
­delineate. And here we see the idea of prose as an expression of person-
ality, a guarantor of individual difference; a form which may relax at any
moment into spoken drift without thereby worrying that it has failed to
communicate, or that it has revealed an incoherence amid the tentacular
roots of the modern self.
Read, whom Jason Harding describes as ‘Eliot’s ‘aide-de-camp’ in the
struggles and campaigns of inter-war London literary journalism—he
would become the Criterion’s most frequent book reviewer—is especially
willing to be prescriptive.15 He writes with a patrician briskness and sure-
ness concerning what prose is, whether creative or discursive. He tells
us that ‘the history of a word is entirely irrelevant in prose style: its face-
value in current usage is the only criterion’; asserting first that ‘as prose is
essentially the art of analytical description, it would seem that metaphor
is of no particular relevance to it’, he changes his mind, in a characteristic
expansion which seeks to include within prose some sense of the artis-
tic: ‘We may divide all metaphors into the illuminative and the decora-
tive … while both kinds are appropriate to poetry, only the illuminative
metaphor will be found appropriate in pure prose style.’ (‘Pure’, here, is
another way to widen the net.) And though he is willing to assert that
‘poetry alone is creative’, and the ‘art of prose is not creative, but con-
structive or logical’, his emphasis on rhythm brings into prose an open-
ness to affective display.16 Once again, as in Dobrée, contradictions are

15 Jason Hardin, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War

Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 109.

16 Herbert Read, English Prose Style (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1946), 10, 26, 28, 34.
 8  T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY)  143

bypassed by the charm of his own sparklingly spoken prose voice. One
has the feeling that when he seeks, yet again, to define prose through
exclusion of qualities which properly belong to speech or to verse, he
is telling us really about an individual personality he admires, and even
believes himself to manifest. Read described himself as, contrary to Eliot,
‘a romanticist in literature, an anarchist in politics, and an agnostic in
religion’; yet, according to his poetics of prose—and that is, no mat-
ter how he frames it, what this book puts forward—beauty and charm
develop out of scrupulousness and control and a sense of the appropri-
ate.17 Prose as the anarchist’s rational baseline: the medium by which
unconventional ideas can be clearly communicated, rather than bafflingly
embodied.
In Eliot’s poem, this ordering movement, however hapless in the face
of what has been hysterically jettisoned, is expressed by the waiter:

An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and
white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: ‘If the lady and
gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman
wish to take their tea in the garden …’

The waiter wishes to restore the appearance of civilisation; Eliot’s prose,

with an eye for the exact perception, looks to counteract the emotional
chaos it has evoked, and come in some way to resemble. The assonance
tying together elderly, trembling, spreading and checked—it terminates
in the repeated word gentleman—has a shaping urgency. It’s a way of
replacing what’s going on inside the speaker with reliable facts about the
real world. Focusing on the colour of the cloth and the table is how the
speaker would remain securely within the present moment.
The waiter’s spreading of the cloth prefigures, as a defensive action,
the speaker’s determination to resolve the matter, although the overlap
between his ‘trembling’ hands and the woman’s ‘shaking’ breasts sug-
gests a force which cannot be contained, which has already escaped into
the world, and proliferated:

17 Sewanee Review (January–March 1966), 46–47; cited by Harding in The Criterion:

Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks, 109.

144  V. RAVINTHIRAN

I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the
fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my
attention with careful subtlety to this end.

Although Scofield’s point stands, about the sexist disintegration of the

woman into her parts, we might subsume under ‘the fragments of the
afternoon’ not only her breasts and teeth, but also the coloured cloth
and table, and the waiter’s trembling hands. ‘These fragments I have
shored against my ruins’ is the more famous, more impressive, verse-line
from The Waste Land; yet, this prose poem can give voice to that deci-
sion, that safeguarding mentality, in a way unavailable to Eliot’s poetry—
at least before it begins to contain prose within it, to become loosely,
even flabbily discursive in the Four Quartets:

And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.18

‘In the general mess of imprecision of feeling’ is a line it was surely

painful for Eliot to write, given the mimetic hamfistedness of its clunky
double ‘of’; here, as in ‘Hysteria’, verse includes prose at the very
moment it alludes to messy feeling. Prose, or the prosaic register, is
assumed as a necessary counterweight, the impulse towards precision
which must accompany any such disorder, representing an attempt to
come to terms with that hysteria or shadow in all its reality, rather than
pushing it under the carpet. And, once again, ‘squads’—‘undisciplined’,
as soldiers may be, and with ‘shabby equipment’—brings into the verse a
historical dimension, a more than individual neurosis. The Four Quartets
were published altogether in 1943, and respond to the Second World
War, as ‘Hysteria’ responds to the First; they also express the final view of
literary form articulated in Eliot’s 1958 preface to a translation of Valéry:
‘I no longer believe that any distinction between prose and poetry is
meaningful.’19 Here, the need, announced by ‘Hysteria’, to both draw

18 Eliot,Collected Poems 1909–1962, 69, 190.

19 Paul Valéry The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1958), xvi.
 8  T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY)  145

and trouble boundaries—between people, between different kinds of

writing—has disappeared.
In ‘Hysteria’, the phrase which captures, right at the end of the poem,
something of the urbane prose culture which would manifest in the
Criterion—and whose reality Eliot wishes, along with Read and Dobrée,
to take as a given—is ‘careful subtlety’. This isn’t scientific detachment,
and we could, indeed, see it as a desperate, ironised stratagem—it isn’t
going to succeed; indeed, the very decision the speaker makes may reveal
him as contaminated by the hysteria he wishes to allay. ‘Careful subtlety’
is one word too many (the adjective may appear superfluous), which sug-
gests this reading. But we might also see Eliot as wanting not to straight-
forwardly mock but also painstakingly cherish, even defend, the subtle
engaged intelligence which would become characteristic of the Criterion.
I speak here of that savviness which connects the power of prose to
make sense of the world with its more subjective and stylish—yet relia-
ble—evocation of a cultural wholeness. This is a form resolutely unfrag-
mentary, and so unlike The Waste Land; Eliot remarks of the prose of
Lancelot Andrewes (it’s a subtle, now-counterintuitive perception) that
his ‘sermons are too well built to be readily quotable’; in contrasting that
author’s style with that of John Donne, he reveals his own ‘passion for
order in prose’.20
Although the disordered speaker of ‘Hysteria’ may at first glance
appear to be trying out an absurd telepathy—as if, withdrawing into
himself like a child when his parents argue, he could simply will the hor-
rible event to stop—we might see him as deciding, through conversa-
tion, to amend, talk out, to recognise his place in, and his responsibility
for, his partner’s mania. Isn’t this close to what the therapist does; is
it not, also, as a cure by words, how one kind of poet strongly intends
their work to affect the society in which they live? It’s how Eliot and
Dobrée and Read wrote, with a confidence that things could be made
sense of, that lacunae in argument could be healed with charm and spon-
taneity. This isn’t, perhaps, a desirable standard for academic scholarship,
but it’s a fact of interaction, and not necessarily an unwelcome one once
we accept that these qualities aren’t unreal or evasive as much as they
are simply human. Denis Donoghue writes sensitively of ‘the obstacles’
in Eliot’s ‘sensibility he had to surmount before he could acknowledge

20 “Lancelot Andrewes” (1926), Selected Essays, 341, 346.

146  V. RAVINTHIRAN

motives radically different to his own … The convinced recognition of

feelings different from his own and equal in privilege to his own was an
experience Eliot had to decide to submit to.’21 Without wishing to press
too crudely on what we know of Eliot’s life, and his marriage to Vivienne
Haigh-Wood, it does seem to me that this isn’t only a poem about fear-
ing women, and using them to characterise a modern uncertainty as to
the contents of the self. It’s also a poem deeply interested in the possibil-
ity of engaging with emotional excess, rather than simply pretending (the
poem is coloured by, analyses, this impulse, too) that the awful thing, the
crisis of relationship, hasn’t really occurred. Its form as a prose poem is
essential to the presentation of this double-mindedness; and the awkward
coming together of two ideas of prose—the French prose poem, and
an inherited sane discursiveness—makes for a unique moment in Eliot’s
body of work, one deeply informed by literary history as well as modern
investigations into madness, or, rather, the insanity of everyday life.

Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. “To Arsène Houssaye,” dedication of Le Spleen de Paris.
Paris Spleen, translated by Louise Varèse. New Directions: New York, 1970.
Dobrée, Bonamy. Modern Prose Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934.
Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2000.
Eliot, T.S. “The Borderline of Prose,” New Statesman 9 (May 19, 1917): 158.
———. The Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode. London:
Faber, 1975.
———. Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, edited by Christopher
Ricks. San Diego, New York, and London: Harvest, 1998.
———. Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1999.
———. Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber, 2002.
Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Harding, Jason. The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-
War Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Murphy, Marguerite. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from
Wilde to Ashbery. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Phillips, Adam. Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis.
London: Faber, 2000.

21 Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 2000), 50.

 8  T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY)  147

Read, Herbert. English Prose Style. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1946.
Saintsbury, George. A History of English Prose Rhythm. London and
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965.
Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
Scofield, Martin. T.S. Eliot: The Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988.
Valéry, Paul. The Art of Poetry. Translated by Denise Folliot. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1958.
 CHAPTER 9

A Weakening Syntax: How It Is with Samuel

Beckett’s Prose Poetry

Scott Annett

Comment c’est/How It Is (French 1961, English 1964) stands as one

of Samuel Beckett’s boldest formal experiments, pointing back to his
earliest work and, in particular, his poetry, which was written mostly
in English throughout the 1930s, and yet also anticipating many of
the innovations to come in his later prose texts, such as Compagnie/
Company (1980). Indeed, it is one of the oddities of Beckett’s biogra-
phy that the poetry of the 1930s gradually dried up to be replaced by
prose and drama. However, rather than attempting to chart the various
twists and turns of Beckett’s formal and linguistic experimentation, this
essay demonstrates through close readings the extent to which How It Is
might be better understood as a prose poem and, as a consequence, sug-
gests some of the ways in which Beckett’s work may have paved the way
for subsequent experimentation in that form.
Beckett’s associations with modernism, and the writing of James Joyce
in particular, coupled with his interests in French poetry, including his
translations of works by Paul Eluard, Arthur Rimbaud and Guillaume
Apollinaire, mean that from a literary historical perspective he is ideally

S. Annett (*) 
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 149

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_9
150  S. ANNETT

placed to explore this form.1 In fact, it is one of the contentions of this

essay that Beckett’s formal experimentation involved an intensified inter-
est in poetic prose; that is to say, prose that demands the kind of atten-
tiveness on the part of the reader normally associated with poetry, whilst
at the same time also interrogating such reading practice. Brian Clements
and Jamey Dunham have argued that the absence of line endings places
an unusual pressure on the prose poet, as ‘pace and rhythm must be built
entirely within the sentence itself and in the play among sentences’. They
continue:

It is incumbent upon the prose poet to find another way to generate ten-
sion within the poem – this substitution is frequently achieved via surrealis-
tic anti-logic, bizarre narrative, lushness of language, innovative structure,
or experiments with grammar and syntax.2

Adam Piette has already demonstrated the extent to which the sound of
prose, or its musicality, is essential to writers such as Mallarmé, Proust,
Joyce and Beckett, and this musicality is presumably what Clements
and Dunham mean when they refer to the ‘lushness of language’.3 In
this essay, I will attend specifically to Beckett’s ‘experiments with gram-
mar and syntax’, or, as he put it himself in conversation with Lawrence
Harvey in 1961 and 1962, the search for a ‘syntax of weakness’.4
Beckett’s weakening syntax allows for an interrogation of the responsi-
bilities of readers, the modes in which each individual reader approaches
a text, and the various ways in which poetic ambiguity might become a
space in which a reader can play.
In How It Is, the narrator wonders ‘when shall I say weak enough
later some day weak as me a voice of my own’,5 and he later laments
the fact that his words are not ‘weak enough most of them not quite

1 Samuel Beckett, The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, ed. Sean Lawlor and John

Pilling (London: Faber & Faber, 2012).

2 Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham, eds., An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Danbury,

CT: Firewheel Editions, 2009), 4.

3 See Adam Piette, Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, ed. Proust, Joyce

and Beckett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

4 Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press), 247.

5 Beckett, How It Is, ed. Édouard Magessa O’Reilly (London: Faber, 2009), 28.
 9  A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S …  151

enough’.6 The narrator’s voice is a ‘faint shrill cry’ while the text has
eliminated all ‘figures’ or characters, leaving only the occasional ‘image’7:
‘then foretaste of this semi-castrate mutter I must bear how long no
more figures there’s another little difference compared to what precedes
not the slightest figure’.8 In Beckett’s earlier Textes pour rien/Texts for
Nothing (French 1955, English 1967), the narrator wonders if ‘perhaps
it will end on a castrato scream’,9 but in How It Is even the act of cas-
tration is incomplete: there is no ‘castrato scream’, only a ‘semi-castrate
mutter’. Throughout the text, we are reminded that there is ‘something
wrong there’, a text ‘ill-spoken ill-heard’, an ‘invocation’ or ‘prayer’
made without hope, a murmured complaint remembered and uttered in
darkness.10 This text attempts to capture the weakened words of the bel-
ligerent and sullen, those angry at their existence; it is a series of belittled
expulsions, mutterings spat into darkness, or as the narrator puts it, ‘little
blurts midget grammar’.11
In searching for a ‘syntax of weakness’, Beckett incorporated key ele-
ments of his earlier practice whilst moving beyond the ‘attitude of dis-
integration’ in which he had written both the Trilogy and (despite his
best efforts) the Texts for Nothing.12 H. Porter Abbott argues that, in the
opening pages of How It Is, Beckett returns to, and dismisses, an ‘old
problem’:

On the very first page the narrator hesitates briefly over an old problem:
‘me if it’s me no question impossible too weak no importance.’ He brings
it up only once again a few pages later: ‘if it’s me no question too weak
no interest’ [21–22]. What he does in these remarks is dispose of the very

6 Beckett, How It Is, 111.

7 There are ‘a few images on and off in the mud,’ Beckett, How It Is, 4.
8 Ibid., 43.

9 Beckett, “Texts for Nothing,” in The Complete Short Prose, ed. S. E. Gontarksi (Grove

Press: New York, 1995), 153.

10 Beckett, How It Is, 117.

11 Ibid., 66.

12 Israel Shenker, “Moody Man of Letters, A Portrait of Samuel Beckett, Author of the

Puzzling ‘Waiting for Godot’,” New York Times, 6 May 1956. Reprinted in Samuel Beckett:
The Critical Heritage by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London, Henley and
Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 148.
152  S. ANNETT

question that constantly tormented the Unnamable. The problem of who

he really is may be impossible to solve, but it is also irrelevant.13

In the Trilogy, Beckett had explored first person utterance by exper-

imenting with the language of paradox and failure. However, this
experiment only took him so far, as the text itself acknowledges: at the
conclusion of The Unnamable, the reader is brought to the ‘threshold
of my story, before the door that opens on my story’.14 In How It Is, the
point of interest has shifted away from identity (‘me if it’s me’) to the
creation of a text capable of accommodating multiple voices, of a text
‘weak’ enough to admit the reader. In the opening lines of How It Is,
we read: ‘voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me when the
panting stops tell me again finish tell me invocation’.15 If this text is a
quotation (‘how it was I quote’), then does each repetition of this phrase
(‘I quote’) signal a quotation within the quotation, or is it a reminder
that the narrator is repeating another voice, a voice that is heard (‘I say
them as I hear them’) and then ‘murmur[ed]’ in the ‘mud’? How can
the voice that is heard be ‘without’ and ‘then in me’? In what way is this
text an ‘invocation’?16
At the beginning of the third part, the narrator describes the text:
‘this voice these voices no knowing not meaning a choir no no only one
but quaqua meaning on all sides megaphones possibly technique some-
thing wrong there’. He goes on to state:

wrong for never twice the same unless time vast tracts aged out of recogni-
tion no for often fresher stronger after than before unless sickness sorrow
they sometimes pass one feels better less wretched after than before unless
recordings on ebonite or suchlike a whole life generations on ebonite one
can imagine it nothing to prevent one mix it all up change the natural
order play about with that.17

13 Porter Abbott, “Farewell to Incompetence: Beckett’s ‘How It Is’ and ‘Imagination

Dead Imagine’.” Contemporary Literature 11.1 (Winter 1970), 39.

14 Beckett, The Unnamable in Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable (London:

Calder, 1994, repr. 1997), 418.

15 Beckett, How It Is, 3.

16 See also Sophie Ratcliffe, On Sympathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 192.

17 Beckett, How It Is, 93.

 9  A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S …  153

Any single reading of the text is ‘wrong’ because the text is ‘never twice
the same unless time vast’. Each reading is different, ‘often fresher
stronger after than before’, ‘unless’ there are ‘recordings on ebonite’.
Furthermore, in contrast to readings of Beckett’s writing that announce
the ‘disintegration of language’,18 which is to say, Beckett’s linguistic
impoverishment, there is ‘meaning on all sides’. In this text, a multitude
of voices (‘a choir’) is packed into a single voice (‘no only one’).
The narrator even explains that there is ‘nothing to prevent one mix
it all up change the natural order play about with that’, before going on
to suggest that the presence of ‘meaning on all sides’ is ‘possibly tech-
nique’. Indeed, the effect of this ‘technique’, this gradual weakening, is
to loosen the connections between words, allowing them to point both
backwards and forwards. Édouard Magessa O’Reilly provides a simple
example from the beginning of the text:

Lacking the familiar guides of punctuation, capitalization and prepositional

linkage, we must slow our reading and look at each word. We might at first
read ‘voice once without quaqua’ but then we encounter ‘voice once with-
out’ repeated again and realise that it is a unit, that without is an adverb,
the opposite of within (‘in me’) and that quaqua belongs to the next unit,
‘quaqua on all sides’, which repeats and clarifies ‘voice once without’. The
rhythm of the text begins to insinuate itself.19

This is the ‘tension’ seen by Clements and Dunham to be central to the

creation of prose poetry.20 In ‘Text 8’ of the Texts for Nothing the narra-
tor explains that ‘it’s for ever the same murmur, flowing unbroken, like
a single endless word and therefore meaningless, for it’s the end gives
the meaning to words’.21 As with so much of the Texts for Nothing, and
as we’re told in the final lines of ‘Text 13’, this statement is ‘true, yes,
it’s true, it’s true and it’s not true’.22 Endings provide meaning by both
demarcating sense units and guiding tonal inflection. However, in How

18 The phrase belongs to Martin Esslin but is reproduced by Stanley Cavel in his essay

“Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame.” See Esslin, The Theatre of
the Absurd, 86 and Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game,” 115.
19 See Magessa O’Reilly, introduction, How It Is, xi.

20 Clements and Dunham, Introduction to the Prose Poem, 4.

21 Beckett, Texts for Nothing, 131.

22 Ibid., 154.
154  S. ANNETT

It Is Beckett’s writing becomes full of false endings, rhythmical pulls

that can be heard first one way, then another, as the prose pushes on and
(dis-)qualifies what went before.
The ‘tension’ in How It Is, explored but not quite expressed in the
Texts for Nothing, lies in its ability to be single (‘always the same old
thing the same old things’), and yet at the same time ‘never twice the
same’, because on each reading and re-reading, upon each new voic-
ing, the text changes. In 1961, Maurice Blanchot published a review of
Comment c’est in which he demonstrated alertness to the multiplicity of
the French text. Leslie Hill explains that, while the ‘majority of critics at
the time saw it as their task to make Beckett’s novel more accessible to
its readership’, Blanchot allowed Comment c’est to shape ‘his own critical
commentary’:

[Blanchot] responded instead to the unruly, disconcerting strangeness of

Beckett’s writing by transforming his own critical commentary into a hes-
itant and inconclusive dialogue between two (or more) unnamed interloc-
utors, each grappling with the problematic challenge of passing judgment
on Beckett’s fragmentary, fragmented, disorientating, and sometimes
shocking text. […] Criticism, with its abiding appeal to values and truth,
had no purchase on the ‘little blurts [petits paquets]’ and ‘midget gram-
mar [grammaire d’oiseau]’ of Comment c’est, which refuse to obey its
normative assumptions. Faced with Beckett’s ‘novel’ […] criticism was
disabled, forced to carry on, if at all, only by enduring through its own
interruption.23

Blanchot’s review is remarkable in its willingness to listen to the mul-

titude of voices muttering within Beckett’s weakened syntax and it
takes seriously the implications for reading practice: shifting from dis-
cussion of ‘La critique’, one voice asks, ‘Même une note de lecture?’,
to which another voice replies, ‘Même la plus courte note.’ Blanchot’s
voices acknowledge that ‘La critique n’est pas modeste’, ‘Le critique
est un homme de pouvoir’,24 and in the give and take of conversation,
they avoid judging ‘la valeur’ of the text.25 Indeed, ‘le dernier mot’ in

23 Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (London

and New York: Continuum, 2012), 18–19.

24 Blanchot, “Les paroles doivent cheminer longtemps,” in L’Entretien infini, ed.

Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 478–79.

25 Ibid., 481.
 9  A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S …  155

Blanchot’s text is a question,26 and a good one: ‘Mais quelle est cette
voix?’27 In describing Blanchot’s review as a ‘critical commentary’,
Hill does it a disservice; Blanchot responds to the questions posed by
Beckett’s text, to the fact that in How It Is each reader, and so each
critic, must admit her or his own partialness, must admit the fact that
hesitations, second thoughts, interruptions and misunderstandings are a
necessary part of engaging with the complexities and nuances of liter-
ary works: they are as much a part of reading (and so criticism) as any
‘appeal’ to ‘values’ and ‘truth’.
For some, this is a cause for concern. Sophie Ratcliffe observes that
critics ‘cannot but mention the apparent absence of those elocutionary,
signalling pauses that usually aid one’s sense of a vocal intonation in a
text, thus bringing How It Is ‘perilously close to the unreadable’. In con-
trast, for Ratcliffe, the ‘lack of tonal instruction could be seen, in part, as
a demonstration of the text’s ‘openness’. You can say it as you hear it’.28
Yet, this is where Ratcliffe urges caution: she argues that ‘the assurance
that such textual openness is, in some sense, ‘contemporary’ or progres-
sive, belongs to the Beckettian theorists, and not to the author himself’,
before insisting that there is, ‘after all, a sign of the author’s hand, “claw-
ing for the take” (HII, 54) in the textual breaks of How It Is’.29 Ratcliffe
is right. This is a text that has clearly been constructed, indeed one of
the concerns voiced within the text is the degree to which it has been
constructed; that is to say, the degree to which the author’s hand can be
seen (or felt). In other words, and to a large extent because of its hybrid
status as prose poetry, How It Is draws attention to both the multiplic-
ity of the interpretive act and the unavoidable compromises involved in
interpreting a text, which is itself profoundly creative; while the ‘natural
order’ can be ‘play[ed] with’, such playfulness takes place within param-
eters; language generates meaning within the contours of the ‘weakened’
syntax.
As such, far from simply being the product of imaginative ‘Beckettian
theorists’, the text’s openness is an attempt to balance the strong
presence of the author. Later in her study, Ratcliffe emphasises the

26 Ibid.,478.
27 Ibid.,486.
28 Ratcliffe, On Sympathy, 201. Ratcliffe is quoting A. Alvarez, Beckett, London:

Woburn, 1973, 189.

29 Ibid., 202.
156  S. ANNETT

importance of The Tempest to How It Is30—in particular, noticing the

narrator’s resemblance to Caliban (‘I am not a monster’).31 At the con-
clusion of How It Is, the narrator claims that the author is looking for
a way to disappear, much as Prospero promises to ‘abjure’ his ‘rough
magic’ at the beginning of Act 5 of Shakespeare’s play32:

has he not staring him in the face I quote on a solution more simple by
far and by far more radical a formulation that would eliminate him com-
pletely and so admit him to that peace at least while rendering me in the
same breath sole responsible for this unqualifiable murmur of which conse-
quently here the last scraps at last very last.33

At least (but not at last) the author has access to ‘peace’, while the text
remains ‘sole responsible for this unqualifiable murmur’. The author’s
role is to recall ‘the essential features’,34 to provide a shape within which
the ‘anonymous voice’ of the ‘self-styled’ reader must work: ‘and this
anonymous voice self-styled quaqua the voice of us all that was without
on all sides then in us when the panting stops bits and scraps barely audi-
ble certainly distorted there it is at last the voice of him who before lis-
tening to us murmur what we are tells us what we are as best he can’.35
The pseudo-scholarly term ‘quaqua’ turns against the lofty description of
the voice as ‘self-styled’; a ‘distorted […] murmur’ is the best a voice can
do when reaching towards silence.
However, and as Ratcliffe notes, this is not to say, then, that we are
in a post-modernist realm of ‘untethered utterances’.36 The text is open
insofar as it incorporates gaps and ambiguities in which each individual
reader can inflect her voice, which is always an impermanent voice amidst
the multitude of other possible voices. At the same time, there is a shape
within which each reading should be placed, or, as it is put in the Texts
for Nothing, there is a ‘pseudo-sculpture’.37 This text is not, to turn to a

30 Ibid., 197–200.
31 Beckett, How It Is, 55.
32 Shakespeare, The Tempest, v. i. 50–57, 1091.

33 Beckett, How It Is, 126.

34 Ibid., 120.

35 Ibid., 123.

36 Ratcliffe, On Sympathy, 192.

37 Beckett, Texts for Nothing, 133.

 9  A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S …  157

phrase used by Beckett to describe Endgame, ‘just play’, or at least it is

not only ‘play’.38 There is ‘toil’ as well (‘so much toil and play’), both on
the part of the author and expected of the reader.39 As O’Reilly argues,
the ‘rhythm of the text begins to insinuate itself’ and this rhythm punc-
tuates the text.40 There are variations, but these variations are restricted
by the text, by the fact that the text is ‘always the same old thing the
same old things’.41 The author’s fingerprints are everywhere and yet the
textual space remains inclusive of other voices, voices that are held (ten-
tatively) within the narrative voice. As such, and as Ratcliffe writes, there
is ‘not a clear separation between the voice that speaks and the voice it
speaks of, nor a spiral of fictional groundlessness, but something between
the two’. Beckett’s text is remarkable because it ‘marks the delicate pas-
sage from one voice to another’,42 the points of possible contact between
self-enclosed subjects as the weakened syntax stretches to accommodate
the presences of unknown ‘apparitions’.43
Critics determined to read Beckett’s fiction on their own terms have
missed the implications of such delicacy. Philip Toynbee condemns ‘the
excrement, the blasphemy, the reiterated indifferentism’, and the ‘emo-
tional aridity’ of the writing.44 In addition to this, Martha Nussbaum has
been emphatic in her condemnation of Beckett for ‘unwriting’ stories,
which she sees as a ‘criticism of emotion’.45 In Nussbaum’s view, sto-
ries ‘contain […] and teach forms of feeling, forms of life’.46 However,
in making this argument Nussbaum ignores the tendency of readers to
lurch into fantasies at the expense of attending carefully to the poetic

38 SB, quoted and translated by Jean-Michel Rabaté. Rabaté, “Philosophizing with

Beckett: Adorno and Badiou,” in A Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. S. E. Gontarski, 102.
39 Beckett, Texts for Nothing, 103–104.

40 Magessa O’Reilly, introduction, How It Is, xi.

41 Beckett, How It Is, 93.

42 Ratcliffe, On Sympathy, 194.

43 Beckett, How It Is, 125.

44 Quoted in Ratcliffe, On Sympathy, 185. Toynbee, “Going Nowhere,” Observer, 18

December 1958, reprinted in L. Butler, ed., Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett (Aldershot:
Scolar, 1993), 26.
45 Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1990), 308.

46 Ibid., 287.
158  S. ANNETT

nuance of a given text. Within How It Is, any such understanding of pity
is dismissed:

he the first to have pity happily to no effect honour of the family to elim-
inate the little stool regrettable innovation discarded and the idea of the
three books set aside where’s the greatness it is there.47

Pity is a ‘little stool’, a ‘regrettable innovation’ to be ‘discarded’, along

with the ‘idea’ of the ‘three books’. In the next fragment, the narrator
mentions ‘the yellow book’ and argues that it is ‘not the voice of here
here all self to be abandoned say nothing when nothing’.48 How It Is
evinces scepticism with regard to the ability of texts to elicit emotion or
rely upon crude ethical pronouncements, referring to ‘lies about mistle-
toe forgiveness’49; Beckett’s prose poem performs the improvisational
points of contact between participants, transforming each reader into an
author and insisting that, in reading, we acknowledge the range of possi-
bilities presented by the text.
Having said this, in rejecting such ‘lies’, How It Is ignores neither the
affectiveness of fictions nor the ‘traces of emotion’ and ‘signs of distress’
present ‘within attempts at recall’.50 Early in the text, the narrator is
confronted ‘suddenly’ with ‘another image’. Turning once more to the
‘I’/‘me’ grammatical form (‘I see me’, ‘I look to me’), the narrator sees
himself ‘about sixteen’, taking a walk with his ‘darling’:

suddenly we are eating sandwiches alternate bites I mine she hers and
exchanging endearments my sweet girl I bite she swallows my sweet boy
she bites I swallow we don’t yet coo with our bills full.

The voice of the text turns its attention to the object (‘me’) and explores
the ‘image’. The ‘figure’ in the text overlaps with the voice of the text (‘I
look to me’) but there is also an uncomfortable gap. The ‘image’ is vivid
but finally wanes (‘we are again dwindling’) and the ‘scene is shut of us’.
On the next page, the narrator observes that ‘way off on the right in the
mud the hand opens and closes that helps me it’s going let it go I realise

47 Beckett, How It Is, 71.

48 Ibid., 72.
49 Ibid., 73.

50 Piette, Remembering and the Sound of Words, 218.

 9  A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S …  159

I’m still smiling there’s no sense in that now been none for a long time
now’.51 This moment articulates both our capacity to be moved by our
imaginations as well as the senselessness of such emotional responses.
Early in the text, the narrator admits: ‘that’s the speech I’ve been
given part one before Pim question do I use it freely it’s not said or I
don’t hear it’s one or the other all I hear is that a witness I’d need a
witness’.52 The narrator is unsure if he can use ‘the speech’ freely, ‘it’s
not said or I don’t hear’, and in order to clarify this confusion a ‘wit-
ness’ is required. In this moment there is, as Ratcliffe argues, a ‘clear
sense’ in which the narrator ‘puts the burden of “understanding”, and
of witnessing, upon his readers, and the nuances of their perceptions’.53
Moreover, this act of ‘witnessing’, as in the Texts for Nothing, entails a
kind of human contact. The narrator is able to ‘fall asleep within human-
ity again just barely’, and, for what it’s worth, such human contact also
brings happiness: ‘I’m often happy god knows but never more than at
this instant never so oh I know happiness unhappiness I know I know
but there’s no harm mentioning it.’54
As the phrase ‘happiness unhappiness’ implies, the text is aware that
human contact is not without its dangers. Beckett insists upon the com-
plexity of such contact and refrains from providing a moral solution or,
as he puts it in conversation with Charles Juliet, ‘les valeurs morales’.55
The narrator makes Pim speak, makes him ‘sing’, by inflicting pain upon
him. The narrator compassionately (if also twistedly) imagines Pim think-
ing as he suffers the blows (‘he must have said to himself’) and he sug-
gests that Pim perhaps guesses that the violence is not ‘aimless’: ‘it is not
aimless that is evident this creature is too intelligent to demand what is
beyond my powers’. Pim might then wonder what he could do to satisfy
his torturer and having considered both singing and weeping (‘to sing
to weep’), he may even suspect that his torturer wants him to ‘think’.
However, this idea is quickly rejected as ‘it comes again’, causing ‘howls’
which are only silenced by a ‘thump on skull’.56

51 Beckett, How It Is, 23–25.

52 Ibid., 13.
53 Ratcliffe, On Sympathy, 215.

54 Beckett, How It Is, 36–37.

55 Charles Juliet, Rencontres avec Samuel Beckett (Paris: P. O. L. éditeur, 1999), 35–36.

56 Beckett, How It Is, 58.

160  S. ANNETT

The howls mentioned in the text are both a response to suffering and
an expression of mirth: ‘I have all the suffering of all the ages I don’t
give a curse for it and howls of laughter in every cell the tins rattle like
castanets.’ In part one of the text, following a summary of the work
before him, the narrator appeals to Thalia, the Ancient Greek muse who
presided over comedy: ‘Thalia for pity’s sake a leaf of thine ivy.’57 This
exasperated request articulates the degree to which the text struggles
to be a comedy. The narrator notes: ‘all that happens to be hanging on
by the fingernails to one’s species that of those who laugh too soon’.58
Human identity is defined in Aristotelian terms as the ability to laugh.
However, the quality of that laughter and its relation to suffering com-
plicates the definition. In Aristotle, the definition of human beings as
laughing animals is given in the context of tickling: ‘And mankind alone
is ticklish both because of the thinness of his skin and because he is the
only one of the animals that laughs.’59 In How It Is, the connection to
‘one’s species’ is perhaps fragile (and so requires hanging onto) but the
narrator is also clinging quite literally to Pim with his ‘fingernails’, and
he is most certainly not tickling Pim’s thin skin. In this text, howls of
laughter and howls of suffering are never easy to distinguish because
there are ‘a thousand and one last shifts with emotions laughter even and
tears to match soon dried in a word hanging on’.60
At the conclusion of How It Is, there is a ‘final negation’ which reads
as follows61: ‘and all this business of above yes light yes skies yes a little
blue yes a little white yes the earth turning yes bright and less bright yes
little scenes yes all balls yes the women yes the dog yes the prayers yes
the homes yes all balls yes’.62 There is, as we have seen, a controlling
presence within the text, a ‘solitary imagination’ conscious of its own
presence.63 And yet, while this ‘ancient voice’ shapes the text, it also
attempts to weaken itself, to ‘abjure’ the ‘rough magic’ of the authorial

57 Ibid., 31.
58 Ibid., 20.
59 Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, trans. James Lennox (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

2001), 69.
60 Beckett, How It Is, 81.

61 Smith, “Bearing Witness,” in How It Is, 352.

62 Beckett, How It Is, 127.

63 Ibid., 3.
 9  A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S …  161

role.64 As we have seen, the narrator claims that there is a ‘solution’ ‘star-
ing’ the author ‘in the face’: ‘a formulation that would eliminate him
completely and so admit him to that peace at least while rendering me in
the same breath sole responsible for this unqualifiable murmur’.65 In the
final moments of The Tempest, Prospero releases Ariel (‘Be free, and fare
thou well’) before stepping forward and pleading for his own freedom:

Since I have my dukedom got

And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.66

In addressing the audience, Prospero merges the fictional and the real,
admitting the audience into the play and placing responsibility for the
happy ending in their appreciative (and prayerful) hands. Yet, even in
his plea for freedom there is a reluctance to abandon the magical world
that he has created. He admits, ‘Now I want / Spirits to enforce, art
to enchant’ and his verb (‘want’) suggests both a lack and a desire, so
that even in the final moments of the play the pull of ‘art’ can be felt.67
The ‘solution’ may be ‘staring [Prospero] in the face’, but that does not
mean that he is happy about it, or that the abjuration is quite as final, or
complete, as he suggests.
In How It Is, we are encouraged to acknowledge the presence of other
voices alongside our own as the author shapes the text to make room
for multiple interpretations; the reader is plural both across persons
(your reading will differ from mine), and the re-readings of an individ-
ual (when I read the text again, I do so as a different person, noticing
different inflections within the ‘pseudo-sculpture’). However, in the final
pages of the text there are repeated acknowledgements that the author’s
attempt to relinquish control fails, perhaps that it must fail. We learn
that ‘all these words I repeat I quote on victims tormentors confidences
repeat quote I and the others all these words too strong I say it again

64 Shakespeare, The Tempest, v. i. 50–51, 1091.

65 Beckett, How It Is, 126.
66 Shakespeare, The Tempest, Epilogue, 6–10, 1094.

67 Ibid., lines 14–15. Both usages are substantiated by the OED and were active when

Shakespeare was writing.

162  S. ANNETT

as I hear it again murmur it again to the mud’.68 At the close, the nar-
rator wonders if ‘it is still possible at this late hour to conceive of other
worlds’:

one perhaps there is one perhaps somewhere merciful enough to shelter

such frolics where no one ever abandons anyone and no one ever waits for
anyone and never two bodies touch.69

In 1961, Beckett told Tom Driver that ‘the key word of my work
is “perhaps”’.70 The narrator of How It Is wonders if there is another
world, another ‘perhaps’, ‘somewhere merciful enough to shelter such
frolics’. A world of texts and readers, a world in which texts are ‘weak
enough’ to admit readers and in which readers are discerning enough to
attend closely to the details of the texts, to bring them to life, while at
the same time being strong enough, finally, to turn away (‘all balls’).

Works Cited
Abbott, H. P. “Farewell to Incompetence: Beckett’s ‘How It Is’ and ‘Imagine
Dead Imagine’.” Contemporary Literature 11.1 (Winter, 1970).
Alvarez, A. Beckett. London: Woburn, 1973.
Aristotle. On the Parts of Animals. Translated by James Lennox. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2001.
Beckett, Samuel. Nouvelles et textes pour Rien. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,
1958.
———. Comment c’est. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1961.
———. Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable. London: Calder, 1994,
repr. 1997; Grove Press, 1995.
———. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989. Edited by S. E.
Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1995.
———. Company. London: Calder, 1996, repr. 2003.
———. How It Is. Edited by Magessa O’Reilly. London: Faber, 2009.
———. The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett. Edited by Sean Lawlor and John
Pilling. London: Faber and Faber, 2012.

68 Beckett.
How It Is, 104.
69 Ibid.,
125.
70 Tom Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum 4.3 (Summer,

1961). Reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London, Henley and Boston:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, repr. 1979), 220.
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Blanchot, Maurice. L’espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955.

———. “Les paroles doivent cheminer longtemps.” In L’Entretien infini, edited
by Maurice Blanchot, 478–479. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and
Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Clements, Brian, and Jamey Dunham, eds. An Introduction to the Prose Poem.
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Driver, Tom. “Beckett by the Madeleine.” Columbia University Forum 4.3
(Summer, 1961). Reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage.
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Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. London: Methuen, 2001.
Harvey, Lawrence E. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970.
Hill, Leslie. Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch.
London and New York: Continuum, 2012.
Juliet, Charles. “Meeting Beckett.” Tri-Quarterly 77. Translated by S. Chamier.
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———. Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde. Translated by
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———. Rencontres avec Bram Van Velde. Paris: P. O. L. éditeur, 1998.
———. Rencontres avec Samuel Beckett. Paris: P. O. L. éditeur, 1999.
Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Piette, Adam. Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce,
Beckett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Rabaté, Jean Michel. “Philosophizing with Beckett: Adorno and Badiou.” In A
Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Stanley Gontarski. Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010.
Ratcliffe, Sophie. On Sympathy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Shakespeare, William. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. Walton-on-
Thames: Nelson, 1998.
Shenker, Israel. “Moody Man of Letters: A Portrait of Samuel Beckett, Author of
the Puzzling Waiting for Godot.” New York Times, May 6, 1956. Reprinted
in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. Edited by Lawrence Graver and
Raymond Federman. London, Henley and Boston: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1979.
Smith, Russell. “Bearing Witness in How It Is.” In Borderless Beckett/Beckett sans
frontières: Tokyo 2006, edited by Minako Okamuro. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2008.
Toynbee, Polly. “Going Nowhere.” Observer, December 18, 1958. Reprinted in
Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, edited by L. Butler. Aldershot: Scolar, 1993.
 PART III

By Name or by Nature?
 CHAPTER 10

Questioning the Prose Poem: Thoughts

on Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns

Alan Wall

What Is a Prose Poem?

Arguably, it cannot be book-length, though enough of them put
together can make up a book. The prose concerned should show the
same fastidiousness in regard to lexis, and exhibit the same vigour and
coherence of rhythm, as verse. So, what then is the difference between a
prose poem and verse? Lineation must be foremost. Verse insists that the
writer choose the line endings, not the typographer or the word process-
ing software. Prose insists only on its punctuation marks, not its lineation
(which can be the single most effective form of verse punctuation, when
properly deployed). On that basis, is the following a prose poem?

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and
meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers
of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog

Some parts of this essay have previously appeared in Agenda. Permission granted
by the author.

A. Wall (*) 
University of Chester, Chester, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 167

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_10
168  A. WALL

on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into
the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in
the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and
small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners,
wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the
afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly
pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck.
Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky
of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hang-
ing in the misty clouds.

This has all the qualities adumbrated above, but it is not a prose poem.
Why not? Because it is embedded in a larger fictional narrative—that
goes by the name of Bleak House. And that precludes its admission into
this nomenclature. So, let us try another piece of prose, once again char-
acterised by its startling pertinacity:

Alas, poore Yoricke, I knew him Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most
excellent fancie, hee hath borne me on his backe a thousand times, and
now how abhorred my imagination is: my gorge rises at it. Heere hung
those lyppes that I haue kist I know not how oft, where be your gibes
now? your gamboles, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were
wont to set the table on a roare, not one now to mocke your own grin-
ning, quite chopfalne. Now get you to my Ladies Chamber, & tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this fauour she must come, make her laugh at
that.

Is this a prose poem? It’s hard to think of anything called a prose poem
that has ever been better. And yet this cannot be so called either, because
the next line uttered is: ‘Prethee Horatio tell me one thing.’ In other
words, we are part of a dialogue here, and that dialogue is, in its turn,
part of a play. In both our chosen instances, it is the continuity sur-
rounding the enislanded period of prose that classifies it as something
other than a prose poem. But, then, what about this?

O Lord God, who has wounded us for our sins, and consumed us for our
transgressions, by thy late heavy and dreadful visitation; and now, in the
midst of judgment, remembering mercy, hast redeemed our souls from the
jaws of death: We offer unto thy fatherly goodness ourselves, our souls and
 10  QUESTIONING THE PROSE POEM: THOUGHTS ON GEOFFREY HILL’S …  169

bodies, which thou hast delivered, to be a living sacrifice unto thee, always
praising and magnifying thy mercies in the midst of thy Church.

This is as sinewy as prose usually gets, and is compact enough to adum-

brate the plague that has recently been laying waste the land in its dread-
ful vastation, but this is never referred to as a prose poem either, and
that is because this is a prayer, one of those contained in The Book of
Common Prayer. Much of that book consists of verses from the Bible,
a book which in its turn has been compiled of texts, sometimes in verse
and sometimes in prose, a hybrid formula also employed by David Jones
in many of his writings, which move in and out of verse at will, the prose
often being as tight in its sequential concentrations as the verse. But
those sections have never been referred to as prose poems.
The prose poem, it would seem, needs to be on the short side; should
be discrete enough in each section (when it is forming a sequence) not
to be accused of being part of a coherent and unified narrative; and argu-
ably cannot be subsumed into another genre, like drama, epistle, liturgy
or prayer, though it has been compared to them all. It should be admit-
ted that, in its English usage anyway, it has always been a phrase that elic-
its from some the most profound suspicion:

French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and pon-
derous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has accordingly resorted
to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more
tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.1

Thus did Peter Medawar lambast Teilhard de Chardin on the publication

of The Phenomenon of Man, a book which managed to convince a lot of
people that it had reconciled the findings of Darwin with the discoveries
of modern physics and the teachings of the Church. It evidently did not
convince Medawar, whose articulate acidities can at times be as amusing
as those of Evelyn Waugh.
The first edition of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, published in
1924, comprised a series of prose poems.2 Small chunks of vivid prose

1 Qtd. in Peter and Jean Medawar, Aristotle to Zoos (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1985).
2 Reprinted in Ernest Hemingway, The Collected Stories, ed. James Fenton (Everyman’s

Library, 1995).
170  A. WALL

alternated with one another. The unity they achieved was not narrative,
but thematic, and the theme explored was the parallelism between the
daily goings-on inside a bull ring, and what happened during the Great
War and immediately after. There is little continuity of place or person-
nel; instead, the joint settings revolve around one another, in rhythmic
and thematic counterpoint. When Hemingway brought out subsequent
editions of In Our Time in 1925 and 1930, the pieces ceased to be prose
poems; he had enlarged them into short stories, and they possess the
structured narrative necessary to that genre.
Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter3 is a work of consid-
erable fragmentation and luminous intensity. That does not make it a
sequence of prose poems, however, because the whole text has the char-
acteristic continuity of a novel. We saw how the opening of Bleak House
displayed all the requisite qualities of a prose poem, but it isn’t one, pre-
cisely because it is embedded in the narrative whole of a novel. James
Joyce, between 1900 and 1903, wrote what he took to calling epipha-
nies, but which appear indistinguishable from prose poems. They were
to turn out to be, in Richard Ellmann’s word, ‘preparatory’.4 They pro-
vided compressed moments of illumination for longer texts, starting with
Stephen Hero. In being so subsumed in a larger literary structure, they
lose the stand-alone quality we ascribe to a prose poem.
So, what then is a prose poem? Whatever else poetry is, said T.S.
Eliot, it is a form of punctuation. Which is to say, as we have seen, that
lineation is chosen by the poet not the typographer, or the automated
typographic device. Once you say ‘this is prose’, you abandon that right
to dictate lineation. But if it is to be a prose poem, then presumably we
are indicating prose which has the intensity of poetry, but whose lines go
to the end of the page, beyond the control of the writer. We are probably
also indicating the lack of any overall narrative, or that there should be at
most a series of glancing allusions to such an overarching structure. So,
we might have a series of lyric meditations, of fragmentary intensity, as
we get in Rimbaud’s Illuminations.
If the term never sat easily in English, that might be because the
French spirit Medawar lamented could cheerfully (or more likely, mourn-
fully) produce sequences of poèmes en prose, but the whole procedure

3 Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter (London: Bloomsbury, 1976).

