Allison Benis White's Small Porcelain Head (Four Way Books, 2013)

Here are some favourite passages from this powerful, enigmatic book in prose poetry:

Please forgive me. I pray and can't make it stop. There were lambswool wigs and paperweight eyes, two factory fires. Instead of blankness, I learned to draw stars with two triangles, one upside and overlapping the other. I covered pages, then like bracelets, my wrists.

*

What should I do with my mind? Think of the way it broke until the breaking is language.

*

Unlike the other automatons who lift a hand mirror or balloon, she exists even when we close our eyes, slapping one small brass cymbal into another, frantically, to prove touching.

*

When I have a headache, I lift my hand over my eyes--if death is a failure of imagination, we are alive.

*

The mutual helplessness of seeing and being seen.

*

As with every revelation, midair, oblivion is realigned and clarified: I want to die then decide.

*

What makes the object alive is desire without relief.

*

Within the bonnet, the two-faced head is rotated by pulling a string from the torso: one face calm, one crying plastic beads on her cheeks--turning: peaceful, sad, peaceful.

Nothing in-between, no transition--I don't remember why she is suffering, why she is glad. It happens so fast: I am hopeless as I pull the string in her torso, then sick with wonder.

*

After a while, we moan and lift our arms in order to feel what she feels: her pose is agony.

In the UK, Small Porcelain Head is available from Wordery.

Hanne Bramness's No Film in the Camera (trans. Frances Presley, Shearsman, 2013)

Here are some favourite passages from this splendid book of prose poems:

Pools of dew swell with the coming of spring but it will soon freeze, because there is a sense of loss.

end of "1"

The floor is partially erased by the light, it is still possible to set out and get across. It is still possible to pull back, run home and put an end to this experiment.

end of "2"

Photographers do not spend their whole lives taking photos in order to recall surfaces, but what has happened just before or long before, and what will happen immediately afterwards.

end of "11"

The presence of the photographer is not really a threat, but a substitute for one.

from "15"

There are many who will not dissimulate, they sacrifice their smile.

end of "19"

She blushes and smiles with her whole body, as much as she possibly can. But trying so hard does not inspire confidence.

end of "20"

The photographer is hunting Europe's spring, along boulevard and pig sty, he wants to catch the light that deprives things of their value--meaning their place in a hierarchy.

end of "27"

If there is no sky in this picture it is still an image of the heavens.

end of "33"

There's no doubt, she is who she pretends to be. 

end of "67"

Some time during the night it happens, she takes a picture of the dream tree just as the clouds are ripped away from the moon.

end of "81"

A fruit tree with buds, stopped before they could unfold, not shrivelled, not dead, but transformed into an image of longing.

end of "77"

Like the ice, the photo keeps everything in place for a while. And the picture exposes the silence, but if you listen long enough it will break into a roar.

end of "82"

You can buy this illuminating book of prose poems directly from the publisher here. 

A powerful review of Imagined Sons by Eileen Tabios at Galatea Resurrects

Eileen Tabios has reviewed Imagined Sons at her poetry review site, Galatea Resurrects. Here's a passage: "But Imagined Sons is also important for showing how craft allows for the effective portrayal of a loss so expansive it could easily wriggle out of control into poetic “laxness” (for lack of a better word; I have read a lot of poems by those touched by orphanhood and/or adoption and many simply sag under the weight of the topic).  In this sense, too, Etter was wise in choosing the prose poem whose form allows the suppleness required for such a fraught topic. 

Here’s another example from a book that deserves to be read in its entirety—this example reveals the utter fearlessness of Carrie Etter (whose lack of timidity here honors Poetry), and how, sadly, the downside of not knowing is that one can imagine anything [...]."

You can read the whole review here.

 

RIP Russell Edson, 1935-2014

I've just learned of the death of Russell Edson, an American master of the prose poem I admired greatly and whom I had the pleasure to hear read some years ago in New York. Here are links to two of my favourite pieces of his: the atypical "The Pilot" and the delightful "A Performance at Hog Theater". I would be grateful to hear of ways his work has inspired other writers and happy to post tributes, responses, etc. here over the coming weeks.

Peter Riley's Greek Passages (2009)

In the quotations that follow, the slashes are not line breaks, but punctuation the author's inserted in prose poems, because that's how Peter Riley rolls in Greek Passages (Shearsman Books, 2009). As all the poems are untitled, know that each new passage comes from a separate poem.

Small chirruping cries, echoed along the coastal cliffs.

*

Our sustenance dragged across our fear....

*

The light of our souls downcast / onto the stones of the shore / Money, what have you done?

*

Wake into fallen dark / the labyrinth cut into the open

*

...when I / catch that music, / tuned to the distant hurt, the small voice.

*

I don't make a narrative, I / await an arrival, a song.

*

Coachloads arrive wanting to buy something / something redemptive, though it might not last. / / Up in the windy hills the rain / marginalises us, serving / every cell of the landscape.

*

Justice that survives in the tales while the actuality lies ten feet down a shaft grave. There was no justice.

*

The mind is a cold and lonely