4 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 85.
 10  QUESTIONING THE PROSE POEM: THOUGHTS ON GEOFFREY HILL’S …  171

surely reeks a little of belles-lettres—indeed, of the exquisite nail-pared

fashionings of the feuilletonistes. And you cannot get much more French
than that, even if you are writing the exquisite pieces in Vienna at the
beginning of the twentieth century.
There is another problem. The term appears to involve a disparage-
ment of prose itself. If this is prose poetry, then the other sort is presum-
ably straightforward, common-or-garden unpoetic prose: prosaic prose,
in fact. The utile stuff. Language as instrument, keeping its extra-utile
foregroundings to itself. The medium at its most functional, with no
fancy airs and graces, words so rigorously ordered that we are able to
use them for purposes of communication, rather than musing. And this
raises a problem. The foundation of the modern movement in literature,
certainly as represented and expounded by Ezra Pound, with the figure
of Ford Madox Ford right behind him, was based on this simple premise:
poetry should be at least as well-written as prose. The prose of Flaubert
did not have anything to learn from the verse of Swinburne. If anything,
the process should have been the other way about. That great devotee
of Flaubert, James Joyce, fashioned his epiphanies in his early years, and
they certainly resemble the prose poem, but by the time of his mature
work the poetry and the prose have simply become one. In this respect,
you cannot point to any moment in Ulysses or Finnegans Wake and say,
‘Now here is a self-contained prose poem worth isolating from the rest’.
*
The individual units of Mercian Hymns have been referred to as prose
poems, but not—noticeably—by Hill himself. When, in his interview
with John Haffenden, Hill is asked why he chose to write the sequence
in the form of prose poems, he replies: ‘They’re versets of rhythmical
prose.’ He then refers to each of them as ‘a pitched and tuned chant’.5
Now a verset, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘a little or
short verse, esp. one of the Bible or similar book; a short piece of verse’.
So, it has more than a little in common with a pericope, one of those
individual sections of the Bible which can be examined (or even memo-
rised) separately, but which needs to be understood in the context from
which it is being lifted. By insisting on the indentations after the first
line of each paragraph, Mercian Hymns breaks one of the conditions for
the ‘prose poem’ mentioned above. This, it would seem, is prose which
5 Geoffrey Hill, interview in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation, ed. John Haffenden

(London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 93.

172  A. WALL

insists upon a type of lineation, and so situates itself midway between

verse and prose. Robert Alter in his book The Art of Biblical Poetry
says that the verset in its Hebrew form, even in verse, is never exacting
either in terms of prosody or form. It is flexible. And it was flexibility, of
course, which attracted Baudelaire to the idea of a ‘poetic prose’.
French verse, particularly when employing Alexandrines and rhyme,
might seem a little constraining, more so than many English equivalents,
but Hill can be knotted enough as a versifier, and the ‘freer form’ might
have represented an attraction.
These are chants then, hymns in fact, and their subject is Mercia, the
region reigned over by Offa in the eighth century. The name derives
from the Mierce, or boundary folk, and towards the southern bound-
ary of Mercia, as it once was, Geoffrey Hill was born and raised. What
he proceeds to do in these versets is to mingle the present-day West
Midlands with the Mercia of Offa’s time. If there is a precedent for this,
it is probably David Jones in poems such as ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’
and ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’. Hill has often referred to Jones’s
work, and must have been aware of these poems (large portions of which
are, in fact, written in prose) before writing Mercian Hymns. The latter
book was published in 1971. ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’ had first been
published in The Listener in 1958 and ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’
in Art and Literature in 1964 but, more to the point, ‘The Dream of
Private Clitus’, along with several other of Jones’ Roman/British poems,
was published in a special edition of Agenda in 1967. Agenda, under
the editorship of William Cookson, embraced three exemplary poets:
Ezra Pound, David Jones and Geoffrey Hill. What Hill seems to have
learned from these texts of Jones is how to superimpose one historical
regime and time upon another inside a single text. In the case of Jones,
the experience was that of the Roman Empire laid over the experience
of Britain and of British imperialism, seeing in the soldiers of the British
armed forces garrisoned in the British Mandate in Palestine an echo of
Roman soldiers who had been garrisoned there long before. Using his
knowledge of soldiery and of how soldiers talk to one another (he had
been an infantryman in the Great War), he blended the two times and
places, often using Roman vocabulary, still in its Latin form, but placing
it authentically in the mouths of British squaddies. Hill seems to have
seen his opportunity here, and so he inserted into Offa’s Mercia the
Midlands of his youth, and even the recently built M5 motorway.
 10  QUESTIONING THE PROSE POEM: THOUGHTS ON GEOFFREY HILL’S …  173

The challenge for the writer here is to hold history and modernity
together on the same page. Hill opens up a dialogue between past and
present, finding locutions that can place the digging of Offa’s Dyke
and the building of the M5 on the same plane of speech. But Hill is
not essentially an urban poet; neither is he a poet of the crowd as was
Baudelaire (or, for that matter, Eliot). Hill has his Parisian city scene in
The Mystery of the Charity of Charley Péguy (though the crowds there are
seen significantly from behind the bookshop window) and in ‘Churchill’s
Funeral’, but it is always solitary voices, solitary images, which lift off his
pages. When a crowd appears in ‘Funeral Music’, it is a crowd of corpses.
When a crowd of soldiers appears in The Mystery, it is as the celluloid of a
cinematic news-reel.
Hill is a poet of underlying continuities, though such continuities are
not (as at least one of his more imperceptive critics has implied) always of
a comforting nature. But where Baudelaire finds novelty and fresh col-
locations in the macadam boulevards, Hill sees in Offa’s kingdom and
the contemporary Midlands parallels worthy of contemplation. The tech-
nique has an undeniable cunning, in that it discovers within contempo-
rary usage, grandeurs of language (sometimes arch) and lays them beside
the abbreviated demotic, thus:

Then he dismissed you, and the rest of us followed,

sheepish next-of-kin, to the place without the
walls: spoil-heaps of chrysanths dead in their
plastic macs, eldorado of washstand-marble.6

The place without the walls cannot but make one think of Golgotha,
but also of Gehenna, that dumping ground for burning which starts off
our Judaeo-Christian notion of Hell as a human spoil-heap. One can
ponder then the etymology of chrysanthemum, and how the Croesus-
gold inside that word gestures to the navigator’s gold inside eldorado.
Both are a long way from the gold of Yeats’ Byzantium. What is daring,
though, is the employment of the demotic ‘chrysanths’ shrouded in the
comedy routine of ‘plastic macs’.
Without diminishing the otherness that is history, Hill manages in the
Hymns to convey something of the menacing intimacy of power:

6 Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns, in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2013), 91.

174  A. WALL

It was there that he drew upon grievances from the

people; attended to signatures and retributions;
forgave the death-howls of his rival. And there
he exchanged gifts with the Muse of History.
What should a man make of remorse, that it might
profit his soul? Tell me. Tell everything to
Mother, darling, and God bless.7

Offa, as far as we can tell, was not a particularly pleasant piece of work.
He had Aethelberht, who was an East Anglian king, beheaded while he
was a guest at the Mercian court. Some said that this had been done
at his wife’s bidding. So, nearly eight hundred years after Salomé and
Herod, the subscription beneath any image of regally sanctioned decap-
itation still appeared to be: Cherchez la femme. Either despite this,
or because of it, Offa travelled under some grand titles: rex Anglorum
or even, at times, rex totius Anglorum patriae. We have this informa-
tion from later documents, nearly all of which appear to be remarkably
unreliable.
Hill is well-aware of all this, and he presents us with one who is on
presentation-terms with Clio, who forgives the dying, who is burdened
with biblical injunctions, but still needs tucking up at night, for this little
monster is undoubtedly a monster of history—not merely his own, but
ours too. If there is a burden to the Hymns, it is this joint complicity in
history’s celebrations and cruelties. The associative contingencies of the
language we inherit is what we sometimes call tradition.
Hill’s vision is also utterly unlike Baudelaire’s, in that his imagina-
tion is lit constantly by rural and village landscape, and their inevitable
ruin.8 When vehicles appear in this landscape they often take the form of
animals:

7 Hill,Mercian Hymns, 92.

8 In fact, in Baudelaire’s various sets of prose poems, the intense Parisian sections, those
meditations on crowds and boulevards, on speed and ruin and the annihilation of the
old city’s identity, represent a relatively small part of the whole, though arguably by far
the most compelling. It was the mixing of human genres that Haussmann’s boulevards
involved, which made the poet reach for a new form capable of capturing this promiscuous
and inclusive hubbub. The non-stanzaic form allows him an immediacy of response to this
mingling of levels of perception, and different types of activity.
 10  QUESTIONING THE PROSE POEM: THOUGHTS ON GEOFFREY HILL’S …  175

Cohorts of charabancs fanfared Offa’s province and

his concern, negotiating the by-ways from Teme
to Trent. Their windshields dripped butterflies.
Stranded on hilltops they signalled with plumes
of steam. Twilight menaced the land. The young
women wept and surrendered.9

Vehicular transport could not be more beast-like:

His maroon GT chanted then overtook. He lavished on

the high valleys its haleine.10

The inanimate becomes animate and articulate: ‘The car radio, glim-
mering, received broken utterance from the horizon of storms’. As with
Hill’s ‘Funeral Music’, even topography becomes organic and heraldic:
‘With England crouched beastwise beneath it all.’ This deliberate confu-
sion of forms and hierarchies is given its ancestry within the text:

Itinerant through numerous domains, of his lord’s

retinue, to Compostela. Then home for a lifetime
amid West Mercia this master-mason as I envisage
him, intent to pester upon tympanum and chancel-
arch his moody testament, confusing warrior with
lion, dragon-coils, tendrils of the stony vine.11

So, if the latest Grand Tourer, accelerating away and burning its fossil
fuels, is confused with a horse, there is a precedent for this. This also
is part of the tradition. Hill presents us with a Mercia where the pres-
ent and the past are intertwined, sometimes snugly, sometimes not. The
lexis flickers back and forth between the arch and the demotic. Here are
motorways and caffs, as well as the required usages of ancilla and servus.
Offa’s province is now one through which charabancs motor, to deliver
their cohorts of travellers to appropriate roadside hostelries. One can
almost hear the wireless crackling in the corner of an evening, delivering

9 Hill,Mercian Hymns, 103.

10 Ibid., 99.
11 Ibid., 106.
176  A. WALL

the Home Service and the cricket results. And so Hill became belatedly
the scop of Offa’s court and, simultaneously, the contemporary gleeman
of the M5.
At the beginning of Une Saison en Enfer, Rimbaud tries to trace his
genealogy—racial, cultural, spiritual. He works out what he inherits from
his ancestors the Gauls—his pale blue eyes, his narrow brain, his disas-
trous clothing. He comes to the conclusion that mendacity and laziness
are his main inheritances. But inherit he does, all the same. The land of
our birth, he says—as does Hill—is always a region of preoccupation.
Others have been there before us. They are the providers of our lan-
guage and our history. We are obliged to work our way through what
they have left us.

Works Cited
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House, Project Gutenberg eBook. https://archive.org/
stream/bleakhouse01023gut/1023.txt.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Collected Stories. Edited by James Fenton. London:
Everyman’s Library, 1995.
Hill, Geoffrey, and Mercian Hymns. Interviewed. In Viewpoints: Poets in
Conversation, edited by John Haffenden. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
———. In Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, edited by Kenneth Haynes.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Medawar, Peter, and Jean Medawar. Aristotle to Zoos. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1985.
Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter. London: Bloomsbury, 1976.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, 1602. Act V, Scene 1.
 CHAPTER 11

‘I Went Disguised in It’: Re-evaluating

Seamus Heaney’s Stations

Andy Brown

In 1970–1971, while teaching at the Berkeley campus in California,

Seamus Heaney began work on Stations, a series of prose poems
that would be published in Belfast in 1975 as a limited edition chap-
book.1 Heaney prefaced these prose poems as ‘attempts to touch what
Wordsworth calls “spots of time,” moments at the very edge of con-
sciousness’ (3).
In this chapter, I argue with the existing, often misguidedly nega-
tive, criticism of Stations and redress Heaney’s use of the form, follow-
ing post-Romantic theories of the prose poem—Nikki Santilli and ‘the
Romantic Fragment’—and postmodern theories—Stephen Fredman’s
‘generative sentence’.2 Much existing criticism, I contend, misreads

1 By1975, some of the prose poems had already appeared in The Irish Times.
2 Fredman identifies the “generative sentence” of the prose poem as a hermeneutics of
emergence: the sentence emerges in relation to its constituent parts perhaps analogously
to someone testing their way out on to the ice. It is “an investigative, exploratory poetry”
(Fredman, viii), often choosing “to investigate how things arise from the matrix of lan-
guage” itself (viii).

A. Brown (*) 
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 177

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_11
178  A. BROWN

Stations by not taking the work on its own technical terms from within
the prose poetic tradition. By considering Stations in light of the
‘Anecdotal Tradition’ of prose poetry (Clements and Dunham), I argue
that Stations works in dialogue with the postmodern American poetics
that Heaney had encountered in California3 and his engagement with
post-Romanticism,4 just as his use of ‘cloistered’ imagery speaks back to
the prose poem’s tradition of ‘frames and borders’ (Santilli). Stations is
also seen to lay the ground for prose poems by a subsequent generation
of British poets going beyond the narrower frame offered by lineated
verse.
*
Prefacing Stations, Heaney wrote of ‘The excitement of coming for
the first time to a place I have always known completely’, showing a
delight in the form that remained throughout his career.5 Yet, he also
noted a number of ‘blocks’, including the appearance of Geoffrey Hill’s
Mercian Hymns, which had ‘headed off’ the writing and the fact that he
was ‘not confident enough’ to pursue the writing on his return from the
USA (3).
Luke Kennard’s unpublished Ph.D. thesis offers insightful r­eadings
of Stations, exploring their self-mythologising tendencies in relation
to Mercian Hymns and to David Jones’s In Parenthesis.6 In the pub-
lished criticism, Blake Morrison acknowledges that Stations restrains
‘the more dangerously recondite and indulgent elements in the poet’s
self-mythologising’ and shows ‘his childhood territory to be intensely

3 Henry Hart describes Heaney’s time in Berkeley (1970–1971) and discusses how the

poet “tried to incorporate the expansive forms of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, William
Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, and Gary Snyder”, and that Heaney was “following the
experiments of the Americans” (5). In correspondence with Luke Kennard, Heaney com-
mented, “Early in my Berkeley days, I bought an anthology of prose poems; I may also
have been influenced by soft-edge pastoral stuff in early Robert Bly” (Kennard, 46).
4 Heaney defines his prose poems to Kennard as “conceived in a late nineteenth-century

symbolist blur”, referring to them as “writings” after David Jones’ use of the term in In
Parenthesis.
5 Heaney publishing 7 of the Stations sequence in his Selected Poems 1966–1987 and a

further 2 in Opened Ground, as well as including prose poetry in North, also published in
1975 and District and Circle (2006).
6 See Luke Kennard, The Expanse: Self-Consciousness and the Transatlantic Prose

Poem, PhD thesis, Exeter University, 2009, https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/

handle/10036/49653.
 11  ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS  179

political’ (50), while Neil Corcoran deems Stations to be ‘of great

interest’ in the work’s approach to sectarianism (252).7 Part of the
­‘interest’ comes through the sequence’s personal voice—it is what Anne
Stevenson calls ‘a series of psycho-autobiographical sketches’ (47), with
evocative local and historical detail. The images are also often striking and
symbolic, in the tradition of symbolist prose poetry. The title ­ suggests
Christ’s ‘Stations of the Cross’ and the choice of twenty-one prose poems
signals them as a coming-of-age number. As Elmer Andrews suggests,
Stations is important because it was ‘Heaney’s first extended use of the
Catholic notion of “stations” to provide a structure for a sequence’ (6).
And yet the critical response remains, broadly, equivocal, echoing Heaney’s
own uncertainty.8 Blake Morrison suggests that this may be why ‘Heaney
chose to publish Stations in modest pamphlet form and to include nothing
from it when assembling his Selected Poems’ (51).9
Much of the negative criticism concerns the linguistic register of
the prose poems. Patrick Crotty reads Stations as ‘lush and some-
what over-fretful prose meditations’ (194), describing Heaney’s ‘diffi-
culty in reconciling the heavy texture of these pieces’ as ‘embarrassing’
(202). Thomas Foster criticises Stations as ‘rarely compelling’ (47) and
Morrison calls them pale in comparison to the poet’s celebrated quat-
rains, or Hill’s Mercian Hymns (51). Others focus on Heaney’s ‘re-­
cycling’ lines from Stations for later verses, concluding that the prose
poems must, therefore, be lesser—mere notes towards later verses.10
Morrison, for example, discusses the re-working ‘to better effect’ of
phrases from the prose poems in North and Field Work (48–49), while
Corcoran, Foster and Crotty all criticise this recycling as signs of their
juvenile status.
And yet, Crotty also discusses how Heaney heavily reworked many of
his verse poems for the New & Selected Poems. Why, therefore, rewriting
the prose poems should signify their weakness is very unclear. The formal

7 Further interest in this sectarian dimension can be found in O’Donoghue (xvi).

8 The final prose poem, “Incertus”, embodies this very “uncertainty”, as Helen Vendler
has noted, “his first poems were published under the pseudonym ‘Incertus’,” 27.
9 There are, in fact, 7 prose poems from Stations included in the New and Selected Poems

1966–1987, including “Incertus”.

10 “Cloistered” (Stations), for example, contains the phrase “his welted brogues unex-

pectedly secular under the soutane”, a phrase that re-appears almost verbatim 10 years later
in the verse poem “Station Island: III”.
180  A. BROWN

prejudice is extended in Foster’s critique, calling Stations ‘mere occa-

sions for nostalgia [or] explanations for the poet’s development’ (97).
Elsewhere in his analysis, Foster also implies that prose poetry is per se a
‘mere novelty’ in Heaney’s hands: ‘One would seem to need more than
mere novelty to recommend a form as exotic as the prose poem […]
yet they also fail to work very convincingly as prose poems – they are
often interesting but rarely compelling’ (47), echoing the commonplace
British prejudice against prose poetry as a form11; a prejudice which,
as we shall see in conclusion, Stations has played an important role in
overturning.
All this is not to argue that Stations is not without its faults or, indeed,
that some parts might have later resurfaced in verse poems. Morrison
fairly notes how ‘Heaney himself has acknowledged the justice of the
criticism that these poems aren’t realised or thrown free, that they are
private family memories’ (50). Yes, some of the heraldic language is rem-
iniscent of Mercian Hymns (see Morrison and Corcoran). Yes, some of
the language is at times overblown—‘I was champion of the examination
halls, scalding with lust inside my daunting visor’; or, ‘I have wandered
far from that ring-giver and would not renegue on this migrant solitude’
(‘The Wanderer’ 19). And, yes, as Kennard notes, ‘when [the past] is
recreated through mock-heroism and self-aggrandisement (tongue-
in-cheek or otherwise) the reader will likely attribute pomposity and
pretence’ (49). Yet, these deficiencies strike me more as the faults of a
developing writer—one sees such overwriting in much verse, after all—
and not as deficiencies because they are prose poems per se.
Furthermore, to criticise the prose poem for ‘heraldic’ language
misses a key linguistic point about the tradition. In both ‘The Sabbath-
breakers’ and ‘Kernes’, for example, heraldic language is counterpointed
with a questioning of authority—the killjoy ‘roundheaded’ elders of the
former poem; the coarse Protestantism of the latter:

Dixon balanced upright on the bicycle, a saddled declamatory king

of the castle.
‘I could beat every fucking papish in the school!’ (‘The Sabbath-
breakers’, p. 14)

11 In Such Rare Citings, when examining the minority status of the prose poem in

Britain, Santilli suggests that “subscribing to the cult of the prose poem introduces a dia-
lectic of orthodox/unorthodox with a political and/or aesthetic choice that most have so
far refused to take in the manner of form” (Santilli, 24).
 11  ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS  181

In this piece, the young boy’s Raleigh bicycle opens up the sectarian
element: ‘‘No surrender! Up King Billy every time!’, the young Dixon
shouts, pledging his historic allegiance to the Dutch Prince William
of Orange, Protestant victor of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne over the
Catholic English King James II (14). The heraldry is used to heighten
the problems of sectarianism. When Heaney writes ‘miles downstream
from the battle’ (in ‘July’, p. 15), he conjures ‘skeins of blood still lazing
in the channel,’ collapsing historical time from the Boyne to the present
day. And when he writes of ‘halls in flames, hearts in cinders, the benches
filled and emptied, the circles of companions called and broken’ (‘The
Wanderer’, p. 19) in a manner almost akin to Beowulf, or Wanderer,
it is because of his literary calling to find a language that is ‘confident’
enough to ‘pursue its direction’ in the questioning of denominational
conflict in Ireland (‘Preface’, p. 3).
To criticise the ‘heraldic’ diction per se is to miss the point. In ‘Patrick
and Oisin’, we read: ‘Aside from their tenebrous conversation, I sat
learning my catechism with its woodcut mysteries and polysyllabic runs,
its “clandestine solemnizations”, its “morose delectation and concupis-
cence” […] the hard stones of “calumny and detraction”’ (10). Heaney’s
questioning of language is integral to his whole project.12 The prose
poem ends: ‘The phrases that had sapped my concentration atrophied,
incised tablets mossed and camouflaged by parasites and creeping green-
ery’ (10). Not only does this image circle back to an earlier image in
the prose poem—the neighbours’ tongues characterised by ‘a back-biting
undergrowth mantling the hard stones’ of their speech—but the ‘incised
tablets’ of the Latinate and the ‘greenery’ of vernacular Irish are brought
into proximity, so that Heaney can test out his developing allegiances.
In some senses, he wishes to find and return to ‘the root of their kindly
tongues’ (‘Cauled’, p. 4), just as in his verse poems, such as ‘North’,
he desires to ‘lie down /in the word hoard’. The heraldic language is
entirely appropriate to both form and content.
The prose poem, with its roots in ancient religious texts, in later
Romantic fragments and, later still, symbolist figuration, has always been
heightened in tone, in ways that verse poetry simply is not.13 One must

12 Again, see “Incertus” (24), which throws doubt on the matter by questioning the

poet’s own use of a Latinate pseudonym in his early poems.

13 A cursory glance at the originary, symbolist works of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, for

example, should settle the matter.

182  A. BROWN

criticise prose poetry from within its own traditions and forms, lest one
criticise prose poems for not being verse. This is, in fact, the fault of the
most critical analysis of Stations—Anne Stevenson’s ‘The Sacred Sense
of the Sensitive Self’. In this essay, Stevenson argues that Stations fails
to do ‘the work of poems’ despite their ‘skill in language’ (50), erring
on ‘sentimentality’ (51) and being ‘rosy with held-back tears’ (51). For
Stevenson, they exhibit ‘carefully but artificially chosen language’ and are
more like ‘self-conscious entries in a diary’, leaving the reader ‘wanting
either more autobiography, or more art, or perhaps less art and more
context, more “reality”’ (50). Stevenson’s judgements are remarkably
subjective—why ‘reality,’ as a quality, should be the mark of the success
of a prose poem rather than ‘artifice’ is unclear. And why should a prose
poem be expected to do the same ‘work’ as verse? Stevenson almost
entirely fails to grasp the very nature of the form. Like Foster, she simply
betrays a personal preference for lineated verse.
In criticising Stations as ‘fragments,’ Stevenson also misses the signifi-
cance of the ‘Romantic fragment’ (Santilli) to the tradition. ‘When we are
permitted only tiny, exquisite, pre-chosen fragments of memory, as if in
a peepshow’, Stevenson writes, ‘we experience frustration’ (50). But the
frustration (Stevenson’s own) is born not so much of ‘not enough reality’
in Heaney’s prose poems (in fact, they abound in the real) but, rather,
from misunderstanding the very nature of the form: ‘What is felicitous
in the poems of North’, Stevenson writes, ‘becomes suspect in the more
artificial mode of Stations. Perhaps prose-poetry always exhibits this weak-
ness’ (51). Prose poetry here becomes a ‘suspect’ form once again, exhib-
iting ‘weakness’, because of some inherent quality.14 Stevenson’s essay
ends on the reassuring note that ‘It is good to know that he is translating
Dante’ (51)—proper poetry, no less!—that will lead him out of ‘the self-
bog’ of his sentimental, self-admiring and ‘suspect’ prose poetry.
In order to move on from such misjudged readings, I want first to
establish the relationship of Stations to the tradition of the ‘anecdotal
prose poem’.15 The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics
14 The “suspect” nature of the prose poem might be traced back to fin de siècle deca-

dence, notably the trials of Oscar Wilde already referenced in this volume.
15 The word “anecdote” (in Greek, ἀνέκδοτον, “unpublished”, “not given out”) comes

from Procopius of Caesarea, the biographer of Emperor Justinian I, whose work Ἀνέκδοτα
(Anekdota, variously translated as Unpublished Memoirs or Secret History), narrated short
incidents in the private life of the Byzantine court. Novalis defined the anecdote as an “his-
torical molecule or epigram”.
 11  ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS  183

includes the ‘anecdotal’ in its description of the ‘extraordinary range of

perception and expression’ in the tradition, while in Geoffrey Godbert’s
anthology, Freedom to Breathe, several examples can be found of such
anecdotal ‘spots of time’, including Walt Whitman’s prose fragment ‘The
White House by Moonlight’, James Agee’s A Death in the Family and
the prose poems of two other notable Irish writers—John Synge’s The
Arran Islands and James Joyce’s Epiphanies, with which, one assumes,
Heaney may have been quite familiar if not, at least, aware of. In An
Introduction to the Prose Poem, Clements and Dunham extend this
account of the anecdotal tradition and give a definition in the sense
intended by Procopius: short, illustrative tales, often in sequence and
often involving accounts of real or invented incidents or characters, but
presented as though emanating from an historical specificity. Anecdotal
prose poems often reveal truths that go beyond the circumstances of the
tale and strike the reader in an instant of revelation, or epiphany (Joyce).
These characteristics ‘may help to explain the strong biographical ele-
ment in anecdote’ (9) or, in Heaney’s case, the autobiographical.16
The second important context for re-evaluating Stations on its own
terms as fragments, or ‘spots of time’, is that of ‘the Romantic Fragment’
(Santilli). Stevenson does at least acknowledge that ‘Stations is as clear
a declaration as we have of Heaney’s dilemma as a post-Romantic,
post-Freudian poet confronted by an impersonal, probably insoluble,
national crisis’ (47) and she discusses Stations in light of Wordsworth’s
influence and ‘the public pressure […] to do something about a public
situation’ (48). But rather than Stevenson’s ‘psycho-autobiographi-
cal sketches’, Heaney’s use of the Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’ places
Stations in the tradition described by Santilli—linked to the German
Romantic critical fragment. Santilli argues that ‘the contracted sphere of
the fragment was to provide the conditions for its [the prose poem’s]
appearance’ (31). In Santilli’s terms, the Romantic fragment provides:

the ideological basis for the prose poem form: its concern with the nature
of truth; a desire to represent totality as the only possible approximation to

16 Many of the examples cited by Clements and Dunham show this “tendency towards

the autobiographical/historical account” (9), including works by Kenneth Koch, Pablo

Neruda, Carolyn Forché, and James Wright.
184  A. BROWN

this idea and the fragmentary way in which this is achieved; the principles
guiding the parameters of the form and the absence of the work itself are
all common properties of both type of composition (39).

For Santilli, the prose poem ‘situates itself ontologically at the intersection
of symbol and allegory, which it effects by appropriating the metonymic
ground’ (42). It is through the metonymic development of an object, say,
in an ‘object poem,’17 that the prose poet parallels the relationship of the
prose poem as fragment to its absent whole: ‘Just as the single figure is
logically related to its elliptical whole, so the prose poem projects a text of
which it is an attributive (rather than imitative) part’ (41).
In a prose poem, then, the lack of context on the page (a decon-
textualised ‘spot of time’) sends readers off in search of it. Readers are
‘denied passivity’ and are obliged ‘instead to participate in the lawlessly
expansive creation process in order to arrive at a point of interpretation’.
Santilli argues that this has resulted in a ‘shift in roles: the writer writes
the work, but the reader writes the text by taking control of context’
(101). In other words, the anecdotes of Stations are metonymic frag-
ments through which readers go off in search of the absent whole. The
very fragmentary nature for which Stevenson criticises Stations is, in fact,
one of their main supporting features.
That Stevenson wants Heaney to provide that context/reality, instead
of searching for it herself, belies the same misunderstanding displayed
in Morrison’s account: ‘It withholds circumstantial information about
“where” and “when”’ (50), which, far from being a reason to criticise
the poems as prose, is one of the very reasons to celebrate them as prose
poems in the tradition of the Romantic fragment itself. What these nega-
tive criticisms of Stations actually highlight is the wider-spread prejudice
against reading ‘poetry’ in sentences—perhaps because of a hitherto rel-
ative invisibility of prose poetry amongst high-profile British poets, the
general reader still expects poetry to be lineated in verse. Stations, there-
fore, plays a significant role in redressing this, encouraging readers to
read differently by addressing the sentence instead of the line. It also, I
shall conclude, encouraged a subsequent generation of poets to be ‘con-
fident enough’ (‘Preface’, p. 3) to pursue the form for themselves.

17 For example, Francis Ponge and Gertrude Stein.

 11  ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS  185

I have written elsewhere of the kinds of rhetorical techniques that

feature frequently in prose poetry,18 while Santilli has comprehensively
discussed ‘Biblical techniques’: ‘parallelism’ (the same thing in differ-
ent words), ‘furtherance’ (‘fractional advance’), ‘trailing’ (anadiplo-
sis19), ‘leaping’ (see Bly) and ‘regression’ (advance through negation, or
absence). Santilli discusses the incremental repetitions and variations of
‘furtherance’, for example, as ‘extension in any direction’ (159); a form
of extensive parallelism that inches the sentence forward to ‘the absent
context’. Such a generative technique ‘suggests the ground is being com-
prehensively covered’ (154), without the need for the full descriptions of
realist prose. A simple example from Stations comes in ‘Hedge-school,’
in which we encounter the image: ‘Primroses grew in a damp single
bunch out of the bank, imploding pallors, star plasm, nebula of May’ (6),
where the tricolon of ‘pallors-plasm-nebula’ emphasises the rhetorical
furtherance: ‘imploding’ suggests ‘star’ which itself is contained in ‘neb-
ula’. We move logically from flowers to universe in one simple phrase, or
image cluster.
My third and final context for re-evaluating Stations comes from Poets’
Prose: Stephen Fredman’s notion of the ‘generative sentence’. Briefly,
Fredman describes the ‘generative sentence’ as one in which ‘grammar
leads the writing through a succession of ideas, resisting the gravita-
tional pull of the ‘complete thought’’ (55). In simple terms, prose poetic
grammar tests its own way, inching the sentence forwards in an emer-
gent fashion. The sentence finds its own way. Such a description echoes
Santilli’s discussion of ‘furtherance’ and invokes the ‘absent context’ of
the Romantic fragment—the ‘spot of time’ in tension with ‘the complete
thought’. As Santilli describes it, ‘As soon as expression begins it frag-
ments the whole that it represents by the exclusivity involved in naming
and ordering, or repetition and furtherance’ (160). To these rhetorical

18 See Andy Brown, “The Emergent Prose Poem,” in A Companion to Poetic Genre,

ed. Erik Martiny (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 318–29, for a discussion of the tech-
niques of “furtherance” in John Burnside’s “Suburbs”, “trailing” in Carolyn Forché’s “The
Colonel”, “leaping”: in Robert Bly’s prose poems and “regression” in Samuel Beckett and
others.
19 Anadiplosis: the repetition of the last word in one sentence, clause, or phrase near the

beginning of the next.

186  A. BROWN

strategies, Fredman adds other anti-closure techniques, such as the

digressive narrative of Thoreau’s ‘Walking’, or the restless uncertainty of
John Ashbery’s Three Poems.
To what degree, then, do Heaney’s Stations exhibit such techniques?
How do their fragmentary ‘spots of time’ resist closure? In what ways
do they inch forwards in a ‘generative’ way to the absent context?
How do they make use of parallelism, furtherance, trailing, leaping and
regression?
The first prose poem, ‘Cauled’ begins in a fragmented ‘spot of
time’, with the phrase: ‘They thought he was lost’ (4), placing the
reader straight into a larger story. Who are ‘they’ and ‘he’? Where has
he disappeared to? This uncertainty is followed by the phrase: ‘For years
they talked about it until he found himself at the root of their kindly
tongues’, extending the narrative outside the immediate timeframe into
a later one. The piece ends ‘They had found him at the first onset of sob-
bing’—a moment of epiphany, no doubt, but one which resists explana-
tion. A similar device is also found in ‘Hedge-school’ (6), dropping the
reader straight into a larger story, without the need for the full character-
isation of narrative prose: ‘Their skirts brushed away over the headrig.’
Again, the reader is invited into ask questions.
A clear example of furtherance can be seen in ‘Sweet William’, which
develops a cluster of images in its first stanza: ‘In the gloomy damp of
an old garden with its gooseberry bushes, strawberry plants and shot
leeks, their blooms infused themselves into the eye like blood in snow, as
if the clumped growth had been spattered with grapeshot and bled from
underneath’ (11). The qualifier ‘shot’ for leeks (bolted, overgrown),
furthers to ‘blood in the snow’ and ‘grapeshot,’ with the ‘fruitiness’ of
that last word also trailing back through ‘strawberry’ and ‘gooseberry’.
The images of death and violence in this first stanza pay dividends in the
second, which leaps to the language of military action: ‘Sweet William:
the words had the silky lift of a banner on the wind, where that king
with the crinkling feminine black curls reached after the unsheathed
flare of his sword—and that was heraldry I could not assent to’ (11). In
these phrases, Heaney again evokes William of Orange at the Battle of
the Boyne, using associative resonance to leap from flowers to the king
and a seminal moment in the struggle for Irish independence; ‘the very
flowers’ whose ‘aura could be and would be resisted’ (11). The rhetoric,
combined with the fragmentary historic detail, evokes the greater historic
narrative and resist closure. And, rather obviously, contra those earlier
 11  ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS  187

critics, the poet signals the questioning of heraldry and its language in
head-on terms.
‘Nesting-Ground’ establishes the theme of home-making that runs
through Stations. The first two stanzas ‘further’ the narrator’s fear of
death, counterpointing death with the birth of the sandmartins. The lan-
guage of threat and fear is balanced by protection, notably the military
language of ‘sentry’, which colours the sequence. Rhetorical anaphora
develops the poem in Fredman’s ‘generative’ way, with the structure ‘he
could imagine his arm going in… but because… he only gazed’ from
stanza one becoming, in stanza two, ‘he heard cheeping… but because…
he only listened’. This repetition inches the narrative forward and antic-
ipates the final stanza: ‘he thought of putting his ear to the ground’,
which the fragment leaves unanswered—what did he expect to hear
there?
In ‘England’s Difficulty’ we encounter Heaney as a northern Irish boy
living in southern Ireland, evacuated during the war—a ‘visitant’, just as
the migrating sandmartins are visitants in ‘Nesting Ground’.20 Such met-
onymic fragmentation ties Stations together. The narrator moves ‘like a
double agent among the big concepts’, echoing the repeated language
of war, with fragmented historical details about the German bomb-
ing of Belfast and the Haw-Haw broadcasts,21 transposing these onto
the Irish troubles. The diction is exact, with a little heightened lexis
(‘opaque security’, ‘fretted baize’, ‘domed valves’) although the common
images of ‘mowing machine’ and the boy being ‘conveyed through the
starlit yard to see the sky glowing over Anahorish’, balance this height-
ened lexis. Again, the full details are withheld, involving the reader in
the de-coding (a suitably ‘double agent’-like activity) of the historical
moment, to let the sentences inch towards their absent context through
parallelism and allusion.
‘Trial Runs’ (18) also develops the war imagery—a Protestant neigh-
bour returns from the war, with a gift for Heaney’s Catholic father.
The ‘WELCOME HOME’ message is painted on the wall above
‘REMEMBER 1690’, another reminder of the Battle of the Boyne. As

20 A trope that “Visitant” tackles head on.

21 Lord Haw-Haw was the soubriquet given to the Second World War broadcaster
William Joyce. His propaganda broadcasts for the Germans opened with “Germany calling,
Germany calling”, in an upper-class English accent, in an attempt to demoralise the Allied
forces and home population.
188  A. BROWN

in ‘England’s Difficulty’, the conflicts are paralleled. The returning man

is another ‘visitant’, bringing a chain of ‘big clicking rosary beads’ for his
neighbour. ‘I stole them for you, Paddy, off the pope’s dresser when his
back was turned’, the man jokes. The imagery makes a ‘leap’ in the rhet-
oric at the end, when the laughter becomes birds: ‘their laughter sailed
above my head, a hoarse clamour, two big nervous birds dipping and
lifting, making trial runs over a territory’. As Helen Vendler comments:
‘The two men will not be able to go farther into amiability than their
awkward joking; but the son hails it none the less as the marking out of
an intermediate territory’ (81). The fragmentary ‘spot of time’ not only
reminds us of the sectarian dimension, but leaps into a metaphor of hope
for the boy’s (and the poet’s) own territory.
We encounter a similar leap in ‘Branded’, in which the boy takes straw
to feed a horse in ‘the haggard’. The leap comes unannounced, mid-­
narrative: ‘As he lifts the straws towards the muzzle his small head hits
the ground like a pod splitting open to the faraway acreage of the sky.
// Now he is curled on the sofa, sucking, weeping’ (5). The action and
effect are shown, but the cause is withheld, resisting closure and creating
a space for the reader to fill. The final image of ‘the inflamed crescent
on his breast’ also creates space for the reader—the horse has kicked the
boy, in his inexperience, and ‘branded’ him with a crescent hoofmark.
Similarly, ‘Waterbabies’ (9) also dramatises a magical leap, beginning
with two boys ‘busy in the fetid corner we christened Botany Bay. You
pumped. I dammed’ (9). The wider context to this fragment is then
evoked through sound—‘a bomber warbled far beyond us, sometimes a
train ran through the fields’—with the leap provided in the image of a
kaleidoscope that the narrator dropped ‘in the puddle. Its bright prisms
that offered incomprehensible satisfactions were messed and silted:
instead of a marvellous lightship, I salvaged a dirty hulk.’ This ‘fouled
gift’ stands in symbolically for the childhood dreams that run through-
out the sequence, now tainted by sectarianism and violence.
A couple of examples of ‘regression’ (advance through negation)
achieve the opposite effect of all these ‘leaps’, yet remain engaged with
sectarianism. ‘Hedge-school’ presents the existential image ‘He stared
himself into an absence’ (6), whose negation creates presence-in-absence.
Here, the phrase ‘they retraced their steps’ provides regressive circular-
ity, but also furthers to the last line ‘he walked behind them, homesick,
going home’ (6). This literal regression ‘home’ and the previous use of
negation/absence, find echoes in ‘The Sabbath-breakers’. Here, a set of
 11  ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS  189

loudspeakers hangs ‘wired and pouting from the hedge like iron hon-
eysuckles’ (13). The speakers are set for a sports tournament: a group
of boys set out a field on a Saturday evening, for the following day’s
tournament. The narrative proceeds in a logical way until we reach the
climax—a moment of regression and negation: ‘The next morning the
goalposts had been felled by what roundhead elders, what maypole
hackers, what choristers of law and liberty. Undaunted we threw in the
ball’ (13). Despite these efforts to negate the game, the boys remain
‘undaunted’, a positive feeling evoked through a negative (‘un’) word.
It is in such a ‘territory’ of hope that we find Heaney breaking away
from rigid, territorialised ways of thinking about poetry as lineated verse
alone. Formally, he steps outside the frame. In discussing prose poetic
traditions through the work of Samuel Beckett, Nikki Santilli notes that
‘The frame is foregrounded because it is the area common to both sides
of the dialectic’ (186).22 Santilli shows how images of rooms, cloisters,
caves, pens, pounds and enclosed camps abound in Beckett, delineating
a dialectical territory. Stations similarly abounds in such images: frames,
skins, rooms, cloisters, cave nests, pounds and enclosed camps, as in: ‘a
caul of shadows stretched and netted round his head again’ (‘Cauled’,
p. 4); ‘Pain still flutters against the trap of his ribs’ (‘Branded’, p. 5) and
‘behind the particular judgements of captor and harbourer’ (‘Visitant’,
p. 17), amongst many others. The poem ‘Cloistered’ itself, with all its
talk of the ‘chapel’, ‘sanctuary’, ‘walled hill’, ‘gated town’, cold ‘study
hall’ and the ‘dormer after lights out’, shows remarkable equivalence
with Santilli’s discussion of the ‘frame’ in relation to Beckett and the
Romantic fragment. It ends with the image of the narrator breaking ‘the
ice on an enamelled water-jug’. The confining skin is broken, with ‘exhil-
arated self regard’. Far from being unformed, these prose poems are cog-
nisant of—and conversant with—the sophisticated formal and rhetorical
traditions of prose poetry, and it is in relation to these traditions that
they should rightly be read.
It is pertinent, then, to ask what impact Stations might have had upon
the trajectory of the British prose poem? While a detailed study of this
is beyond the scope of this short chapter, I contend that Stations not
only challenges commonplace prejudices against the form as discussed
above, but that it also lays the ground for a subsequent generation of

22 The dialectic in question is Beckett’s inquiry into the “essence of the object and the

nature of the mind that represents it” (180).

190  A. BROWN

writers. It is unthinkable that a book such as Maurice Riordan’s The Holy

Land (2007)—which similarly portrays coming-of-age narratives in rural
Ireland—could have been published by such a well-known poet (and,
again, by Faber & Faber) without Heaney’s influence. One might go
so far as to argue that, through its lyric lineage and relationship to the
Romantic fragment, Stations has also influenced other high-profile and
popular contemporary lyric poets: Simon Armitage’s Seeing Stars (2010)
with their surreal anecdotal ‘spots of time’ (what else is a star, if not a
spot of time?); John Burnside’s ‘Suburbs’, with their parallel explorations
of ‘cloistered’ lives; Robin Robertson’s subtle inclusion of the form in
each of his books, and Alice Oswald’s notable use of prose poetry in her
book-length work Dart. Each of these notable poets has, in their own
use of the form, to some extent echoed Heaney’s ‘excitement of coming
for the first time to a place I have always known completely’ (3).

Works Cited
Andrews, Elmer, ed. Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays. London:
Macmillan, 1993.
Brown, Andy. “The Emergent Prose Poem.” In A Companion to Poetic Genre,
edited by Erik Martiny, 318–29. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Corcoran, Neil. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study. London: Faber &
Faber, 1998.
Crotty, Patrick. “All I Believe That Happened There Was Revision: Selected
Poems 1965–1975 and New Selected Poems 1966–1987.” In The Art of Seamus
Heaney, edited by Tony Curtis, 192–204. Bridgend: Seren Books, 1982.
Foster, Thomas C. Seamus Heaney. Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 1989.
Fredman, Stephen. Poets’ Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Godbert, Geoffrey. Freedom to Breathe: Modern Prose Poetry from Baudelaire to
Pinter. Exeter: Stride Publications, 2002.
Hart, Henry. “Crossing Divisions and Differences: Seamus Heaney’s Prose
Poems.” The Southern Review 25 (1989): 803–21.
———. Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions. New York: Syracuse
University Press, 1993.
Heaney, Seamus. Stations. Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1975a.
———. North. London: Faber & Faber, 1975b.
———. New and Selected Poems 1966–1987. London: Faber & Faber, 1987.
———. District and Circle. London: Faber & Faber, 2006.
 11  ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS  191

Kennard, Luke. The Expanse: Self-Consciousness and the Transatlantic Prose Poem.
PhD thesis, Exeter University, 2009. https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/
handle/10036/49653.
Morrison, Blake. Seamus Heaney (Contemporary Writers Series). London:
Routledge, 1982; 1993.
O’Donoghue, Bernard, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Parker, Michael. Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet. London: Macmillan,
1993.
Preminger, Alex, et al. The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, rev.
ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Santilli, N. Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature. Madison, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.
Stevenson, Anne. “Stations: Seamus Heaney and the Sacred Sense of the
Sensitive Self.” In The Art of Seamus Heane, edited by Tony Curtis, 47–51.
Bridgend: Seren Books, 1982.
Vendler, Helen. Seamus Heaney. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998.
 CHAPTER 12

The Letter-Poem and Its Literary Affect:

Mark Ford’s ‘The Death of Hart Crane’

Anthony Caleshu

Within his five collections of poems, Mark Ford has published a single
prose poem and two others which are part prose/part lineated verse.
This slim investment in the genre might preclude him from being the
subject of an essay to be included in a book on British Prose Poetry,
but for the fact that ‘The Death of Hart Crane’—Ford’s prose poem
­assuming the stance of a letter-to-the-editor—is of real interest for its
epistolary/prose poem crossover and its perpetuation of literary affect.
While the history of the epistolary poem has been well-documented
from its classical origins to present times—encompassing open letters
to a readership at large, projections of autobiographical address to lov-
ers and friends, fictitious letters to fictional audiences, and hidden mate-
rial efforts (literally poems in letters)—little has been written about the
relationship between the letter poem and the prose poem. In Julia De
Pree’s study of the ‘Epistolary Lyric in the Siècle des Lumières’, how-
ever, she ‘identif[ies] the fictitious letter as a primary … influence on the
prose poem’, and moreover refers to the ‘tendency … toward narrative

A. Caleshu (*) 
University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 193

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_12
194  A. CALESHU

and anecdote’ of nineteenth-century French writers such as Baudelaire.1

Ford’s literary influences are wide and varied; in terms of English
national identity, he comes after Auden and Larkin, but he is also clearly
extending the traditions of American influences such as Ashbery and O’
Hara and the nineteenth-century French writers he ‘came across’ when
he was just beginning to publish in the 1980s: Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Pierre Reverdy, not to mention Raymond Roussel, of whom Ford has
written the definitive biography.2 Though de Pree’s concern is the writ-
ers of the French Enlightenment, her understanding of the letter/prose
poem as something ‘romantic’ is relevant to Ford, whose poem assumes
a fictitious persona’s anecdotal report within the realm of a lyric piece of
prose which re-imagines the ‘self.’ As De Pree writes:

The blending of prose and verse may be said to represent an ‘obsessive

ideal’ to quote Baudelaire … the ideal is romantic in its very nature, seek-
ing transcendence over difference and striving to unite the dissociated

1 Julia de Pree, The Ravishment of Persephone: Epistolary Lyric in the Siècle des Lumières

(Chapel Hill, NC: Department of Romance Languages, The University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, 1998), 74, 77.
2 Mark Ford, unpublished interview with Anthony Caleshu, 9 July 2017:

“AC: What about the prose poem interests you, if anything?

MF: The only two prose poems I’ve written have both been in the form of letters: the
first, called ‘From Shenandoah to Cherry Stone’, was very early (circa 1985) and was pub-
lished in Oxford Poetry, but I never reprinted it, I think partly because it was too close to
W.H. Auden’s ‘Letter to a Wound’ in tone. The prose passages in Auden’s The Orators and
also The Sea and the Mirror’s pseudo-Jamesian ‘Caliban to the Audience’ were the prose
poems that most excited me about the possibilities of the genre. It is rather odd that Auden
should have written such great prose poems, since the form comes really from the French,
and he was very anti-French. After Auden I came across Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Pierre
Reverdy etc., and of course John Ashbery’s Three Poems. The prose poem became incred-
ibly popular in the 80s and 90s, with Lyn Hejinian and almost every Language poet you
can think of, and that probably put me off it somewhat—it felt like poetry was drowning
in prose poems. But I should mention that I have a couple of poems which combine prose
and verse, ‘The Confidence Man’ in Six Children and ‘Fide et Literis’, which has just been
published in Poetry London, and will be in my next collection, Enter, Fleeing (2018). The
prose passages in both these poems allude to Hölderlin, which makes me wonder if, for me,
there is something overtly literary about prose poems (as I recall, ‘From Shenandoah to
Cherry Stone’ makes reference to Emily Dickinson); and, further, that this inherent literari-
ness may be the reason that I have been reluctant to do more than dabble in the genre. But
there’s no doubt there are lots of great prose poems getting written these days—my favour-
ite British prose poet is the witty and wonderful Ian Seed.”
 12  THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ...  195

verbal realms of abstraction and narration. Romantic too in that every

attempt is inspired by the impossibility of the desire: letters err too much
on the side of sentiment and the prose poem privileges telling over
showing.3

Roussel achieved this obsessive ideal to some extent, claims De Pree;

and, as I shall argue here, so, too, does Ford.
Ford’s interest in exporting the romantic into the twenty-first century
becomes even more interesting if we consider the philosophical bridge
between letters and poems, as written about by Daniel Katz in his essay
on the ‘Epistolary Poetry’ of American poet James Schuyler (which refer-
ences Jack Spicer’s letter poems as well):

traditionally, letters and poems are considered to be very different sorts of

objects … whereas poems, subject to the aesthetic, are fit objects of con-
templation, a letter would be seen to have above all an utilitarian function.
To blur the distinction letter/poem is precisely to unsettle the category of
the aesthetic as that of disinterested contemplation.4

In its presentation as a letter-to-the-editor, Ford’s poem poses as hav-

ing an utilitarian function since, in form and voice, the matter-of-fact
prose (at least at first) looks and sounds like the very sort of letter which
might be published in the London Review of Books (where, in fact, the
poem was first published)—a letter which convincingly assumes the
guise of responding to a previous reader’s letter-to-the-editor about
the death of Hart Crane. Ford’s letter-poem, however, increasingly
trumps its mere utility as it becomes a letter full of desire, to use the
word of De Pree, which Katz also utilises when he defines ‘disinterested

3 De Pree, Epistolary Lyric, 78–79. De Pree prefaces this with: “The blending of prose

and verse may be said to represent an ‘‘obsessive ideal,’’ to quote Baudelaire: Voltaire
warned against this romantic attempt, Diderot stopped heeding the warning, and Roussel
achieved the ideal to some extent. The ideal is romantic in its very nature, seeking tran-
scendence over difference [between prose and verse] and striving to unite the dissociated
verbal realms of abstraction and narration” (78).
4 Daniel Katz, “James Schulyer’s Epistolary Poetry: Things, Postcards, Ekphrasis,”

Journal of Modern Literature 34.1 (Fall 2010), 143–161: 150.

196  A. CALESHU

contemplation’ as deriving from the ‘ultimate utility … to fulfill desire’.5

Desire in Ford’s poem is expressed in its significant leaps of parodic and
imaginative verve and takes two major fronts: the letter-writer’s desire to
correct the previous letter-writer’s account of the death of Hart Crane
(‘murdered and thrown overboard by sailors after a night of … rough
sex’, we are told in the early moments of the poem)6; and the letter-­
writer’s desire to re-render (even transcend) his very ‘self’. The self
is both the cause of and also what’s at stake in the romantic lyric, and
Ford’s poem is entirely invested in this, intervening in the tradition and
likewise provoking a mock literary historical debate. In collapsing the
binaries between prose and poem, and letter and poem, Ford forces the
poem into a sphere whereby even the unsettled category of ‘disinterested
contemplation’ is unsettled. Though the aesthetic of the letter-poem may
assume the posture of disinterested contemplation, beneath this is the
conditioned affect of a letter-writer who perpetuates a subversive, coun-
ter-world order, offering a fabulist, alternative history to the death of
twentieth-century queer Modernist author Hart Crane, and, likewise, an
alternative vision of himself.
An affective turn—expressive of emotional entanglement—becomes
not just Ford’s persona, but the reader of Ford’s poem. In assum-
ing the prose-block form of a letter—as opposed, for example, to tak-
ing the form of a traditionally lineated ‘poem’, or even a traditional
literary essay on Hart Crane—the letter-poem deliberately bucks any
privileged inclusion in the literati. Instead, it is welcoming to readers,
enormously so considering the abstract obliqueness which contempo-
rary poetry is usually accused of (i.e. being hard slog) and the coded
­obtuseness of so much scholarly writing (i.e. even harder slog).7 Most
interestingly, the prose-letter form playfully and tantalisingly encodes
the poem’s cognitive reflection: a disembodied speaker exists behind

5 Katz,“James Schulyer’s Epistolary Poetry,” 148.

6 Mark Ford, “The Death of Hart Crane,” in Six Children (London: Faber & Faber,
2011), 18–19. All references to this poem refer to these pages.
7 Note: This description of scholarly work does not apply to Ford, whose literary essays

in LRB and NYRB etc. are as reader-friendly as scholarship comes. Indeed, as the com-
mendation which appeared with his winning the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from
Poetry magazine cites John Lancaster: “If more literary criticism were like this … more peo-
ple would read it.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/press/71805/poet-
ry-foundation-announces-winner-of-the-2015-pegasus-award-for-poetry-criticism, accessed
20 July 2017.
 12  THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ...  197

what we’ll find an investigation of corporality—bodies which are made

material, resurrected, only to be thrown back into the sea, ‘devoured by
sharks’, as Ford concludes his poem.8 Far from being a simply ‘literary’
poem, then—merely of the mind—a connection to the body is sought
(the body of the letter-writer and the body of Hart Crane). This inten-
sifies the ‘affective encounter’, to use the terms of Melissa Gregg and
Gregory J. Seigworth.
In their seminal text The Affect Reader, Gregg and Seigworth write:

Affect is in many ways synonymous with force or forces of encounter. The

term ‘force’, however, can be a bit of a misnomer since affect need not be
especially forceful … In fact, it is quite likely that affect often transpires
within and across the subtlest of shuttling intensities: all the miniscule or
molecular events of the unnoticed.9

In assuming the posture of a prose letter, Ford’s affect is one which perpet-
uates an encounter at a distance, an anonymous letter-to-the-editor which
corrects ‘a letter from a reader in your last issue’.10 That distance is nar-
rowed when we consider that the letter is a claim of corporal encounter, via
an implied rhetoric of exchanged body fluids, semen and blood (as I will
soon explain). Gregg and Seigworth go on to ‘tentatively lay out’ various
‘orientations’ of ‘affect’s theorization’, including the idea that it ‘is found
in the regularly hidden-in-plain-sight politically engaged work—perhaps
most often undertaken by feminists, queer theorists, disability activists, and
subaltern peoples living under the thumb of a normativizing power—.’
While I would not, necessarily, consider Ford’s poem ‘politically
engaged’ on the front of queer activism, it is inviting to imagine it as
such since its investment in an alternative world order chimes so well with
queer theory advocate Jordan Alexander Stein, who writes:

modernity’s alignment of sex and time generates a queer counterdiscourse

that continues to hold sex and time together, even as it challengingly
reimagines their interarticulation (interarticulation as a rhetorical concept

8 Ford, “The Death of Hart Crane.”

9 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect
Reader (Duke University Press, 2010), 2.
10 Ford, “The Death of Hart Crane.”
198  A. CALESHU

that can help us account for both the shifting meanings in unevenness of
rhetorics as they travel in the same direction).
It is to this counterdiscourse—its contents as well as its strategies and
improvisations—that I mean to point when I suggest that literary histori-
ans expand their notions of history beyond the normative temporal order-
ings of chronology. More specifically, I am arguing that queer theory is
exceptionally well-poised to offer such a counterdiscourse because queer-
ness is so often positioned outside of (temporal as well as sexual) normativ-
ity, from which vantage it has iterated powerful and persuasive objections
to normativity’s claims on universality.11

Ford’s ‘counterdiscourse’ comes in its formal strategies (prose), as well

as its reimagining of Hart Crane in terms of sex and time, dramatically
making a new literary history. In one of his own literary essays on Crane,
Ford writes of how ‘Crane’s voyaging [in the poem ‘Voyages’] … entails
a rapturous suspension of meaning, a delighted, sensual dwelling in the
possibilities of response and counter-response.’12 Correspondingly, we
find here that Ford’s poem is fashioned explicitly out of the ‘­possibilities
of response and counter-response’ over a collapsed sense of time.
(Crane is pronounced dead in 1932, resurrected in the early 70s, and in
our 21st century is prompted to live again via this counter-responding
­letter-to-the-editor.) In some respects, Ford’s prose-poem seems to pick
up where his prose essay leaves off, whereby he writes—referring to the
respective negative reviews of Crane’s The Bridge by his ‘erstwhile allies
and friends, [Alan] Tate and Yvor Winters’:

You don’t have to be a Queer Theorist to decode the implication of such

terms; underlying both Winters’ and Tate’s judgements was a dislike of
Crane’s homosexuality, and a conviction that no homosexual could write a
convincing American epic.13

11 Jordan Alexander Stein, “American Literary History and Queer Temporalities,”

American Literary History 25.4 (Winter 2013): 866–67, https://muse-jhu-edu.plym-

outh.idm.oclc.org/journals/american_literary_history/v025/25.4.stein.html, accessed 31
August 2016.
12 Mark Ford, “Not Ready for Repentance: Hart Crane,” in Mr. and Mrs. Stevens and

Other Essays (London: Peter Lang, 2011), 83.

13 Ford, “Not Ready for Repentance,” 86–87.
 12  THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ...  199

Though one needn’t be a queer theorist to read Ford’s poem as one of literary
affect, in offering a correction to Winters and Tate—and mounting a defence
of Crane’s homosexuality by enabling him to transcend time—Alexander
Stein’s suggestion to employ queer theory seems apt nonetheless.

I cite Mark Ford’s ‘The Death of Hart Crane’ in full:

Sir/Madam,
I was intrigued by the letter from a reader in your last issue that recounted
his meeting, in a bar in Greenwich Village in the mid-sixties, a woman who
claimed to have been a passenger on the Orizaba on the voyage the boat
made from Vera Cruz to New York in April of 1932, a voyage that the
poet Hart Crane never completed. According to her, Crane was murdered
and thrown overboard by sailors after a night of such rough sex that they
became afraid (surely wrongly) that he might have them arrested when the
boat docked in Manhattan. This reminded me of a night in the early seven-
ties on which I too happened to be drinking in a bar in Greenwich Village.
I got talking to an elderly man called Harold occupying an adjacent booth,
and when the conversation touched on poetry he explained, somewhat
shyly, that he had himself published two collections a long time ago, one
called White Buildings in 1926, and the other, The Bridge, in 1930. I asked
if he’d written much since. ‘Oh plenty,’ he replied, ‘and a lot of it much
better than my early effusions.’ I expressed an interest in seeing this work,
and he invited me back to his apartment on MacDougal Street. Here the
evening turns somewhat hazy. I could hear the galloping strains of Ravel’s
Boléro turned up loud as Harold fumbled for his keys. Clearly some sort of
party was in progress. At that moment the door was opened from within
by another man in his seventies, who exclaimed happily, ‘Hart! – and
friend! Come in!’ The room was full of men in their seventies, all, or so it
seemed, called either Hart or Harold. The apartment’s walls were covered
with Aztec artefacts, and its floors with Mexican carpets. It dawned on me
then that Hart Crane had not only somehow survived his supposed death
by water, but that his vision of an America of the likeminded was being
fulfilled that very night, as it was perhaps every night, in this apartment on
MacDougal Street. At the same instant I realized that it was I, an absurd
doubting Thomas brought face to face with a miracle, who deserved to be
devoured by sharks.
Yours faithfully,
Name and address withheld14
14 Ford, “The Death of Hart Crane.”
200  A. CALESHU

Gregg and Seigworth come to affect via seventeenth-century Dutch

philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, in which he writes: ‘No one has
yet determined what the body can do.’ The ‘issue’ they tell us, is about
‘endeavoring to configure a body and its affectedness, its ongoing affec-
tual composition of a world, the this-ness of a world and a body.’15 The
relationship of the body to affect, and particularly a gendered body, is
of consequence from the start of the letter. The greeting, ‘Sir/Madam’,
blurs the lines of gender, and yet the tone is academic in anecdote, an
impartial letter from someone who himself is positioned as gender neu-
tral, a dis-embodied speaker/narrator, maybe even asexual, a speaker
bent on narrative introspection (and eventual self-retrospection) but,
above all and throughout, a speaker of ‘reticence and tact’ (as Ford once
wrote in an essay of his own about Schuyler).16 Another way of putting
this is to say that Ford’s poem has no premonitions towards what Frank
O’ Hara, in his mock-manifesto, ‘Personism’ called for poetry to perpet-
uate: ‘one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other
than the poet himself)’.17 In being directed to the dualistic ‘Sir/Madam’
(the figurehead for a generalised readership), it is ultimately a letter to
and for no one in particular, an open-letter, written into a nether space
without bodies, a virtual place of just words. At this point, the poem is
not ‘social’, but an articulation of a conscious thought about ‘viable inte-
riority’—a letter-poem written for its own author—and so, in the words
of another Ford poem, seeking a place where a speaker can go ‘drifting
from inner suburb to inner suburb’ alone, since ‘Men, historically, for-
swear their special friends.’18 The speaker affects us by being unaffected
(in the absence of an identifiable addressee—the speaker is literally,
untouched).
In time, however, the letter-writer goes on to recollect his recep-
tion as a ‘friend’—albeit whilst also ‘doubt[ing]’ it. The call to friend-
ship is a coded call for sexual liberation, a homosexual tryst which
Ford’s persona—after what may well be too many years of denial and

15 Gregg and Seigworth, “Inventory of Shimmers,” 3.

16 Mark Ford, “James Schuyler and Englishness,” in A Driftwood Altar: Essays and
Reviews (London: Waywiser Press, 2005), 167.
17 Frank O’Hara, “Personism,” in Selected Poems, ed. Mark Ford (New York: Knopf,

2008), 248.
18 Mark Ford, “She Spears,” in Soft Sift (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), 32–33.
 12  THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ...  201

repression (of not just sexuality, but of the Stevens-esque ‘miracle’ of

the imagination19)—ultimately confesses to in order to defend Crane’s
version of everlasting, immortal masculinity. As letter-writer, he rises up
to challenge the provocations of the first letter-writer, which, not inci­
dentally came out of a hetero-relationship: a man who met a woman in
a bar. As the poem reads: ‘According to her [the woman the previous
letter-writer met], Crane was murdered and thrown overboard by sailors
after a night of such rough sex that they became afraid (surely wrongly)
that he might have them arrested when the boat docked in Manhattan.’
That parenthetical phrase ‘surely wrongly’ is our first clue that the
poem’s letter writer is aware of Crane’s homosexuality, and that he is
going to support Crane and challenge the hetero-libel that essentially
tells us Crane died because he was gay. In this way, the poem thinks and
feels its way toward correcting a hetero-normative wrong that was done
to the body of Hart Crane.

Gregg and Seigworth tell us:

Affect is born in in-between-ness and resides as accumulative
beside-ness. Affect marks a body’s belonging to a world of encoun-
ters or; a world’s belonging to a body of encounters but also, in non-­
belonging, through all those far sadder (de) compositions of mutual
in-compossibilities.20

Ford has been written about by Helen Vendler as a poet who writes
in the tradition of Hart Crane for his ‘physically sensuous documenta-
tion’: ‘it is the physical, with its irruptions of sensuous transcendence
that appeals to Ford in Crane’.21 So much of Ford’s poetry is concerned
with the body22 and, in this poem, Ford’s letter-writer gives us a poem
which supplements biographical concern as he exposes bodily concern.
The body is the place where he can make his greatest historical leap and
offer a variant alternative to what’s ‘known’—a defence of the social

19 Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value,” in Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose

(Washington: Library of America, 1997), 738.

20 Gregg and Seigworth, “Inventory of Shimers,” 2.

21 Helen Vendler, 191.

22 Ford’s interest in the “body” would be the subject of another essay of course. But I

direct the reader to such poems as ‘‘In the Adirondacks’’ from Landlocked, “She Spears”
from Soft Sift, “A Natural History” from Six Children.
202  A. CALESHU

vision of an ‘America of the likeminded’—which is to say, the democratic

and the tolerant, a challenge to what America (against Constitutional
declarations) has become: a place rife with self-righteousness, funda-
mentalist versions of justice, and (per the previous letter-writer) salacious
rumour-mongering, which all but deems homosexuality as being deviant
to the point of deserving of death (a body’s being thrown overboard).
Ford’s letter-writer offers a counter-pose by taking up Jordan Stein
Alexander’s desire for the sort of ‘literary historian who will expand their
notions of history beyond the normative temporal orderings of chronol-
ogy’.23 The idea that Crane did not die, but is still writing poetry, living
in the 1970s, in an apartment on MacDougal Street, where nightly gath-
erings of all-male, 70-somethings named Harold (Hart Crane’s given
first name) gallop to the ‘strains of Ravel’s Bolero’ is not only literally
fantastic, but delves deep into the territory of camp.
‘How does a body, marked in its duration by these various encoun-
ters with mixed forces, come to shift its affections (its being-affected)
into action (capacity to affect)?’, asks Gregg and Seigworth.24 Ford’s
poem answers this question by turning a by-chance conversation about
poetry into a pick-up, but even this is not straightforward. At the point
of the letter-writer’s accompanying Harold back to his apartment,
Harold fumbles with his keys before the door, and we begin to won-
der just who picked up whom? No longer is the letter-writer an ama-
teur historian bent on pedantically correcting a transgression of death
and dates; instead, we hear the letter-writer’s earlier encouragement of
Harold’s advance as bold and anticipatory: ‘I expressed an interest in
seeing this work, and he invited me back to his apartment …’ We are
thinking about the poem taking place in the early 1970s, and the let-
ter writer’s slightly wry declaration that ‘I too happened to be drinking
in a bar in Greenwich Village’, that liberal bastion of Manhattan. We
read again Harold’s modest boasting of his ‘effusions’, and this time the
sexual euphemism (‘Come in!) is as loud as those ‘galloping strains of
… Bolero’, which is as loud as the aforementioned ‘rough sex’. ‘Here’,
the letter writer tells us, standing at Hart Crane’s apartment door, ‘the
evening turns somewhat hazy’. And it is in this deliberately ambiguous
‘haze’ that the reader of the poem imagines the letter-writer and Harold
take their night’s affair to the next physical stage, two bodies coming

23 Alexander, 867.
24 Gregg and Seigworth, “Inventory of Shimers,” 2.
 12  THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ...  203

together … melding/multiplying (can I go so far as to say ‘reproduc-

ing’?) the modernist poet in this ‘room … full of men … all … called
either Hart or Harold’.
The poem now begins to present itself as an intricate and intimate
encounter between not just the ‘likeminded’ but the same-sex lov-
ing relationship which, up until recently, was relegated to the sphere
of ‘friendship’ (without recourse to legal marriage). It is in this sphere
that it relates to the ‘body’s affectual doings and undoings’. And so we
ask some of the very questions friendship philosophers from Aristotle to
Montaigne to Emerson have asked over these past two millennia: What
is the distinction between friendship and love? How does gender inform
it? Hetero-normative accounts are, not unexpectedly, the norm, and
Montaigne, in his essay ‘On Friendship’, expresses his belief that the dis-
tinction is absolute and gender biased:

The fire [of a man’s love for a woman] is … more active, more eager, and
more sharp … more precipitant, fickle, moving, and inconstant; a fever sub-
ject to intermissions and paroxysms, that has seized but on one part of us.
Whereas in friendship [of a man with a man], ’tis a general and univer-
sal fire, but temperate and equal, a constant established heat, all gentle and
smooth, without poignancy or roughness [I like Ford’s and Montaigne’s
shared use of that word].25

Montaigne punctuates the gender/emotional boundary in no uncertain

terms; friendship is the stuff of men, whereas love is the stuff of men and
women: ‘We are not here to bring the love we bear to women.’26
Alan Bray’s book of queer theory, The Friend, offers an alternative and
fascinating history of male friendships from the eleventh century to the
seventeenth century, one where male kinships were inevitably replaced
with male–female family units. The sacrament of ‘marriage’ as conferred
by the Church and State on men and women was (certainly in the 1970s,
and even still in most places, though of course no longer in the UK) denied
single-sex relationships. Loving gay relationships were thus expressed in
terms of partnerships, or in the coded ‘friendship’ of the poem. The gay

25 Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton, ed.

William Carew Hazlitt. Project Gutenberg Ebook. Volume 6, http://www.gutenberg.org/

cache/epub/3586/pg3586-images.html, accessed 1 September 2016.
26 de Montaigne, Essays.
204  A. CALESHU

(and, by ‘gay’, I mean happy) exclamation, ‘Hart! – and friend! Come

in!’ spoken by the man who opens Harold’s door is one which opens the
door to entertain both friendship and love between men, a ‘vision of
an America of the likeminded … being fulfilled that very night, as it was
perhaps every night, in this apartment on MacDougal Street’. Bodies are
invited to come into action and the encounter is made.
As I approach the end of this poem, I want to bring into the con-
text of my reading Natalie Pollard, who writes about ‘poems as letters’ in
Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address. Pollard’s sense
of the epistle (as written about by twentieth-century British authors as
varied as Carol Ann Duffy, James Fenton, W.S. Graham, Seamus Heaney,
Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin, Edwin Morgan, Don Paterson, C.H. Sisson
and Anne Stevenson) is one whereby the poem as letter makes use of
‘dissenting poetic address [that] exemplifies in a fresh light, how late
twentieth-century poetry makes considerable use of voices that reject,
and explore the politics of being seen to reject, what Robert Crawford calls,
in writing of Douglas Dunn, “the apparently unshakeable dominance of
metropolitan Englishness”’ (my emphasis).27
Ford’s poem, interestingly and readily, exploits ‘Englishness’ in tone
and subject. Despite rejecting the previous ‘reader’s’ claim, the persona
makes positively affecting use of what Pollard calls ‘the smooth patter,
false assurances, glib language of the polite literary occasion: the poetry
reception, the academic conference, the tempered exchanges of men of
letters’.28 She then poses the question: ‘to what extent can such literary
addresses move effectively in opposition to conservative immobility, staid
linguistic convention, and assumed authority’, before answering with a
litany of writers, including Larkin, who ‘work[s] to parody the closed
values of the establishment, the stuffy idiom of the old boys’ network’29
(my emphasis). In some respects, Ford, like Larkin ‘pokes savage fun
at … the mannered politeness of middle-class sociability’ (is there any-
thing more middle-class than a letter-to-the editor?). Ford’s parody is,
then, twofold: firstly, via the grand distance of a letter-to-the-­ editor,
his persona offers a new world view which challenges the first letter-
to-the-editor writer’s brash ignorance; and, secondly, in his adopted

27 Natalie Pollard, Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2012), 28.

28 Pollard, Speaking to You, 28.

29 Ibid., 29.
 12  THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ...  205

tone of mannerly ‘intrigue’, which transforms into reticence and, ulti-

mately, self-recrimination. In this way, Ford manages to both sound and
­subsequently re-sound (with distortion) an ‘English’ voice.
Even if, as I am surmising, the voice of the persona is an English
one, I appreciate that this is in tension with the poem’s investment in
America: Hart Crane is an American poet, of course, and both l­etter-
writers refer to drinking in a Greenwich Village bar. The last statement
as well complicates the trans-Atlanticness of the voice, complexly locat-
ing us somewhere between shores (and between Earthly and Heavenly
worlds) in its religiousity: ‘At that same point, I realized that it was I,
an absurd doubting Thomas brought face to face with a miracle, who
deserved to be devoured by sharks.’ There is nothing more American
than Christian idealism and, in disrupting the time-continuum and
bringing the American poet back to life, Ford’s letter writer appropri-
ates hetero-society’s Biblical terms of reference and rhetoric. Before he
dooms himself to the ocean to be devoured by sharks, he is invited to the
MacDougal Street apartment where he’s greeted as a ‘friend’, and where
he realises he’s come ‘face to face with a miracle’; one perhaps akin to
that which takes place in the Fourth Gospel (Chapter 11, verse 3), where
Jesus is said to refer to ‘our friend Lazarus’ before bringing him back to
life. But, instead of being happy about bringing Hart Crane back to life,
the letter-writer reflects back on himself as the body-conscious ‘doubting
Thomas’ (insistent on seeing and probing Christ’s wounds with his own
eyes and fingers), cementing Biblical intertextuality and not incidentally
posturing severe self-loathing (unworthiness has a long and distinguished
history within the Church). If we read this admission as sincere, we also
read it as a performing an intricate act of exchange with the tale the
woman told the previous letter-writer at a bar, which started this series
of letters about the death of Hart Crane in the first place, a homophobic
tale of what happens to those who engage in ‘rough [male] sex’.30 The
poem thus presents itself as an argument of faith, in which the narrator
assumes his own bad faith: indicting himself at the poem’s end as being
in the same position as the previous letter-writer. His ‘I’ thereby com-
plicates the gender-dynamic further, a first-person admonishment of the
third person ‘she’ whose scandalous tale of Crane’s death at the hands of
gay sailors seems something out of Leviticus:

30 This woman puts me in mind of Stevens’ “A High Toned Old Christian Woman.”
206  A. CALESHU

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them
have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their
blood shall be upon them.31

Where there are sharks there is blood. To explore the fear and criminal-
isation of blood that came with the AIDS epidemic a decade after these
early 70s would be interesting, but would also require another essay.
Instead, I’ll complicate the social rejection of blood with the desire for
it, by returning the reader just briefly to Ford’s own essay on Crane, and
the account of Crane telling Katherine Anne Porter of his inclination ‘to
images of erotic frenzy and satisfactions for which he could find no coun-
terpart in reality … he now found himself imagining that if he could see
blood, or cause it to shed, he might be satisfied.’32
To ‘see’ blood in the sea as a mode of satisfying a self-destructive
impulse is exposed as both a physical goal and theoretical position (the
desire and fatal consequences that come in the poem ‘after a night of
such rough sex’). In the letter-writer’s proposed sacrifice of his own body
(as well as the woman, and anyone else who might doubt Crane’s life as
one of ongoing affirmation), Ford’s poem offers a counter discourse of
sex and time and, in doing so, begins to break down the binaries affected
by two “like minded” bodies coming together (my emphasis):

affect and cognition are never fully separable – if for no other reason than
that thought is itself, a body, embodied. Cast forward by its open-ended
in-between-ness, affect is integral to a body’s perpetual becoming (always
becoming otherwise, however subtly, than what it already is), pulled
beyond its seeming surface-boundedness by way of its relation to, indeed
its composition through, the forces of encounter. With affect, a body is as
much outside itself as in itself – webbed in its relations – until ultimately
such firm distinctions cease to matter.33

To be ‘out’ or ‘outted’, and then to come ‘in’ to the room, is to expose

a metaphorical ‘out of body’ experience with the long-thought dead—
it brings metaphor into a literal space and, in so doing, disrupts the
sex-time continuum. Whether my afore-argued and speculated sexual
encounter takes place, ultimately, does not matter. More interestingly,
31 The King James Bible. Leviticus: Chapter 20: 13.
32 Ford,“Not Ready for Repentance,” 86.
33 Gregg and Seigworth, “Inventory of Shimmers,” 2–3.
 12  THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ...  207

perhaps, is the route taken to bring together men in a room not having
sex. Since a room full of Harolds NOT engaging in sex, necessarily, is—
as Michel Foucault has it—hetero-society’s greatest fear:

what most bothers those who are not gay about gayness is the life-style, not
sex acts themselves … the common fear that gays will develop relationships
that are intense and satisfying even though they do not at all conform to the
ideas of relationship held by others. It is the prospect that gays will create as
yet unforeseen kinds of relationships that many people cannot tolerate.34

Even though the poem comes out-of the-closet of time to depict an

affecting literary encounter, it ends in the shadows of anonymity, identi-
fying that the redressing of the normative is not complete: ‘Yours faith-
fully, / Name and address withheld.’ The letter-writer’s epiphany does
not claim enlightenment so much as reinforce self-doubt about socie-
ty’s sexual squeamishness (the belief that gay sex will get a body thrown
overboard). The withholding of name and address keeps the poem
in tension with the queer goings-on in that apartment on MacDougal
Street, where a room full of Harolds happily remain galloping, to the
obliviousness of the normative hetero-world, to the ‘strains of Bolero’.
In terms of literariness, this prose letter-poem earns its pathos all the
more by presenting itself as an affecting counter-posture to the straight-
laced and conventionally lineated. As an open letter, it offers an open
opportunity for engagement, a lay-effort presenting a non-literary/
non-threatening stance for something which is, of course, exceedingly
literary. A blurring of the literary and the non-literary, however, is fur-
ther complicated when Ford himself in interview refers to two other
poems of his which move between prose and verse:

[The prose passages] in both ‘The Confidence Man’ and ‘Fide et Literis’,
which appears in a recent edition of Poetry London and will be in my next
collection, Enter, Fleeing (2018) … allude to Hölderlin, which makes me
wonder if, for me, there is something overtly literary about prose poems,
and, further, that this inherent literariness may be the reason that I have
been reluctant to do more than dabble in the genre.35

34 Michel Foucault, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: Foucault and Homosexuality,” in

Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence
D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 301.
35 Ford, unpublished interview with Anthony Caleshu, 9 July 2017.
208  A. CALESHU

Nonetheless, Ford’s playful literariness is one of his signature markers;

it is what makes his work so innovative—rewriting and reinvigorating
­tradition and literary material by way of subject, language, aesthetics,
form, and so on. Ford may be a British poet, but his American influences
and interests36 make Michel Delville’s sense of literariness as he writes
about it in his ground-breaking study, The American Prose Poem, as rele-
vant to Ford as any American:

Many writers have turned to the prose poem because of its ability to reflect upon
the methods, aspirations, and internal contradictions of poetry and thereby invite
us to ask questions that address the problems of dominance and subversion, tra-
dition and innovation … what is at stake here is the extent to which poetry …
can have claims to larger concerns in the world outside the text.37

‘The Death of Hart Crane’ is very much concerned with the politics intrin-
sic to counter-discourse, presenting, as I’ve argued, a speculative literary
history which subverts the dominant (hetero-normative) and promotes the
subversive (homo-alternative). By blurring and collapsing binaries through-
out (between verse and prose, letter and poem, fiction and biography, body
and mind, etc.), Ford conditions a mode of literary affect that imagina-
tively challenges the physical laws of life and death (sex and time), and
thereby connects the readership to larger world concerns.

Works Cited
de Montaigne, Michel. Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Edited by William Carew
Hazlitt. Translated by Charles Cotton. Project Gutenberg Ebook. Volume 6.
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3586/pg3586-images.html. Accessed
1 September 2016.
de Pree, Julia. The Ravishment of Persephone: Epistolary Lyric in the Siècle des
Lumières. Chapel Hill, NC: Department of Romance Languages, The
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998.

36 See “Coda: An Interview with Anthony Caleshu,” in Mark Ford, Mr. and Mrs.

Stevens and Other Essays (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011): “when I started reading poetry dur-
ing my student days all the cool poets of the post-war era were American … undoubtedly
American poets, in particular Ashbery and O’Hara, got me going, and made poetry seem
possible” (229–230).
37 Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre

(Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), x.

 12  THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ...  209

Delville, Michel. The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of
Genre. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1998.
Ford, Mark. “She Spears.” In Soft Sift, 32–33. London: Faber and Faber, 2001.
———. “James Schuyler and Englishness.” In A Driftwood Altar: Essays and
Reviews, 167. London: Waywiser Press, 2005.
———. “Not Ready for Repentance: Hart Crane.” In Mr. and Mrs. Stevens and
Other Essays, 83. London: Peter Lang, 2011.
———. “Coda: An Interview with Anthony Caleshu.” In Mr. and Mrs. Stevens
and Other Essays, edited by Mark Ford. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011.
———. “The Death of Hart Crane.” In Six Children. London: Faber & Faber,
2011.
———. Unpublished Interview with Anthony Caleshu, 9 July 2017.
Foucault, Michel. “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: Foucault and Homosexuality.”
In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984,
edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman, translated by Alan Sheridan et al. New York:
Routledge, 1988.
Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Reader. Durham NC:
Duke University Press, 2010.
Katz, Daniel. “James Schulyer’s Epistolary Poetry: Things, Postcards,
Ekphrasis.” Journal of Modern Literature 34.1 (Fall 2010): 143–161.
O’ Hara, Frank. “Personism.” In Selected Poems, edited by Mark Ford. New
York: Knopf, 2008.
“Poetry Foundation Announces Winner of the 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry
Criticism.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/press/71805/
poetry-foundation-announces-winner-of-the-2015-pegasus-award-for-poet-
ry-criticism. Accessed 20 July 2017.
Pollard, Natalie. Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Stein, Jordan Alexander. “American Literary History and Queer Temporalities.”
American Literary History 25.4 (Winter 2013). https://muse-jhu-edu.plym-
outh.idm.oclc.org/journals/american_literary_history/v025/25.4.stein.html.
Accessed 31 August 2016.
Stevens, Wallace. “Imagination as Value.” In Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose.
Washington: Library of America, 1997.
Vendler, Helen. “The Circulation of Small Largeness: John Ashbery and Mark
Ford.” In Some Things We Have That They Don’t: British and American Poetic
Relations, edited by Mark Ford and Steve Clark. Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 2004.
 CHAPTER 13

‘Immeasurable as One’: Vahni Capildeo’s

Prose Poetics

Jeremy Noel-Tod

Vahni Capildeo’s oeuvre is fascinated by the double nature of prose

poetry and the nameless third thing that it makes. The result is six books
in which prose and verse are interwoven: No Traveller Returns (2003),
Undraining Sea (2009), Dark & Unaccustomed Words (2012), Utter
(2013), Measures of Expatriation (2016) and Venus as a Bear (2018). ‘In
my own writing’, she has said, ‘I try to create changes of modality in
one book, not make collections of “prose poems” and “poem poems”.’1
‘Dog or Wolf’—a short lyric which responds to an Iron Age canine figu-
rine in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford—offers a poetic version of this
position. The poem begins by citing the hesitation of the curatorial note
in the display case (‘Dog or wolf’) and then proposing, in the next line,
a literary equivalent: ‘Verse, or prose’. Its conclusion, partly written in
lineated prose and partly in verse, queries the neat separation of these
taxonomic pairs:

1 Vahni Capildeo, “Poetry into Prose: In One Binding,” Lighthouse 12 (Spring 2016): 72.

J. Noel-Tod (*) 
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 211

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_13
212  J. NOEL-TOD

Mistress / I set up a gentle howling / tomb or toy / and now I am

about / wyrd or ward / now I am wholly towards / play or prey /
ave, vale / which is it to be, Huntress?

I hear with ears that point upwards.

Eagerness valleys my backbone.
Satisfaction curls over my tail.
Good lupo; optimum dog.2

The domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris) still contains much of the
wolf (Canis lupus). A pet dog may be ‘gentle’, a ‘toy’, a ‘ward’, a creature
of ‘play’ and affectionate greeting (‘ave’, Latin: hail) to a ‘Mistress’. But if
the homely mistress becomes the ‘moonrules Mistress’ invoked earlier in
the poem—that is, Diana the ‘Huntress’, Roman goddess of the moon—
then the creature who speaks the poem aligns with a darker, wilder set of
words: ‘howling’, ‘tomb’, ‘wyrd’ (Old English: fate), ‘prey’, ‘vale’ (Latin:
farewell). The macaronic final line translates the domesticated English
phrase ‘good dog’ into the sonorous Latin of ‘optimum lupo’ (‘best
wolf’). Verse and prose, by implication, are similarly entangled as formal
denominations for the same restless creature known as ‘poetry’.
Beginning with the dialogic framing of her major early sequence,
‘The Monster Scrapbook’ (2003), Capildeo has been interested in the
poetics of prose as a way of formally dramatising a multiplicity of iden-
tity that overflows a limited lyricism of the personal. In her next major
work, ‘Person Animal Figure’ (2005), the human-animal-monster/
prose-verse-poetry triad of ‘monsterhood’ was refigured with a new satir-
ical emphasis on the politics of gender and race, reflecting her own expe-
rience as a Trinidadian woman living in Britain. Over a decade later, the
prose title sequence of Measures of Expatriation (2016), Capildeo’s most
directly autobiographical book to date, makes explicit her recurring use
of domestic space as an analogy for how prosimetric form both contains
and liberates the hybridity of the poetic imagination. In the same year,
Capildeo published ‘Poetry into Prose: In One Binding’, a short essay
concerning prose and verse as ‘changes of modality’ which draws on her
knowledge of Old Norse poetics and its use of the metaphor of binding.
As in ‘Dog and Wolf’, the essay begins by complicating binary categories
and foregrounding the question of translation:

2 Vahni Capildeo, “Dog or Wolf,” in Venus as a Bear (Manchester: Carcanet, 2018), 30.

 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS  213

Old Norse distinguishes between language that conforms to no poetic

shape and language in poetic form by using technical terms that are also
a construction metaphor: bundið mál, bound language or speech, versus
óbundið mál (but how roughly is unbound speech or language translatable
as ‘prose’?).

Readers familiar with the poetic concept of ‘fixed form’ will grasp the
idea that verse is ‘bound language’ readily enough. But ‘unfixed form’
would be a strange antonym to apply to prose or free verse. ‘Bound’ and
‘unbound’, like ‘dog’ and ‘wolf’, are terms that exist in a specific cultural
dichotomy that can’t be easily unpicked on other terms. As Capildeo
goes on to show, in the alliterative tales of the Poetic Edda, the idea of
binding-as-form becomes a metaphor for power relations within the nar-
rative: ‘text and body, binding and unbinding, […] poetry and prose,
partake intensely of each other’s being’. Thus, it is the fate of ‘the love-
lorn, bearlike smith-figure Völundr’ to be bound hand and foot and have
his ankle sinews cut by his enemies: a brutality that is at once a binding
and an unbinding and which, in its ‘interpretation of what he can and
should be […] is as if he has been made prose’. ‘Prose’ here denotes the
opposite of the poetic: Völundr’s heroic identity as a smith depends on
his powers of poiesis (from the Ancient Greek, meaning ‘to make’), but
now he is himself reduced to shapeless ‘matter’; in the hands of his ene-
mies, he is a sinewless text, lacking the power to become poetic.3
That ‘text and body […] partake intensely of each other’s being’ is a
recurring idea in Capildeo’s dialectical thinking about identity. Speaking
on BBC radio, she observed:

When I was growing up I had the idea that the poet could be a channel for
all languages, for any sort of linguistic phenomenon that any literary work
encountered, and then when I came to England I found that marketing
and identity politics were combining to crush, like in the Star Wars trash
compactor, the body, the voice, the voice on the page, the biography, the
history […] You had to choose, you had to be a sort of documentary wit-
ness wheeled around and exposing your wounds in the market place.4

3 Capildeo,
“Poetry into Prose: In One Binding,” 69.
4 Vahni Capildeo, “Language and Reinvention,” Start the Week, BBC Radio 4, 1
February 2016.
214  J. NOEL-TOD

The ‘Star Wars trash compactor’ refers to a scene in George Lucas’s

1977 science-fiction film where the four heroes—Luke Skywalker,
Princess Leia, Han Solo and Chewbacca—find themselves caught
between the closing walls of a waste disposal system. The horror of the
scene, which will be familiar to many children of Capildeo’s generation
(she was born in 1973), is that it threatens to obliterate not just one per-
son, but a whole group. As a critical analogy, therefore, the Star Wars
trash compactor not only illustrates the idea that a young writer may feel
‘crushed’ by external forces, but asserts—with Roland Barthes—that ‘the
voice, the voice on the page, the body, the history’ are not simply to be
squeezed into one ball known as ‘the Author’.5
Coming to England from Trinidad in 1991, Capildeo began to pub-
lish poems while she was a student at Oxford University, signing herself
‘S.V.P. Capildeo’. One motivation for publishing under one’s initials
might be to conceal gender, as well as to align oneself with the modern-
ist tradition of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and others. The ‘marketing and
identity politics’ that she seems to have found particularly inhibiting at
this time, however, were those of race. The 1990s was a period that saw
literary culture in Britain take an increasing interest in the publication of
black writing, some of which was promoted by anthologies commemo-
rating the fiftieth anniversary of the first wave of large-scale immigration
from the West Indies with the arrival of the Windrush in 1948.6 Such
projects, worthy in intent, inevitably risk simplifying the oeuvres they
represent by conflating historical interest with literary interest, identity
with voice. The Caribbean writer, in Capildeo’s words, becomes ‘a sort
of documentary witness’—an image which, with a violently ironic twist
(‘exposing your wounds in the market place’), she elaborates to suggest
that the marketing of ethnic minority writing in Britain remains haunted
by the slave-trading history of empire, when wounds were disguised at
auction.7

5 See Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen

Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977): “the voice loses its origin, the author enters his
own death, writing begins” (142).
6 See Bruce King, The Internationalization of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2004), 224–226.

7 Capildeo, “Language and Reinvention”. Derek Walcott makes a comparable argument

in “The Muse of History” (1974) when he attacks the conflation of history and identity
into an easily consumable poetry of black protest as a modern form of ‘minstrel’ entertain-
ment, What the Twilight Says (London: Faber & Faber, 1998, 54–55).
 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS  215

Such efforts nothwithstanding, very few black poets were visible in

Britain at the turn of the twenty-first century, while a black prose poet
was almost unheard of.8 Although well-established in America by the
1990s, the prose poem was a marginal practice in Britain in the early
2000s, mainly published by the more formally experimental magazines
and presses.9 In this context, Capildeo’s decision to devote seventy-one
pages of her first collection, No Traveller Returns (2003), to ‘The
Monster Scrapbook’, a sequence of poems in both prose and verse, was a
bold assertion of her belief that ‘the poet could be a channel […] for any
sort of linguistic phenomenon’. As she later commented in a ‘Synopsis’
of No Traveller Returns, written for the publisher’s website:

I realized that this shifting of modes, which initially seemed natural, was
not universally obvious. This became a concern within the writing. Identity
politics; the lyrical I; were inadequate to a sense of self evolving from oth-
ers and their words, accessible or arcane.10

A prefatory section, written as pastiche epistolary fiction, toys with the

questions such a ‘shifting’ text would raise for readers. ‘H.’—whom we
later learn is called Henry—presents a ‘bundle of writings’ by an anon-
ymous relative to a male friend whom he addresses as ‘My dear J.’ (later
identified as Jeremy). His attitude towards the manuscript is both fasci-
nated and apologetic. ‘Do you not share my instinct’, he asks, ‘that some
among us are most closely akin to those hybrid and marvellous beasts which
haunt legend, manuscript, and folk memory alike?’ Such people, he sug-
gests, are ‘Monsters’, and the present hybrid manuscript is ‘a true image
of the MONSTER STATE OF MIND’:

8 Honourable mention should be made, however, of Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon,

whose long, lyrical prose text “Poem in London” was broadcast on the BBC’S Caribbean
Voices programme in 1951. D.S. Marriott, whose oeuvre is contemporary with Capildeo’s,
has also experimented with prose form: see, for example, Incognegro (Cambridge: Salt,
2006).
9 See Carrie Etter, “Poetry in the Prose: Getting to Know the Prose Poem,” Poetry

Review 102.2 (Summer 2012): 69–71.

10 Vahni Capildeo, “No Traveller Returns: Synopsis,” Salt Publishing, https://www.salt-

publishing.com/products/no-traveller-returns-9781876857882, accessed 25 September

2017.
216  J. NOEL-TOD

It consists of highly disparate parts, as do the minds of Monsters (if one may speak
of Monsters’ minds). It is a feature of the Monster mind that the most abrupt
transitions and the unlikeliest effusions are believed by the Monster to connect.
Excessive acquaintance with Monsters or the Monster way will lead any reader,
except the most robust, to believe in and pursue this Monstrosity of connections. This
is why I would suggest the title OBSESSIVE TALK for the finished collection which
(excuse the impertinence!) you, my dear J., will have edited. In the meantime, I
have left the original compiler’s title, THE MONSTER SCRAPBOOK, to stand.
It is my belief that even the apparent stretches of prose are to be read as poetry.
Monsters want logic, therefore everything they speak is a kind of poem. Your fine
mind will assemble in its entirety the continuous poem which is the MONSTER
SCRAPBOOK in its ideal state. It requires only your reading – the POEM will
stand complete.11

The reader is left unsure, however, as to the precise relationship

between the preface and what follows. Does the fact that ‘The Monster
Scrapbook’ appears with its ‘original compiler’s title’ mean that we are
reading the manuscript in Henry’s possession? His version, though, was
also not the original: we are told that ‘some later hand has annotated
these writings, and done a cut and paste job on them. It is difficult to say
how much has been discarded’. So, if we are not reading Jeremy’s edited
version, or the redacted version that has come into Henry’s hands,
is this the Monster Scrapbook ur-text? Or is it the expanded version
of the text that Henry fears a female editor would produce: ‘for on the
topic of Monsters females have little sense, and would doubtless have pre-
served the documents in their entirety, indeed adding notes of admiration
to the bizarreries there contained’? (48). (To confuse matters further, the
preceding sequence in No Traveller Returns is called ‘Obsessive Talk’—
Henry’s proposed title for Jeremy’s revision—and comprises a single
four-part poem titled ‘Twist’.)
The effect is to open up a mise-en–abyme around the origin and
authorship of the ‘Monster’ poems. At the same time, an argument is
advanced about how to read such a text as ‘poetic’: it is a work that
‘want[s] logic’, but the ideal reader will be able to trace a path through
its ‘Monstrosity of connections’ and, by sympathetic response, convert
its scrappiness, which includes ‘stretches of prose’, into a ‘continuous

11 Vahni Capildeo, “The Monster Scrapbook,” in No Traveller Returns (Cambridge: Salt,

2003), 47–48. Further page references will be given in the text.

 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS  217

poem’ (48). Both the dandyish tone and the paradoxical argument of the
preface strongly suggest a burlesque of the most famous statement on
prose poetry in the European tradition: Charles Baudelaire’s 1862 letter
to his editor Arsène Houssaye, which was published as the posthumous
preface to his seminal Petits Poèmes en Prose or Paris Spleen (1869). This
begins:

My dear friend, I am sending you a modest work of mine, of which

nobody can say without injustice that it has neither beginning nor end,
as everything in it is both head and tail, one or the other or both at once,
each way. […] Take out a vertebra and the two halves of my tortuous fan-
tasy will join together again quite easily. Slice it into any number of chunks
and you will find that each has its independent existence. In the hope that
a few of these slices will have enough life in them to please and entertain
you, I venture to dedicate the whole snake to you.

Like Capildeo’s Henry, Baudelaire presents his hybrid work with a dif-
fidence that nevertheless asserts its strange power by characterising
it as a kind of ‘marvellous beast’. The essential quality of the Monster
mind is to make connections between ‘highly disparate parts’. Similarly,
Baudelaire’s plotless collection of prose poems is a fantastical serpent that
can be cut into ‘any number of chunks’ but will always recombine into a
‘whole snake’. Both prefaces offer their monsters deferentially to read-
ers whose job is to appreciate them discerningly, and so complete the
magical transformation of piecemeal prose into continuous poem (what
Baudelaire calls ‘the miracle of a poetic prose’).12 Capildeo’s Henry
takes Baudelaire’s conceit of the monstrous text further by presenting
the unknown author of the text as a possible monster, too, and warning
the less ‘robust’ reader against ‘excessive acquaintance’ with ‘the Monster
way’. Only Jeremy, and his ‘fine mind’, can be trusted with the heroic
task of drawing the poem out of the prose.
The need to be sensitively appreciated is also the troublesome demand
of the Monster species itself. They are, Henry writes, ‘people whose eyes
hit you with large and sudden appeals—people whose capacity for feeling
and action seems sometimes more, sometimes less, than the human […]
They induce SPECIES FEAR, a kind of wincing of the soul’ (48). To read

12 Charles Baudelaire, The Poems in Prose and La Fanfarlo, trans. Francis Scarfe (London:

Anvil, 1989), 25.

218  J. NOEL-TOD

‘The Monster Scrapbook’ is to enter into a condition of uncertainty not

only about literary form, but the category of the human itself—a cate-
gory which, according to ‘the Monster’s system of reckoning’, it tran-
scends: ‘Monster is the opposite of Animal, human being no more than
a shared subset of both’ (130). In the sequence’s various descriptions
of ‘Monster consciousness’, the Monster, like the prose poem, disturbs
dualities by occupying a third position. ‘Monster Pastimes’, for example,
tells us first that Monsters ‘are great readers’ who respond to poems in
‘uncritical rhapsodies’ of ‘purple prose’; then, that Monsters ‘get lost in
their own poems’; and finally, that Monsters sometimes ‘insist on speak-
ing in ellipses’ (69). Monsters, it seems, are both readers, writers and a
third thing that ‘turn[s] away from adequate communication’. An anal-
ogy for this tripartite nature is offered by another prose poem in the
sequence which does not explicitly concern Monsters, but is part of the
bigger ‘scrapbook’—a compilation, that is, of things of personal interest
to a Monster. ‘Seeing Without Looking’ describes a sheet of song music
in three different ways: as ‘a set of printed stanzas’, ‘a page of printed
music’, ‘a page of lyrics and music’. Each is then compared to a percep-
tion of the world that is ‘all […] in the mind’. Of the third image, which
combines words, melody and music on ‘three staves’, we are told: ‘You
would like to rationalize it as a grid. No, the effect is of parallelisms, of
things that are separate yet that are, in so far as they become ultimate,
irretrievably enmeshed’ (58). The rational grid of definition cannot be
applied to ‘The Monster Scrapbook’; its dualities can only be read imag-
inatively, mystically even, by ‘seeing without looking’—a riddle that
returns in the final sentence of the sequence: ‘Monsters have their vision,
but they have lost half their sight’ (138).
Among the ‘things that are separate yet […] irretrievably enmeshed’
in this sequence are the meanings of the word ‘monster’ itself. The pri-
mary definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is:

a mythical creature which is part animal and part human, or combines ele-
ments of two or more animal forms, and is frequently of great size and
ferocious appearance. Later, more generally: any imaginary creature that is
large, ugly, and frightening.

But the OED also records an antiphrastic usage—considered obsolete

from the eighteenth century, but revived in modern American English—
in which ‘monster’ signifies ‘an extraordinarily good or remarkably
 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS  219

successful person or thing’. In a poetic context, moreover, it conjures up

the hybrid Caliban, Shakespeare’s imaginary Caribbean islander in The
Tempest (a play in which ‘monster’ occurs thirty-four times). Capildeo’s
repositioning of ‘monster’ as the antithesis of ‘animal’, with ‘human’
relegated to the hybrid subset, suggests that one lens through which to
read the human allegory of ‘The Monster Scrapbook’ is the postcolonial
tradition of Caliban revisionism. In George Lamming’s ‘A Monster, a
Child, a Slave’ (1960), for example, Caliban is presented as ‘the epitome
of a pure and uncalculated naiveté’, enslaved by Prospero’s feeding him
and teaching him language.13 Similarly, Capildeo tells us: ‘To gain the
trust of a Monster, all you have to do is speak to it three times a month
or so, in human language, with reference to biscuits’ (55). Further such
parallels with Lamming’s Caliban might be elaborated.14 Capildeo’s
employment of the lyrical privacy of the prose poem to explore ‘monster
consciousness’, however, also carefully avoids committing itself to unam-
biguous markers of race and gender. As she comments: ‘This poetry
collection includes prose. Some pieces […] half-express, half-explain, a
certain pressure of situation.’15 Highly conscious of the pressures that
it holds off, ‘The Monster Scrapbook’ resists being reduced in the trash
compactor of personal identity.
Capildeo’s next major prose sequence, Person Animal Figure (2005)
was dedicated to Nikki Santilli.16 Santilli’s 2002 study of the prose
poem seeks to offer ‘concrete evidence for what is still so often consid-
ered to be one of the more exotic literary genres’. Her title (Such Rare
Citings) is a punning riposte to ‘The Jubjub Bird or Some Remarks on
the Prose Poem’, an essay from 1985 by the poet George Barker, who
observes:

The idea of the prose poem exists, certainly; but does the prose poem?
[…] What is this monster really like? […] Like the Loch Ness monster the

13 George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Allison & Busby, 1984), 114.
14 Compare, for example, Capildeo’s concluding statement of the distinction between
a Monster’s imaginative ‘vision’ and impaired ‘sight’ (138), with Lamming’s claim that
Caliban ‘is never accorded the power to see’ but exists in a condition of ‘creative blindness’
(107, 115).
15 Capildeo, ‘Synopsis.’

16 The dedication appears in the first chapbook publication of the sequence by Landfill

Press in 2005.
220  J. NOEL-TOD

prose poem is a creature of whose existence we only have very uncertain

evidence.17

Barker’s mocking use of the cryptozoological metaphor reflects a wide-

spread scepticism about the prose poem as a ‘real’ form in ­twentieth-
century English literature. It is, moreover, expressed in terms that
invoke a cultural suspicion of the exotic: do we believe reported sight-
ings of such monsters? Having answered this question formally in ‘The
Monster Scrapbook’, in Person Animal Figure Capildeo answers it polit-
ically. Developing the triadic model of identity (human-animal-monster)
sketched by the earlier text, she places a fictionalised version of herself as
a British Trinidadian citizen in the ‘Person’ corner of the triangle, oppo-
site the ‘Animal’, with the liminal ‘Figure’ emerging from the resulting
dialectic. The sequence is built around anaphoric, third-person descrip-
tions of ‘the animal’, a restless creature of unknown species, but with
many human qualities, including the inhabitation of domestic space.
Capildeo’s Animal is amorphously metaphorical, and its shape-shift-
ing sees it merge readily with the material fabric of its genteel British
life-world:

The animal who knocks and patters lives in the next room […] It has a
fondness for chimney pots. It inquires about fireplaces. When it mourns, it
becomes the length of a Victorian flue.18

These third-person descriptions are, however, intercut with a first-per-

son monologue which develops in counterpoint to the Animal passages,
and which is visually distinguished from them by the use of a bold font.
Whereas the Animal is a mystery that only deepens with every state-
ment made about it, the Person is a mind on immediate display, via a
stream-of-consciousness prose that resembles the thoughts of Molly
Bloom in the final ‘Penelope’ chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).
The Person’s monologue is a stylised performance of the anxiety of
being between identities. The first paragraph establishes both her famil-
iarity with England and the fact that she is also a foreigner, conscious of

17 N. Santilli, Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature (Madison, NJ:

Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2002), 17.

18 Vahni Capildeo, “Person Animal Figure,” in Undraining Sea (Norwich: Eggbox,

2009). Further page references will be given in the text.

 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS  221

a life elsewhere: ‘I am the person who buys stamps with the Queen’s
head on them because this is England […] why a letter because if
your family lives far away they are in a different time zone’ (58–
59). Like Molly Bloom, Capildeo’s Person’s run-on style is characterised
by the endless curiosity about causal connection of a mind enmeshed
in the global quotidian (over the course of eight long, unpunctuated
sentences, ‘Penelope’ employs ‘because’ forty-eight times, and roams
imaginatively between Dublin and Gibraltar, where the half-Spanish,
half-Irish Molly was born). In the next paragraph, we meet the Person
in the supermarket, where she is ‘the person who stands up among
special offers’ and considers sympathetically ‘the girl at the cash desk
[…] perhaps she hasn’t been here long in this country’. Later in the
sequence, defying her own tendency to feel ‘guilty about everything’,
she launches into a contrarian defence of the consumerist joys of the
supermarket:

Let me say that the supermarket is something to celebrate […] think

of all those hands harvesting in lovely warm countries there’s pro-
gress for you big spills of sunshine on bare feet and funny hats isn’t
it wonderful it’s like the whole world ends up in here […] always
Christmas and never winter that’s what it is. (62–63)

As Marc Augé has observed, the ‘non-places’ of late capitalism, such

as the airport and supermarket, construct the individual consumer as
‘innocent’ through ‘the passive joys of identity-loss’.19 Here, the Person
experiences that loss as a world of overabundance, in which the exter-
nal reality of place is effaced by the suspension of time under artificial
lights (‘always Christmas and never winter’), and the reality of other
people’s labour in other countries shrinks to a sprinkling of glib visual
synechdoches (‘hands […] bare feet and funny hats’) among a mass of
other products.
Having atomised the speaker of these passages under supermarket
lights, the sequence then moves towards a more profound confronta-
tion of the question of identity and place by drawing the Person back
towards private domestic existence. Previously, this is the domain that
had been observed by the empirical, third-person prose associated with

19 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John

Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 102–103.

222  J. NOEL-TOD

the Animal. Affirming the need ‘to confront my fears at home’, the
Person acknowledges that she will ‘need a lot of punctuation to do
that’. Freed from formal convention, the flow of stream-of-conscious-
ness prose is—like the anxious mind—potentially boundless in its asso-
ciations. In the passage that follows, an implicit analogy is developed
between the punctuation of sentences and the securing of domestic and
psychological space. Itemising aspects of the house that exclude—cur-
tains, blinds, shutters, locks—she reflects that ‘the brass letterflap is a
point of weakness, but what can one do? It is a period detail.’ The
lexical play here on ‘point’ and ‘period’ is made explicit in the next sen-
tence, which reverts to the unpointed periods of previous passages as it
slips out of the impersonal prose of an estate agent’s description (‘this
desirable midterrace Edwardian property’) into an imaginative rev-
erie about a former owner (‘Bill a broadshouldered factory worker’).
Correcting the slip, she comments: ‘The punctuation went there. I
have double-bolted, deadlocked, Yale locked, chained, wired, and
alarmed the door’ (64).
The sequence’s oscillation between the observation of an abstract oth-
erness (the Animal) and the narration of a concrete individuality (the
Person) converges here in the private house, with the suggestion that the
Person and the Animal may, in fact, be inhabiting the same domestic, as
well as textual, space, and are therefore be understood as the observation
of the same individual from different perspectives. The splitting of self is
everywhere in the Person’s monologue, whose ‘fears’ are precisely to do
with the experience of feeling out-of-place. Her fear that ‘I do not have
good taste’, for example, is exacerbated by her experience of the racism
encoded in the class structure of British society: ‘the people behind the
counters in banks and dress shops talk to me as if I were poor but
the poor eye me like loose change […] is it wrong to like ribbons
well perhaps in London naturally’. The Person’s stammering anxiety is
a dramatisation of her sense of verbal and cultural in-between-ness that
reaches a climax with the recollection of a temporary loss of language itself
(‘I could no longer say the green book was green’, 65–67). And it is at
this point that another voice enters the sequence, bringing to its alterna-
tion of Animal/Person a third poetic being: the abstract ‘Figure’ of art.
Capildeo’s Figure is an entity characterised by the in-between-ness
of metaphor—where images are always in transit—as well as the in-­
between-ness of prose poetry itself. The description of the Figure,
which is typographically distinguished by the use of an italic font and a
 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS  223

right-justified margin, reads as a text commenting on its emergence as

the dialectical shadow of the Animal and the Person:

This dark figure moves from peripheral vision when the nest of the body has
sprung apart. It jets up from the ground. Turned to face each bodily action,
it leads as it beckons, beckons as it mirrors, contracting, decontracting,
by a plumage spray of lines.

Visually resembling both prose and poetry in its ‘plumage spray of lines’,
the Figure stands for both Person and Animal as they become writing
itself, in the living moment of being read:

This dark figure, in sending itself out, draws after. Constant on all sides, its places
itself ahead, proceeding containing the person, that which is drawn at its back.
The prickle of nerves betokens the instances of its moves.

Although Capildeo’s ‘dark figure’, like her ‘Monster’, passes through the
racialised ambit of Caliban-language (‘this thing of darkness’, as Prospero
calls him), it resists being confined to a personal interpretation—that is,
one dominated by the Person. Instead, the Figure asserts the indivisibility
of the text and its depersonalised art: ‘Detachment is this dark figure’, the
section concludes. ‘That is immeasurable as one’ (67).
‘Person Animal Figure’ does not end at this mystic point of unity,
however, but tracks back to narrate the further adventures of the Animal,
who is now presented in a state of deepening domestic abjection (‘This
animal, faithful and grateful, accepts punishment as its due […] It is a
lashed and pitted animal’) until a final paragraph of sudden release:

This animal bursts the house open one day and finds another. It cannot do
without houses now, but it will find a house that is more wild. […] This
animal bounds and rises. […] It is an animal that knows no terms. […]
This animal remains beyond those animals forever. (69)

This animal, to borrow the terms of Capildeo’s later poem of wildness

and domestication, is more wolf than dog—and, it is tempting to say,
more prose than verse. But that would be to set terms on an animal that
‘knows no terms’: no labels, no compromises, no termini. It ‘bounds’
beyond bounds, to other ‘houses’ that are ‘more wild’.
The metaphorical equation of reimagined domestic space with
prose as a poetic form is one that Capildeo has continued to develop
224  J. NOEL-TOD

in her later, more explicitly autobiographical writing. ‘Letter Not from

Trinidad’, for example, a short essay from 2015, describes her childhood
experience of Deepavali, when the family garage and part of the house
would be transformed into a ‘ritual space’, with lamps lit and Sanskrit
chanted, leading to ‘other mixings: of space, and of language’. ‘Now that
habit of mind has aestheticised itself’, she writes:

I see no problem, I take delight, within the space of the page, in crossing
from mundane to heightened, elaborated, even opaque codes, registers,
allusions. […] To this experience I can trace my instinctive revolt against
such terms as ‘line break,’ ‘white space’ or ‘margins of silence.’ Without
meaning to, I developed a poetics of reverberation and minor noise [and
became] a practitioner of a mixity of the alinguistic, the musical, the
structured. I write this for an unruly language which is not ‘fractured’ as
with the avant-garde or ‘resistant’ as with the old-style postcolonial, but
may indeed have a politics, as well as a poetics, belonging to a modernity
rooted in ways of life still not considered safe, polite or relevant to admit
to the canon.20

As with Capildeo’s essay ‘Poetry into Prose: In One Binding’, this asser-
tion of poetics by practice carefully avoids anything as simplistic as a
binding distinction between verse and prose. But it may be set beside a
key passage from the essayistic title sequence of Measures of Expatriation
(2016), in which ‘language’ is investigated as a term that both sets
bounds to expression and goes beyond them. In ‘Going Somewhere,
Getting Nowhere’, the third part of ‘Five Measures of Expatriation’, the
poet reflects on what the words ‘home’ and ‘Trinidad’ came to mean
when living in England, concluding ‘Language is my home’ but with the
caveat that ‘thought is not bounded by language’. This proposition is
illustrated by a brief memory of having ‘lost’ the words ‘wall and floor’,
so that ‘the interiority of the room was in continuous flow’, without for-
mal divisions. This ‘languageless’ experience of being in domestic space
then leads to the final declaration, which comes freighted with implica-
tion for the politics of rigidly demarcating certain kinds of imaginative
language use ‘prose’ and others ‘poetry’: ‘Language is my home, I say;
not one particular language.’21

20 Vahni Capildeo, “Letter Not from Trinidad,” PN Review 221 (January–February

2015): 6.
21 Vahni Capildeo, Measures of Expatriation (Manchester: Carcanet, 2016), 100–1.
 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS  225

Works Cited
Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.
Translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 1995.
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image Music Text, translated by
Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Poems in Prose and La Fanfarlo. Translated by Francis
Scarfe. London: Anvil, 1989.
Capildeo, Vahni. “The Monster Scrapbook.” In No Traveller Returns, 45–138.
Cambridge: Salt, 2003.
———. “Person Animal Figure.” In Undraining Sea. Norwich: Eggbox, 2009.
———. “Dog or Wolf.” In Venus as a Bear, 30. Manchester: Carcanet, 2018.
———. “Letter Not from Trinidad.” PN Review 221 (January–February 2015): 6.
———. “Language and Reinvention.” Start the Week. BBC Radio 4, February 1,
2016a.
———. Measures of Expatriation. Manchester: Carcanet, 2016b.
———. “Poetry into Prose: In One Binding.” Lighthouse 12 (Spring 2016c):
69–72.
———. “No Traveller Returns: Synopsis.” https://www.saltpublishing.com/
products/no-traveller-returns-9781876857882. Accessed 25 September
2017.
Etter, Carrie. “Poetry in the Prose: Getting to Know the Prose Poem.” Poetry
Review 102.2 (Summer 2012): 69–71.
Joyce, James. Ulysses (1922), edited by Jeri Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993.
King, Bruce. The Internationalization of English Literature. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
Lamming, George. “A Monster, a Child, a Slave.” In The Pleasures of Exile,
95–117. London: Allison & Busby, 1984.
Santilli, N. Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature. Madison:
Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2002.
Walcott, Derek. “The Muse of History.” In What the Twilight Says: Essays,
36–64. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.
 CHAPTER 14

The Successful Prose Poem Leaves Behind

Its Name

Owen Bullock

Some commentators have asserted that discussions of prose poems

­privilege poetry to the detriment of an examination of prose.1 While this
may be true, I would like to suggest that the term itself privileges poetry
in an appropriate way. In the name ‘prose poem’, the word ‘prose’ can
be read as a modifier, subordinate to the main noun ‘poem’, and in that
sense is not an oxymoron at all, as has also been claimed.2 A simple defi-
nition might be offered, such as a poem with some attributes of prose,
but, as with any definition, there are problems applying it to all cases,
and ultimately the genre, if it is a genre, may well be indefinable.
The problem of definition makes acceptance of the form difficult. The
success of Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End—Prose Poems (1989) in
winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 would seem to have helped establish

1 For example, Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1978), 116.

2 Michael Riffaterre, “On the Prose Poem’s Formal Features,” in The Prose Poem in

France: Theory and Practice, ed. Mary Ann Caws and Hermine Riffaterre (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 117.

O. Bullock (*) 
University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia

© The Author(s) 2018 227

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_14
228  O. BULLOCK

the genre and to increase its acceptance, at least in the USA,3 but that
acceptance seems to have taken longer in the UK. Simic’s book is nota-
ble for the fact that it acknowledges prose poems in the subtitle, which
many volumes do not. Does this differ from the practice of poets pub-
lishing prose poetry in the UK?
More recently, UK interviewers, editors, critics and judges have
embraced the concept of the prose poem. Those in such roles are all
readers, and readers and poets might talk about prose poems in quite
different ways. Prose poems make broader use of narrative than most
lineated poems, including critical engagement; their language is perhaps
freer and closer to speech, both qualities which may make them more
accessible. But it is important to remember that the writing itself does
not need the title ‘prose poetry’ in order to achieve these effects. The
affordances the movement towards prose gives the poet beg investiga-
tion. These questions will be discussed in relation to recent works by
Claudia Rankine, Simon Armitage and Peter Riley.
Stephen Fredman suggests that prose poetry is inherently explorative,
even investigative; a very open form of writing that accommodates the
world of facts and ideas, and even of criticism.4 It appropriates the tech-
niques of prose, and this appropriation ‘may be seen as central to our
time’5 as hybrid forms proliferate. In so doing, prose poetry recognises
that all discourse is a kind of art.6 Since critics tend to agree on lineation
as the defining feature of the free verse poem,7 the absence of the line is
a crucial marker for the prose poem. Instead, the sentence takes centre

3 That is, despite the struggles of earlier collections, such as Mark Strand’s The Monument

(1978), which was initially nominated for a major award and then withdrawn. Admittedly,
it is a work that confounds one’s understanding of poetry in a more confrontational way.
4 Fredman used the term ‘poet’s prose’ and, though this never gained traction, his ideas

about prose poetry are significant and durable. See Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose: The
Crisis in American Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), viii, 10.
5 Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 10.

6 Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 139.

7 Robert Frank and Henry Sayre, eds., The Line in Postmodern Poetry (University of

Illinois Press, 1988), ix–x; Marjorie Perloff, Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent
Occasions (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 116–117; and Charles O.
Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1980), 11.
 14  THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME  229

stage.8 The sentence could be more accessible to the general reader; its
ordinariness breaks down barriers, and the prose poem does not scream
poetry! to the uninitiated.9
The ‘subversive potential’ of the prose poem has been emphasised
by critics,10 since any new form or hybridising of genres can be under-
stood as a revolution against accepted norms. Yet, Wordsworth was
already questioning the boundaries of prose and poetry in the preface to
the Lyrical Ballads, arguing that there is no essential difference in their
composition.11 Ginsberg talks about writing which ‘passes from prose to
poetry & back, like the mind’,12 a statement which suggests that poetry
is something like ordinary speech, at the same time as acknowledging
that the individual idiolect includes poetry. Philip Gross describes lyric
and narrative as ‘two poles that create a process’, that the prose poem
can hold a certain ambiguity which is useful for both.13
Rankine’s 2014 collection Citizen is subtitled An American Lyric.
Nowhere does the poet or publisher use the term ‘prose poetry’. The
volume has been nominated for and won many awards, including a dou-
ble nomination for poetry and criticism in the National Book Critics
Circle Awards (winning for poetry). Newspapers such as The Telegraph
announce her work as prose poetry.14 One review is unclear whether it

8 See Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 10 and Anthony Howell, ed., “The Prose Poem—What the

Hell Is It?” The Fortnightly Review (2016), http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2016/04/

prose-poetry/.
9 This might include the writer new to poetry, as well as the reader new to poetry, as

Robert Alexander narrates, in “Prose Poetry,” The Marie Alexander Poetry Series (2016),
http://mariealexanderseries.com/prosepoem.shtml.
10 Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre,

(Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 10 and Margueritte Murphy, A

Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).
11 Murphy, Tradition of Subversion, 9.

12 Allen Ginsberg, “Notes for Howl and Other Poems,” in American Poetic Theory, ed.

George Perkins (Open Library: Holt, Rinehart & Winston of Canada Ltd., 1972), 345.
13 Philip Gross, “Voices in the Forest: Three Ways of Conceiving of a Work in Progress

with Selected Pieces from Evi and the Devil,” Axon: Creative Explorations #6 (2014),
http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-6/voices-forest.
14 Kate Kellaway, “Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine Review—The Ugly

Truth of Racism,” The Guardian, 30 August 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/

books/2015/aug/30/claudia-rankine-citizen-american-lyric-review, accessed 22 September
2016.
230  O. BULLOCK

is, in fact, poetry, but asserts that the question becomes unimportant as
one reads.15 Adam Fitzgerald reports that, on being asked by an audi-
ence member at a poetry reading if her work was prose poetry, Rankine
responded that is was a hybrid, but also that she wanted to provoke
such questions.16 The author’s acknowledgements on the back page of
Citizen note, ‘poems and essays’ from the collection previously pub-
lished. One certainly has the sense that it is the essay form in pieces such
as the discussion of Serena Williams’ career.17
There is a great deal to be said for the argument that a work is sit-
uated in whatever genre the author claims for it. Of course, the reader
has their own expectations (characterised by Bakhtin as ‘genre memory’),
as well as responding to the way publishing and marketing describe and
categorise a book, as a facet of the culturally specific and ‘historically
determined’ understandings of genre.18 Citizen has been published in an
English edition, which won the Forward Prize and was nominated for
the T.S. Eliot Prize. This seems like a coup for prose poetry. And yet
only indirectly so, since the signposting suggests some other form: a kind
of lyric. While the form of the prose poem would seem to be gaining
acceptance with critics, the writer’s seeming resistance to the term ‘prose
poetry’ could hinder that progress.
If there is some precedent to the popularity of Rankine’s work, it
might be found in the accessibility of Margaret Atwood’s Murder in the
Cathedral: Short Fictions and Prose Poems (London: Virago, 1997). The
subtitle is a broad shot; the reader is left to figure out which pieces are
short fictions and which are prose poems. Lyn Hejinian’s much admired
My Life has something in common with Rankine in its use of motif and
repetition. Hejinian’s work is described on the back cover as ‘poetic

15 Tristram Fane Saunders, “Claudia Rankine Wins £10,000 Forward Prize with Book of Prose

Poems,” The Telegraph, 30 September 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-

read/claudia-rankine-wins-forward-prize-with-book-of-prose-poems/, accessed 11 August 2016.
16 Adam Fitzgerald, “‘That’s Not Poetry; It’s Sociology!’—In Defence of Claudia Rankine’s

Citizen,” The Guardian, 23 October 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/books-

blog/2015/oct/23/claudia-rankine-citizen-poetry-defence, accessed 11 August 2016.
17 Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014),

23–36; references to this text will be given in parenthesis hereafter.

18 Marjorie Perloff, Postmodern Genres (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 7.
 14  THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME  231

autobiography’; it won awards in poetry categories but nowhere does the

term ‘prose poetry’ appear in the edition I have in front of me.19
Rankine has used the subtitle ‘lyric’ before—in her previous collec-
tion, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004), a collection
also composed mainly of what I would call prose poems.20 There are
two claims at work in the subtitle: that the text concerned is inherently
American, vying for status in a still white-dominated country, and assert-
ing the lyric quality of a work as being key to what constitutes poetry.21
Yet, Rankine’s work is comparatively bare in its use of poetic tropes22;
motif and repetition are probably the most obvious ones in Citizen.
There are narrative fragments and essay-like ruminations of a variety
close to the original understanding of the essay as a forum for trying out
one’s thoughts, of a kind that Emerson would surely have applauded.
Indeed, Emerson has been cited as one of the innovators in the develop-
ment of a specifically American prose poem, in contradistinction with the
French-influenced, largely surrealist prose poem.23 Rankine’s language
is direct and unfussy; its mystery comes in the shadowiness of response
from those who display racist attitudes, in the accompanying thoughts
and feelings of the person slighted and the uncertainties between peo-
ple—in other words, through content.
The book begins and invites the reader into its world with the admis-
sion of being too exhausted to engage with and turn on any gadgets or
mobile technology. This small detail alone suggests that this is a book
with contemporary preoccupations, of and for our times. More seriously,
recent shootings of African-American citizens by US police, and subse-
quent reprisal killings of police officers, show its concerns to be sicken-
ingly current.
The use of language is important for any issue construed as politi-
cal. The form of address is often the second person; the text tries to get
us involved—What if this were you? How would you feel treated this
way?—but also establishes a sense of ambiguity in regard to identity and
to the critical theme of invisibleness experienced by African-Americans in

19 Lyn Hejinian, My Life (Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 2002).

20 And Rankine’s 2001 collection Plot is composed largely of prose poetry.
21 Commonality with the lyric essay is observable, but a full consideration of this form is

beyond the scope of consideration of this chapter.

22 Also observed by Howell, in “The Prose Poem….”

23 Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 5.

232  O. BULLOCK

American culture. But the use of the second person is not always ambiva-
lent or universal, and complicated slightly by the use of the first person in
tandem with it. Initially, this is confusing, until one sees the complexity it
lends the topic of identity.24 It communicates the possibility that the ‘I’
might be owned internally but not with the same ease socially, because
of the pressures of prejudice, and the erasure of self that is systematic in
the face of racism. Rankine moves away from the more direct encounter
with racism in earlier texts—particularly, for example, in the sequence ‘In
Transit’ and ‘New Windows’, from Nothing in Nature is Private (1994).
Though this earlier, lineated work from Nothing in Nature is subtle
and compelling, the strategies of Citizen are even more psychologically
complex. The ambiguity of the prose poem and the particular use of the
second person in Citizen serve to support this complexity and open up
unique ways on both literal and emotional levels to overcome all kinds of
barriers, not just those around race.
By the time Citizen comments explicitly on the use of the second per-
son, the ambiguity around form of address has helped forge an active
connection between text and reader. Slights delivered through igno-
rance or uncertainty nevertheless highlight overt racism and make one
consider the spectrum. The refrain that you are not that guy highlights
the problem of identity for the victim of racial prejudice. Selfhood is
embodied and the abuse of the body is another ploy in the devaluing
and dehumanising strategies of racism, which is seen taking formal hold
of the body, much like imprisonment. The text’s explorative power and
sense of interconnectedness helps achieve these aims, and the voice of
the text wonders if the issue is too ‘foreign’ to assimilate. The emphasis
on you is disembodied by a sense that a weird and undefined experiment
is going on around her, for example, in being told that a university is
hiring people of colour in spite of the fact that there are so many other
great writers and having to face a two-hour meeting with men who she
has overheard making racist comments.
Some of the later texts in Citizen, notably those written for video
collaboration, showcase the postmodern fragment, an important ele-
ment of the hybrid text. Some prose poems as monologues employ frac-
tured statements and place greater emphasis on language for its own
sake, sometimes condensing a number of complex ideas by disdaining

24 The strategy of the writing recalls Atwood’s ambiguous second person in “A Parable”

(Atwood 1997, 101–102).

 14  THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME  233

punctuation (101). ‘World Cup’ is an assemblage of quotations about

race, which includes racist slurs made against soccer player Zinedine
Zidane in 2006, noted by lip readers. If this assemblage is a postmodern
trope, it is certainly familiar—and continues to reflect the age in which
we live.
The speech-like tone of the writing gets across the ordinariness or eve-
rydayness of the ongoing tragedy described. A friend advises the author
that she needs to absorb the world, meaning to take the abuse and not
mind too much. Notably, the friend who actively refuses to take on or
hold what is not hers suggests the limitations of empathy. There is pres-
sure from the justice system not to speak out about racism, to let go, or
move on; this is what it means to be a citizen. Language close to speech
ensures an all the more direct account of the situation in its unforgiving
reality.
The false sense of moving on is contrasted with impressions of tran-
scendence. For example, universality is suggested in the author’s sense of
her own presence at the beginning of a day, and the concerns of the self
are in some mysterious way shared with everyone. The fact remains that
an injury to selfhood has been sustained, and the seemingly universal
quality of blobbing out watching tennis matches—described so candidly
as a neat way of displacing any form of trial, aim or being let down—has
another meaning for the person of colour, associated here with the racist
attitudes that Serena Williams has encountered.
The book’s final metaphor is a weighty one in the full knowledge
that the defeat of prejudice is slow. The image of the patient stethoscope
implies a monitoring of the situation, like the poet’s ability to com-
ment on societal values, and, through the medium of ordinary speech, is
upheld in prose poetry.
*
When a successful poet such as Simon Armitage uses the prose
poem, as Seamus Heaney did during and after the 1970s, does it make
a difference to the acceptance of the form? Is it no longer subversive?
The cover blurb of Seeing Stars accentuates the storytelling aspect of
the book, ‘a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic mon-
ologues, allegories, parables and tall tales’. This is a specific and inter-
esting list, but, again, omits the term or even the possibility of ‘prose
poetry’. While some reviewers have no hesitation labelling the work as
234  O. BULLOCK

prose poetry, others are undecided as to what name to assign it.25 The
poems are, indeed, a series of dramatic monologues. These are not the
imagined worlds of real characters or real situations. They are supremely
imaginative and tending towards a kind of intellectual surrealism. Since
neither Heaney nor Armitage have used the term ‘prose poetry’, at least
in these collections, however,26 their adoption of prose poetry may not
have helped the acceptance of the term. But they have helped acceptance
of the practice of writing prose poetry, and that is a distinction which
needs making.
It has to be said that Armitage’s lineated poems are themselves quite
prose-like. The structure of ‘Snow Joke’, for example—the first poem
in his debut collection Zoom (1989)—could fit very well in Seeing Stars
without lineation. Yet, Armitage is clear that prose and poetry represent
‘two different mindsets’; if too much poetry spills over into the prose it
becomes clogged, he confesses.27 That has not happened here.
Visually, the setting of Seeing Stars troubles any discussion of prose
poetry. The ends of lines have been left ragged and stop rather a long
way short of the right-hand margin, as if to tease the reader, or open
up related discussions of the long line.28 The effect is that one is uncer-
tain how the poems are meant to be read. Yet, familiarity with poetry
suggests that these are not line-endings in the normal sense: they seem
completely arbitrary. Armitage shed light on the situation by explain-
ing that the typesetting choice was his, agreeing that the line breaks
are casual, and saying simply that he had a conception of a certain size
for the poems.29 Furthermore, Armitage has asserted that they are not
prose poems and gleefully describes one reviewer’s opinion of them as
‘not poems’.30 His assertions about form spill over into doubts as to

25 For example, Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Telegraph, 24 June 2010 and Paul Batchelor, The

Guardian, 5 June 2010, respectively.

26 Heaney merely called his 21 prose poems in Stations “pieces”. See, Stations (Belfast:

Ulsterman Press, 1975), 3. Much later, Heaney revisited the form in the sequence “Found
Prose,” in District & Circle (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 36–41.
27 Simon Armitage, “Interview,” The Poetry Archive, 2010, http://www.poetryarchive.

org/interview/simon-armitage-interview, accessed 11 August 2016.

28 See Howell, “The Prose Poem…”.

29 Simon Armitage in conversation with the author, University of Canberra,

16 September 2016.
30 Armitage’s comments during poetry reading, Poetry on the Move Festival, University of

Canberra, 13 September 2016.

 14  THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME  235

whether Rankine’s Citizen is poetry, which he challenges on the basis of

its generalisations and regarding which he makes reference to the vary-
ing typography of the differing editions of her work.31 One reviewer of
Armitage’s inaugural Oxford lecture sensed a residua of white privilege
in these remarks,32 while acknowledging some progressive ideas. Another
reviewer was more freely complimentary in the new professor’s ability to
herald change.33 If anything, Armitage’s pragmatic ambiguities assist his
work overall, even as they do for Rankine.34
The trait of ambiguity is ongoing in Armitage’s text. One is never
quite sure what is intended. For example, is the son who wants to be
an executioner merely an example of cheap sensationalism, or does it
raise real questions about parenting and ambition? Some poems in this
respect are closer to enigmas, rather than parables. Armitage’s surreal-
ism (intrinsic to these enigmas and ambiguities) is of a different kind to,
say, Baudelaire’s or Simic’s; it takes as its model James Tate’s Return to
the City of White Donkeys (2004).35 In a few cases it can seem strained,
with too big a suspension of disbelief (e.g. ‘Aviators’), but the variety
of ‘what if’ scenarios is entrancing. The main difference from previous
work seems to lie in the extent of freedom given to imagination; we have
moved from strange scenarios to fantastical ones.

31 Armitage, “The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet”, Inaugural lecture, Oxford

University, 2015, http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-events/news/201511/listen-profes-

sor-simon-armitages-inaugural-lecture-professor-poetry.html, accessed 22 September 2016.
32 Dan Holloway, “The Place of Poetry in the World—Simon Armitage’s Inaugural

Lecture,” Sabotage Reviews, 2015, http://sabotagereviews.com/2015/11/26/the-place-

of-poetry-in-the-world-simon-armitages-inaugural-lecture/, accessed 22 September 2016.
NB: It was noticeable that, in a symposium keynote address, of the nine works Armitage
referred in detail only one was by a female poet, so that male privilege might also be an
issue. The poets were: Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Robert
Graves, Edward Thomas, Jorie Graham, Douglas Dunn, and Thom Gunn (Armitage
2016b).
33 Michael Delgado, “Review: Simon Armitage Inaugural Lecture,” The Oxford Culture

Review (2015), https://theoxfordculturereview.com/2015/11/26/review-simon-armit-

age-inaugural-lecture/, accessed 22 September 2016.
34 See Howell, “The Prose Poem…”.

35 Armitage, in conversation, 2016b.

236  O. BULLOCK

One reviewer complained at the lack of originality of Armitage’s sit-

uations.36 Though the precedent for ‘An Accommodation’ is, indeed,
obvious from a certain episode of Steptoe and Son, where the two pro-
tagonists divide their living space in half, the reviewer in question ignores
the appraisal of marriage that ends the poem—and far from flippantly.
The premise for ‘Knowing What We Know Now’ also has an obvious
antecedent in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but the unexpect-
edly romantic affirmation at the conclusion of the poem still manages
to break new ground. In any case, language itself comes to the res-
cue, in sentences such as, ‘Could he really go swanning around with a
young man’s intentions and a fashionable T-shirt while she slipped away
towards undignified infirmity and toothless old age?’37 Sentences and
phrases ring with life; who could resist, ‘the true scold of Antarctica’s
breath’.38 There is comic drama and fairy tale, with deft use of dia-
logue and extreme confrontational interactions—for example, in ‘The
Accident’ and ‘Seeing Stars’—which perhaps appeal to the novelist/
dramatist in the author. These are all extensions of Armitage’s poetic
mode, made possible by incorporating prose more freely.
Another pragmatic aspect of the prose poem worth considering is in
the differences between text and performance. In a panel discussion on
prose poetry at the University of Canberra in 2015, an audience mem-
ber made the astute observation that when prose poems were performed
they became lineated poems, since the poet had to choose to pause some-
where. Of course, this idea needs to be nuanced by the fact that perfor-
mance is a variable phenomenon. Many poets, for example, who make
use of enjambment in a skilful way in the published versions of their
poems, then fail to pause or linger in the appropriate places when read-
ing them aloud; this tendency ensures that many readers of poetry sound
as if they are reading prose throughout. But with the above audience
member’s observation in mind, I would like to consider Armitage’s poem
‘An Accommodation’ as performed in the video recording hosted by The
Guardian. If one were to lineate the poem in response to where the poet
actually pauses in performance, it would come out something like this:

36 Paul Sutton, review of Seeing Stars, “Unoriginality & Simon Armitage,” Stride, 2010,

http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag2010/May%202010/Armitage%20
review.htm, accessed 1 August 2016.
37 Simon Armitage, Seeing Stars (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), 32.
38 Armitage, Seeing Stars, 17.
 14  THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME  237

An Accommodation

___ and I
both agreed that something had to change,
but I was still stunned  and not a little hurt
when I staggered home one evening to find she’d draped
a net curtain slap bang down the middle of our home.
She said, ‘I’m over here and you’re over there,
and from now on that’s how it’s going to be.’
It was a small house, not much more than a single room,
which made for one or two practical problems.
Like  the fridge was on my side and the oven was on hers.
And she had the bed while I slept fully clothed in the inflatable chair.
Also  there was a Husker Dü CD on her half of the border
which I wouldn’t have minded hearing again for old times’ sake,
and her winter coat stayed hanging on the door in my domain.
But the net was the net,
and we didn’t so much as pass a single word through its sacred veil,
let alone  send a hand crawling beneath it,
or,  God forbid, yank it aside and go marching across the line.
Some nights  she’d bring men back, deadbeats, incompatible,
not fit to kiss the heel of her shoe.
But it couldn’t have been easy for her either,
watching me mooch about like a ghost,
seeing me crashing around in the empty bottles and cans.
And there were good times too,
sitting side by side on the old settee,
the curtain between us, the TV in her sector
but angled towards me, taking me into account.
Over the years  the moths moved in,
got a taste for the net,
so it came to resemble a giant web,
like a thing made of actual holes  strung together by fine, nervous
threads.
But there it remained,
and remains to this day,
this tattered shroud,  this ravaged lace suspended between our lives,
keeping us  inseparable and betrothed.

There is a no-nonsense quality to these line breaks, since full stops and
commas already do most of the work of organising the way it will be
238  O. BULLOCK

read. Where the pauses are slight, I have inserted extra spaces to give
a more complex view of how the poem sounded. Making further line
breaks after ‘Also’, ‘let alone’ and even ‘or’ and ‘over the years’ could
be productive, emotionally, on the page, as it was in performance. By
implication, the prose poem resists the idea of the breath as a defining
characteristic of poetry.39 But, in performance, lineation does indeed
seem to return because of the performer’s need to pause. One could say
that a prose poem is an unperformed poem: unperformed lineation. In
comparing the written and spoken word, it can seem as though there is
uncertainty in the poet’s mind, but perhaps this is simply a reflection of
the uniqueness of performance.
The most dramatic difference in Armitage’s reading from the writ-
ten text is the large break after the opening ‘__ and I’ (the reading also
includes the motion of a finger drawn across silenced lips to denote the
missing name). The full stops are definite pauses: line-breaks; the com-
mas less clear, as one might expect. Each use of the word ‘But’ creates
a very clear break, stronger than after any other full stop—should this
denote a stanza break? The only obvious opportunity for the use of
enjambment is with ‘keeping us’ suspended before the reveal of the last
line, though in the reading Armitage barely pauses at this point. At any
rate, there is a tension between the spoken and written word, which fur-
ther complicates the understanding that ‘poetry is rhythmically organised
speech while prose is ordinary speech’.40 Appended to this summary,
performance must equal lineation.
*
Another British poet, Peter Riley, makes frequent use of prose in his
collection The Glacial Stairway (2011). The cover blurb discusses the
interplay between poetry and prose, rather than using the term ‘prose
poetry’. Sometimes this interplay is achieved by a judicious insertion of
a prose stanza into an otherwise lineated poem. For example, in part I
of the long title poem (a sequence over seven pages) just one stanza is
prose. Its content is noticeably less organised, and it creates a lovely con-
trast with preceding stanzas, focusing on information and observations

39 The idea of the line being a breath unit was made popular by Charles Olson in his

famous essay “Projective Verse”.

40 Yury Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, ed. and trans. D. Barton Johnson (Michigan:

Ardis/Ann Arbor, 1976), 27.

 14  THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME  239

on the track through the Pyrenees to Andorra, without reflection.41 The

prose section is clearly signalled by being justified on both sides, and
represents a change of tone. The cover blurb notes the ‘layering and
counterpoint’ of the poems, and this shift between poetry and prose is a
significant contributor to the effect of counterpoint. Riley himself claims
that there is no definition of poetry. He also notes a movement away
from pragmatic prose; he is ‘interested in prose as a support to poetry’.42
The sequence ‘Best at night alone’ makes more frequent use of prose,
but with a shift of emphasis. Here, the prose sections are stream-of-­
consciousness—for example, ‘And where does all this get us where do
we go from here where are my glasses what are the practicalities of col-
lective hope’ (36)—some responding to social situations in quiet reflec-
tion, such as, ‘Sing the slow long song and watch the forces part. Street,
street, baleful street, paved with wishes’ (37), after a night of singing and
as one reveller continues in the distance. The changes of tone achieved
are reminiscent of the ‘link and shift’ strategy of haibun, where a con-
cise prose is counterbalanced by haiku. Riley notes a similar dimension
in Scandinavian poetry as ‘a song interlude in a narrative’.43 Whatever
mood and tone the lineated sections establish, the prose sections create
departures from them. When moving from one prose section to another,
the shift in the link tends to be even more profound, taking us to a new
but related topic or preoccupation.44
The journey narrated in the prose poem ‘King’s Cross to SOAS’ is
full of sharp observations and found quotations. Postmodern fragment
and cacophony pervade the poem: ‘World with your gliomas and your
bibles’; its contemporary orientation: ‘I don’t think I have the password
for this’, anchors the poem in our times (68). In this ‘diagonal journey
across a N-S grid’, we find that ‘the labyrinth has no centre but the true
voice which is not so hard to find’ (the postmodern world and the post-
structuralist text are not as decentred as Derrida would have us believe).

41 Peter Riley, The Glacial Stairway (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), 8; references to this

text will be given in parenthesis hereafter.

42 Peter Riley, “In Conversation with Keith Tuma,” Jacket #11, 2000, http://jacketmag-

azine.com/11/riley-iv-by-tuma.html, accessed 1 August 2016.

43 Peter Riley, “In conversation…”.

44 An earlier version of this work was published as a chapbook by Oystercatcher Press.

There is a sustained interest in the possibilities of the prose poem in Riley’s work (e.g. in
the chapbook, The Ascent of Kinder Scout, 2014).
240  O. BULLOCK

The sense of displacement leads the voice of the text to muse, ‘At every
corner I become a different creature’, yet, there’s a clear sense of an indi-
vidual consciousness choreographing movements. The voice imagines
walking into each shop and buying the body parts necessary to reassem-
ble ‘a people out of their debts’ (70). Just as ‘debts’ takes in the semi-
otic potential of ‘depths’, the figure is sensitive to the plight of consumer
humanity. It is a heroic route, lined with the concerns of the everyday
and the extremes of urban life.
The prose poem sequence ‘Western States’ (1) is ‘a journal of trav-
els’—a fact which makes the reader ponder the varieties of short form
that can be encapsulated by the prose poem, including diaries, letters,
philosophical reflections (à la Wittgenstein, Neitzsche and so on):

Unsustainable light, discontinuous song, unpayable debt. A display of surplus

energy not yet accounted for: a burning cauldron, a mass of bright lights sur-
rounded by blackness as the plane descends towards Los Angeles. (72)

The sentence fragments of the opening take us straight into the point of
view of the voice, with its environmental and economic concerns, shown
by ‘unsustainable’ and ‘unpayable’, and the lack of accounting. We also
encounter the free associative, or connotative, reference to a cauldron.
The protagonist soon gets out of the city:

The desert each side of the road pitch black, the desert of fun pitch bright
disappearing behind to a flicker and we are alone. Such lights will always
leave you alone, looking for somewhere to lay your head. (72)

The unnatural, unsustainable light is left behind; it disappears in a way

prophetic of economic meltdown, such lights unable to help humanity.
The chatty, ruminative style and the poetic use of free association soften
the philosophical tones of the work. There is much opinion here with-
out substantiation, one takes it or leaves it—again, evoking the original
understanding of the essay form.
Recollecting Ed Dorn’s probing of life in Nevada and Idaho (presum-
ably in Gunslinger), which he characterises as ‘a lustful quest for exhaus-
tion’, Riley sees ‘faceted mirrors in people’s speech and eyes that stir
up our hope’ (81). People make the best of life; the national situation
seems irrelevant, and the fear of Islam manufactured. The writing is full
of memorable statements of the best and worst of humanity: ‘Nevada,
 14  THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME  241

dumping grounds for Indian tribes surplus to requirements and nuclear

waste’ (83), where the ungrammatical import of the causal addition, ‘and
nuclear waste’, would not be achievable outside a sentence structure.
The simple and quotidian is respected: ‘An elderly woman comes out of
her door to examine the post box, finds nothing and goes back in, sur-
rounded by sky and earth’ (83). Once more, the grammar is doubtful; it
is the whole action that is surrounded by sky and earth, not the closing
one. There is much more that could be said about this evocative portrait,
but the closing self-conscious statement is apt: ‘Under the circumstances
it seems best to end with a paragraph struggling to be born’ (86). Is this
a metaphor for the USA? For form? For sustainability? Again, the text’s
form and its frequent ambiguity assist content, and recall Gross’ com-
ments, above, about ambiguity being useful for both lyric and narrative.
Riley’s strategies extend to writing supporting prose texts which
accompany poems (Riley 2000, n.p.). This practice is paralleled in David
Bromige’s prose, which forms biographical commentaries on earlier
poems and has been described as bespeaking ‘an immense anxiety about
the future of one’s writing’45—and, though it is questionable that anx-
iety is the right word, it does show a seriousness of intent and explo-
ration that is a good model for writing. Perloff’s quoting of William
Spanos that ‘poets want to make prose out of their poetry’ is also apt
for the above,46 and nicely counterbalances the thesis ‘that poetry can be
extracted from prose’,47 or Riley’s ‘song interlude in a narrative’.
With regard to the advantages prose gives the poets discussed in this
chapter, one might say, with Fredman, that their strategies are ‘a sign of
engagement with the largest range of language in order to both under-
stand and come into the world’.48 Correspondingly, each poet offers
actual and possible versions of that world in ways that extend the range
of their poetry. It has been claimed that the prose poem can include an
illumination of the self by the discourses that surround it and from which
it cannot be independent.49 Such engagement would seem particularly

45 Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 144.

46 Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Illinois:
Northwestern University Press, 1999), 291.
47 N. Santilli, Such Rare Citings (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2002), 32.

48 Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 147.

49 Santilli, Such Rare Citings, 36.

242  O. BULLOCK

true of Rankine and Riley; perhaps less so of Armitage, where the self
is hidden by the monologue. In Rankine, the critical capacity of prose
poetry is strongly to the fore. In Armitage, the prose launches fantas-
tical narratives. Riley’s work centres on technique as much as subject
matter, highlighting stylistic choices and the inherent contrasts between
prose and poetry. Rankine, in particular, seems to transcend genres. If
poetry and prose are ‘two independent but correlated artistic systems’,50
then she blends that independence and, in doing so, her work recalls
the much-enjoyed notion that prose poetry is subversive. Delville notes
the way prose poetry ‘straddles’ genres, and uses this word interchange-
ably with subverts.51 In contrast, a recent essay introducing a selection
of prose poetry in the Australian Poetry Journal claimed that the prose
poem is so self-evident an option for the (Australian) poet that it is no
longer subversive at all and may even be considered a form, rather than
a genre.52 On balance, one could say, that the pragmatic sense in which
the prose poem ‘defies categorization’53 in itself means that the prose
poem can always be seen as subversive.
Finally, I would like to refer back to Gross and the ideas or thoughts
he had during his recent return to prose poetry. Excerpts from ‘Evi
and the devil’ are owned as ‘a prose poetry sequence’. According to
the author, the work, tried first in lineated form, resisted poetry. It was
attempted in other hybrid genres, including a ‘poem-documentary’, but
all were unsatisfactory. He describes a movement towards narrative and
away from the lyrical. His conclusion—important for himself and use-
ful for us—is that ‘lyric and narrative are principles, not demarcations’.54
This belief accords with Alexander’s assertion that many poets are story-
tellers and many storytellers are poets.55 Both these ideas reflect on the
work of the poets discussed here, in terms of their shifting use of regis-
ters and functions.

50 Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, 25.

51 Delville,American Prose Poem, 10.
52 Ali Jane Smith, “The Mongrel: Australian Prose Poetry,” Australian Poetry Journal

4.1 (2014): 6–14.

53 Steven Monte, Invisible Fences—Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American

Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 236.

54 Philip Gross, “Voices in the forest…”.

55 Alexander, “Prose Poetry”, Marie Alexander Poetry Series.

 14  THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME  243

We are challenged as readers and writers to look at concepts such as

‘prose poetry’ to see, ultimately, whether they are helping or hinder-
ing us. Perhaps the designation ‘prose poetry’ is more useful to readers
and critics than to writers. I have suggested above that there is a differ-
ence between acceptance of the term and the practice of writing prose
poetry. A look at journal contents and recent collections suggests that
the practice is now far more widespread in the UK than previously. It is
the writer who is more able to work in the liminal space that does not
need a name, and innovative writing, which is of its times, is often name-
less or in defiance of these categories. This essay has imposed the term
‘prose poem’ on works which are not thus assigned, but which might
all be considered versions of prose poetry; this represents one reader’s
choice. The works differ from one another significantly; the fact that
they are so different indicates the rich potential of hybrids, but does not
make it easier to define them. The discussion has sought to highlight the
advantages that aspects of prose gives to poets and how they work with
these additional resources to produce compelling literature. Where form
is unclear, a deeper discussion about content and style becomes possi-
ble, and readers may be more open to these issues than an over-­emphasis
on genre can allow for. The success of hybrid works is not necessarily
impeded by our inability to categorise them. At the same time, the his-
tory of the discourse of the prose poem has thrown up significant and
useful debate about prosody and reading, both through its name and
what it comprises.

Works Cited
Alexander, Robert. “Prose Poetry.” The Marie Alexander Poetry Series, 2016.
http://mariealexanderseries.com/prosepoem.shtml. Accessed 18 August
2016.
Armitage, Simon. Zoom. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1989.
———. Seeing Stars. London: Faber and Faber, 2010a.
———. “Interview.” The Poetry Archive, 2010b. http://www.poetryarchive.
org/interview/simon-armitage-interview. Accessed 11 August 2016.
———. “The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet.” Inaugural Lecture, Oxford
University, 2015. http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-events/news/201511/
listen-professor-simon-armitages-inaugural-lecture-professor-poetry.html.
Accessed 22 September 2016.
———. Comments during poetry reading, Poetry on the Move Festival, University
of Canberra, 13 September 2016.
244  O. BULLOCK

———. Conversation with the author, University of Canberra, 16 September

2016.
Atwood, Margaret. Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems. London:
Virago, 1997.
Delgado, Michael. “Review: Simon Armitage Inaugural Lecture.” The Oxford
Culture Review, 2015. https://theoxfordculturereview.com/2015/11/26/
review-simon-armitage-inaugural-lecture/. Accessed 22 September 2016.
Delville, Michel. The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of
Genre. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998.
Fitzgerald, Adam. “‘That’s Not Poetry; It’s Sociology!’—In Defence of Claudia
Rankine’s Citizen.” The Guardian, October 23, 2015. https://www.the-
guardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/oct/23/claudia-rankine-citizen-po-
etry-defence. Accessed 11 August 2016.
Frank, Robert, and Henry Sayre. The Line in Postmodern Poetry. Illinois:
University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Ginsberg, Allen. “Notes for Howl and Other Poems.” In American Poetic
Theory, edited by George Perkins, 343–346. Open Library: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston of Canada Ltd., 1972.
Gross, Philip. “Voices in the Forest: Three Ways of Conceiving of a Work in
Progress with Selected Pieces from Evi and the Devil.” Axon: Creative
Explorations #6, 2014. http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-6/voices-for-
est. Accessed 13 July 2016.
Hartman, Charles O. Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1980.
Heaney, Seamus. Stations. Belfast: Ulsterman Press, 1975.
———. “Found Prose.” In District & Circle. London: Faber & Faber, 2006,
36–41.
Hejinian, Lyn. My Life. Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 2002.
Holloway, Dan. Review of “The Place of Poetry in the World—Simon
Armitage’s Inaugural Lecture, 2015.” Sabotage Reviews. http://sabotagere-
views.com/2015/11/26/the-place-of-poetry-in-the-world-simon-armitages-
inaugural-lecture/. Accessed 22 September 2016.
Howell, Anthony, ed. “The Prose Poem—What the Hell Is It?” The Fortnightly
Review, 2016. http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2016/04/prose-poetry/.
Accessed 11 August 2016.
Kellaway, Kate. Review of “Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine—
The Ugly Truth of Racism.” The Guardian, August 30, 2015. https://www.
theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/30/claudia-rankine-citizen-ameri-
can-lyric-review. Accessed 22 September 2016.
 14  THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME  245

Lotman, Yury. Analysis of the Poetic Text. Edited and translated by Dan Barton
Johnson. Michigan: Ardis/Ann Arbor, 1976.
Monte, Stephen. Invisible Fences—Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and
American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.
Murphy, Margueritte. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from
Wilde to Ashbery. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Noel-Tod, Jeremy. “Review of Seeing Stars by Simon Armitage”. The
Telegraph, June 24, 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/
bookreviews/7851863/Seeing-Stars-by-Simon-Armitage-review.html.
Accessed 11 August 2016.
Perloff, Marjorie. Postmodern Genres. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1989.
———. Poetry On & Off the Page—Essays for Emergent Occasions. Illinois:
Northwestern University Press, 1998.
———. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Illinois: Northwestern
University Press, 1999.
Rankine, Claudia. Nothing in Nature Is Private. Cleveland: Cleveland State
University Poetry Centre, Cleveland State Poetry Series, 1994.
———. Plot. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
———. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf
Press, 2004.
———. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014.
Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1978.
———. “On the Prose Poem’s Formal Features.” In The Prose Poem in France:
Theory and Practice, edited by Mary Ann Caws and Hermine Riffaterre, 117–
132. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Riley, Peter. Best at Night Alone. Old Hunstanton: Oystercatcher Press, 2008.
———. “In Conversation with Keith Tuma.” Jacket #11, 2008. http://jacket-
magazine.com/11/riley-iv-by-tuma.html. Accessed 1 August 2016.
———. The Glacial Stairway. Manchester: Carcanet, 2011.
———. The Ascent of Kinder Scout. Sheffield: Longbarrow Press, 2014.
Santilli, N. Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature. Madison,
NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2002.
Saunders, Tristram Fane. “Claudia Rankine Wins £10,000 Forward Prize with
Book of Prose Poems.” The Telegraph, September 30, 2015. http://www.tel-
egraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/claudia-rankine-wins-forward-prize-with-
book-of-prose-poems/. Accessed 11 August 2016.
Simic, Charles. The World Doesn’t End—Prose Poems. San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1989.
Smith, Ali Jane. “The Mongrel: Australian Prose Poetry.” Australian Poetry
Journal 4.1 (2014): 6–14.
246  O. BULLOCK

Strand, Mark. The Monument. New York: Ecco Press, 1978.

Sutton, Paul. Review of Seeing Stars by Simon Armitage. “Unoriginality &
Simon Armitage.” Stride. http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20
mag2010/May%202010/Armitage%20review.html. Accessed 1 August 2016.
Tate, James. Return to the City of White Donkeys. New York: HarperCollins,
2004.
 PART IV

Other Voices, Other Forms

 CHAPTER 15

‘Man and Nature In and Out of Order’:

The Surrealist Prose Poetry of David
Gascoyne

Luke Kennard

In her authoritative study of the form, Santilli puts forward a­

number of useful analogies for the prose poem, four of which are espe-
cially pertinent to an assessment of David Gascoyne’s surrealist works:
the ­container, the fugue, the refrain and the footnote. In the container
analogy, the prose poem becomes ‘a kind of transparent container that,
while it possesses certain constant attributes (prose sentences, brevity,
and collective presentation, let’s say), acquire[s] its immediate effects
from current literary moods that it absorbs or subverts’ (20). As we shall
see, Gascoyne’s ‘containers’ at once absorb and subvert the mood of
Surrealism: its techniques of automatism, its profoundly rebellious stance
against reason and traditional structures of authority, specifically reli-
gion. It is in the case of the latter that Gascoyne’s poetry rather subverts
the subversion of the movement. In the fugue analogy, Santilli draws on
compositional theory to demonstrate the way in which an ‘abandoned
theme’ within a prose poem may be used ‘to initiate new sections’.
This will be best examined through close textual analysis of the prose

L. Kennard (*) 
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 249

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_15
250  L. KENNARD

poems in question, in particular ‘Automatic Album Leaves’, which makes

consistent use of furtherance or, as Santilli defines it, ‘extension gener-
ated through repetition’. As in a complex musical work, ‘the point of
origin masks its own privilege by setting itself in a context that coun-
teracts causality and even association because it is a reflection’ (108).
Gascoyne’s prose poems tend to have two main points of attention: dis-
turbed mental states and rituals. In the disturbed mental state the point
of origin is masked for different reasons, but the effects are the same: the
attempt, via ritual, to generate meaning, to explain the unexplainable and
to explore metaphysical, noumenal spaces for which no proof exists is, by
definition, a reflection.
This leads us to the refrain, which Santilli defines later in her study:
‘Repetition suggests a return or ceremonial circling. In the context of
(suppressed) narrative(s), the refrain-encased text lifts a moment out of
the general flux of passing moments, nullifying the time scale because the
prose poem now exists outside sequentiality, freezing continuity into a
tableau’ (187). We shall see this reification of distorted time, ceremony
and narrative in ‘The Great Day’, as well as ‘Automatic’ and a number
of the shorter prose poems. It is the suppressed narratives, in this case
Gascoyne’s questioning of his own position on the Surrealist’s stance,
which will be of interest to us here. Finally, Santilli also defines the prose
poem as akin to the footnote: a textual space which is itself supplementary/
subservient to the main body. In the past, I have looked at the various
ways poets have used their prose poetry to comment on, interrogate and
destabilise the techniques they use (apparently without self-­consciousness
or complication) in their verse poems. This is no less the case when
considering Gascoyne’s Surrealist prose poems in the context of his
Surrealist verse.
In aesthetic terms, the prose poem can be defined by its combination
of the conversational and the Surreal. It is democratic in that it appropri-
ates and absorbs non-literary language and form, turning it to literary
ends; and didactic in that we are to agree on the superiority of the latter.
It is collaborative insofar as we, as readers, are expected to participate in
that construction of meaning; and authoritative insofar as there is, as in a
satirical one-liner, a plateau on which we are expected to converge. Like
Breton, it asks us to concur with the great inner work of the imagination,
its significance and, even, primacy. David Gascoyne’s Surrealist poems
were composed and published between 1933 and 1936. He was the only
British poet to be accepted by the movement and is therefore of interest
 15  ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST …  251

to any British critic looking to define (or apply) its tenets. Nonetheless,
it is impossible to overlook the fact that Gascoyne’s Surrealist period was
fairly brief and summarily rejected by him over the decades which fol-
lowed. We can look to various sources to confirm this.
The dual language (English/French) anthology Man’s Life is This
Meat was published by Black Herald Press in 2016. According to Will
Stone’s introduction, Gascoyne ‘divorced from Surrealism’ in 1938 with
Holderlin’s Madness. (‘Reflected Vehemence’ is the only prose poem
in this concise selected—a poem I cannot make head nor tail of.) I like
Stone’s use of ‘divorce’ here, and one needn’t read Holderlin’s Madness
for very long to conclude, with him, that the collection constitutes a for-
mal separation. These poems are no less complicated than Gascoyne’s
Surrealist works, but they are unabashedly spiritual lyric poems of great
seriousness, almost monastic in their focus. ‘He has no need of candles
who can see / A longer, more celestial day than ours.’ A seriousness
reflected in its pentameter and confirmed by his later devotional poems
on the Stations of the Cross. Roger Scott’s editor’s preface to the New
Collected Poems (2014) adds further insight. ‘Gascoyne’s involvement
with Surrealism was a necessary but brief journey of liberation. That
phase, as he told me, tended to hang like an albatross around his neck
in the public consciousness until the remarkable scope of his lifetime’s
work became apparent in the 1990s. My focus became Gascoyne’s devel-
opment from precocious avant-garde theoretician and practitioner of
Surrealism into a religious poet of major significance’ (xx). We can agree
with this conclusion, and yet still see the worth in exploring what was
necessary in this ‘journey of liberation’, albatross notwithstanding.
Such a journey (or volte-face) is explored in depth by Kathleen Raine
in her 1967 article ‘David Gascoyne and the Prophetic Role’, which did
much to cement Gascoyne’s reputation as the poet of major significance
Scott describes. The escape, as Raine describes it, is from ‘suburban val-
ues and modes of thought’; and in Robert Fraser’s biography, Night
Thoughts: The Surreal Life of David Gascoyne, we learn that Gascoyne was
educated, before the comprehensive system, at a polytechnic school with
a complete focus on business and the civil service (also football, but not a
whisper of music, poetry, or philosophy).
While Surrealism, and its exponents’ enthusiastic acceptance of the
young Gascoyne, may have provided passage from this dreary fate, we
may yet share Raine’s suspicions of the movement in the late 1960s
252  L. KENNARD

today, specifically its Dadaist embrace of nihilism,1 but perhaps also its
methods and results. Raine writes:

Surrealist imagery is not archetypal; often striking, sometimes prophetic,

most of what surprised at first by its novelty seems in retrospect the lumber
of another age. […] every line is a new beginning; and the juxtaposition
of image after image, whose shock at first strikes the attention, in the end
wearies it for want of an organizing principle – or rather, because subjected
to the wrong organizing principle, murders it on a procrustean bed of man-
ifestos and formulations.2

This amounts to a concise and comprehensive inventory of all that can

fail in a piece of Surrealist writing; it is not just that it is off-putting for
the reader, or disturbs the relationship between the writer and reader;
rather it is that it fails even to accomplish that frustration in any engag-
ing or interesting way. We could argue over what exactly ‘the wrong
organizing principle’ is (and therefore what the ‘right’ one might be),
but Raine’s conclusions are both unignorable and valuable in considering
Surrealism’s current usage or obsolescence.
Gascoyne’s first published Surrealist poem, ‘And the Seventh Dream
is the Dream of Isis’, contains all the above. It opens: ‘white curtains of
infinite fatigue / dominating the starborn heritage of the colonies of
St Francis / white curtains of tortured destinies / inheriting the calami-
ties of the plagues of the desert / encourage the waistlines of women to
expand…’ (25) and continues for several pages. But, aside from his verse,
Gascoyne wrote seven Surrealist prose poems which, at their best, tran-
scend the more common trappings of the technique (via the expansive
nature of the form itself) and contain, I will argue, the seeds for his divorce
from the movement: the reflection turned against itself, the subversion
used against the totalising orthodoxies of subversion per se. Little Medusas.
Allow me to absorb one of the more beautiful contentions of the
Surrealists and to speak to you as if you are a poet (as every human being

1 “Such evil jokes appear less amusing since Belsen and Buchenwald put nihilism into

practice on a mass scale, and the instruments of mechanized warfare made the prophetic
nightmares of Ernst seem as old-fashioned as Jules Verne. Had such art been, after all,
cathartic, or had it played its part in the loosing of the devils into a possessed world?”
(201).
2 Kathleen Raine, “David Gascoyne and the Prophetic Role,” The Sewanee Review 75.2

(Spring 1967): 203.

 15  ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST …  253

is, whether they have suppressed this facet of their humanity or not).
What do we aim for when we write a Surrealist prose poem? I like to
think of the first-wave Surrealists in direct competition with one another,
or, that is to say, the salons where they shared their work were for the
joint purposes of admiration and the camaraderie of jealousy (when they
weren’t disavowals or aesthetic show-trials). But it is not enough sim-
ply to ‘out-strange’ the last poem and there is little more tedious than
listening to a stranger’s dream. Unless it is about you. Especially with
these long-form prose poems, the reader/listener must be interested
enough to go on reading/listening past the opening lines, to discover
something, even if that something is only our instinctive need to make
sense of that which resists our efforts. In that tension alone, there are
rewards and consolations. So, when we write a Surrealist prose poem
we are aiming for something ‘heady’, something the reader might get
lost in but nonetheless enjoy the experience of being lost and find, in
their disorientation, a new state, a metaphysical space of faith, doubt and
seemingly illogical juxtaposition negotiable by certain points of illumi-
nation. A breadcrumb trail. My contention here is that such effects are
more convincingly achieved in prose poetry than verse. Prose poetry is
more spacious; it tends to contain complete sentences; it allows for more
incongruity and complex yet visible patterns; already at odds with the
supposed purpose of prose (to convey information clearly) it is, in fact,
the ideal Surrealist form.
‘I know what I am saying…’ insists Gascoyne’s narrator of the hys-
terically nonsensical prose poem ‘The Great Day’. Indeed, the narrator
insists that he is of sound mind and reason, in spite of sentence by sen-
tence evidence that he is not. The four-page long prose poem begins
with the narrator waking up, but waking into an even less logical space:
a dream narrative with time out of joint and interjections of violence
and lustful images. The poem feels fairly raw and unprocessed, and was
likely composed automatically (pace the movement). The narrator wakes
up refreshed, the stairs swimming towards him, everything shining and
beautiful. He watches from his window, enervated, as a succession of
ambulances or an Easter parade passes; he is not sure which, and hence
neither are we. He refers to ‘Pascal lambs’ which, it should be noted, are
sacrificial, and therefore could stand for the victims in the ambulances.
The world is part threatening and part whimsically benign: a bygone
era (or a single, era-long day) where things start to happen ‘precisely
at the hour of the one-o’clock séances and balloon-course meetings’, a
254  L. KENNARD

conflation and expansion of time fairly typical of Surrealist dream logic.

The basin is not filled with water, but with ‘cream and ashes’ and this
brings on ‘one of my fainting fits’. Cream and ashes could simply be
shaving foam and stubble, the narrator so dissociated from his actions
that he has forgotten, mid-shave, what he is doing. At this point ‘she’
appears: the object of the narrator’s affection/obsession. He rushes
straight up to her: ‘her mouth was like a beautiful garden full of flowers
and full of bronze flowers and beautiful flowers like medals’. The hyper
repetition of ‘flowers’ is deliberately clumsy; it gives the impression of
a speaker overwhelmed by the moment, or obsessively pedantic, or stu-
pid, or both. Such guileless repetition also undercuts poetry itself (the
best words in the best order). It is a device which persists in contemporary
application of Surrealist technique3 because it works so well in under-
mining the authority of the narrator/author, perhaps to comic effect
(which always masks something else), or perhaps towards a subtler disso-
nance (which comedy always points towards anyway).
Within the same sentences of ‘The Great Day’ we are given the flap-
ping of sheets and the bottling of new wine (as metaphors for his kisses
in the air), and this is where he insists that he ‘knows what he is saying’:
at the moment of supplying us with the wildest succession of analogies.
Maybe his account of the day is distorted beyond recognition as report-
age, but it is precisely this distortion which makes him able to describe
a kiss. We can say that we kissed someone and that it was exciting, but
this does nothing to capture the experience or to recreate, for the reader,
our state of mind (or body or soul) during the experience we purport to
describe. It is the difference, we might say, between watching a football
match and looking at a score line in a newspaper the next day; between
the event which inspired a Rothko canvas, and the feeling the event
inspired in the artist and, thereafter, anyone who experiences the painting.
Andre Breton saw such psychic automatism as the raw material for
insight: ‘If the depths of our mind harbour strange forces capable of
increasing those on the surface, or of successfully contending with
them, then it is all in our interest to canalise them, to canalise them
first in order to submit them later, if necessary, to the control of reason’
3 There are too many examples to list here, but we could think of Heather Philipson’s

“mashed potato” in “Heliocentric Cosmology”; “fucking” in John Cooper Clarke’s

“Chicken Town”; the register of casual communication in Sam Riviere’s first two Faber
collections, or, indeed, what I was aiming for in using the word “murder” (or murderer/
murdered/murdering) 57 times in “The Murderer”.
 15  ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST …  255

(60). These strange forces Georges Hugnet defines as being manifested

in ‘madness, dream, the absurd, the incoherent, the hyperbolic and
everything that is opposed to the summary appearance of the real’ (60–
61). In an era of scientific rationalism, we may add religion to this list of
strange forces and observe that, in the aforementioned realm of ‘com-
monsense’, faith is regarded with much the same suspicion as poetry.
The principal ontological difference between a position of atheism and
a position of faith is the importance we place in thought. For the ration-
alist, such thoughts as itemised above can only be a waste product: saliva
looping from the spit valve of a woodwind instrument before it contin-
ues its sane and coherent melody. But for the Surrealist and the person
of faith alike, such thoughts are as real as the location in which they are
thought.
In response to Henry Miller’s ‘Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere’,
Gascoyne wrote Miller a ‘Letter to An Adopted Godfather’,4 since published
in chapbook form by Etruscan Press in 2012. Gascoyne’s letter is heartfelt,
lyrical and eccentric, describing his inner struggles with a rare and alarming
clarity. ‘I have always had […] a sense which seems almost like a mysterious
recollection of the state preceding birth, and that is what I really want, and
I can never hope to be satisfied with anything else. And so: drama, strain
and anguish without end. An ever-latent Claustrophobia caused by the walls
of the world-womb […phrase missing] – in order to persevere I must have
faith, ex nihilo, in spite of everything. This ounce of faith is one of the rare
concessions to the instinctive human demand for comfort that I can at all
willingly allow myself to make.’ At this point, Gascoyne still views his ‘ounce
of faith’ as a concession to bourgeois comfort, but it is nonetheless pres-
ent, and clearly explored in his prose poetry. He was never, to put it bluntly,
quite comfortable with the nihilism of Surrealism.
Surrealism’s central adversarial relationship to Christianity may strike
us now as slightly dated. We can look at the oft reprinted photograph
from the journal The Surrealist Revolution: ‘Our contributor, Benjamin
Peret insulting a priest’, which Gascoyne identifies as indicative of Peret’s
poetry and its ‘brutal, bitter, crazy humour’ (77). We can also look at
Paul Eluard’s ‘Critique de la Poesie’ [1929] as a key example insofar as
it implicates not only the establishment, but all of us who fail to loath

4 Traditionally, the role of the Godfather or sponsor is to give their godchildren advice

and spiritual guidance, to answer their questions and worries about the Church and
spiritual life in general.
256  L. KENNARD

it as much as he does: ‘Of course I hate the reign of the bourgeois /

The reign of cops and priests / But I hate still more the man who does
not hate it / As I do / With all his strength. / I spit in the face5 of
that despicable man / Who of all my poems does not prefer this Critique
de la Poesie’ (110). This poem is interesting for its conflation of clerical
and civic law, its completely straightforward language (in the sense of a
gloves-off revelation of the poet’s subtext all along), and its meta-textual
commentary upon itself as the only Eluard poem we should celebrate
(on pain of being spat on).
In a liberal, Western democracy such as the UK in the twenty-first cen-
tury, the Christian religion does not occupy the same elevated position
(ideologically, politically, morally) as it did in the early to mid-twentieth
century and may even seem like something of a soft target; the well-
thrashed dead horse of the New Atheism. Certainly, we are surrounded
by other forms of epistemological violence, whether marketing, PR and
advertising, political rhetoric (including right- or left-wing extremism,
yes, and including liberalism), corporate philosophy, hack-work posing as
journalism, the means of representation and public language owned by
the most privileged 4% of our society. One might feel that Thought for The
Day ought to be the least of our worries. I’m writing this essay partly in
order to argue that Surrealism and Absurdism persist as vibrant and vital
tools for interrogating authority, specifically by pointing out its arbitrary
nature, and that their burning scorn might be turned against the new
orthodoxies.6 In that sense, its program has barely begun.7

5 Worth noting that Peret’s aforementioned “insult” is in the form of literally spitting at
a passing cleric.
6 Gascoyne writing to Henry Miller: “You attribute man’s misery to the fact that he

allows himself to be the prey of unreal abstractions, do you not? The inexorable abstrac-
tions bred by moralists, ethicists, philosophers, critics, lawyers, politicians, etc. We are
sucked dry and sterile by ideas as though by vampires. Therefore we must rid ourselves
of our exaggerated awe of them, cease to attribute more than a secondary and quite rela-
tive importance to their authority, refuse to admit the validity of their unremitting claim to
determine human behaviour (without succeeding in doing so, except quite superficially).
Then we shall be able to live in and enjoy the only true reality, which is that of most imme-
diate present experience.”
7 Not least in that gestures of rebellion tend to be appropriated and marketed back to us

as an opportunity to express our individuality—and if that individuality by its nature attacks

the very system which is making it available to us, all the better—through what we buy;
e.g. Che Guevara t-shirts, punk band t-shirts in high-street chain stores.
 15  ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST …  257

I have mentioned Santilli’s comments on the ‘ceremonial’ repetitions

and refrains to be found within prose poetry. In Surrealism such cer-
emonialism takes a decidedly satiric turn towards the mockery of ritual.
Gascoyne’s most substantial prose poem (a sequence of nine parts),
‘Automatic Album Leaves’, is a work in vigorous dialogue with Surrealists
on the topic of faith. In A Short Survey of Surrealism, Gascoyne locates
the roots of the movement in Dadaism, characterised by its ‘violent, vit-
riolic attacks on modern society’ and its motifs of ‘destruction and sac-
rilege’, often manifesting in a subversion of presentation/distribution
(gallery openings and poetry recitals violently distorted into eccen-
tric, offensive ‘happenings’ which often insulted their own audience)
and resulting in riots and police involvement. ‘They wanted to break
everything down in order to liberate – what? They did not know as yet.’
Gascoyne concludes that ‘complete anarchy, such as Dada repre-
sented, ultimately amounts to the most restricting kind of tyranny’.
In this sense, Surrealism survives because ‘it is fundamentally a rev-
olution of ideas and not of the forms expressing them’ (32–35).
Nevertheless, the Surrealists preserved this violence on the level of the
text and we might look at Peret’s8 poem ‘And So On’, translated by
Gascoyne in the same study, as a point of comparison:

A kick in the pants once more

and the empty sardine-tin thinks itself holy
A kick with the heel on the jaw
and it is a divinity
which swims in pure honey
not caring about protozoons
(155)

I want to focus on the opening lines here: the language of science and
religion, ritualistic gesture reduced to a single, repeated and simple act of
violence: ‘a kick’; the empty sardine-tin here representing the tools used
in the sacrament of the Eucharist. An empty sardine can is an inanimate
object; a piece of litter. It is ridiculous that it might be capable of thought,
or self-image. Everything is ridiculous. Religion is especially ridiculous,
but mainly insofar as it is a part of the bourgeois establishment.

8 Peret was a prominent late Dadaist before being embraced by the Surrealist movement

under Breton.
258  L. KENNARD

Gascoyne’s ‘Automatic Album Leaves’ is as typical of the movement

as ‘The Great Day’, a tribute as much as a contribution,9 but one which
vacillates as it accuses; as anti-Surrealist as it is anti-Christian. In fact, a
poem which telegraphs Gascoyne’s abandonment of Surrealist tenets in
favour of the lyric tradition and a reckoning with his own faith. Part I is
a mise en scene describing what appears to be a manner of small chapel or
church. It could also be a workshop or private study. Some of the para-
phernalia is familiar but exaggerated: ‘hundreds of crosses hanging, made
of rotten, worm-eaten wood, and to each is nailed a small flat figure cut
from rose coloured tin’; but even here the décor is wilfully disconcert-
ing. The abject description of the wood and the carving of the crucified
Christ, if that is indeed what it is, reduced to an anonymous ‘small flat
figure’ is itself a distancing effect, as if the narrator had never seen such
iconography before. The altar holds ‘bundles of hair, paper-knives, pho-
tographs of angels kissing’, miniature Greek statues in cork. The narra-
tor describes a shadow ascending to the ceiling and bursting, whereupon
many books open at once on ‘coloured plates showing embryonic devel-
opment’ which then flutter to the floor in slow motion, ‘faintly phos-
phorescent and smelling of sweat’. Here, and throughout the sequence
of nine prose poems, Gascoyne, like Peret in ‘And So On’, juxtaposes
religious and scientific symbolism and language, as if the one might undo
or pollute the other.
In the New Collected Poems published by Enitharmon in 2014, only
this first part of ‘Automatic’ is included, and the sequence is catego-
rised within the ‘Other Early Poems’ section as opposed to its group-
ing with ‘Surrealist Poems’ in the original Oxford Poets Collected Poems
1988. This is a shame, I think; although doubtless the full sequence of
‘Automatic’ is flawed and perhaps negligible in the context of Gascoyne’s
major work, to excise it altogether is to miss its subtext. Robert Fraser
gives us the details of its initial publication in his biography: ‘Just as

9 Gascoyne himself comments on “The Great Day” and “Automatic Album Leaves”: “the

result of my first attempt to produce a sequence of lines of poetry according to the ortho-
dox Surrealist formula: ‘Pure psychic automatism by which is intended to express … in
writing … the real process of thought … in the absence of all control exercised by the rea-
son and outside all moral or aesthetic preoccupations’, in the words of Andre Breton. […]
In November 1933, A.R. Orage published in his New English Weekly […] the series of
short Surrealist texts that in the present volume I have re-titled ‘Automatic Album Leaves’.
[…] All these poems are united by the basic aim of achieving the greatest possible sponta-
neity, but this aim can produce results of considerable variety” (xxvii–xxix).
 15  ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST …  259

soon as he was back in London again, Gascoyne appeared in Orage’s

paper once more as the author of ‘Ten Surrealist Cameos’ [since retitled
‘Automatic Album Leaves’] featuring a similar [as in similar to ‘And the
seventh dream is the dream of Isis’] stream of unlikely and macabre con-
nections, with an occasional disturbed ecclesiastic undertow’ (69). These
connections still connect, and the undertow is to become the ostensible
direction Gascoyne’s work eventually flows in.
Part II makes reference to ‘the mental seasons, the spectacular Roman
Catholic seasons’ and goes on to describe some form of initiation cere-
mony: ‘And did they ever show you the heavenly respiration-box with its
nine coagulated wounds and its ink-stained mouth into which they used
to pour gall-stones?’ It reads almost like instructions for a piece of instal-
lation art, but this sacred/profane object used in an obscure ceremony is
a distorted version of a reliquary: a decorative cabinet where fragments
of bone, scabs and teeth of Saints were stored for veneration. Initiates are
then required to recite numbers and phrases, and the tone remains quite
formal and serious, especially when that which is described becomes hys-
terical and preposterous. ‘They would never have shown you the seasons’
combs, they have to be kept apart during the day, as they are apt to turn
black and to sprout poisonous feathers.’ But perhaps no more prepos-
terous than faith in itself, couched in terms of truths we all hold to be
self-evident with weary pomposity, captured by the narrator’s tone here:
‘I refer of course to the mental seasons.’ Of course.
The pleasures of ‘Automatic Album Leaves’ are fitful, but Part III
opens with the finest sentence in any of Gascoyne’s prose poems: ‘Several
years ago I fell violently in love with a pear tree, and sat for a long time
in one of its branches.’ This is gorgeous, contemplative, silly, and opens
up limitless potential (it would be a great opening line for a novel). What
follows, however, is somewhat disappointing. The narrator coughs up a
surprising amount of blood, which settles in a pool around the tree, and
thousands of tiny creatures with alarm clocks for bodies and daffodils
for faces emerge from the pool and start ascending towards his perch.
In the final sentence: ‘they climbed without pausing to the very topmost
bough, where they astonished birds by committing hara-kiri en masse’.
It is instructive—for anyone who wishes to use them now—to look at
why this fails as a piece of writing and as an implementation of Surrealist
technique. For one thing, it is hard to visualise the creatures commit-
ting seppuku. Do alarm clocks even have stomachs? Where did they get
the ceremonial blades? How did they climb the tree if they were holding
260  L. KENNARD

swords? The reader can only conclude that the scene is not an ‘authentic’
dream: the appropriations too arbitrary, an imagination too insistent on
its own eccentricity.
We can think here of Hopkins admonishing a young Yeats for the lack
of logical cohesion in The Island of Statues wherein the poem’s characters
live abandoned on a remote rock: ‘(how did they get there? what did
they eat? and so on: people think such criticisms very prosaic; but com-
monsense is never out of place anywhere.)’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins: A
Life, by Paul Marlani, pp. 370–371). Of course, Surrealism sets out to be
the enemy of ‘commonsense’ and other dominant rhetorics, and the ‘out
of place’ is arguably its metier and prime location, but it may do to dwell
on Hopkins nonetheless: in order for the effects of the out of place to
work on us, the place itself must be established, evoked, agreed upon by
the writer and reader.
Thus, ‘Automatic’ is more successful when the reader can firmly
grasp its deviations via the norms from which it deviates. To appropri-
ate non-literary writing to literary ends is a legacy of the prose poem,
and Part IV is written in the second person as a set of instructions.
‘Halfway down the alley you will meet a naked woman who will take you
by the hand and drag you out to the esplanade. There you will receive
the secret message about which I have already told you.’ In this con-
text, second-person directions inevitably bring to mind the late passages
of the Gospels where Christ instructs his disciples before the entry into
Jerusalem: ‘Saying unto them, Go into the village over against you, and
straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them,
and bring them unto me’ (KJV, Matthew 21:2). ‘And if any man say
unto you, Why do ye this? say ye that the Lord hath need of him; and
straightway he will send him hither’ (KJV, Mark 11:3). Sourcing a loft
apartment in which to eat the Passover with his disciples is couched in
similar, delightfully arbitrary terms. In Gascoyne’s poem, the narrator has
not told us anything about the ‘secret message’ at all—again, setting the
authority of the speaker against his own illogic while simultaneously dei-
fying him with the gift of foresight.
Part V opens with an exultation: ‘How historic and full of resonance
are these crumbs!’ Gascoyne’s narrator then describes these possessed
crumbs as if they were creatures (with a now familiar whimsy). There
is no consistency of time and place, and the mundane is put beside the
sanctified space. ‘Observe the way they glide out of the churches, lifting
their skirts with lobster-like delicacy, watch how carefully they transform
 15  ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST …  261

themselves into Japanese plants and begin to scrub the floor of the travel
bureau!’ The crumbs themselves, via a process left out of the poem,
are somehow ensouled and can behave in contravention of basic physi-
cal rules. ‘They will never risk thinking in the ordinary, mediocre and
sensible way that people like ourselves do.’ Here, Gascoyne dramatises
the rational mind faced with the impossible, which we might even see as
an allegory for faith; that these creatures/phenomena are bread crumbs
alludes to the material of communion. Within Catholic or Orthodox
Christianity the sacramental is beyond the symbolic: the congregation
are required to fast completely before receiving communion and the sub-
stance itself, the bread and the wine, is sacred. It is not a symbol, it is the
body and blood of Christ and becomes this during the Liturgy. In fact,
this is the very purpose of the Liturgy. There is nothing remotely ‘sensi-
ble’ about this and, here, Gascoyne locates another unlikely intersection
between Surrealism and Christianity. If we are supposed, in Surrealism,
to eschew the sensible, might that not be a similar suspension of rational-
ity required to accept the transubstantiation?
Part VI takes on an apocalyptic air as it describes ‘Suffering’, who
becomes a character: another impossible, surreal embodied force, a fifth
Horseman, if you like, in a poem already heavily laden with impossible
creatures in nightmarishly exaggerated and inconsistent forms. ‘They
shake their rattling wrists and Suffering flies up the chimney and opens
its green chemical head like a workbox. The trout that swim continu-
ously through her hair…’ and so on. The world is in chaos as Suffering
makes its rounds: diseased trees break through everything, nurses per-
form unnecessary operations and our bodies are themselves horrifically
augmented: ‘Priests pull pieces of string through holes bored in their
jaws.’ Out of this maelstrom and ‘stench of burning rubber’, Suffering
triumphantly emerges, ‘dressed in white, wearing a bishop’s mitre
stained with ink, wine, blood and sperm’. We might take this as an ironic
statement on the supposedly enobling nature of suffering, noting the
Dali-esque collage of the sacred and the profane, the oozing stuff of life
(blood, sperm) presented as if it were itself somehow an ugly negation of
the spiritual, a call-back to earlier juxtapositions and an attempt, perhaps,
to reckon with the narrator’s disgust at the physical, its mess and fluidity.
We might also see it as a necessary element of Gascoyne’s thought exper-
iment, wherein he must consider every impossible angle in all its dream-
like violence if he is to accept his own faith.
262  L. KENNARD

Part VII concerns ‘the little pilgrims that make their nests in stones’:
they are afraid of ‘the wings of swallows. They are afraid of street cor-
ners.’ This information is reincorporated in the final sentence of the
stanza where the little pilgrims are found in street corners, the very place
they fear most, ‘shouting at the tops of their voices’. The collocation is
most successful here; elsewhere in the sequence the elements feel inter-
changeable (Why Japan? Why not Hong Kong, Maharashtra, Sweden?)
and appear as of nowhere. This is the case here, too, I suppose, but it is
that much more satisfying through comic timing. ‘I tell you again and
again: “There is a crystallized hair in the last workman’s bouquet and fish
are cleaning their nails with the rose-coloured pencils of despair.”’ This
is a simple trick of dissonance: a commonplace (How many times do I
have to tell you?) followed by a sentence of glorious nonsense, but the
restraint of the former is sufficient in allowing us to smile at the lat-
ter. The italicised lines could be a sentence from any other point in the
poem, recasting the entire sequence as a plaintive need to be understood
(a grumpy authoritarian demand, in fact) while explaining in terms that
evade interpretation.
Part VIII is especially pertinent to the idea of the anti-ritual with its
clergyman who ‘is said to have made advances to the statuette of the
Madonna that he keeps in his study’. This clashing of the erotic and the
religious is embedded earlier in the poem when the narrator confesses:
‘It makes very happy to be able to read the word ROME on the top
of your stocking.’ This sentence acts simultaneously as the prelude to
a sexual encounter10 and an intimation that said encounter is in some
way legitimised or granted special dispensation by the seal of Rome.
‘Please do not stare at my lips’, the narrator breaks off to say, ‘I know
they are swollen, it is because of the wooden doll that I use for brush-
ing my teeth.’ Once again, the explanation is as beside the point as it is
true or, to put it another way, in answering one, it raises a more press-
ing question: why? As elsewhere in ‘Automatic’, the assault on the sacred
is literal: ‘let us amuse ourselves by tearing apart this shirt front with
consecrated buttons’, a garment which recalls a priestly cassock, which,
in Catholicism, has thirty-three buttons to symbolise the thirty-three
earthly years of Christ and, in Anglicanism, thirty-nine buttons to

10 In a letter to Henry Miller, Gascoyne relates an anecdote about engaging two sex

workers, taking them back to his hotel and telling them that he wants only to talk to them
about their lives. “I don’t really care very much for fucking.”
 15  ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST …  263

symbolise the thirty-nine Articles (post-Reformation, clergy would alleg-

edly leave unbuttoned the articles they disagreed with). The violence is
not even committed out of any revolutionary impulse or zeal but, rather,
for amusement, as arbitrary as the narrator feels the ritual of consecration
itself to be. In Part IX, the whole sequence concludes with a manner of
appeal to a public assembly: ‘Does anyone know how to play conkers, a
recipe for bats in the belfry, the way to lick stamps, the way to London;
how to open collection boxes?’ The final question being well-placed
as a link between the Church and finance, specifically the money taken
from the congregation, in funding the ‘pearl of great price’, or in the
propagation of a monstrous lie, depending on one’s perspective. It is, I
hope, still the case that I am able to allude to scriptural references such as
the pearl with the expectation of being understood but it is, in fact, the
function of this very order of reference which ‘Automatic’ worries, if not
overturns. If we cannot assume the reader’s foundational knowledge of
scripture, such arcana might as well be possessed alarm clocks, dolls for
toothbrushes, trout swimming through our hair. It is a question, then,
of what we depart from, atheist and theist alike, ultimately to embrace or
dismiss it.
A few days after writing Holderlin’s Madness, Gascoyne wrote the fol-
lowing in his journal: ‘24.IX.37. Anything of the kind I may write from
now on will be entirely different: no more themeless improvisation, no
more autonomous lyricism, no more “pure” effect. I want depth, sol-
idarity, experience. Poetry that will say something definite. Emotion,
a raised voice, but clear and coherent speech.’ He would live out this
resolve in his future works (and in a manner which is only beginning
to be appreciated after his death), but we may also note that depth and
coherent speech were existing facets of his prose poetry. Indeed, the
prose poem is unique in allowing the poet a depth of equivocation: there
is no space in Gascoyne’s Surrealist verse for the clerical dimension, or
for exploring anything so radical as faith and doubt in the Surrealist
context or aesthetic. Aesthetically speaking, the verse is very much after
Peret, if not written specifically to please him, and such content would
have been anathema. His prose poems, on the other hand, provide the
space, both physical and philosophical, to do just that. Gascoyne would
return to the form in later aphorisms and for passages of his long radi-
ophonic poem Night Thoughts (1956), alongside the techniques of col-
lage, multiple dissonant voices and equivocacy he developed in the
Surrealist mode.
264  L. KENNARD

Works Cited
Caws, Mary Ann, ed. The Yale Anthology of Twentieth Century French Poetry.
Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2004.
Fraser, Robert. Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Gascoyne, David. A Short Survey of Surrealism. London: Cobden-Sanderson,
1935.
———. The Sun At Midnight. London: Enitharmon Press, 1970.
———. Extracts from A Kind of Declaration. Warwick: Greville Press, 1988.
———. Collected Journals 1936–42. London: Skoob Books, 1991.
———. Night Thoughts: A Radiophonic Poem. Paris: Alyscamps Press, 1995.
———. Selected Prose 1934–1996. London: Enitharmon Press, 1998a.
———. Interview. Stand Magazine, Volume 33, 25 (1991). Reprinted in
the introduction to David Gascoyne, Selected Prose 1934–1996. London:
Enitharmon Press, 1998b.
———. Letter to an Adopted Godfather. Devon: Etruscan Press, 2012.
———. New Collected Poems 1929–1995. London: Enitharmon Press, 2014.
———. Man’s Life Is This Meat. Paris: Black Herald Press, 2016.
Miller, Henry. An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere. New York: New
Directions, 1939.
Raine, Kathleen. “David Gascoyne and the Prophetic Role.” The Sewanee Review
75.2 (Spring 1967): 193–229.
Santilli, N. Such Rare Citings. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2002.
 CHAPTER 16

Nonsense and Wonder: An Exploration

of the Prose Poems of Jeremy Over

Ian Seed

‘Must a name mean something?’ Alice asked doubtfully.

The prose poem is an ideal vehicle for making the world we think we
know, and indeed language itself, strange to us.1 It can work, as Michel
Delville puts it, as ‘a self-consciously deviant form […] calling into ques-
tion the naturalness of accepted boundaries between prose and poetry, the
lyric and the narrative, or the literal and the figurative’.2 Or, as that master
of the prose poem Max Jacob declared, a prose poem will open the read-
er’s eyes ‘to the absurdity of our rituals and the things we hold dear’.3

1 A much shorter, earlier version of this article first appeared in Tears in the Fence, 63.

Permission granted by the author, also the editor of Tears in the Fence.
2 Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre

(Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 11–18.

3 Max Jacob, The Selected Poems of Max Jacob, trans., ed., and intro. William Kulik

(Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 1999), 15.

I. Seed (*) 
University of Chester, Chester, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 265

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_16
266  I. SEED

In the hands of Jeremy Over,4 the prose poem has much in common
with nonsense literature in its ability to combine the seemingly irrec-
oncilable: to be at the same time comic and philosophical, lyrical and
satirical, absurd and beautiful. His work lays out before us the dazzling
possibilities of language. Lurking not far beneath there is also a sense
of melancholy, even when he is at his silliest. However, we have to be
careful here when coming to an aesthetic judgement. As W.H. Auden
warned Frank O’Hara: ‘I think you must watch for what is always a
great danger with any surrealistic style, namely of confusing authentic,
non-logical relations which arouse wonder, with accidental ones, which
arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.’5 This essay will argue that
Over does, indeed, succeed in ‘arousing wonder’.
Over’s work has a clear lineage back to Edward Lear. Like the later
Lear who mixes prose and poetry, Over has a seductively sprawling and
anarchic style. Indeed, many of his prose poems are in fact ‘hybrid’
poems, in which he combines pieces of prose and chopped lines within
the same poem. On a brief examination of Over’s biography, one
might be surprised to find such an anarchist lurking within the life of
a former civil servant. He was born in Leeds in 1961, studied Law at
Leeds University and, for many years, worked as a policy adviser for the
Department for Work and Pensions, from which he has recently retired.
Over has published two collections with Carcanet: A Little Bit of Bread
and No Cheese (2001) and Deceiving Wild Creatures (2009), a third to
be published in 2019.
The ‘hybrid’ poem is hinted at in the first stanza of ‘The Poet Writes
to His Family from New York,’ and is the opening poem of his first
book. In the initial stanza, the lines are those of poetry but, since they
come almost to the edge of the page and, in the third line, go over the
edge (to be aligned on the right on the fourth line), might pass at first
glance for prose with a ragged right margin. The last line of the first
stanza, which is much shorter, could be the end of a paragraph rather
than the end of a stanza:

4 This article is an exploration of Over’s prose poems. I should point out, however, that

much of his work takes the form of lineated poems, which I plan to explore in a future
article.
5 This quotation is given by Kenneth Koch in an interview with Mark Hillringhouse (Joe

Soap’s Canoe 12, 1989).

 16  NONSENSE AND WONDER: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PROSE POEMS OF …  267

Well here I am, alleluia, alleluia — a hot pineapple on a sharp parasol!

The sea voyage was marvellous — six days of roses and cool hands.
On arriving in New York one feels a faint trace of the ink’s
desperation
but what a sky I look for and am!6

Of course, it is visually, if not aurally apparent, that this is poetry

rather than ragged prose as many of the lines on the page turn out to
be short, and because of its bouncy, exuberant rhythms in lines such
as: ‘but what a sky / I look for / and am’. What is equally apparent is
Over’s characteristic use of nonsense in play with language and tim-
ing of unusual imagery. What does Over mean when he says that he is
a ‘hot pineapple on a sharp parasol’, that he ‘feels a faint trace of the
ink’s desperation’, and that he both looks for and is ‘a sky’? What is the
connection between such a bewildering array of images? Why should we
concern ourselves with them? We shall briefly return to the question of
why we should bother at the end of this essay. In the meantime, it is
worth pointing out that there is an important theme running through-
out Over’s work: that of the difference between the literary or poetic
reality we desire and the awkwardness and messiness of ‘real’ reality.
The reference to ‘New York’ in the title of this first poem points the
reader towards Over’s poetic lineage. In the way he relishes and makes
use of all kinds of bits of language that most of us would pay little atten-
tion to, he clearly owes something to the so-called New York School of
Poets—above all John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Ron Padgett who,
in turn, took much from the Dadaists and Surrealists who, in their turn,
owe more than a little to Edward Lear and the wider tradition of non-
sense verse.
What of Jeremy Over’s relationship to British prose poetry? Here, it is
best if we let him speak for himself:

I’m not sure I’m very well qualified to talk about what’s happening at
the moment with contemporary British poetry of any kind. My finger has
never been on the pulse of things exactly. I’m aware of excellent prose
poems being written by younger writers here like Luke Kennard and Carrie
Etter but the ‘context’ in which I’d set my work, i.e. the people I’ve tried
to learn and steal from, is quite an odd one and probably a bit out of date.

6 Jeremy Over, A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), 9.
268  I. SEED

Early in the eighties I went on a happy day trip to Asa Benveniste’s

bookshop in Hebden Bridge and came away with a copy of the Trigram
Press anthology 5 x 5, which he edited, containing selections from Glen
Baxter, Ian Breakwell, Ivor Cutler, Anthony Earnshaw and Jeff Nuttall. It
was all boundary crossing work including prose poems and it’s been on
and off my shelves many times over the years. I also bought a copy of
Eugene Ionesco’s Fragments of a Journal which sort of compounded an
absurdist view of the world. A lyrical and occasionally ecstatic absurdity.
His journals (more than his plays really) have been important to me ever
since.
Other journal writers too like the natural historian Gilbert White.
There’s perhaps a link between the everyday and apparently common-
place and prose poetry. I’ve enjoyed Lee Harwood’s work for a long time
– Gilbert White appears a few times in Harwood’s work – and I like the
mix of storytelling and the curiosity cabinet quality of some of his prose
poetry. What he said about John Ashbery’s poetry and Joseph Cornell’s
boxed assemblages too, both sharing a sense of being open to the reader/
viewer and inviting them into the work to animate it.
I’ve also liked Peter Redgrove’s weird brand of magical realism and the
thick texture and synaesthesia of Roy Fisher’s The Ship’s Orchestra. There’s
a feeling of crammedness in both of these poets’ prose poetry that appeals
to me.
I’ve always taken my bearings from American poets more than British
ones though. I’m not sure why but in the pre-internet days of the nineteen
eighties and nineties, when I started writing, books from the US seemed
very remote and attractive to me. And American poets seemed to be hav-
ing a lot more fun than British ones. Prose poetry there was just one of the
ways in which the stays were being loosened. Martin Stannard’s excellent
Joe Soap’s Canoe introduced me to many of the New York poets including
Ron Padgett who I think is a master of the prose poem. Several different
kinds of prose poem in fact.7

British prose poets, then, and tellingly the work of the dreamy humour-
ist Ivor Cutler, have their place in Over’s work. Yet, he clearly draws his
inspiration from an extensive range of sources, including non-literary

7 Email interview between author and Jeremy Over, 4–11 June 2016.
 16  NONSENSE AND WONDER: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PROSE POEMS OF …  269

ones such as the boxed assemblages of artist Joseph Cornell.8 It is impor-

tant to note, however, that Over comes back in this quotation to the
New York poets. John Ashbery, especially, is known for abrupt changes
of tone within the same poem. Many of Jeremy Over’s comic effects
depend on similarly startling changes, though in Over’s case the shifts
can also be more gradual and subtle, and built into the narrative of the
poem—for Over uses just enough of a ‘narrative’ thread to make us
think that we are reading some kind of story which we intuitively under-
stand. His nonsense is never mere nonsense.
The hybrid poem ‘Love Poem 5 a.m.’ (‘hybrid’ being, as stated ear-
lier, a mixture of prose and lineated poetry) begins with a quiet, medita-
tive, intimate voice (although the element of send-up is already present),
addressing us in short, lyrical lines:

8 “Visual art has been important for some time as a creative prompt; something to write

about and something to learn from in terms of how to write. I’m interested in an English
strain of visionary artists like Samuel Palmer and Stanley Spencer and have written some
collaged poems about their work using words they’ve written in letters and journals.
Collage plays a big part in my writing process and the work of Joseph Cornell (his journals
as well as his collages and boxed assemblages), Kurt Schwitters (again his writing as well as
his visual work and merz environments) and Peter Blake (especially his collecting and the
art he’s made as a fan) have been inspirations.
I’m writing a long poem at the moment based on my experiences in the light artist James
Turrell’s skyspace environment at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Turrell talks about his art
being a ‘non-vicarious’ one focused more on the seeing of the viewer than that of the art-
ist and I’m interested in the verbal equivalent of this. There’s a link here back to what
Harwood said about Cornell’s work inviting the viewer in. Both Turrell and Cornell are
dealing with box-like environments. With Turrell’s skyspaces you literally enter into them
in order to gaze out at the sky; with Cornell’s you are held at a distance by the glass but
peer inside to share his reverie. There are often skies (night and day) in Cornell’s boxes too
ironically. People often talk about prose poems being kinds of boxes of course but sonnets
and haiku are also little containers. Perhaps prose poems are actually quite un-box-like in
fact in their uncontained lack of line endings?
I’ve been a practising Buddhist (practising in the zen sense of life being ‘one continuous
mistake’) for some years and this also feeds into my writing in some ways I think. There is
a lot of ‘I,’ ‘me’ and ‘my’ in the above and viewed from the Buddhist perspective of anatta
(not self) this is deluded and likely to lead to a lot of suffering. So ‘I’ am interested in
ways of writing (including collage and the use of chance or its OuLiPian alternatives) that
play around with, and loosen, the sense of any permanent, stable ‘self’. I’m not sure where
prose poetry fits in here. Luke Kennard sees its defining attribute as self-consciousness but
perhaps it’s a self-consciousness that is busy sawing away at the branch of the self on which
it is sitting. Or something.” (From an email interview I conducted with Jeremy Over, 4–11
June, 2016.)
270  I. SEED

The last grains of the night

sift through the branches above our heads
as we step, on bare feet
through the young larches.9

The narrator and his companion are ‘too much in love to sleep’. But
the poem then moves to:

weary swallows resting on the ground

in small hollows – pockmarks on the grass body
of a golf course by the sea10

It is the word ‘pockmarks’ here which, with its grotesquely comic

connotations, changes everything in the poem’s tone. However, with lit-
tle time to contemplate this new register, we are immediately swept into
what seems to be something from a golfing manual:

This is sometimes tricky on seaside links, of course, where the often sandy
ground can drain quickly and become very firm, causing the ball to travel
a long way after the first bounce. In these sorts of conditions, I always opt
for the low chip and run approach myself: close the face of a seven iron
slightly and just sweep the ball off the turf like you were clipping it off the
dining room table. Better control and no divot.11

These unexpected twists and turns are a key part of Over’s somewhat
seductive strategy and he constantly has the reader wondering where
they are going next.
Often, as in the above, Over seems to move from cut-ups of other text
to larger pieces of found text. By taking an existing text out of its con-
text and not only putting it alongside, but also connecting it to, another
seemingly unrelated text, he highlights the sheer oddity of different
kinds of language and demonstrates the fragility of meaning. The result,

9 Over, A Little Bit of Bread, 13.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.
 16  NONSENSE AND WONDER: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PROSE POEMS OF …  271

not unlike a Zen koan, provokes a realisation that not everything which
we take so seriously is important in the way we think it is.
The two-page prose poem, ‘Pendolino’, the last poem in his second
collection Deceiving Wild Creatures, performs a similar strategy to that of
‘Love Poem 5 a.m.’, moving from one narrative to a completely different
one through a series of associations which Over somehow makes appear
seamless to the reader. ‘Pendolino’ begins in banal enough fashion with
the narrator sitting on a train with a ‘low evening sun shining through
the window’. We then learn that ‘there is also rain […] so the window
is covered with raindrops that are running diagonally down the glass
because of the speed of the train’. It reads like someone who is practising
being a writer by observing what is around him, but who hasn’t quite
got the hang of it yet and has little idea of what to put in and what to
leave out:

I am looking at the back of the seat in front of me. I don’t know what it is
made of – some sort of grey slightly reflective material – a kind of metal or
hard plastic perhaps. The sun is shining through the window and onto the
back of the seat so that the raindrops on the window are projected onto it
– the shadows of the drops that is.12

There is a feeling here of the writer trying to impose a poetic and mean-
ingful narrative onto an awkward and untidy reality which will never fit
into a story he is trying to find. He keeps us wondering where he can go
next with his attempt to overcome the irreconcilability of life and litera-
ture. Although we are continually taken by surprise, the twists and turns
of the narrator’s thoughts trick us into believing that they are somehow
inevitable.
The narrator goes on to imagine that he is watching a ‘semi-­abstract’
film directed by Stan Brakhage, even though, as we learn, he has never
actually seen one. As he studies the raindrops, he realises that they
remind him of:

sperm – sperm in a hurry for something. An egg, I suppose would be nor-

mal. Only they don’t look like they are searching for an egg to me. They
just look like they want to escape – to flee the scene.13

12 Jeremy Over, Deceiving Wild Creatures (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009), 73.

13 Over, Deceiving Wild Creatures, 73.
272  I. SEED

The back of the seat in front starts to look like a gravestone and the
raindrops like words being scribbled across it. The writer begins to feel
that he is getting somewhere, but then notices that ‘the gravestone has
a handhold on the aisle side, shaped a bit like a Mickey Mouse ear’. He
concludes that a ‘gravestone with a cartoon ear is no good to me’, and
instead looks out of the train window to look for inspiration there, only
to be confronted by a small copse which reminds him of a woman’s
genitals. Feeling ashamed by this thought leads to a whole new series
of questions on what might be the sources of this shame; for example,
‘imagining a woman’s genitals in a landscape owned by the National
Trust’ or ‘imagining the wrong woman’s genitals perhaps?’ This train
of thought takes us into unexpected territories. He wonders, in fact, if
he is really ashamed of ‘not being on a train at all now but here at my
desk […] while pretending to be sitting on a train’. In conclusion (here,
we have to miss a few steps in the poem along the way), he asks: ‘What
is there to be ashamed of, after all, in trying to follow Reverdy’s direc-
tions by learning “to love reality better after a long detour by way of
dreams”?’ He turns the question, seemingly, to the reader: ‘I ask you.
I ask you in particular’, but we then learn that this ‘you’ is ‘R.H. Stacy,
Associate Professor of Russian Literature at Syracuse University, poised
there on the back flap, perusing your own half-read book and thought-
fully smoking an unlit pipe. You look like you might know a thing or two
about this.’
Somehow, in the space of two pages, we have started with one story
and ended in a completely different one, and yet it all seems quite natu-
ral, quite ‘real’ as we are reading it. At the same time, we are thrown into
the gap between narrative on the one hand, and reality on the other.
As with much nonsense literature, there is something enticingly ter-
rifying about all this, as well as comical and ridiculous. Over achieves a
more intensely nonsense effect in his poem ‘Daubed Loops’ through a
rather different technique, that of repeating one seemingly simple phrase
in a series of variations. The sentence is taken from an autobiographical
note by the German artist Gerhard Richter:

[…] as a child, after I had eaten all my food and while my supper plate
was slightly greasy, I daubed loops with my finger, curves that con-
stantly cut across each other and produced fantastic spatial structures that
changed according to the light, that could be reshaped endlessly, according
to the light, while the endlessly intertwining forms constantly cut across
 16  NONSENSE AND WONDER: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PROSE POEMS OF …  273

each other, and spatial structures that had eaten all my food to illustrate
my plate, daubed loops in order that I as a child […] could be supper,
had eaten all my finger, slightly cut, while I daubed loops, I had eaten all
my finger, and while my eaten finger could be changed, could be slightly
reshaped as a finger, I daubed loops with my other finger, I changed finger
and daubed loops endlessly, constantly, I daubed loops, could be curves,
could be loops […]14

This is like something which starts off as practical prank and gets out
of control. The effect, if the poem is read out loud, is not dissimilar to
being spun at increasing speed and, although the initial whirls are tan-
talising and escape-inducing, the poem’s content, style and process
combine even more effectively to form an alternative perception of the
world. In other words, once we have stopped reeling and had the chance
to regain our senses, we see the world we thought we knew in a freshly
adjusted and ultimately welcome light.
In his five-section prose poem ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’,
Over takes some sentences from an essay by Wallace Stevens and repeats
them in a way that evokes a dog chasing its own tail. The effect of this
poem is to highlight the way in which our thought is often circular with-
out us realising it. We believe we have moved forward and made progress
when, in fact, all we have done is stay trapped in self–defeating, obses-
sive ways of thinking. The result, as always with Over, is funny without
diminishing the inevitable sense of underlying sadness and isolation:

To begin with, I don’t know. I don’t know if I am competent to discuss

this. I am afraid not. I don’t know. Perhaps no one knows and if no one
knows, perhaps it doesn’t matter. It may be that someone else does know.
I don’t know. Does it matter? This is not the same thing as saying it does
or that I do. On the one hand it does and on the other hand it doesn’t. I
don’t know. But it really has, along with everything else, and for the most
part no doubt always shall, in time, be something of that sort, for very lit-
tle is ever not. I suppose I had very little in mind anyway. A kind of jotting.
I should like to consider this by autumn.15

This kind of repetition clearly owes something to the prose poems of

Gertrude Stein. However, the effect of Stein’s work is less comical, more

14 Over, A Little Bit of Bread, 41.

15 Ibid., 44.
274  I. SEED

an investigation into the endless possibilities of what we might call ‘sur-

face reality’. Stein’s poetry shows how much there is in everyday objects
which is marvellous and strange, which can never really be captured
finally in language. It does not have the same strong element of parody
and, unlike Over, does not make use of found text.
In his poem ‘Wunderkammern’, for example, Over appears to take
sections of found prose and cut off their margins (the excerpts are cen-
tralised and tightly framed by a black rectangle so that there is no space
between the words and the frame) in order to show how easily mean-
ing can be disrupted with just a little tinkering. The effect, once more,
is beautiful and comical. Figure 16.1 presents the first two sections of a
six-section poem.16
Over has, in fact, edited the found text to intensify the experience he
is seeking to create for the reader, namely to ‘get the effect of a peephole
with the language sort of half-hidden behind and extending beyond the
frames. I wanted that crowded curiosity cabinet feeling.’17 As with the
world through the looking glass, nothing is ever quite what it seems.
Here, we return to the question put at the beginning of this article:
why should we bother with any of this? Chesterton offers a convincing
defence. After differentiating between satire and nonsense, Chesterton
states that nonsense literature offers an ‘escape into a world in which
things are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness’.18 That much,
perhaps, is obvious, though it is a point we are continually in danger
of forgetting. However, Chesterton goes on to say that the ‘cosmos’ is
‘nonsensical also […]. And here we fancy that nonsense will, in a very
real and unexpected way, come to the aid of the spiritual view of things.
Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the “won-
der” of creation, but they have forgotten that a thing cannot be com-
pletely wonderful so long as it remains sensible.’19
Existentially, nonsense can be seen as a way to authenticity and free-
dom in its resistance to common sense, or to any dominant view of what
reality ultimately is (Lecercle, 108).20 It keeps judgement in suspense.

16 Ibid.,53.
17 In an email from Jeremy Over (29 June 2015).
18 G.K. Chesterton, Stories, Essays and Poems (London: J. M. Dent, 1935), 124.

19 Chesterton, Stories, Essays, Poems, 124.

20 See Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense

Literature (New York: Routledge, 1994), 108.

 16  NONSENSE AND WONDER: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PROSE POEMS OF …  275

Fig. 16.1  From ‘Wunderkammern’

276  I. SEED

It also, crucially, makes us laugh. Whereas the gap between subject and
object, between what one desires and what really is (which in any case
is ultimately unknowable) is rendered in some sense tragic by philoso-
phers (such as Nietzsche and Camus), this same gap becomes comic in
nonsense literature. It is this gap which the poet Jeremy Over exploits so
well.
For Over, not even surrealism can lay any claim to ultimate reality.
His prose poem ‘…and they lived happily until they died’ parodies not
only the fairy tale but also the surrealists, as if he wished to say to them,
‘Don’t think for a moment that you have any access to a superior world!’
Surrealism may subvert our everyday sense of reality, but it can be sub-
verted in turn, as this excerpt shows:

She knew him at once and fell weeping upon his neck. Two of her tears fell
upon his eyes, which immediately grew quite clear so he could see as well
as ever. Everything that he had forgotten came back […]. On that spot a
fine tree sprang up on which the bird rested, then it took them both home
where they found their child grown tall and beautiful and the blockhead
rode up the glass mountain and ordered more spinning wheels.21

However, in showing reality in different possible lights, Jeremy Over’s

work can also take on a more sombre tone; for example, that of an autis-
tic child in the poignant ‘Tree / Bush’. Here, as acknowledged in a
note at the bottom of the page, the poem relies on excerpts from Hans
Asperger’s paper on autism in childhood. The poem is worth quoting in
its entirety:

TREE / BUSH
It can happen that three or four cross over each other so that one
has a knot in one’s hand. Then there is a wound there then they
grow together.

STAIRS / LADDER
It is much more comfortable on the stairs than on the ladder.

STOVE / OVEN
The stove is what one has in the room.

21 Over, Deceiving Wild Creatures, 11.

 16  NONSENSE AND WONDER: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PROSE POEMS OF …  277

LAKE / RIVER
Well the lake it can never be as long and never have that many
branches not in the least little bit.

GLASS / WOOD
Glass is a moss. You would have to make a hole in it unless it’s a dry
twig. With glass you need to hit only twice.

FLY / BUTTERFLY
The fly has wings like glass.22

The effect is to show us that the world can be seen in different ways,
and that there is not necessarily any ‘best’ or ‘most real’ reality. Although
the result of how he dexterously evokes sadness and happiness simulta-
neously is astonishing, the reader cannot help but ask: why sadness? The
answer is that these texts show us that our own way of perceiving reality
may work much better in terms of our survival in the world, but that
this perception is also in some way impoverished. Through images and
language rich with association, Jeremy Over empowers voices that we
do not normally pay any attention to, giving us glimpses into strangely
beautiful truths, and re-awakening our buried sense of wonder.
Of course, in the UK the prose poem itself has always been regarded
as marginal and can therefore be seen as a fitting form for such voices,
making use of the form to throw ‘authority figures off the scent—pre-
tending to fish for the moon so that they can be left alone to pull up
the nets and see if they have snared any real fish’.23 Jeremy Over, along-
side other new British prose poets such as Emily Berry, Luke Kennard
and Hilda Sheehan,24 works from the rich traditions of nonsense verse,
surrealism and Dadaism, to sweep us through doors we did not think
were there into a new reality in which sadness and delight, lyricism and
parody, the banal and the beautiful are reconciled. With the new British
prose poem, we finally get to celebrate real fish on the real moon.
22 Ibid.,33.
23 See Over, “Fishing for the Moon: Some Recent Prose Poetry in the UK,” Hard Times:
Contemporary British Poetry Issue 80 (2006): 39–44.
24 These poets employ the prose poem alongside many different poetic forms. See, for

example, Emily Berry, Dear Boy (London: Faber & Faber, 2013); Luke Kennard, The
Harbour Beyond the Movie (Cromer, Norfolk: Salt, 2010); and Hilda Sheehan, The Night
My Sister Went to Hollywood (Sittingbourne, Kent: Cultured Llama, 2013).
278  I. SEED

Works Cited
Auden, W. H. Quoted by Kenneth Koch, in Joe Soap’s Canoe 12 (1989). http://
martinstannard.com/jsc/jsc12compressed.pdf. Accessed 10 June 2017.
Chesterton, G. K. Stories, Essays and Poems. London: J. M. Dent, 1935.
Delville, Michel. The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of
Genre. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998.
Jacob, Max. The Selected Poems of Max Jacob. Translated and edited by William
Kulik. Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1999.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian
Nonsense Literature. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Over, Jeremy. A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese. Manchester: Carcanet, 2001.
———. “Fishing for the Moon: Some Recent Prose Poetry in the UK.” Hard
Times: Contemporary British Poetry Issue 80 (2006): 39–44.
———. Deceiving Wild Creatures. Manchester: Carcanet, 2009.
 CHAPTER 17

Prose Poetry and the Spirit of Jazz

N. Santilli

New Orleans, in the early years of the twentieth century, was a bus-
tling and noisy place. Numerous cultures—domestic and foreign—vis-
ited, passed through or settled, and all of them practised their traditions
loudly against the backdrop of places made infamous in the jazz numbers
they inspired: Basin Street, Funky Butt Hall, Mahogany Hall.
Public parades, including funerals, were frequent events in the city.
Around the official parade line, hangers-on would ‘be having their own
damn parade, taking what was going on in the street and doing something
with it, tearing it up kind of, having their fun. They’d be the second line of
the parade’ (Sidney Bechet).1 Not an anti-parade, not even a heckling one,
but people catching the spirit and continuing its momentum with their
own expressions. With its brass bands leading the way and the colourfully
sinuous Second Liners behind them, this vehicle of early jazz parallels the
classic symbol of prose poetry, the Thyrsus. Jazz music itself might usefully
be equated with this Second Line: around traditional Western, composed
music, the arabesque can be seen as the soloist’s interpretation—anything
from a modestly syncopated rag to a hot jazz solo.

1 Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press,

2002), 62.

N. Santilli (*) 
Independent Scholar, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 279

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_17
280  N. SANTILLI

Ever since Baudelaire’s ‘Le Thyrse’ appeared in his iconic collection

of prose poems, the straight rod surrounded by its arabesque of green
tendrils has provided an ideal image of prose poetry itself which, like
jazz, embellishes the classical tradition around which it plays. The rod
equates with prose fiction, biblical narrative, archaeological report and so
on, which the prose poem presents then dances around in its inimitable
and always individual way. It is this shared sense of play around a stand-
ard, a classical, or otherwise canonical form that I would describe as the
‘spirit of jazz’. Under this phrase I would also suggest the relocation of
the lyric and, most recently, in British practice, it has enacted a synco-
pation upon its very poles of rod and thyrsus to shed its skin, emerging
capable of dealing with humanity at its current state, with its contempo-
rary concerns and struggles with expression. It is this final act with which
the prose poem passes into a new era, not—as was always the risk—as
a twentieth-century form but, like jazz itself, a succession of styles but
always questioning and moving its boundaries, incessantly avant-garde.
Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton claimed to have invented jazz in 1902.
His claim may be unlikely, his dating of it even more dubious, but his
description of jazz, as the syncopated marches of ragtime combined with
the lyrical flow of the blues, is generally accepted as a fairly accurate one.2
Forty years before Morton’s extravagant claim, Charles Baudelaire was
trying to write into existence a form of writing that would suit modern
Parisian life. He found something of what he sought in the miniatures of
Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit and applied it to his own exper-
iment, Les Petits Poèmes en Prose. An artistic alchemy, which Jelly Roll
used years later, was at the heart of his new form.3
Baudelaire’s famous defence invokes the spirit of jazz, avant la lettre,
explicitly associating it with the birth of the prose poem as a dynamic
form. On one hand, ‘musical but without rhythm…’ refers to the strict
French poetics of the time. On the other, Baudelaire suggests that the
innovation he seeks will be found inside music itself; a new prose that

2 A generally-accepted date for the introduction of jazz is 1917, with the recordings by

the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

3 “Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of

poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to
adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movement of our rever-
ies and the convulsive movements of our consciences?” From Charles Baudelaire, The Prose
Poems and La Fanfarlo, trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 30.
 17  PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ  281

flows and convulses with the new rhythms and disruptions of modern
life. Such connection with the spontaneous expression of an individual
will later be found in jazz music.4 Syncopation and swing in general,
and the jazz solo in particular, would come to fit Baudelaire’s searching
description.5 Baudelaire continues: ‘This obsessive ideal springs above all
from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their
innumerable connections.’6
Scarred and noisy, Paris was undergoing major development at the
time of his writing. New boulevards and public spaces were drawing peo-
ple outside. Characters from all levels of society emerged to watch each
other and to be seen, accompanied by the sounds of demolition and con-
struction. Baudelaire draws on Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas De Quincey
when he explicitly aspires to a style that integrates the human flow of
the city with the unfamiliar sounds of its mechanical interruptions. At
this point, the new locus for the lyric is not outside society, but at its
core; the poetic voice now just one sound: competing, soaring, threading
through the mechanistic and human melee of the city.7 It is no wonder

4 In one of his record reviews for The Daily Telegraph, Philip Larkin misquotes Baudelaire

to update him (with characteristic dourness): ‘Back from a holiday where the only music
came from waiters’ beach radios, my scoured palate revels in the accumulation of recent
records. While an exciting multilayered sandwich works slowly down the spindle of my
record-player, I realize afresh the truth of Baudelaire’s words: “Man can live a week with-
out bread, but not a day without the righteous jazz.” Philip Larkin, “Make Me a Palate,” 9
September 1961, reprinted in All What Jazz (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), 45.
5 The writer Carl Van Vechten was still trying to sweep away older forms in 1917, “it

is not my intention to start someone writing a tone-poem called New York… But, if any
composer, bearing these tendencies (jazz) in mind, will allow his inspiration to run riot, it
will not be necessary to quote or to pour his thought into the mould of the symphony, the
string quartet, or any other defunct form, to stir a modern audience”, Carl Van Vechten
“the Great American Composer”, Vanity Fair, April 1917, qutd. in Roger Pryor Dodge,
Hot Jazz & Jazz Dance: Roger Pryor Dodge Collected Writings 1929–1964, Selected and
edited by Pryor Dodge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 45.
6 Baudelaire, The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo, 30.

7 Cf. Winthrop Sargeant, “like jazz, skyscraper architecture lacks the restraint of the older

forms. The skyscraper has a beginning, and perhaps a middle. But its end is an indefinite
upward thrust. A jazz performance ends, not because of the demands of musical logic,
but because the performers or the listeners are tired… A skyscraper ends its upward thrust
in precisely the same way. It might be stopped at almost any point in its towering series
of floors.” Jazz: Hot and Hybrid, qtd. in Roger Pryor Dodge, Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), 71.
282  N. SANTILLI

that both prose poetry and jazz will become identified with the city, and
particularly with Paris.
Oscar Wilde also pre-dates Jelly Roll Morton’s new form, but he was
familiar with Baudelaire’s work in this genre. His own, very mannered,
biblical-styled prose poems were among the first to be written and titled
‘poems in prose’ by a British writer.

When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup
of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weep-
ing through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give
it comfort.
And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of
sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses
of their hair and cried to the pool and said, ‘We do not wonder that
you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.’
‘But was Narcissus beautiful?’ said the pool.
‘Who should know that better than you?’ answered the Oreads.
‘Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on
your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters
he would mirror his own beauty.’
And the pool answered, ‘But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay
on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw
ever my own beauty mirrored.’
‘The Disciple’, Fortnightly Review 56 (July 1894), 23–24.

Wilde narrated his pseudo-biblical tales over lunches hosted by

Frank Harris, who published six of them in his Fortnightly Review
(1894), including revised versions of ‘The Disciple’ and ‘The House of
Judgment’ which had appeared in The Spirit Lamp in 1893. Some of
Wilde’s ‘poems in prose’ therefore have existed in at least three versions:
live performance (we might say) and two, different, published versions.
A.J.A. Symons instinctively refers to the spoken versions as ‘witty
improvisations’ Yet, however modern they sounded, Wilde’s appro-
priations and inversions were in line with pre-1920s jazz which was
still mostly composed ensemble playing with prepared and controlled
improvisations. Nevertheless, it would be out of these early forays from
canonical classical form that both the prose poem and jazz would blos-
som as lyrical improvisations in the 1920s.
 17  PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ  283

Ragtime8 struck the first freedom for jazz, which followed it, break-
ing (or ‘ragging’) the even pace of the popular march-time with lively,
lightly syncopated embellishments. In any comparison between music
and literature, it cannot be over-emphasised that jazz players were com-
mercially more restricted by their market—live audiences and, when
recording became possible, the recording companies.9 However, it is
because Wilde was essentially a performer and improviser at heart that he
bears comparison—perhaps seen most fully in the transcript of his trials,
where he thrives on turning real-time question and answer into another
form of call and response. In some respects, his embellishments in this
context are more thrilling than the composed witticisms of his plays and
aphorisms.
Wilde remained quite conservative in many ways, artistically, so we
cannot make guesses as to what he would have made of even the earliest
jazz. He does not report on any new music during his trip to America in
1882, although he does engage with the country on an auditory level:
‘America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in
the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale but by the steam
whistle… such continual turmoil must ultimately be destructive of the
musical faculty.’10 His tour is a learning journey for him and he comes to
re-evaluate the new sounds: ‘It was not until I had seen the waterworks
at Chicago that I realized the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of
the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most
beautifully rhythmic thing I have seen.’11
If he had survived a few more years, Wilde would have encountered
the tango, the fox trot, the grizzly bear, and the new syncopations of
Ragtime, which would have resolved his struggle between the rural
­harmony and urban rhythms that he identified in America. His death in

8 “Ragtime—A genre of musical composition for the piano, generally in duple meter

and containing a highly syncopated treble lead over a rhythmically steady bass. A ragtime
composition is usually composed three or four contrasting sections or strains, each one
being 16 or 32 measures in length”. Library of congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/
ihas.200035811/.
9 Referring to pre-1920s, “The city of New Orleans sported two kinds of jazz:

the rougher, blues-colored music of Uptown and the more polite Creole music of
Downtown”, Schuller, 70.
10 “Impressions of America” by Oscar Wilde, edited with an introduction by Stuart

Mason (Sunderland: Keystone Press, 1906), 22–23.

11 Wilde, “Impressions,” 24.
284  N. SANTILLI

1900 holds him forever poised on the cusp of Modernism. The broken
rhythms of syncopation and the beauty of industrialised sounds (boogie
woogie, for example, favours the train) were still ahead.
*
Jumping forward in time to an era when jazz was openly appreci-
ated by British poets, we can see prose poetry moving beyond rag-
ging to a ‘jazzing up’. In contrast to Wilde’s embellished biblical-style
prose poems, Roy Fisher’s The Ship’s Orchestra is biblical style, ‘jazzed’.
Fisher wanders further from familiar biblical format and inserts it as a
detail into a larger work. Nevertheless, it is a recognizably biblical regis-
ter that is used for this surrealist scenario, in which ‘he’ (the narrator or
not-the-narrator) is seduced by a flower:

And forthwith the flower made great to do to unloose the fastenings of

his garments, even to the buttons of his braces. And right hard the work
proved, whereas the flower had not fingers but the points of its leaves only.
So in this wise passed a longer while than that of all that went before.12

There is no specific biblical tale on which this piece hangs: Fisher has
created the sense of a passage from the Old Testament by his register and
phrasing, while simultaneously playing with it in characteristic, gentle
humour. We recognise in the flower, the familiar biblical use of a nat-
ural object as the instrument of God’s will (such as the burning bush,
or the whale). Yet, in this prose unit, the flower is an active agent, mis-
chievous in its ‘deflowering’. The subtle accuracy of imitation in the
vocabulary, ‘unloose the fastenings of his garment’ (my emphasis) is
precisely what provides the ‘physical’ humour further on—namely, that
without fingers the unfastening takes a right long time. For a time-frame
that has lasted only two sentences, the final sentence skews it all beauti-
fully with a moment stretched so far that is almost painfully shambolic.
Finally, the introduction of the West Midlands dialect, ‘and right hard
the work proved’ (my emphasis) suggests a vernacular translation, but
with everything getting somewhat lost in that translation. The dream-
like de-flowering by the flower turns the whole composition into a ‘head

12 Roy Fisher, The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005 (Northumberland:

Bloodaxe, 2005), 113.

 17  PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ  285

arrangement’ where, once stated, the next sentence must push on with
the logic of the previous one.13
Today, the phrase ‘jazzed up’ is a quaint expression, suggestive of
something once made modern but viewed from the perspective of hav-
ing already passed into the ‘old-fashioned’. Yet, ‘made modern’ really is
quite accurately what early twentieth-century popular music represented.
‘It has been said that there is no such thing as jazz music and that what
is commonly called jazz is only a manner of playing music. This is partly
true’, writes early jazz dancer and music critic, Roger Pryor Dodge, in
1929.14 Early jazz was an active approach to musical expression. Not so
much a fully conceived form or simple subversion, but a flight of fancy.
From the early ventures of ragtime and the similarly closed set of biblical
(re-)arrangements by Wilde, we can begin to see how this mischievous
transgression operates within prose poetry. The shift is a subtle one. With
Wilde and Fisher still in mind, let’s take another modern work, ‘Proust
from the Bottom up’, in which Tom Raworth uses Proust’s text as his
source (by this very act, asserting it to be on a par with the Bible or
Shakespeare, perhaps as a known text).
Using the Enright/Kilmartin translation of A la Recherche du Temps
Perdu (913–914), Raworth rewrites the key passage which begins:
‘As for the inner book of unknown symbols’. Raworth instead starts
mid-sentence ‘exploring the ocean bed’ stopping at ‘The book whose
hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really
belongs to us’ and re-transcribes the whole passage back to front. One
sentence (which marks a repetition, albeit in translation) jumps to a pre-
vious sentence to continue, ‘cheekily and literally, from bottom to top,
while at the same time redistributing its elements in willful disregard of
normal syntax and sense’.15

13 A musical term used by bands in which the version is not written down but arranged

and remembered collectively.

14 Roger Pryor Dodge, “Negro Jazz,” in Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance: Roger Pryor Dodge

Collected Writings 1929–1964, selected and edited by Pryor Dodge (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 3.
15 Christopher Prendergast, Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic (Princeton and

Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 158.

286  N. SANTILLI

PROUST FROM THE BOTTOM UP

not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us. not that the
truth, they are arbitrarily chosen. the books whose hieroglyphs are patterns
formed by the pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible
upon us, it remains behind as the token of its necessary truth. the ideas
printed in us by reality itself, when an idea – an idea of any kind – is let in
dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the ‘impression’ has been
laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been
the most austere school of life, the true last judgement. this book, more
listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all in
art and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to
intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it. but excuses have no place
genius, that is, to say ‘instinct’. for instinct dictates our duty and the these
are mere excuses, the truth being that he has not or no longer has the
moral unity of the nation, he has no time to think of literature. but this
book: he wants to ensure the triumph of justice, he wants to restore war,
furnishes the writer with a fresh excuse for not attempting to decipher to
evade this task! every public event, be it the dreyfus affair, be it the aside
from writing! what tasks do men not take upon themselves in order our
work for us or even collaborate with us. how many for this reason turn
any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no-one can do
exploring the ocean bed), if I tried to read them no-one could help me
with.16

Raworth enacts an astonishing novelty act on the Proustian text in this

prose poem (I use the term ‘novelty’ in the same way that it was used to
describe jazz when jass was still a zeitgeist rather than an event). ‘Proust
from the Bottom Up’ is not a simple cut-up or ironic subversion of an
iconic text—that would be ragtime behaviour. Rather, Raworth’s text
involves time and movement, and is alive with engagement in its own
play. Concepts and words are substituted at what feels like key points.
For example, where Proust writes ‘ideas formed by the pure intelligence’,
the skewed transcription turns out ‘patterns formed by the pure intelli-
gence’ and later substitutes ‘impression’ for Proust’s ‘ideas’.
Christopher Prendergast suggests that the whole thing ‘totters’ like
the Duc de Guermantes as he appears at this point, near the end of the
novel. I propose instead that the piece stands, like the description of the

16 Tom Raworth, “Proust from the Bottom Up,” in Tottering State: Selected and New

Poems (New Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1984), 186.

 17  PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ  287

duke’s head, whipped by a ‘tragic gale’ of time. As Raworth’s recorded

reading of the piece reveals, without using a single word of his own, he
has created a new language from Proust. Even the double-article, ‘and
the these are mere excuses’ is not a rock on which two halves of the text
crash, but a break which ripples them. It is seamless while composed
entirely of seams: Frankenstein’s monster, alive and tottering.
Raworth’s technique creates certain rhythms and/or conceptual gro-
tesques out of Proust’s text through its substitutions. Alternatively, it
may be that he is simply ‘cavorting around’, which is how Roy Fisher
describes Louis Armstrong’s early trumpet solos. The fact that Proust
himself manages to manipulate time as if the narrative were made of rub-
ber would make Raworth’s avatar even more complex, if it were not for
the poet’s absolute economy. Raworth does not add, he only interferes.
As a mischievous curator, he challenges our beliefs in the truths that
Proust postulates. Is the ‘pure intelligence’ changed by being formed of
‘patterns’ rather than ‘ideas’? Or does the notion survive intact, consid-
ering that both words are part of the proustian palette? Are all Proust’s
words related to each other as notes in the same key, harbouring mel-
ancholic or vibrant tones, reverberating regret or scintillating prospects?
Raworth skips the metaphor and the question to tickle those keys on
his re-fashioned paragraph. If we have not read Proust’s In Search of
Lost Time (and the Enright/Kilmartin translation, in particular), we are
confused. If we have read it, we are not much more enlightened—just
unsure whether the line of logic has been saved, ragged, or completely
‘jazzed up’.
*
In 1928, Louis Armstrong laid down a trumpet solo to ‘West End
Blues’, which made the world take note of a new sound and marked the
shift from ragtime to jazz and novelty to art.17 Innovations had occurred
gradually, including the return of the old gospel-tinged improvisational
lyric of blues, which was stretched across the formal and still relatively
stiff ragtime, delivering a softer flow and an onward propulsion. This was

17 I do not have space here to discuss the issue, but can only insist that this essay be

read in the light of an awareness of the social and political discrimination of the era which
skewed the opportunities for progress and/or perceived achievements of many African
American musicians in particular.
288  N. SANTILLI

one of the most important innovations: the notion or quality of ‘swing’

which came to be identified with the jazz of the 1930s and 1940s.18
Like syncopation, swing is, in part, a physical stretching and collapsing
of passing time; such as coming in late on the beat (swing musicians will
flirt in different ways with the time that each beat takes to sound) but it
is not a quantifiable quality. The question ‘does it swing?’ remains a legit-
imate one for assessing any piece of early jazz. Much like prose poetry,
without much history to lean on, we still often wonder of a piece if it is
‘authentic’: Is this a prose poem? Does this swing?
Composer and critic Gunther Schuller describes swing as ‘a force in
music that maintains the perfect equilibrium between the horizontal
and vertical relationships of musical sounds; that is, it is a condition that
pertains when both the verticality and horizontality of a given musical
moment are represented in perfect equivalence and oneness’. He breaks
down the swing function into two parts: a ‘“type of accentuation” and
a “continuity”—the forward-propelling directionality—with which indi-
vidual notes are linked together’.19 We have no great leap to find a paral-
lel with Roman Jakobson’s vertical and horizontal qualities in language.
For Schuller, verticality in music refers to the regular march of the
pianist’s left hand while the horizontal invokes the lyrical, the embel-
lishment and, at times, the improvised line of thought which the right
hand expresses through melody. For Jakobson, verticality in language
refers to the poetic or metaphoric, where layering rather than (marching)
progress takes place. It is the horizontal, in Formalism, which describes
the onward nature of expression. In prose poetry, as I have argued else-
where, the horizontal axis is the slightly dominant because the medium
is prose and the movement must be onwards, however slightly. Gertrude
Stein enacts the strongest case for the tension between the two axes in
her prose poetry, apparently circling her still life objects, entranced by
them so as to suggest a purely metaphoric layering until we become
aware that her circling is what we are following and that, by isolating the

18 This “big band” period is often considered the golden era of jazz, but the context is

populist, rather than artistic.

19 Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1968), 7.

 17  PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ  289

object with so much repetition and not quite repetition, she is reweaving
the very fabric of the contextual atmosphere in which that object sits.20
Returning to our comparison with early jazz, it is interesting that,
within the interplay of these similarly bi-directional qualities, both arts
should be characterised by that moment of perfect balance between
them; as if getting it right puts the wind in the sails of both the jazz
piece and the prose poem…
Perhaps partly due to his long-term experiences with serious medical
conditions, Raworth raises time over character, onwardness over elabo-
ration. Like Beckett, the primal need to go on, regardless of the current
condition, is the only goal. Amelioration is not the issue (‘fail again, fail
better’), executing the next step is all that counts. To go on is to live and
if that step swings… there is the joy of life. However, to set the wheels
turning, to allow onwardness, gives rise to plot and subplot, to character
and narrative logic, to chapters and endings. Raworth manages to avoid
this by the sheer adrenalin rush of his poems which cascade down each
book, spilling across each page in such a hurry that we read to catch the
falling words, to make sense as they rush past. There is little time to sit
back and contemplate the whole. Live readings in Raworth’s breathless
style support this rush to a stop. Raworth has described his method of
composition and it is not of breakneck speed, but highly wrought and
considered.21
*
For Roy Fisher, there is as little subversive behaviour in the emergence
of prose poetry as there was in the emergence of jazz. ‘A thing has inher-
ent qualities (musical or verbal) which give it form and hold it together

20 See Michel Delville’s discussion of Gertrude Stein and the relationship of her work to

formalist plotting. In particular, Delville defends Stein’s work against David Lodge’s insist-
ence that her “vignettes” are more surrealist than cubist due to their predominantly meta-
phoric nature (Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem (Gainesville, FL: University Press
of Florida, 1998), 70–71).
21 Marjorie Perloff suggests that Raworth’s broken rhythms may be linked to a constant

awareness of his own heart condition [Raworth underwent open heart surgery in 1956].
“Cardiac arrhythmia, moreover, plays a role, not only thematically but formally. The dis-
location of rhythm is hardly unique to Tom Raworth—indeed it is a staple of experimental
poetries today—but in comparison to the rhythmic units of, say, Bruce Andrews or Steve
McCaffery, Raworth’s starts and stops connote a curious breathlessness”. Marjorie Perloff,
“Filling the Space with Trace,” in The Gig, 13–14 (May 2003), 130–144.
290  N. SANTILLI

without bells and whistles and anapaests and so forth. Why that should
be subversive sounds curious to me. It’s just something done well.’22
Fisher refers to Anabase, by St.-John Perse as ‘rhapsodic noise’. ‘It
went on and on’, he says, ‘he [St.-John Perse] had his elasticity. I had
mine, which was much more tight-arsed.’ To be done well, Fisher, ever
the entertainer, is sensitive to his time on stage. Start off, say something
and get out, he explains, ‘You’ve got Coltrane or a three-minute record’
and he plumps for the three-minute record every time.
Fisher’s long prose poem, The Ship’s Orchestra (composed 1962–
1963) is a modernist work, made up of eighty-three prose units. The
narrative revolves around a small band who are employed on board ship
but who are never invited to play. The narrator is one of these musicians
and the prose poem takes place in his consciousness, which moves from
direct observations of his immediate surroundings to musings, to tran-
scriptions of dreams. As a narrator, his identity loses definition until it
becomes as watery as the ocean on which he sails. ‘He’s an indeterminate
sort of character… You don’t know much about him except the way he
sees things. He may or may not be sober, he may or may not be telling
the truth. He may or may not know whether he’s telling the truth or
not. He may or may not be who he says he is. He may or may not know
all these things.’23
Each prose unit represents a new idea, shifting slightly in tone or reg-
ister even if the identity of the speaker does not necessarily change. Each
unit might be a new three-minute record on which the narrator is the
soloist, adapting to the number and the ensemble. Meanwhile, everyone
and everything in The Ship’s Orchestra seems to be waiting and yet, at the
same time, everything is happening: musicians are playing, women are
being seductive, men are being uncommunicative, passengers pass by and
make provocative statements, someone is hallucinating, the narrator gets
drunk and vomits.
One of Fisher’s favourite works from his oeuvre, The Ship’s Orchestra
was inspired by Picasso’s cubist painting, ‘The Three Musicians’.
Comedic nightmares and image fragmentation are characteristic of
Kafka, Beckett and Woolf. It is not difficult to read their traces:

22 Telephone conversation with me, April 2015.

23 John Tranter interview with Roy Fisher, 1989. Published in Jacket (October 1997)
(accessed 8 April 2015), http://jacketmagazine.com/01/fisher-iv.html, accessed 23 July
2017.
 17  PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ  291

I am something that has been pushed out of Amy’s body, though

I cannot remember it. I have no legs, though I have the idea of legs,
and I have no arms or hands, though I can conceive of them; but
I can move my head this way and that, where I lie. She knows I have
come out but she doesn’t know where I am.
It would upset her very much to learn that I can move my head in
this way, and I shall take care that she never finds out. My eyebrows
are beautifully thick and curved, incidentally.
A thin brass ring goes bouncing down the steps noisily. And still the
orchestra is about to agree.
Bandaged, I am something that has been pushed out of Merrett’s
body in his sleep. Although I can run and jump I have no head at
all. I think I am yellow. (The Ship’s Orchestra, 122)

Half way through composing the prose poem, Fisher was scrapping
units because he knew they could continue, they could run on and on,
they could develop. Like Gertrude Stein, he keeps moving although the
object of his text is not allowed to develop. Like Raworth—and unusu-
ally for prose poetry writers, who often make much of the ceremonies
of exit—Fisher does not regard endings with much concern. While this
seems to contradict his preference for ‘the three-minute record’, surely
the very epitome of closure, the prose poem was not to evolve into a
novel or long prose narrative.24 To retain its cubist aesthetic, the short
unit must be maintained throughout. Nothing must be allowed to grow
roots, become rhapsodic, or extend beyond its discrete prose unit. ‘They
were becoming loose’, explains Fisher, ‘That’s not my music.’ So what is
his music? Fifty years on, Fisher remains absolutely clear about how he
composed the piece and what he was trying to achieve:

I had a rigorous law of composition, which is that everything that was

written must somehow come from what was already written, but that must
be regarded as complete. The work at any moment was finished. I couldn’t
lay trails as a novelist can for something that was coming in advance. And
I was not to know – I must not know – what was coming next. So I wrote
in these short units that were almost like verses, and each one was finished,

24 The three-minute record became the industry standard around 1910, when the

10-inch, 78 rpm shellac disc rose to become the most popular, causing artists to write to
that format.
292  N. SANTILLI

and for me that was a compositional law, and it gave me a standard. A

compositional law sharpens up your texture.25

Fisher’s comments on how it feels to be improvising in music are worth

laying alongside his compositional method: ‘if you’re improvising jazz’,
he says, ‘you find you are in a common language of re-phrasing tunes,
core sequences and so forth… ways of laying things out’.
Returning to The Ship’s Orchestra, in another cluster of semi-related
units, a woman (possibly the female musician, Amy) gives birth (possibly
to the narrator) in a disused vehicle part, the sound of which, as it rolls,
accompanies the build-up to the possibility that the band are about to
agree, with a coming-together in perfect harmony, a climax, which is an
airplane tyre, which is the same object in which the musician Amy gave
birth… and so on…
By his own admission, it is legitimate, although not straightforward,
to consider Fisher’s prose poetry from a jazz perspective: ‘you can legiti-
mately say what you’re saying’, he reassured me, when I first approached
him about whether prose poetry might be usefully discussed along
with early jazz. ‘People will dig what’s going on.’26 He understood my
approach was never a syntactical exercise in comparing rhythms, and
Fisher does not mix his music and his writing. In fact, he aligns his prose
with that of Samuel Beckett, closer to silence: the writing emerges.27
His remarks on both writing and playing are drawn to the feel of ebb
and flow, at least from a compositional point of view. Fisher really loves
the swing. Speaking of the early recordings of Louis Armstrong with
Fletcher Henderson of around 1924, Fisher describes Armstrong’s solos
as ‘simply cavorting around’ and, as if astonishingly to him, it’s an antic
which catches on. ‘Trumpeter after trumpeter learned to lark about and
it became a language.’ Fisher is interested in this idea of a common lan-
guage that he can create both as a musician and a writer because it estab-
lishes a new ground from which he can take flight. He participates in the

25 Telephone conversation with me, 2015.

26 Ibid.

27 “There’s a basic artisan level in playing a tune in time and in the right key without

failing, without scaling the impossible. But at the same time you’re always pitching yourself
against something—you’ve got to invent. So I like that combination” [John Tranter inter-
view with Roy Fisher, 1989. Published in Jacket 1 (October 1997), http://jacketmagazine.
com/01/fisher-iv.html, accessed 8 April 2015].
 17  PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ  293

source of his own whimsy, whether that is a swing solo or a prose unit
such as this one from The Ship’s Orchestra, ‘A journey. Between Amy’s
breasts by caterpillar tractor. And back again.’ Fisher enjoys surprising
our line of thought. It is not the caterpillar tractor that makes us smile so
much as the ‘And back again.’
Although many of the images are details—from a painting, or the
ship, or a body part—the effect is not one of fragmentation because each
idea, each unit, is complete in itself. So much for the verticality of swing.
For the flow, the onwardness, the horizontality that is the prose gene,
Fisher directs me to Lester Young, the introvert saxophonist who didn’t
listen to Louis Armstrong and who came up with his own style. It’s easy
to see the attraction. Like Fisher, Lester Young was neither part of the
academic set, nor a trained musician. He was essentially a blues player, a
‘musicianer’, re-telling the tales of ordinary people.28 His soulful, blues-
drenched solos are also known for expressing so much depth in a narrow
range of notes and an absolute economy in the number of notes he used.
By this time, it’s worth noting, in the 1940s and 1950s, the jazz solo
has moved quite far from a simple embellishment of the main theme: the
musical lyric can weave its own separate line of thought before returning
its listener to the common melody played by the ensemble. Young’s solo
saxophone notes rise, almost regretfully, from the ensemble playing, like
a sleeper rousing, moaning softly and turning away from us. We want
to follow, to know the dream he is reluctant to leave. Before too long,
the plaintive notes reveal their thought and drop away. It is no wonder
Lester Young was the ideal accompanist to Billie Holiday.29
If Fisher’s aesthetic is that his words emerge from silence, in a com-
mon language that will playfully caper about before returning to the
silence, then it is unsurprising that his other mode of expression is jazz
music of the swing era. From the late ragtime/early hot jazz break,
where the ensemble would pause for the soloist to flourish, to the pro-
pulsive nature of combining a steady march with a flowing lyricism,
Fisher’s work combines the shared language of the common tongue with
the capering about of a truly talented soloist whose confidence never
overtakes his mischief.

28 Sydney Bechet used the word “musicianer” for his type of musician. See, Sidney

Bechet, Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002).

29 Listen, for example, to Lester Young’s solo on Billie Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow”.
294  N. SANTILLI

Structurally, the prose units of The Ship’s Orchestra are interruptions

to the waiting; a disruption and embellishment to sleep. Returning to
Baudelaire’s dream of a new form of expression, Fisher believes that
the prose poem itself is now a common language which, despite being
characterised by relative brevity, is a flowering form, just like a solo: ‘clo-
sure-gestures would be a lurking presence, available and hinted at but
not sought after’.30
*
Among commentaries of early twentieth-century hot jazz, a key line of
appreciation is the soloist’s logic. Random fancy is not rewarded; neither
is hogging the limelight with nothing to say. The solo seems to lift the
melody away from the ground of the ensemble. We follow its trajectory, its
turns and tumbles, its soaring and its dives, until it returns at just the right
moment to rejoin the band. For all its inspired individualism, the jazz solo
is a virtuoso display of contiguity: the prosaic ‘and then’ of the piece. The
prose poem offers precisely that: a prose lyric for modern city life; a unified
vision in piecemeal; a sound that reaches us as a collection of voices in a
space that defies every definition in order to harbour any form of life.
English literature was slow to recognise prose poetry as a genre for
the likely reason that it had no need of it. Medieval interlinear transla-
tions, seventeenth-century penchant for marginal notes, experimen-
tal novels as early as the form itself and much more besides, meant that
prose poetry never commanded the attention that it enjoyed in other less
liberal countries where prose and poetry were kept separate and distinct.
Why then, would it come into view in the twenty-first century? One pos-
sibility is that the fundamental aesthetic has shifted. The prose poem,
from its very naming, has been predicated on the dialectic relationship
between prose and poetry or similar categories (metaphoric/metonymic
and so on). In the twenty-first century, these traditional categories are
being overturned in favour of fluidity, a sliding between poles which
themselves melt into their own spectrum. The political left and right
have moved to occupy a narrower middle ground. More recently, gen-
der itself has been redefined from a duality to a scale. Heterosexuality,
re-named ‘cisgender’ becomes one state among many. We can equate
this with the African-based jazz manner of promoting the off-beat, from
which can arise the characteristic sound of syncopation.

30 Email to me, 2015.

 17  PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ  295

The prose poem as genderless genre becomes the site where the term
passing slips into British usage to refer to gender fluidity. ‘Passing’ in
the jazz era referred mainly to light-skinned African-Americans passing
as Caucasian in order to live as part of white society. Related issues of
passing referring to movement across countries—issues of immigration—
might also be drawn to the prose poem form.
Roy Fisher’s narrator in The Ship’s Orchestra cannot be identified
with any certainty as male or female, simply as a pure consciousness
flowing around the sculptural set. Fisher’s influences were modernist in
­general, and Picasso’s painting ‘Three Musicians’ in particular. British
poet, Patience Agbabi, who has referred to herself as ‘bi-cultural and bi-­
sexual’, is more explicit in her playing with gender. If Fisher’s vagueness
is aesthetic, Agbabi’s is clearly political.
In the prose poem ‘Double Entendre’, an after-work scenario takes
place between two friends in a gay bar in Soho. Agbabi appears to have
closed the book while the ink was still wet. When we open it, the fac-
ing page carries a prose poem of equal length, set in a coffee shop in
Amsterdam, paralleling the Soho scene but ‘translated’ to a slightly dif-
ferent cultural scene. This technique, a textual inkblot butterfly in rain-
bow colours, evokes the call-and-response of African music and biblical
text.

“Andy!” she replies, wide-eyed and pierced eared, “How are you?”
“Solo. The shit hit the fan. She was sex on legs in long johns but
wore pritt- stick for lipstick,” he replies. “And how are uhu?”
“Dionne!” replies Café au Lait, sucking hard on her home
grown, “How are you?”
“Solo. The shit hit the fanny. He was sex on legs in PVC but
wore wheels of steel in his conga eel,” she replies. “And how are
you, go-go girl? Still selling your cunny for money?”31

‘He’ and ‘she’ are used but are not direct indicators of the characters’
genders. The scene is twinned rather than doubled or repeated. Words
are echoed. Instances of copy or imitation occur internally, either on the

31 Patience Agbabi, Transformatrix (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2000), 72, 73.

296  N. SANTILLI

surface level of rhyme (Agbabi’s prose crackles with these) or deeper, in

the list of other patrons, for example, which reads like a stage play of
stock characters ‘Bizzy Lizzy the speed freak, a hippy chick talking pop-
pycock, a fat cat, a fag hag’ and so on.
Like ‘Proust From The Bottom Up’, we read the two texts initially as
an original text and a variation, but subsequently come to see them both
as variations on a timeline that goes backwards and forwards, democratis-
ing the whole idea of variation, embellishment and transgression.
Agbabi plays this game in extended form in another work of prose
poetry, Problem Pages. The conceit here is that fourteen famous sonne-
teers from Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547) to June Jordan
(1936–2002) write to ‘Patience’ with their problem in one paragraph,
to which she responds as a helpful, modern agony aunt in the next. The
poets are represented in humorously modest and slightly self-conscious
sentences—which increases the irony when ‘Patience’ not only embodies
her name, but delivers her advice to these legendary writers in a rather
arched tone. The prose poem is the perfect vehicle for this neatly exe-
cuted ironic textual performance in which ‘Patience’ is mostly telling
geniuses to pull themselves together, dishing out practical advice that
would not look out of place in current-day creative writing magazines.
The consistent rhythm across the piece, of two fairly equally-weighted
paragraphs, creates a familiar ‘call-and-response’ dynamic, which places
the sonneteers on a production line, while the consistently repeated
address to ‘Dear Patience’ soon draws a smile.

TWO LOVES I HAVE

Dear Patience, I am a poet who writes for the stage and thus
typecast a performance poet. Yet my plays are on the GCSE syl-
labus so my verse will stand the test of time [….]

I empathise. When will people stop categorizing and embrace the

page-stage, black-white, heterosexual-homosexual continuum? […]32
Agbabi and Raworth clearly favour the spoken over the written word.
There are numerous recordings of Raworth reciting his poetry and
prose poetry. He reads everything at breakneck speed, as if taking Roger

32 Patience Agbabi, “Problem Pages”, in Bloodshot Monochrome (Edinburgh: Canongate

Books, 2008), 34.

 17  PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ  297

Pryor Dodge’s note about improvisational artists to heart: those ‘per-

formers are constantly, joyously, doing their art at white heat’ (Dodge,
31). Agbabi employs the rap-rhythms that are based on rhymes, which
are activated in silent reading as well as performance. Indeed, it may
have been the generation growing up with rap in the 1970s that has
helped establish the once-uneasy relationship between (prose) poetry
and music.33 In her verse, such as her Prologue to Transformatrix, the
rhymes are all placed at the end of the line, as in early-style hip hop:

If you rub two words together you get friction

cut them in half, you get a fraction.
If you join two words you get multiplication.

In her prose poems, Agbabi works more with internal rhymes, which,
like the sonnet form, emphasises the contrast between the form’s hard
shell and the internal flow of its content. It is worth noting that Agbabi
also engages with northern soul, a British phenomenon from the late
1960s based on rare American soul music.34
With this fresh perspective, the prose poem suddenly seems an ideal
form for modern times, just as jazz was the ideal musical expression for
the new century. Suddenly, the prose poem becomes a vital contributing
factor in this new landscape where the very pillars of organised society
have been recast. Contemporary prose poetry must discard the Thyrsus
itself, founded as it is on dualism, just as jazz moved away from synco-
pating composed classical music to follow its own evolution. Rooted in
classical music, jazz developed along its own lines and split into hot, cool
and sweet, swing, bebop and so on. Just like its twin soul of jazz, the
prose poem is shedding its skin—it does so easily—to sustain its defining,
quixotic nature and continue to host its unique space for literary protest
and play.

33 In pre-1970s jazz poetry, the emphasis is on rhythm, but rap introduced the idea that

rhythm is based on rhyme, which took the lyric centre-stage and felt much more natural
than rhythmic jazz poetry, such as the blues poems of Langston Hughes.
34 Agbabi’s personal history helps her to access both black and white cultures, as well as

hetero and homosexual social scenes. She “passes” in the most positive sense of the word.
(Black-British by birth, Agbabi was raised by a white family and acknowledges her twin
attachment to white, middle-class literary forms alongside African ones). Her most well-
known work to date is perhaps Telling Tales, an updating of Chaucer’s characters in the
Canterbury Tales.
298  N. SANTILLI

Works Cited
Agbabi, Patience. Transformatrix. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2000.
———. Bloodshot Monochrome. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2008.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo. Translated by Rosemary
Lloyd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Bechet, Sidney. Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography. Cambridge MA: Da Capo
Press, 2002.
Delville, Michel. The American Prose Poem. Gainesville, FL: University Press of
Florida, 1998.
Dodge, Roger Pryor. Hot Jazz & Jazz Dance: Roger Pryor Dodge Collected
Writings 1929–1964. Selected and Edited by Pryor Dodge. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995.
Fisher, Roy. The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005. Northumberland:
Bloodaxe, 2005.
Larkin, Philip. All What Jazz. London: Faber & Faber, 1985a.
———. “Make Me a Palate” (9 Sept 1961). Reprinted in All What Jazz.
London: Faber & Faber, 1985b.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Gig 13–14 (May 2003).
Prendergast, Christopher. Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic. Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Raworth, Tom. “Proust from the Bottom Up.” In Tottering State: Selected and
New Poems. New Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1984a.
———. Tottering State: Selected and New Poems. New Barrington, MA: The
Figures, 1984b.
Sargeant, Winthrop. “Jazz: Hot and Hybrid.” In Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance,
edited by Roger Pryor Dodge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Schuller, Gunther. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1968.
Tranter, John. Interview with Roy Fisher, 1989. Jacket 1 (Oct 1997). http://
jacketmagazine.com/01/fisher-iv.html. Accessed 23 July 2017.
Vechten, Carl Van. “The Great American Composer,” Vanity Fair (April 1917),
quoted in Roger Pryor Dodge, Hot Jazz & Jazz Dance: Roger Pryor Dodge
Collected Writings 1929–1964. Selected & Edited by Pryor Dodge. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995.
Wilde, Oscar. Impressions of America. Edited with introduction by Stuart Mason.
Sunderland: Keystone Press, 1906.
 CHAPTER 18

Roy Fisher’s Musicians

Peter Robinson

Roy Fisher’s book-length prose poem The Ship’s Orchestra appeared in

a hardback-only edition from Fulcrum Press, London, in 1966. It is a
small, square object bound in green boards with lighter green end papers
and a cream dust jacket printed in black with a strikingly irrelevant, and
unacknowledged, David Jones woodcut of an ark being constructed, and
an acknowledged black-and-white portrait of its author wearing a tie
and period art-school-style horn-rimmed glasses.1 It has a jacket blurb
of two paragraphs that carefully indicates its aesthetic allegiances, what a
reader may expect to find inside, and an assertion of the author’s emer-
gent standing: ‘A poet of international reputation has broken through
the barrier between poetry and prose with this disturbing and original
volume. Using the same motifs over and over he paints us a picture.
Simultaneously as in a cubist canvas several sides of the subject emerge
at once.’ This comparison with cubist paintings, gesturing towards
one of the work’s starting points in a painting by Picasso, locates it as

1 For a description of the woodcut and its non-relation to the book for which it pro-

vides a jacket, see Ian Pople, “Roy Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra,” PN Review 229, 42.5
(May–June 2016): 60.

P. Robinson (*) 
University of Reading, Reading, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 299

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_18
300  P. ROBINSON

part of the 1960s modernist and experimental revival. However, rather

than the revived aesthetic simultaneity of that moment, the overlapping
or intersecting of planes is probably more relevant to it, and the men-
tion of ‘motifs’ tilts this towards the composition as an equivalent for a
piece of music. When Philip Larkin asked Fisher whether he had gone
through the bebop barrier, the poet and jazz pianist replied: ‘There is
no bebop barrier.’2 It is as unlikely he will have thought there was a bar-
rier to break through between poetry and prose. Nevertheless, The Ship’s
Orchestra is amongst his most uninhibited of works, and its being written
in prose contributes directly to its flexibility of development and lack of
constraint.3
In the second blurb paragraph, the work’s allegiances are shifted from
that nineteen-teens art movement to another from the inter-war years:

Roy Fisher leads us on a journey through a tunnel where in the prolonged

darkness the whole world begins to feel with its ears and fingertips eyes
and dilated nostrils. The music from the ship’s orchestra cannot be heard
but the echoes work their way intermittently along the words. The musi-
cians are lost somewhere in the depth of the ship. The blackness breaks
into hallucinatory retinal images, not as completely mad as a nightmare
more in the first stages of sleep when reality merges with fantasy and slips
into the world of the surreal. It is here that his acutely perceptive painter’s
eye and ear for the words makes the images so real and his surreal journey
so disturbing.4

The work is located in intermediate states which draw benefit from

both sides of the transits, between sleeping and waking, the real and the

2 This remark was reported in conversation with the present author.

3 The Ship’s Orchestra is Fisher’s first published long work composed exclusively in a prose
that has poetic purpose and texture. With one exception, the prose sections of the earlier
City, mainly written in 1959, were written as part of an abandoned fictional work enti-
tled The Citizen. Excerpted from the manuscript, they were collaged with independently
composed poems to produce the hybrid work first published in June 1961. The excep-
tion is “Starting to Make a Tree,” which was written on 28 August 1960. Two early sur-
realist prose poems, “Pharaoh’s Dream” (1954) and “The Doctor Died” (1954), were
included in Three Early Pieces (London: Transgravity Advertiser, 1971). The latter of these
is included in Slakki: New and Neglected Poems, ed. Peter Robinson (Hexham: Bloodaxe
Books, 2016), 64–65.
4 Front and back jacket flaps to Roy Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra (London: Fulcrum Press,

1966)
 18  ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS  301

surreal, with synesthetic switching as well, so that the visual and auditory,
the tactile and olfactory, will conjure each other. The final ‘disturbing’
note suggests that this ‘journey’ will not be conducted only for the pur-
poses of aesthetic experiment, but with something else in mind, some-
thing hinted at in ‘not as completely mad as a nightmare’. What is that
other aim or purpose? The aim or purpose of this chapter is to comment
on what happens and to whom in The Ship’s Orchestra, and to offer an
explanation of what it may access, and why, through this reviving of
modernist poetics, Cubist aesthetics, Surrealist liminal states, and oppor-
tunities suggested by the French-influenced prose poem.
It had been composed during 1962–1963, and was first read in type-
script by Gael Turnbull and others in the writer’s immediate circle.5 The
Ship’s Orchestra came to be published by Stuart Montgomery at Fulcrum
Press after a private samizdat edition, made in an edition of ten copies by
Fred Hunter, started to circulate in London literary circles.6 This came
to Montgomery’s attention and suggested the possibility of an officially
sanctioned publication, which then needed to be marketed as the first
edition, so the samizdat’s existence was quietly forgotten. The Ship’s
Orchestra was thus the first of Fisher’s books published in hardback, and
by this press. It was the start of a relationship that ran to three further
publications and launched the poet onto a national stage, a being at sea
that would precipitate his writing block of about four years brought on
by becoming conscious of having attentive readers.
The 1966 publication was, despite the oddity of the association with
David Jones’ art, The Ship’s Orchestra’s only fully sympathetic publica-
tion—for the size of the bold, modernistic typeface and that of the small
square pages meant that the often short, individual prose paragraphs
achieved a textual presence appropriately equivalent to their metaphori-
cal and aesthetic weight. Fisher has stated that it closely reproduced the
appearance of his own typescript, which, if it has survived, is not pub-
lically available. Both of the work’s later republications—whether as an
appendix to the two editions of the poet’s works, Poems 1955–1980 and
Poems 1955–1987, issued by Oxford University Press (1980 and 1988),

5 For Turnbull’s response, see “An Unpublished Commentary from 1966,” News for the

Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher, ed. Peter Robinson and Robert Sheppard (Exeter: Stride
Publications, 2000), 47–49.
6 This and other observations about the publication derive from conversation with its

author.
302  P. ROBINSON

or in The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005 (2005) also pro-
duced by Bloodaxe Books in an enlarged edition in 2010—print the
prose poetry paragraphs in smaller typefaces and with much wider text
areas, making the paragraphs both shorter and thinner, dispersing their
visual and poetic impact as they associate the work with a more worka-
day expository or narrative prose. The importance of typeface and layout
to the aesthetic yield of prose poetry (Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns
would be a prime example) suggests the need to mitigate the loss of
expressivity in the lack of enjambed or stopped line endings; for prose
poetry is, as its name indicates, defined in relation to the losses and gains
of a relation to an absence.
The Ship’s Orchestra is reported by Fisher to have been prompted by
musings on a reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921),
a synthetic Cubist group portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob,
author of many prose poems, and Picasso himself: that’s to say, of two
poets and a painter.7 The figures in the painting are also formed of over-
lapping planes, the figures intersecting as they do, too, in Fisher’s prose
work, where there are ‘about five of us, then’: two called Green, two
black, three men and two women:

About five of us, then, and something of an assortment. The coloration

problem touches Merrett and me more lightly, in that we are, fairly decid-
edly, Caucasian, although I can tell already that there’s a need for one of
us to feel Jewish at times, and we pass this rôle back and forth tacitly. I am
sallow and fleshy, with something of a nose, while he is more ruddy, with
black hair and a pout. Both of us come from nondescript families; both of
us are called Green. He is a Londoner. Both of us are circumcised, too; but
so, as it happens, is Dougal. The other oddity is Joyce, from Nottingham,
who looks very young. She must be about seventeen, but doesn’t look
it: little face, rather pasty (has been sick, though); long blonde hair she
can’t quite manage; longish nose and big (relatively) dark eyes. Round-
shouldered; sometimes a bit damp-looking under the arms. (108)8

These sentences tentatively introduce characters that the narrator has

been thrown together with for the purpose of playing on a ship; they

7 See Roy Fisher, Interviews Through Time, ed. Tony Frazer (Bristol: Shearsman Books,

2013), 29–30.
8 Page references in parenthesis are to Roy Fisher, The Long and the Short of It: Poems

1955–2010 (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2012).

 18  ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS  303

point towards possible narrative developments, the descriptions suggest-

ing aspects of their personalities that will interact and evolve a story. Yet,
the work does not satisfy this lightly trailed expectation. The number
of musicians eventually settles on six: ‘Now there’s this trumpet-player,
Henrik, come out of the sickbay at last.’ He is the subject of some
empathetic and then cruel observations: ‘Suffering and love in Henrik’s
eyes. A thinking love. Temptation to make him happy, then outwit him’
(123). But the temptation is not acted upon. Narrated in the first person
by the pianist, one of the Greens, the work thus has a setting, a set of
characters and intermittent snatches of dialogue.9 Beyond these, its sim-
ilarities to a novella or short story are neither established nor sustained.
So, when Fisher says in interview that he is ‘not interested in making a
structure which has got a climax, a thing which has got an authoritar-
ian centre, a rule or mandate somewhere in its middle which the work
will unfold and will reach’, he gives only half the strategy, for he is cer-
tainly sufficiently interested in such things to establish possibilities that
will then be disappointed. He keeps them so as to evade expectations
sketchily evoked.10
Just as no sounds issue from Picasso’s painting, where the ‘coloration
problem’ helps to differentiate the figures, haplessly emphasising the
silencing of Apollinaire by death and Jacob by his retreat to a monastery
(it has been suggested), so, too, Fisher’s musicians are not asked to play:

Dougal has spoken to each of us in turn, to say ‘Four days at sea, and they
haven’t asked us to play.’ I believe he has also written these same words in
a diary, the only entry so far. Dougal concerns himself a great deal with
this question of our status, and Amy at least is beginning to be suspicious
about his musicianship. This may be because, however obscurely, Amy is
American, and is plainly a negress: being black, stringy and big-mouthed,
although she wears her hair straight, while Dougal is equally plainly a late
British Empire seaport (Liverpool) Spade; tall and medium brown, with
quiet eyes and cropped ginger hair and a neat moustache of the same col-
our. There isn’t a leader in fact; we’re just a Foster Harris orchestra and if

9 The narrator is not “unnamed,” as Pople has it in “Roy Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra,”

(60), illustrating the difficulty of keeping its ‘realist’ lineaments in mind.

10 Fisher, Interviews, 6. Fisher expresses similar views, relating them to romantic and

sexual themes, in filmed conversation intercut as part of Tom Pickard’s documentary

Birmingham’s What I Think With (1991).
304  P. ROBINSON

the ship people get any trouble they just wire the office behind your back.
But Dougal has to bother. (107)

There is no such thing as a Foster Harris orchestra: the writer has

invented this name with its faintly American flavour, a taste sustained by
the threat that they will ‘wire’ the office to complain of the musicians’
playing or behaviour. There were and are, though, agencies that put
together bands for voyages and cruises, while the experience of form-
ing ad hoc groups for specific gigs is humorously reported in Fisher’s
memoir, ‘License my Roving Hands’.11 That this orchestra is not asked
to play—the question of their status—occasions the work’s strange tra-
jectory. Their need for expressive release, which the narrating pianist
accompanies and improvises upon, is squeezed out as a series of synes-
thetic themes and variations, wildly sensory perceptions of themselves
and others, sexual fantasies, identity confusions, and speculations about
their predicament.
August Kleinzahler remarks that The Ship’s Orchestra ‘feels almost as
though’ its author ‘had fallen asleep during a break between sets with
a copy of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch spread across his face’, adding that
‘Fisher had not yet read’ that work, and ‘there can’t have been much
of this sort of thing going down in Handsworth in 1961’.12 Doubtless
true on the face of it; but just as Fisher’s ‘Handsworth Liberties’ finds
freedom of movement in the association of patches of landscape with
particular records, so the idea of music in The Ship’s Orchestra con-
jures by driven compensation a vast range of experience, released from
entailments to empiricism through analogy and association.13 The

11 ‘Geraldo’s Navy’, for example, was the nickname for Gerald Walcan Bright’s agency

for placing jazz musicians on transatlantic liners. For the original of Merrett appearing in
the Birmingham jazz scene, see “License my Roving Hands,” Roy Fisher, in An Easily
Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963–2013, ed. Peter Robinson (Bristol: Shearsman
Books, 2014), 90–91. John Lucas relates the mishaps of the practicing jazz musician to
The Ship’s Orchestra in “The Works of a Left-Handed Man,” The Thing about Roy Fisher:
Critical Essays, ed. John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2000), 91.
12 August Kleinzahler, Foreword, Roy Fisher, Selected Poems (Chicago: Flood Editions,

2011), xxiii.
13 For the musical sources of “Handsworth Liberties,” see ‘Handsworth Compulsions’

in An Easily Bewildered Child, 106–108; and, for Fisher on ‘entailment […] in ordinary
reality’, see Interviews, 37.
 18  ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS  305

poet’s characteristic landscapes put in an occasional appearance, through

the repeated ‘on the land’ motif: ‘On the land the oil-refineries strain
to escape from themselves along the river banks but cannot move, and
the sky on its conveyor comes round and round again’, or ‘On the land
the men swarm over the new concrete obstacles and fill the spade’s
ravines with their ebullient bodies. Let us build again!’ (119), which is
last recalled in: ‘This is what it is like on the land: the town-gods, with
coloured rings painted around their eyes, drive their cars down to the
water’s edge and stand in them watching the ships go by’ (127).14
One of the work’s possible other aims or purposes, then, is to explore
what the meanings of improvised jazz music might be, what sorts of
obscured or repressed materials it can articulate and release. Having the
musicians fail to play, silencing the music (which would express them
without referential content), occasions the work’s obligation to articulate
such content in the prose. As often with jazz, and other popular forms of
music, the matter being expressed, often comically, is the socialisation of
sexual urges and instincts: ‘Monitors, those curious warships there used
to be. Little vessels that each carried one enormous gun. Restless home
lives of their captains’ (112). In ‘The Thing about Joe Sullivan’ (1965),
Fisher characterises the white Chicagoan’s style as not ‘the snake­
charming ­business, /the ‘masturbator’s rhythm’, but generated by ‘his
mood: / a feeling violent and ordinary’,15 which produces:

the rapid and perverse

tracks that ordinary feelings
make when they get driven
hard enough against time. (164–165)

Both Joe Sullivan and Fisher tended to play accompaniments for, or

improvisations on, ‘standards’, popular songs, often with simple and sen-
timental lyrics, where the apparent content of the work as expressed in

14 For later prose poems in which Fisher uses their freedom of form to evoke his more

characteristically “in-between places” across land- and cityscapes, see, for example, ‘At
Once’ (The Long and the Short of It, 139) and the fifth section of ‘The Dow Low Drop’,
24–25.
15 The phrase in quotation marks is derived from Stravinsky’s comment that the ‘beat’ of

jazz “is a kind of masturbation that never arrives anywhere,” in Igor Stravinsky and Robert
Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), 116.
306  P. ROBINSON

the words, for instance, is at odds with what is signalled by the orches-
tration, the piano intros and fills—figuring a relation between ‘ordinary
feelings’ and those ‘rapid and perverse/tracks’ generated by the urge to
improvise expressively across standard structures and changes. A further
analogy is then implied between music and poetic rhythm, whereby the
silencing of the music in The Ship’s Orchestra (nobody wants it played),
like the stopping of poetry (as if no one wanted that either), occasions
prose poetry.16 The prose is then flooded with contents that could have
been articulated in musical terms without having to be directly spoken.
In the absence of music, and given the narrative need of the pianist, they
grow articulate through analogy and metaphor.
The following passage appears immediately after the two Greens and
Joyce are introduced:

Think of what all the people you see taste like and you’d go mad: all those
leaping, billowing tastes through the world, like a cemetery turned sud-
denly into damp bedsheets with the wind under them. So the possible taste
of a person is a small thing, just a flicker of salt, putrescence, potatoes, old
cardboard across the mind, behind the words, behind the manners. (108)

This has attracted comment from The Ship’s Orchestra’s few critics.17
Having established its ‘given’, the passage works it in two ways: first, by
exploring what happens if you try to capture such tastes, and improvis-
ing a little on ‘meaninglessness’; then, by turning the idea upon itself,
wondering what the narrator’s ‘taste’ would be and who or what could
identify it. The passage in which Fisher touches on the impossibility
of knowing your own taste suggests one of the further sources for this
work—since the idea of shaking hands with yourself compares closely
with the impossibility, as Wittgenstein has it, of your left hand giving
your right hand money.18

16 A foreshadowing of formal ideas behind The Ship’s Orchestra can be found in the 1957

poem “Why They Stopped Singing,” The Long and the Short of It, 383.
17 See, for example, Robert Sheppard, “‘Making Forms with Remarks’: The Prose”, in

The Thing about Roy Fisher, 137. Ian Pople relates its “body sensations” (see Interviews,
35) to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (61). For a review of The Ship’s
Orchestra’s reception by critics supportive of Fisher’s project, see Pople, 62–63.
18 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe

(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 268, 80, 80e. For the influence of Wittgenstein’s aphoristic
style on Fisher’s poetry and prose, see Interviews, 20, 63.
 18  ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS  307

When discussing this piece, Fisher has kept away from the work’s aims
and purposes, by concentrating on what he won’t do (‘I’m not going
to give you biography or I’m not going to give you pornography or any
kind of rallying cry’),19 or by elucidating its formal properties and how
they derived from the writing procedure. Describing its compositional
method on a number of occasions, he does so most fully when talking to
Eric Mottram:

But the ideal procedure for me is to have an intensely realised starter and
then I work something on the starter, and then I work the next thing on
the thing I’ve got so far. So the work is completely subsumed into the
last moment of writing, and then I write further. The Ship’s Orchestra is
a model of this […] I cheated insofar as I had certain revolving themes
which I would feed in when the thing started to slow down so that I had
a number of little themes which kept coming round; but basically I would
perfect every step and cut it and phrase it so that it would stand, and then
I would write the next piece on the support of that, which meant that I
could no longer alter what had gone before. So that I adopt, in fact, com-
plete linearity of composition. The one thing I can’t do is to sketch and
then to tidy up afterwards. I don’t have a sense of a large overall form.20

The Ship’s Orchestra was written in separate prose paragraphs, varying in

length from a brief sentence to a larger block, preserved in the work’s
layout. When each was completed the writer could use what had been
produced to generate the next paragraph, without retrospective edit-
ing or revising. The method might be compared with lines from Yeats’
‘Byzantium’ in which ‘Those images’ will ‘yet/Fresh images beget’—and
in ‘that gong-tormented sea’ a ship’s orchestra might be remotely imag-
ining music.21 The direction of Fisher’s work would be determined thus
by the improvisational skill of the writer in a strictly forward direction.
No coherence through added foreshadowing would be possible, and the
work’s direction would emerge as it went along.
It is most likely, then, that the arrival of Henrik the trumpet-player
was not exactly planned, but prompted perhaps by noticing the ‘about
five’ expression when returning to go further. Thus, characters, themes

19 Fisher,
Interviews, 45.
20 Ibid.,
21.
21 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems, 2nd ed., ed. Richard J. Finneran (Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1989), 249.

308  P. ROBINSON

and imagery could be picked up and run with for a space, and as quickly
dropped. This happens with ‘The Ivory Corner’, the work’s starting
point, which is returned to intermittently on other occasions. In small
jazz bands, the pianist’s location might be thought of as a corner with
ivories, but no piano is described as being there:

Ivory corner for Joyce; on the white paintwork a big lipstick mouth to kiss
her. Ivory Corner for Amy: padded hooks, to hold her up by the shoul-
der-straps. (121)

This is an entire paragraph, some three-quarters of the way through the

work, followed by another:

Ivory Corner for Merrett; with a heavy iron disc to press down on the
crown of his head when he stiffens upward. Ivory Corner for Dougal:
Joyce, standing stark naked and freezing cold, with her eyes shut, at two in
the morning. (121)

Thus, ‘Ivory Corner’ comes to figure as a cross between a necessary sup-

port and place of exposure and torture: as the stage can for perform-
ers. The compulsion to improvise and produce variations, in jazz, using
emotion as the driving force and sexuality as the tacit theme, exfoliates
into images of the musicians constrained by Ivory Corner, a figure for
the unused bandstand.
Among the consciously articulated reasons for The Ship’s Orchestra’s
writing procedure is its relieving the author of a need to produce a struc-
ture of an Aristotelian kind with beginning, middle and end. It similarly
relieved him of having to create sustained personages whose sexual con-
cerns might be generated by their psychologies and characters. Thus,
the writing strategy detaches the fantasies and speculations about others
from entailments either to the characters themselves, including the nar-
rator, the pianist Green, or to the then living author, Roy Fisher, dur-
ing that early 1960s period of composition. This liberty of movement
is one of the benefits The Ship’s Orchestra, then, offers its readers—one
intimately related to the narrative device enabling it to be staged—that
the musicians are troubled by the fact that they have not been asked
to play. So, when Amy is heard sounding ‘Long notes, staccato series.
Methodical, clear, accurate; says nothing’, Green observes that she ‘must
 18  ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS  309

be feeling low, to have to play’ (111). Gael Turnbull observed: ‘To have
to. The necessity, the ignominy of it.’22
Yet, as the Fulcrum blurb indicates, however surreal and disturbing,
The Ship’s Orchestra is not ‘as completely mad as a nightmare’, and offers
reasons for its predicament and indirection:

Reasons. The ship is a unity. Enclosed within its skin of white paint it floats
upon, and chugs across, the unified ocean. Some would think of it as hav-
ing the shape of a cleavage, a narrow leaf: to me it is a flat canister bearing
another canister and a similarly cylindrical funnel, the basic canister shape
being eccentrically elongated. This is because the vessel’s speed is not great
and, whereas there are those who would see the superstructure as a vague
and mutable spectre above the hull, it is that hull that appears ghostly to
me, while the funnel never altogether leaves my thoughts. At any rate the
ship is a unity and does one thing: it proceeds on its cruise. Not only does
it have a structural and purposive unity; it makes music which proceeds
with it, sounds within it and makes signals of the good life. In among the
musicians is the tough glass bubble of the music. (112)

This paragraph continues for almost as long again, in a process of

self-undoing:

Reasoning, now. The musicians don’t play. No bubble. The ship is not a
unity. It is not white. It is grey, indigo, brown. Thin girderworks of green,
and orange even, and coils of pale yellow piping. It is not a series of can-
isters; it is a random assembly of buildings which, though important-look-
ing, have no proper streets between them. It does not float; its parts are
arrested in their various risings and fallings to and from infinite heights and
depths by my need for them to be so. The funnel cannot be said to crown
the firm structure; rather it juts rakishly over inconsequential forms and
looks when the sky is dirty like the chimney of a crematorium suspended
above the waves. The ship does not proceed on its cruise, but opens and
closes itself while remaining in one spot. The ocean is not a unity but a
great series of shops turned over on their backs so that their windows point
at the sky. (112)

22 Gael Turnbull, “An Unpublished Commentary from 1966,” in News for the Ear:

A Homage to Roy Fisher, ed., Peter Robinson and Robert Sheppard (Exeter: Stride
Publications, 2000), 49.
310  P. ROBINSON

Comparing the above paragraph with Fisher’s comments on the compo-

sitional procedure of The Ship’s Orchestra raises a number of questions.
Is the strict linearity of the compositional method purposive like the
ship’s cruise? Or are the individual paragraphs like those ‘inconsequential
forms’, or the shops’ windows that ‘point at the sky’? The method has
unidirectional forward movement as its mode of development, but the
preference not to sketch and revise means that a fully directed structure
cannot be elaborated. This paragraph of ‘Reasons’ and ‘Reasoning, now’
combines both aspects of The Ship’s Orchestra’s compositional struc-
ture, in that it is a set of discrete items, like shop windows which can be
looked into for objects of desire and revulsion, and that these do not add
up to a unity, while at the same time, and as if willy-nilly, they constitute
the forward movement that it has and manifest its improvised music.
This entire paragraph is also an experiment in thinking by means of
embedded metaphors figured around a copula; and, because these can
contradict each other, they then figure as not so much descriptive of
the world as expressive of the describer’s needs—though, again, this is
another transit point across which the work oscillates, as here in what
is another complete paragraph: ‘Joyce is taller than I thought she was’
(126). In such statements fact and impression rapidly change places, for
the first fact in the light of the second false thought suddenly becomes a
correct impression with implications, while the false impression becomes
a report of subjective fact. The work is thus also conceptualised upon
the idea of expressive need, and it homes in on both explicit and implicit
sexual content, as even here, minimally, in the question of Joyce’s height.
The work’s sexual content is, like the relationship of improvisation on
standards to their often simple lyrics, a shadowy obverse to ‘the good
life’ as expressed in popular music—a content multiplied and prolifer-
ated out of a search for substitutes to the music, there being no music
other than that generated by the words of its poetic prose paragraphs.
Further differences between music and writing are suggested through-
out The Ship’s Orchestra, for music without words ‘says nothing’. It does
not need to articulate the exact nature of the material that it expresses,
though Amy ‘must be feeling low’ (111). Musical expression can be
made of built and released tensions, repeated phases of ‘approach, devel-
opment, climax, discard’ (164)—as Fisher describes it in Joe Sullivan’s
 18  ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS  311

playing.23 However, it cannot do this by articulating the nature of that

material; while writing is more usually compelled to articulate and
explore what, by that means, it expresses:

Somewhere there’s going to be some music. I haven’t the courage myself

to clamber over what keeps me from the piano, to plunge my fingers into
its clashes of sound. And what I play isn’t what I mean by music. Breath
music. Slow opaque music. The ship has come close, drawn itself up my
body and continues to rise. Yet it is, though fitted to me, nevertheless very
big and stretches far away from me above and below and on all sides. And
all the compartments of which it is made are full of milky sounds ready to
knock against the bulkheads and echo all through the vessel. (117)

It is as if the title, The Ship’s Orchestra, had shifted implications, for now
it is the ship that appears on the point of playing and becoming the
music.
Two things stand in the way of accepting Fisher’s word that the
achieved freedom of movement and development that The Ship’s
Orchestra delivers is not entailed to aim or purpose beyond not doing
some things, or doing them in a certain way, and these things, too,
derive from the work’s formal characteristics, its unusual style and mate-
rials. The first is the match between the pianist Green’s situation and that
of his creator, for both are jazz-pianists, both appear as writers, and both
combine striking degrees of mental travelling towards the natures and
conditions of consciousness, sensibility and relations between individuals
with a similarly striking detachment. The second is that the style of the
work is acknowledged by the author as his, both by means of the pub-
lication and in his many comments in interview. The point of these two
observations is both to note the degree of involvement that Fisher has
with the work (which derives from his experience and thought), simulta-
neous with a characteristic detachment from it (he won’t give you biog-
raphy). Further, the observations point towards reader interest in it as
well; for both observations invite the thought that the work’s formal and
aesthetic characteristics have performed tasks regarding the writer’s sen-
sibility—not least because they can be experienced as performing tasks

23 For Fisher’s evocations of playing jazz piano himself, see “The Home Pianist’s

Companion” (240–41), and the playing of others, see “Death by Adjectives,” in An Easily
Bewildered Child, 139–42.
312  P. ROBINSON

in relation to our own, tasks of specification, exploration, and relief in

expression such as distinguish the work, as a literary performance, from
listening to or playing music.
Consider, in this light, how The Ship’s Orchestra speculates about the
other musicians in the silent orchestra. It operates, we might think, in a
realm not far from, though not the same as, the ordinary curiosity that
people can have about the relationships and sexual lives of those around
them. Yet, what keeps it from being exactly the same as such gossip is its
dependence on metaphor and image, rather than narrative. Green won-
ders what his own playing will sound like:

Perhaps the little white piano has useless dampers, and however good the
others are my playing will be a continuity of shining brass water, shaking
idiotically. Have the others wondered whether I can play? Pianists who go
about alone usually can. For my part I have seen Dougal stowing his bass
behind the door; have heard him scat odd bars; I have heard Merrett blow
a few sodden flourishes on his alto when he took it out to show it to me
as soon as we were drunk; I have not seen Joyce anywhere near her drums,
but I have heard her humming to herself. I have heard Amy’s short notes,
and her long notes; and what appeared to be a series of arpeggios of the
chord of the fifteenth, with the fifth, seventh, ninth and thirteenth degrees
flattened in various combinations as the afternoon proceeded. Some of
them showed her up a little, but it would have been an achievement for a
woman who was sober. Amy has stayed drunk in order to break Joyce in, it
appears. (119–120)

His professional speculation about them, which runs from their play-
ing to their characters and behaviour, quickly turns to their sexuality,
and to sexuality as such. Sometimes the shorter paragraphs have the feel
of call-and-response improvisations: ‘If Merrett, Dougal and I dress as
women, become women, will Amy and Joyce have to become men?’ To
which the next paragraph replies with loaded ambiguity: ‘There’ll be no
need’ (121). What interests Green, it would appear, and his creator, is
the texture, often phobic and fetishistic, of his speculations about oth-
ers’ lives and fantasies. It is a sense of the world that extends beyond
the bodies of the other musicians to the ship that surrounds them and,
beyond that, to the sea within which the ship moves. Thus, the entire
world of the musicians is, through Green’s sensibility, attributed with the
textures and characteristics of sex-inflected desires and fears.
 18  ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS  313

Yet, what does the work’s not having a structural or narrative ‘climax,
a thing which has got an authoritarian centre, a rule or mandate’ do for
its meaning? After all, it is not as if nothing happens in the work:

The ship’s orchestra is at sea. Crammed into a high and narrow compart-
ment in a heated train on a penal railway, we loom out of the shadows
at one another in our full dignity at last, between the brownish light of
the windows on either side, light that fails to reach right into the domed
ceiling of the compartment. The light paints over Merrett’s glasses and
covers his eyes. Amy’s cheekbones are luminous in the tobacco shadows;
our heads reach up close to one another, preternaturally large from narrow
shoulders and stretched bodies. We are about to agree. (119)

Agreeing might even mean playing music together. Not quite ‘all at sea’,
but close to it, the musicians grow increasingly uneasy about their posi-
tion. They suffer the kind of ‘existential’ or ‘identity’ crises that were,
and would continue to be, fashionable in European art around the time
that the work was composed. Some of them engage in sexual activities, as
does the narrator, and these are reflected upon: ‘She seems to enjoy me
as if she were enjoying something I should not myself like: a shiny, sticky
iced cake, for example’ (123). There are outbreaks of excessive drinking
and the inevitable consequences of such overindulgence:

There’s a binary phase to this kind of vomiting, especially marked if your

balance is fairly good. A strong consciousness of two ears, two shoulders,
two knees, feet, elbows, sets of fingers gripping the edges of the basin;
these two sets of characteristics existing each on its side of the room.
Between them is a void, a gully; and that is the vomiting. (111)

So, the work has what might be called a repertoire of happenings upon
which improvisations can be staged, but, unlike the incidents in a pica-
resque novel (for which the ship’s voyage provides a remote analogy),
these happenings do not have teleology. They don’t point towards any
conclusions about the characters of the musicians (so there is no bil-
dungsroman trajectory) and there is, as one would expect with this
author, too, no—overt at least—moralising or being ‘tempted by ethics’
(221), though that resistance is itself, of course, ethical.
The behaviour of the musicians, whatever it happens to be in acts or
fantasy, is not judged, a characteristic that collaborates with the work’s
314  P. ROBINSON

speculative freedom. This combination of a non-moralising or judging

approach to the figures and materials encountered, alongside an associ-
atively cumulative, strictly linear approach to composition, suggests that
its unstated, but perhaps evident, purpose is therapeutic—first, for its
author and, then, a reader. Comparing this work with ‘The Cut Pages’,
Kleinzahler describes it as a ‘significant and immeasurably more success-
ful detour’.24 Being a detour, it may have done its work for the author.
Unusually accepting of the human predicaments of its characters, The
Ship’s Orchestra does not have to act upon its temptations, such as the
urge to outwit Henrik, or build up to a resolving denouement, or be
constrained to the shaping formalities of poetry. It thus figures a safely
prose poetic area of release, release for both the writer and his readers, in
which oppressive thoughts and impulses, aggressions and anxieties, such
ordinary feelings as Joe Sullivan used to drive his style, can be pressed as
equally hard against time—not the signature-time of music, but of words
in rhythmic shapes unimpeded by enjambment or by end-stopping lines.

Works Cited
Fisher, Roy. The Ship’s Orchestra. London: Fulcrum Press, 1966.
———. The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2010. Hexham: Blookaxe
Books, 2012.
———. Interviews Through Time. Edited by Tony Frazer. Bristol: Shearsman
Books, 2013.
———. An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963–2013. Edited by Peter
Robinson. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014.
———. Slakki: New and Neglected Poems. Edited by Peter Robinson. Hexham:
Bloodaxe Books, 2016.
Kleinzahler, August. “Foreword.” In Roy Fisher, Selected Poems. Chicago: Flood
Editions, 2011.
Lucas, John. “The Works of a Left-Handed Man.” In The Thing about Roy
Fisher: Critical Essays, edited by John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.
Pickard, Tom. Director. Birmingham’s What I Think with. Documentary on Roy
Fisher, 1991.
Pople, Ian. “Roy Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra.” PN Review 229, 42.5 (May–June
2016).

24 Kleinzahler, Foreword to Selected Poems, xxiii.

 18  ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS  315

Sheppard, Robert. “‘Making Forms with Remarks’: The Prose.” In The Thing
about Roy Fisher: Critical Essays, edited by John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.
Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. Conversations with Igor Stravinsky. London:
Faber & Faber, 1959.
Turnbull, Gael. “An Unpublished Commentary from 1966.” In News for the
Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher, edited by Peter Robinson and Robert Sheppard.
Exeter: Stride Publications, 2000.
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems, 2nd ed. Edited by Richard J. Finneran.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.
 PART V

Thinking Back, Writing Forward

 CHAPTER 19

Wrestling with Angels: The Pedagogy

of the Prose Poem

Patricia Debney

The challenges of teaching prose poetry are akin to the challenges of

teaching any conceptual art form: the resulting pieces must be technically
sound and exhibit ‘form’ in one way or another, yet be transformative,
surprising and inventive. For apprentice writers, harnessing and finesse-
ing these ‘chops’, while remaining open to flights of the subconscious
and so on, can feel a Sisyphean endeavour at best. As, in a way, it should,
if a writer’s work is set to develop throughout their lives.
When it comes to the prose poem, however, everything, all aspects
of its teaching and learning, can—as is typical for this form—get slip-
pery. As David Young writes in his sparky introduction to Models of the
Universe: An Anthology of Prose Poetry,1 ‘If you mean to write a poem
and choose to do that in prose, you wrestle with an angel who knows
more holds than you have dreamed of.’

1 David Young, “Introduction,” in Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem,

ed. Stuart Friebert and David Young (Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1995), 18.

P. Debney (*) 
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 319

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_19
320  P. DEBNEY

Naïveté
I first started teaching the prose poem as part of a general creative writ-
ing class in an adult education institution in 1992. I had studied for my
undergraduate degree at Oberlin College in the USA, where writing
prose poetry was a recognised and accepted undertaking. It therefore did
not occur to me that the prose poem was a form that no one—not one—
in my two classes of adult students in the UK would ever have seen or
even thought about making themselves.
I was young—twenty-seven—and had only published a couple of sto-
ries at this point. I had stumbled into teaching for adult education via my
MA in Creative Writing (in prose) from the University of East Anglia,
and my teaching experience gained at undergraduate level in the USA in
my final year. I had been in the UK for three years, and had not yet read
much UK contemporary poetry. When the faces of the keen adult writ-
ers—some of whom were very experienced and published writers them-
selves, I later found out—gazed at me, asking ‘What is this? What is a
prose poem?’ I was completely unprepared. I had not imagined that the
form needed explaining or justifying. I had not begun to interrogate it or
look at it critically—and therefore could not really teach it.
And yet—if pedigree is anything to go by, I should have been bet-
ter at describing and communicating the nature of the prose poem. As
an undergraduate at Oberlin College, I was part of a vibrant, interna-
tional community of poets and writers, supported and cherished by com-
mitted writers, teachers and translators such as Stuart Friebert, David
Young, David Walker and Diane Vreuls. Oberlin College Press pub-
lished the FIELD translation series—with which, in some way, we all
became involved—and, consequently, I read great prose poem writers
such as Francis Ponge, Günter Eich and Miroslav Holub as a matter of
course. I practised translating some of their work, and David Young and
David Walker both wrote prose poems as part of their practice. While at
Oberlin, I wrote both poetry and prose—in fact, still do—and the prose
poem became a place that held, for me, poetic moments of stories that
were not stories: poems that felt like stories; stories that felt like poems.
Soon after my graduation, Stuart Friebert secured a Dana Grant and
asked me to begin collating prose poems for a new anthology. I worked
on it for a year, reading hundreds of collections from the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, from all over the world; from them I extracted
examples, transferring the information to index cards. Several years later,
this initial work contributed to Models of the Universe.
 19  WRESTLING WITH ANGELS: THE PEDAGOGY OF THE PROSE POEM  321

The questions which must be asked—of myself, in retrospect, as a

compiler of prose poems dating from around the mid-1800s—are: How
did I know a prose poem when I saw it? What did I ‘count’? What did I dis-
count? And why? And how do I communicate these views to students? How
will they, in turn, know when they write or read a prose poem?
Raising these questions does get us a closer to the pedagogy of the
prose poem, and also closer to the nature of the prose poem itself—
and, thereby, how to teach it, and how its influence may affect writers’
developments and lives. Because it turns out that a prose poem is a prose
poem as much as by what it is not than by what it is.

Talking About What It Is Not

My early research for Models of the Universe had enormous impact on
how I think about prose poems now, and also how I talk about them
with students.
I continued to teach in various institutions—prisons, further educa-
tion and higher education—and, by 2003, I was writing a lot of prose
poems myself. I had two young children, could not write the sustained
prose of my postgraduate training and, anyway, ideas seemed to come
to me in contained moments, much like a germinating image for a poem
might, yet connected to a voice which seemed closer to storytelling. It
felt entirely natural to explore these ideas in prose poem form. Writing
them so regularly—alongside teaching—then led me to start to for-
mulate how and what I was making, and to articulate the bases of my
choices for the anthology years before. I began to do small workshops on
‘the prose poem’—again, for adult learners. This is where I started:

(1) A prose poem is NOT part of a larger piece of prose.

(2) A prose poem is NOT poetic prose (which can by turns be either
purple or sustained, as in Marguerite Duras’ Moderato Cantabile).
(3) A prose poem is NOT a poem written as prose.

The reaction of the adult learners, ten years after my first attempt, was
nearly as sceptical as before. Many of these students were published writ-
ers—and yet, none could see what the prose poem might offer either the
reader or the writer.
This time, perhaps because of my accumulating practice, I was less
panicked and more considered. It became obvious to me that this reac-
tion was less resistance than straightforward ignorance. Most students at
322  P. DEBNEY

the time had only ever read the odd single prose poem within a collec-
tion, and such a piece’s ‘reason for being’ did not need exploring; it was
simply an ‘unusual form’. So, I returned to the anthology—and my own
work, which was now becoming book-sized—and flooded the students
with examples. We started again—from the work itself this time, rather
than definitions. We returned my own New Criticism roots, analysing the
work for sound, image, language, sense, rhythm—the traditional stuff of
poetry—and then segued to voice, narrative, character, syntax—the tradi-
tional stuff of prose. We interrogated two dozen pieces, beginning with
Baudelaire, then Stein, then Holub, Eich, Edson, Ashbery and so on.
And at no point did we make a declaration: this is the definition of prose
poetry. Because what became obvious very quickly was that prose poetry
could not be defined any more easily than poetry could, or prose. And
once this hurdle was leapt, the world of writing opened up. The students
began to see prose poetry from the inside, from the process, rather than
from a distance.
At the same time, I realise now, I stopped ‘justifying’ the existence of
prose poetry. It seemed that, although it might take time, we were all
re-focusing our eyes, as we might when scouting for cicadas huddled in
trees: they are so well-disguised, yet their sounds define the landscape.
That there is no precise definition of prose poetry was finally estab-
lished. Students still, however, needed ways into writing it.

Openness
In 2004, I joined the School of English at the University of Kent. One
of my first ‘jobs’ was helping to develop the MA in Creative Writing
(with Susan Wicks, Patience Agbabi and Scarlett Thomas). The obvious
research expertise for me to pursue was the prose poem—so I wrote a
module that explored prose poetry, with poetic prose as an alternative,
and a foil.
Through this teaching situation, I was forced to theorise prose poetry
in ways I’d never attempted before. At the same time, I became more
involved in the British prose poem scene, and discovered Santilli’s Such
Rare Citings. This book confirmed some of my ‘instinctive’ critical
approaches to the prose poem, and helped me arrive at the next stages.
Faced with the challenge of guiding these talented MA students into
writing prose poems, I decided now to offer guidance by cultivating
ideas of paradox, tension and lack of resolution:
 19  WRESTLING WITH ANGELS: THE PEDAGOGY OF THE PROSE POEM  323

(1) Prose poetry uses the sentence as its unit, like prose, not the line,
like poetry.
(2) Prose poetry is essentially paradoxical in nature.
(3) The negotiation of paradoxes creates tension, and tension (which
can take many forms) is the engine of prose poetry.
(4) The sources of these tensions and paradoxes are numerous, and
most feel familiar to writers of sophisticated work. They include:

Intimacy vs distance
The part vs the whole
Surreality vs reality
Revelation vs secrecy
Said vs unsaid
Conventions of prose vs conventions of poetry
Horizontal vs vertical
The self vs character
Accessibility vs inaccessibility
Informal vs formal register
Convention vs subversion

Of course, many of these complexities are explored in any advanced

writing—but as I myself became more comfortable with lack of resolu-
tion, with the surprise or transformation that is so typical of prose poetry,
with the sense of the surreal that often emerges in prose poetry—indeed,
in my own prose poems—I became convinced that prose poetry is almost
entirely driven by these tensions, that paradoxes and liminal spaces are
not only exposed, but celebrated in prose poetry—rather than resolved.
And that it is this lack of solution, this open-endedness, this shocked
laugh or falling sensation which so often unsettles readers. And, in turn,
makes writers think: Have I done it? Have I written a prose poem? Does
it stand up? Or does it fall over?
By the second year of teaching the postgraduate module, it became
apparent to me that, in effect, dismantling what students may feel they
already know about writing—poetry or prose—was a good place from
which to begin writing prose poetry. Through this cultivated open-
ness, students began to enter their work as a process of discovery, rather
than a process of capture, and the confusion, the questioning, the
de-stabilisation of what they thought they were doing almost always led
324  P. DEBNEY

to work which surprised them, which took more risks than they’d taken
before, and which seemed to articulate interests and passions and obses-
sions with more freedom than any of them had experienced.
By this point, my students were fashioning pieces which took risks,
which stretched tensions and definitions, with few pre-conceptions and
lots of inventiveness—but it still wasn’t clear to me how I might be able
to help move writing the prose poem past the ‘happy accident’ and into
an educational direction of its own, one with finesse, mass and weight.
I realise now that I was learning—intensively—alongside my students:
by 2003, my own first collection of prose poems, How to Be a Dragonfly,
was in preparation. The first half of the book was full of ‘happy acci-
dents’, in that I had no plan and had not set about either writing it or
revising it with any deliberation or considered insight. Acting on a sug-
gestion from a friend, I submitted the twenty pieces I had completed to
The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition, and awaited the
results.
What happened next was instructive, to say the least. The work was
shortlisted, and I was given a month to produce a book-length manu-
script. I managed to write and complete twenty-two prose poems in
one month, and won the competition. For the first time in my life I had
deliberately set out to write only prose poems; I structured sections of
the book around ideas for series—plants, childhood events, astronomy. I
wrote several a day for the first few days, letting them rush out, sketching
them without revision, and then, one by one, revised them, using all of
my ‘writing muscle’ gained from years of writing both poetry and prose.
From this experience, I knew it was possible to set out to write prose
poems (and nothing else). I also knew that revising them had required
skills I’d never used in combination before.

Talking About What It Is

In 2007, I had the opportunity to offer prose poetry as a specialist mod-
ule on the undergraduate programme. This move marked a real shift in
how I approached the pedagogy of the prose poem. I dropped the explo-
ration of poetic prose as foil for prose poetry, and re-designed the mod-
ule so that the first half of the module looked at exemplar prose poetry
texts, and the second half concentrated solely on students’ own produc-
tion of prose poems. This clear division of time and energy also allowed
me to contextualise the history and development of the prose poem
 19  WRESTLING WITH ANGELS: THE PEDAGOGY OF THE PROSE POEM  325

more usefully. Students saw early on how different strains—the European

and Eastern European threads, and the North American thread—had led
to pieces which differently emphasise speech patterns, language, notions
of reality or surreality, sound and so on. While this exploration opened
out possibilities even further, in time this contextualising knowledge
allowed students to understand with what tradition their work may be
more aligned—and, from there, gain insight into its development and
editing.
Also, and as importantly, each year more and more whole collections
of prose poems have emerged. Today, the reading list not only includes
the single poems from my earlier classes, but entire collections within a
wide range of voices: Luke Kennard’s The Solex Brothers, Carrie Etter’s
Imagined Sons, Lynne Rees’ and Sarah Salway’s Messages, Michael
Rosen’s Carrying the Elephant, Donna Stonecipher’s Model City,
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. More anthologies have emerged as well—A
Curious Architecture: A Selection of Contemporary Prose Poems (edited by
Rupert Loydell and David Miller), and This Line Is Not for Turning: An
Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry (edited by Jane Monson).
In each, there is a wide range of styles—from rambling, chatty glimpses
into other worlds, to crystalline, distilled moments. There are pieces
which follow the ‘traditional’ prose poem shape—written entirely as
prose, with no variation, no line-break, fitting to one page—and pieces
which are a more experimental prose poem, employing line-breaks in
places, fragmentation, running over several pages and so on.
We begin each term analysing and discussing a substantial range of
work, ask: How is this working? What draws you? What doesn’t draw
you? Why?
At the same time, I ask students to locate an idea that has ‘legs’. I ask
them to find something they have expertise in, or something they are
interested in or obsessed by. Something particular to each one of them.
I ask them NOT to write a prose poem, not yet; as in the very earli-
est classes I taught, I continue firmly to believe that entering the prose
poem from a state of openness and near-trepidation means that risks are
taken.
The most substantial shift in my teaching for this undergraduate mod-
ule is my insistence upon the development of a ‘series’ of prose poems.
And this is because today—in this time, this era—series of prose poems
are where the greatest strengths of the form lie in my view. The prolifera-
tion of prose poetry in the UK is founded upon series. Upon each taking
326  P. DEBNEY

up space of its own, rather than as part of versed collections. The faint
idea of series I had developed in my first book became a conviction that
series is right for the prose poem—indeed, that it benefits from series,
it excels in series. This idea was partly—as ever—gleaned from my own
practice which, by 2010, was solely focused on a series of prose poems
centred around the sea and the coast. At the time, I located a glossary of
coastal terminology which fuelled piece after piece in the book; I braced
my more lyrical register against the technical register of the glossary
and, from that tension, a sustained series emerged. This series eventually
became my second collection, Littoral.

And What It Can Be

Producing innovative work—once it starts—becomes, as ever, the ‘easy’
part of the process. What follows is that, of course, students also need to
edit their work. Are there aspects of this process as well which are par-
ticular to prose poetry?
As with the initial drafting, the initial editing involves stepping back
into a place where anything is possible, but some things seem already
under way. I ask students to examine what matters in their pieces: Is it
the workings of the language? Is it the voice? Is it the syntax? Is it what is
said? What is not said? I ask them to interrogate the pieces’ connectivity:
do they half-tell a story; or do they tell fifteen facets of the same story?
Only after making what might be prose poems, can students re-instate
their critical eyes, their technical chops and their expertise, in order to
arrive at fully realised pieces. By taking this approach, students have been
able to produce a huge range of work, each ultimately and knowingly
staking out its own particular territory.
For instance, Georgia Hingston’s portfolio uses fairy tale tropes
as scaffolding, yet deliberately redirects the narrative, as seen here in
‘Cinderella’:

You mop the floor wearing your lab coat, the hem of your dress snagging
on glass slippered heels. Your blonde hair is falling out of its fancy doo,
dying leaves, a flash of orange amongst the tumbling curls. Test tubes rat-
tle in your pocket, fragile glass quivering. The floor unravels a gleaming
wake from soggy twists, moisture soaking into the dragging dress trim.
You pause to push your glasses up the bridge of your nose, but a shrill,
hysterical cry rises from the next room. Enough. Down goes the mop with
 19  WRESTLING WITH ANGELS: THE PEDAGOGY OF THE PROSE POEM  327

an angry clatter. You pull off your glass shoes, throw them at the marble
floor, where they shatter. They’ve rubbed your feet raw.2

By contrast, Katrine Solvaag’s work disrupts a known narrative through

pure collage, in this case of Moby Dick, chapter by chapter:

The Carpet-Bag [chapter 2]

Don’t you hear? So goes the story within blocks of blackness where the
first American whale was found stranded upon imported cobblestones.
We only catch glimpse of gods within smoky light, these eyes of mine
teeth-gnashing ashes from that destroyed city as flying particles sent by
Euroclydon’s turbulent winds almost choke me. Walking along red silken
streets packed with congealed frost laying ten inches thick of which Death
is the only glazier we neglect the connexion between our hearts. We never
asked Lazarus what he thinks. So they sally out in canoes to give chase to
the leviathan only to find the universe is finished.3

Both methods exploit narrative expectations as ways into the work, but
subvert these expectations differently; the essential tensions of the pieces
lie in the relationship between what we think we know, what feels famil-
iar through the use of narrative signals (storytelling words like ‘so’ and
active, sequencing verbs, physical movement through landscapes, known
archetypes)—and the ‘poetic’ resonances of the pieces (as opposed to a
conclusive storytelling ending): Hingston’s by revealing feminist con-
cerns, and Solvaag’s by (re)creating a story we never grasp, so our atten-
tion continually turns to the linguistic experiments of the work.
Other work more typically has its roots in poetry. For instance, Sam
Julier’s ekphrastic pieces highlight image more than narrative, as in ‘A
Response’:

The ocean uncurls in subtle blue brushstrokes tipped with a crystal-

line bristle of foam, suspended in its arc, holding
for a moment.

2 Georgia Hingston, “Cinderella,” unpublished (April 2014).

3 Katrine Lynn Solvaag, “The Carpet Bag,” in Moby Dick, unpublished (April 2017).
328  P. DEBNEY

A gentle wind manipulates the pebbles, shapes irregular dunes,

forming round the feet. An expensive bottle spills and dampens the
sediment, and the crab we constructed from its scattered anatomy.
We’ll bounce a couple stones across the water in August, or March,
still waiting for oysters;
where Whitstable’s still beautiful as a painted ocean,
the sun along the surface,
water coloured.4

Charlie Lay’s portfolio, on the other hand, relies on fragmented and

sparse prose, structured as a book, as in its first two pieces:

[foreword]
with the rain tapping at the world outside and the streetlamps blink-
ing in the wind, you could almost be a ghost sitting there on the
edge of my bed.
you feel solid enough when you bush my hair back from my face and
kiss my cheek.
i ask you to shut the window, and all the lights in the world go out
when you leave.
[1]

at first it hung by a thread of flesh and you were afraid it would be

left behind. the pain was measured carefully in cups by the nurses
hands and when you had run out she showed you the pictures. all
that hurt poured into boxes you could sign for later when the flesh
was reattached. amazing, you thought. when your mother sat by
your bed you smiled at her like the flowers. it took you a while to
notice the clean cup she held in her hands.5

Both Julier’s and Lay’s work privilege space and movement on the page,
a typically poetic concern. Both portfolios also foreground sound and
rhythm as structuring principles. The tensions in these works spring from

4 Sam Julier, “A Response,” unpublished (April 2015).

5 Charlie Lay, unpublished (December 2015).
 19  WRESTLING WITH ANGELS: THE PEDAGOGY OF THE PROSE POEM  329

a broader place of questioning boundaries: how do we read the line-

ended parts of Julier’s work? What are we to make of no capitalisation,
no titles, and so much unsaid in Lay’s? Once again, as readers we arrive
in unexpected places: both Julier and Lay ultimately tell complex sto-
ries (Julier’s through seasons, and Lay’s through a parental relationship)
across their portfolios, despite their essentially poetic drivers.
Over time, I have learned to ask students to edit for something, and
toward the particular strengths of their pieces. And to avoid, for as long
as possible, the urge to ‘make sense’, to ‘smooth out’, to ‘finesse’; doing
this too early tends to flatten prose poems, and removes their tensions.
Exploiting tension in prose poems, wherever it is located, and whether
piece by piece or over a whole series, really does allow the work to func-
tion differently from both poetry and prose, it seems. Locating and fore-
grounding tension of whatever sort discourages one of the main pitfalls
of writing the prose poem: the slide into anecdote. Indeed, time and
again students rise to the occasion: there would seem to be something
about writing the prose poem which presses them into the best work
they are capable of. And presses them into individuality.
Of course, similar approaches are common (in different ways) when
revising both poetry and prose. The difference with prose poetry, how-
ever, is that the writer edits for anything which the work itself deter-
mines, with tension really being the only necessary ingredient. There is
no regard for convention; there is only the usage or subversion of the full
range of technique and craft available in both poetry and prose. There
are only decisions made from the full palette.
Given all this and more, I am convinced that the formalised teaching
of prose poetry—the learning and experiment of doing it—has enabled
the production of this work in ways no other form of writing could have
done.

Experience
Over the last twenty-five years, the teaching and learning of prose poetry
has grown from entirely unknown in the UK to something recognizable
and accepted, and undertaken—to some degree—in a number of institu-
tions. This has been matched and fed by the proliferation of prose poem
collections published in the UK, particularly since the early 2000s.
The prose poem has become part of the fabric of young writers’ lives
in the UK. For most, it is no longer ‘foreign’ or encountered singly,
330  P. DEBNEY

buried in collections. The experiences of writing it and studying it in

university mean that the days of greeting a prose poem with ‘But why?’
are—thank goodness—gradually drifting into the past.
For my own students—whose experiences and writings I have fol-
lowed and whose openness has, in turn, fired my own experiments,
expanding my own prose poetries—for them, their enthusiasm for prose
poetry continues. When I contacted several about being represented in
this essay, to a person they said they planned to write more. Several stu-
dents have published some of the prose poems written as undergraduates
and postgraduates, several students have published collections of prose
poems, and at least two students have completed PhDs in the study and
writing of prose poetry.
Year after year, I have learned about the value of always starting from
‘not knowing’ when teaching prose poetry. From the students’ mystifi-
cation, discomfort and curiosity—and from my own. Each year I remind
myself to withhold, not to say what I think I know, not to pre-empt, or
even offer much comfort. It is important that we stay for several weeks in
a place without known boundaries, and in a place of transition. For their
sakes—and for mine.

Works Cited
Debney, Patricia. How to Be a Dragonfly. Huddersfield: Smith/Doorstop Books,
2005.
———. Littoral. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2013.
Etter, Carrie. Imagined Sons. Bridgend: Seren Books, 2014.
Friebert, Stuart, and David Young, eds. Models of the Universe: An Anthology of
the Prose Poem. Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1995.
Kennard, Luke. The Solex Brothers (Redux). London: Salt, 2010.
Loydell, Rupert, and David Miller, eds. A Curious Architecture: A Selection of
Contemporary Prose Poems. Stride Publications, 1996.
Monson, Jane, ed. This Line Is Not for Turning: An Anthology of Contemporary
British Prose Poetry. Gwynedd: Cinnamon Press, 2011.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014.
Rees, Lynne, and Sarah Salway. Messages. Bristol: bluechrome Publishing, 2006.
Rosen, Michael. Carrying the Elephant: A Memoir of Love and Loss. London:
Penguin Books, 2002.
Santilli, N. Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature. Vancouver:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.
Stonecipher, Donna. Model City. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2015.
 CHAPTER 20

Life, Death and the Prose Poem

Michael Rosen

In 1999, my eighteen-year-old son died. It was overwhelming. The first

way I dealt with it was to pretend it hadn’t happened. I would lie in bed
in the mornings and come up with stories of where he was. As I started
to realise that he was dead, I found myself making a conscious decision
to not write about him, not write about how I felt. I had written about
him often before and, earlier on the very day he died, I had told some
children how small he was when he was a baby but now how huge he
was, so huge that he could lift me up and whirl me round on his shoul-
ders. I loved the fact they thought that this was funny, especially when I
acted it out shouting, “Put me down! Put me down!”
But now, with him dead, I decided I couldn’t and wouldn’t write
about him.
Several months went by and I stuck to my plan. But then I read
‘Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In’ by Raymond
Carver.1
I read it over and over again, sometimes performing it to myself in a
faux,’ specially dry, Robert Frost-like voice. It is in part about death, the

1 Raymond Carver, in All of Us: Collected Poems (London: Harvill, 1997), 73–74.

M. Rosen (*) 
Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 331

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_20
332  M. ROSEN

persona’s death. He can see his death because he’s not in his house. As
it happens, I had once done a radio interview with his last partner, Tess
Gallagher, and she had talked about Carver’s last days. In a way, I was
on the other side of the poem. He had written about what had now hap-
pened. He wasn’t in his house.
I loved the way Carver had said these things without being obviously
metaphorical or emotional until the end of the poem when he talked of a
‘wave of grief’ and being ‘violently ashamed’. It felt as if the topographi-
cal detail of standing outside the house earned the right to have this out-
burst later on.
I started to write about what had happened. I started to describe
things like my son’s body bag slipping down the stairs, or the way in
which it looked as if hair grew out of his forehead several days after he
died. I recorded the things that people said. Carver laid his poem out
according to the conventions of free verse: a line-break representing a
speech-pause. I had written hundreds of poems like that. For some rea-
son, and quite spontaneously, I decided that I didn’t want to put that
patterning over the words I was writing. I wanted them to be even less
rhetorical than that. I wanted what I was writing to be more prosaic,
more factual than the free verse format implied. I was hanging on to the
idea that I wasn’t writing poetry. I was writing paragraphs.
The moment that I had that word ‘paragraphs’ in my head, I knew
what to do. I could write short, medium or long ones, but not too long.
No longer than Carver’s poem. What came out were anecdotes, rever-
ies, meditations, considerations about what had happened. I saw them
as fragments of a whole, just as the segments of a stained glass window,
or the pieces of a mosaic make up a whole. But, I wasn’t pretending or
claiming them as poems, I kept saying. If other people wanted to call
them that, that was fine. I was writing paragraphs, segments and mosaic
pieces. They weren’t the whole truth. They weren’t even the essence or
the ‘inscape’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins. They were moments.
There was even the satisfaction of seeing how they looked on the
page. I engineered tiny cliff-hangers at the end of lines, so that they were
the opposite of the free verse pause. The ends of lines were anticipations
demanding that the eye and meaning were suspended in the hope that it
would make the reader go on. I liked the chunkiness of the paragraphs,
too. I started to have an ideal length in mind, somewhere around eight-
een lines.
 20  LIFE, DEATH AND THE PROSE POEM  333

The more I wrote about my son, the more a uniting principle started
to appear. This loss, this hole in my life had connections with other
losses. But, in writing, I discovered that it wasn’t only a matter of loss.
There was something incongruous and bizarre about what had hap-
pened. Something so big and all-encompassing had taken place in the
ordinariness of home. He went to bed. I went in the morning to tell him
I was going off to work. He was dead. It was all so simple.
This strangeness, I felt, was in its own way like surrealism: the unlike
in amongst the like; the unfamiliar stuck in the middle of the familiar.
Thinking along these lines produced more paragraphs, some excavated
from my past, others spun out of the present. I came back again and
again to a postcard I had bought in Paris. It was an eighteenth-century
engraving by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, illustrating one of La Fontaine’s
fables: ‘Les Deux Aventuriers et le Talisman, Fable XIII, Book X’. In the
picture, a man in knee-breeches and shirt is carrying an elephant up a
mountain. I have it on my window-sill in front of me as I write even now.
I decided I was the man in knee-breeches. I am carrying the elephant,
I thought. And he became another paragraph, an eighteen-line one that
became the core of the collection which came out under that name,
Carrying the Elephant (Penguin, 2002).
I went on to write two more in that vein, This Is Not My Nose
(Penguin, 2004) and In the Colonie (Penguin, 2005), and I digested all
three into Selected Poems (Penguin, 2007).
The prose poem form enabled me to tell stories that seemed, at the
moment of writing, important. Because I took from that form its appar-
ent prosiness, I felt I could inhabit the kind of detachment that a narra-
tor of a novel has at the moment that narrator appears to be telling the
story. I like the way the author hides behind the narrator, just as Michael
Rosen could hide behind ‘I’. Michael Rosen could invent some qualities
of ‘I’ that didn’t belong to Michael Rosen.
Of course, the prose poem doesn’t dictate any of this sort of thing. A
prose poem can be as metaphorical, rhythmic, non-syntactic, ornate and
poetic as it wants to be. I think that I’m saying that the apparent prose
format of a paragraph suggested to me a non-fiction quality—not inevi-
tably or essentially attached to that form—just the one that I took from
it. So, I used it to write three autobiographical mosaics.
At the core of This Is Not My Nose is the experience of having con-
sumed my own thyroid gland. I didn’t do this voluntarily. My immune
system identified my thyroid as a foreign being and digested it. The
334  M. ROSEN

result was a change of body and identity. When I started to take replace-
ment medicine, I became someone else. The format that had served me
so well in describing the extremes of death seemed to be just right for
describing many different ways in which I wasn’t who I appeared to be.
Again, the detachment worked for me.
Finally, in In the Colonie there was a core experience which I was, and
still am, haunted by: a six-week stay at the age of sixteen, as the only
English person in a French colonie de vacances (kids’ summer camp) on
the dry plateau of the upper Ardéche. In my head was a set of scenes. I
had tried on several occasions to knit it into a narrative until I realised
one day that there wasn’t one. There wasn’t a slowly developing sense
of jeopardy, or an unresolved conflict that swelled to a climax, no hubris
that took six weeks to work its way through to a denouement. It was
a series of scenes, vignettes, cameos which sat in my mind, untold but
affecting, scenes that I had returned to over and over again over the fifty
years since their happening. A mosaic for paragraphs, I felt, would serve
me well. The idea of being away, estranged, on my own, but being ini-
tiated, politicised and forced to acknowledge my own culture, released
other analogous stories before the spell in the colonie and after.
In digesting them down, I think now, in retrospect, I lost something
of the three uniting principles. Indeed, the uniting principles (or is it
symbols?) behind each of the books had had the effect of holding these
detached paragraphs together in a way that I hoped would result in the
books being more than the sum of their parts. There was an invisible
string running between the prose poems in the three books that was
much less evident in the selection from the three books.
Defensively, I can feel myself acknowledging here that sometimes
these prose poems—I’m most certainly not speaking for any others—
need each other. Where the secret string is absent, the detachment that I
am so fond of can sometimes tend towards the ordinary. That tone that
I picked up from Raymond Carver needs support. That’s how it feels to
me.
There was a pause between the Selected and a rush of writing that I
did in 2012, 2013 and 2014. This time, instead of it being a poet, as
it was with Carver, it was new technology. I’ve found that two digital
spaces feel just right—snug, if you like—for writing prose poems or par-
agraphs: Facebook and my blog. I found that I could respond in direct,
surreal, absurd, satirical ways to events as they happened, rather as if I
was just saying them to someone sitting next to me. I could dash off a
 20  LIFE, DEATH AND THE PROSE POEM  335

para—a comment on what George Osborne had said; a reply to someone

on Question Time; a story of something that could have happened on
the bus today, that is if a whale had got on the bus. One moment these
paras could be in the voice of, say, Adrian Mitchell, another more like
Eddie Izzard or Ross Noble, another more like Bertolt Brecht. I don’t
say these names because I fancy myself as being them; more that I’m say-
ing I was talking as if I was their echo.
This time the paragraph quality told me that I was writing short mon-
ologues. When you open the old ‘Reciters’, much loved in the Victorian
and Edwardian period, you notice that they are full of non-rhyming
monologues that people would perform in ‘parlours’, or by way of home
entertainments. In fact, looking back to my university days, I remem-
bered that I had written and performed some monologues which we
called ‘sketches’ or ‘cabarets’. All a bit self-satisfied perhaps, but an
interesting form all the same. In fact, all sorts of performers from Joyce
Grenfell to Michael Crawford, Harry Enfield, Rik Mayall have done
something very similar. As I’m not on the road or knocking on the door
of TV to let me in, I found that I could do my monologues on Facebook
and my blog. I could even video them and put them up on Youtube.
On the page, they are prose poems, they are paragraphs. As I started
to collect them, I found myself looking at everyday events and turning
them into everyday encounters with the surreal. A man tries to sell me
a washing machine that de-shrinks clothes, I lose a cucumber and try to
get it back from the Lost Property Office, Bear Grylls gives a course in
poetry and so on. Surrealism is not only a means to investigate whether
we have an unconscious or not. It can also be a means to investigate the
meaning of our random encounters. If I can meet a man who I’ve never
met before and within a second he tells me he hasn’t been to the toi-
let for a week (true), why shouldn’t Michael Bublé be in the next door
loo compartment on Euston Station. And if the Guardian says that
the Israeli government put out a directive that no one should mention
the names of children killed in the latest round of wars going on, why
shouldn’t I extend that directive in absurd and totalising ways?
Again, I was pleased to see that the paragraphs found their secret
strings again. Events that are to all intents and purposes ‘real’, sit along-
side the whale on the bus and an invisible tattoo. The act of decon-
struction, in a critical sense, is to reveal the power relationships behind
the texts and utterances we come across (not, as some say, to separate a
statement, or work into its constituent parts). Poetry of any kind has a
336  M. ROSEN

tradition of revealing powers and reasons that lie behind what is said or
shown. That old ‘defamiliarising’ process can do a lot of that. Paragraphs
seemed, as I wrote this time, to be very useful, too. One moment, they
could be mini-essays, as if I was some kind of modern-day Montaigne,
and the next a stand-up peering into an audience trying to fool them
that this odd thing happened on my way to the theatre. This collection
appeared as Don’t Mention the Children (Smokestack, 2015).
So, this form has served me well. I am grateful to it.

Works Cited
Carver, Raymond. All of Us: Collected Poems. London: Harvill, 1997.
Rosen, Michael. Carrying the Elephant. London: Penguin, 2002.
———. This Is Not My Nose: A Memoir of Illness and Recovery. London: Penguin,
2004.
———. In the Colonie: A Memoir of Separation and Belonging. London:
Penguin, 2005.
———. Selected Poems. London: Penguin, 2007.
 Index

A Bletsoe, Elisabeth, 25–27

Academia, 66
Agbabi, Patience, 13, 295–297, 322
Aldington, Richard, 4, 20, 34–36
Armitage, Simon, 11, 13, 15, 190,
228, 233–238, 242
Ash, John, 21
Ashbery, John, 2, 56, 57, 186, 194,
267–269
Atwood, Margaret, 230, 232
Autism, 276
Autobiography, 182, 231
B Clements, Brian, 11, 26, 150, 153
Babbitt, Irving, 30, 138, 139
Barker, George, 219, 220
Barthes, Roland, 83, 122, 214
Baudelaire, Charles, 12, 14, 19, 21,
30, 31, 37, 42, 43, 79–85, 99,
100, 118, 131, 138, 172–174,
181, 194, 217, 280, 294
Beckett, Samuel, 3, 21, 53–55,
149–151, 157, 159, 162, 185,
189, 289, 292
Bertrand, Aloysius, vii, 19, 31, 280
Borges, Jorge Luis, 52, 55, 56
Breton, André, 250, 254, 257, 258
Brown, Andy, 13, 185
Burnside, John, 185, 190
C
Capildeo, Vahni, 13, 25–27, 211–213,
215, 216, 220, 224
Carver, Raymond, 331, 332, 334
Chaloner, David, 64–66
Christianity, 255, 261
Cities, 37, 281
Crotty, Patrick, 179
D
Davis, Lydia, 51, 55
Decadence, 2, 4, 20, 182
Delville, Michel, 4, 5, 13, 117, 208,
242, 265, 289
Dickens, Charles, 6, 103, 168
Dismorr, Jessie, 38–42
Dobrée, Bonamy, 106, 141, 142, 145

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 337

J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1
338  Index
Dowson, Ernest, 2, 4, 20, 138
Dreams, 14, 27, 43, 60, 84, 119, 188,
272, 290
Dunham, Jamey, 26, 150, 153, 183
E Hulme, T.E., 32, 36, 41
Edson, Russell, 2, 7, 322
Eliot, T.S., viii, 2–5, 9, 13, 15, 19–22,
30, 34, 35, 53, 94, 100, 106,
133, 134, 136, 146, 170, 214,
230
Ellmann, Richard, 117, 119, 123,
124, 126, 170
Eluard, Paul, 149, 255, 256
F Jakobson, Roman, 288
Fisher, Roy, 13, 21, 22, 47, 51, 58, 60,
61, 268, 284, 287, 289, 290, 292,
295, 299–304, 306, 308, 309
Flint, F.S., 29, 33
Ford, Mark, 13, 56, 57, 193, 194,
196, 198–200, 208
Fredman, Stephen, 5, 177, 185–187,
228, 241
French poetry, 19, 137, 149
G Kennard, Luke, 13, 25, 67, 178, 249,
Gascoyne, David, 13, 21, 249–253,
257–261, 263
Gender, 200, 203, 205, 214, 294
Ginsberg, Allen, 2, 57, 62, 66, 229
Gross, Philip, 229, 241, 242
H
Haiku, 12, 122, 126, 239, 269
Hart, Crane, 195, 196, 199, 201, 202,
205
Harwood, Lee, 21, 47, 56, 57, 268
Heaney, Seamus, 13, 177, 204, 233, 235
Hemingway, Ernest, 169, 170
Henri, Adrian, 51, 58, 62–64
Hill, Geoffrey, 6, 13, 171–173, 178,
204, 235, 302
Mercian Hymns, 171–175, 178–
180, 302
Huysmans, J.-K., 128
Huyssen, Andreas, 36–38, 42, 43
I
Imagism, 32, 37, 125
Internet, 51, 268
J
Jameson, Fredric, 43, 44
Jazz, 13, 279–289, 292–295, 297,
300, 304, 305, 308, 311
Jennings, Humphrey, 9–11
Jones, David, 20, 53, 169, 172, 178,
299, 301
Joyce, James, 3, 117–119, 122, 124,
125, 149, 170, 171, 183, 220
K
267, 269, 277, 325
L
Lehman, David, 49
Lowell, Amy, 33–36, 125
Loy, Mina, 47, 48, 52
M
Mac Low, Jackson, 97, 102
Madge, Charles, 9–11
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 98–100

Mass-Observation, 9, 10
McMillan, Ian, 8, 9
Merrill, Stuart, 2, 31
Merseybeat, 62
Miller, Henry, 255, 256, 262
Minimalism, 8, 9, 12
Modernism, 12, 13, 21, 31, 34, 36,
44, 149, 284
Monte, Steven, 6, 51, 242
Morrison, Blake, 178, 179
Morton, Ferdinand, “Jelly Roll”, 280,
282
Mottram, Eric, 57, 58, 62, 307
Murphy, Margueritte, 12, 74, 229
Murry, John Middleton, 32, 33, 38
N definitions of, 5, 6, 95, 322
Nonsense, 13, 237, 262, 266, 267,
269, 272, 274, 276, 277
O found text, 270, 274
Olson, Charles, 20, 48, 58–60, 63,
64, 238
Oswald, Alice, 190
Over, Jeremy, 13, 266–269, 271, 274,
276, 277
P paragraphing in, 302
Peret, Benjamin, 255, 257
Perloff, Marjorie, 49, 60, 228, 230,
241, 289
Perse, St.-John, 30, 47, 290
Pound, Ezra, 33, 52, 125, 126, 130,
135, 171, 172, 178
Prizes, 11
Prose poetry, 1, 3–6, 8–15, 19, 22,
24, 26, 31, 42, 48–51, 53, 57,
Index   339
62, 67, 75, 85, 87, 94–96, 98,
153, 155, 171, 178–180, 182,
184, 185, 189, 190, 193, 211,
217, 222, 228–231, 233, 234,
236, 238, 242, 243, 250, 253,
255, 257, 263, 267–269, 277,
279, 280, 282, 284, 285, 288,
289, 291, 292, 294, 296, 297,
302, 306, 319, 322–326, 329,
330
anthologies of, 24, 268, 325
attacked as unmasculine, 30
and the avant-garde, 47
as British rather than English, 1, 2,
10–12, 14, 15, 30, 67, 75, 180,
193, 194, 267, 284
compared to drama, 12, 234, 236
as disparagement of prose, 171
essays, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12–14, 48, 94, 95,
242, 243, 256, 330
flash fiction, 12, 15
French origins of, 193
gender, 2, 13, 15, 106, 136, 139,
212, 219, 294, 295
indeterminacy of, 22
magazines, 31, 95
in the nineteenth century, 1, 12
in novels, 10, 75, 95, 294
poetic prose, 1, 14, 15, 322, 324
prizes, 14, 15, 227, 230
public transport, 175
punctuation, 75, 153, 170
short stories, 75, 170
small presses, 67
in the United States, 31
Publishing, 5, 14, 58, 59, 68, 87, 124,
178, 214, 215, 228, 230
340  Index

Q Surrealism, 234, 235, 249, 251, 252,

Queer theory, 197–199, 203 255–257, 260, 261, 276, 277,
333, 335
Symbolism, 20, 21, 85, 258
R
Race, 212, 214, 219, 232, 233
Racism, 222, 229, 232, 233 T
Raine, Kathleen, 251, 252 Translation, 2, 47, 80, 82, 85, 99,
Rankine, Claudia, 13, 14, 67, 228– 128, 138, 144, 212, 284, 285,
230, 325 287, 320
Raworth, Tom, 51, 58, 60, 285, 286, Turnbull, Gael, 47, 51, 58, 59, 61,
289 301, 309
Revision, 216, 324
Riley, Peter, 7, 13, 25, 64, 65, 228,
238, 239 V
Rimbaud, Arthur, 30, 31, 99, 149 Versioning, 81, 82
Robertson, Robin, 190
Rodker, John, 42, 43
Romanticism, 41, 178 W
Walcott, Derek, 214
Wanner, Adrian, 8, 9
S War, 8, 20, 39, 41, 43, 50, 53, 58,
Santilli, Nikki, 13, 21, 177, 189, 219, 103, 137, 140, 142, 144, 170,
220, 241, 249, 279 172, 187, 208, 286, 300
Schuller, Gunther, 288 Wilde, Oscar, 2, 20, 30, 182, 282, 283
Schuyler, James, 56, 57, 195, 200 Williams, Rhian, 95
Scofield, Martin, 136, 137, 144 Williams, William Carlos, 12, 47, 51,
Seed, Ian, 8, 9, 13, 67, 194, 265 64, 85, 87, 121, 178
Selerie, Gavin, 25, 26, 64, 66, 67 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 12, 13, 22, 74, 76,
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 20, 74, 76, 78, 77, 79, 91, 92, 97–101, 105
87 The Waves, 22, 74–78, 94, 96, 97,
Simic, Charles, 2, 227, 235 105
Smart, Elizabeth, 20
Spinoza, Baruch, 200
Star Wars, 213, 214 Y
Stein, Gertrude, 3, 19, 47–50, 94, Yeats, W.B., 98, 102, 117, 119, 120,
184, 273, 288, 289, 291 173, 260, 307
Stevenson, Anne, 179, 182, 204 Young, Lester, 293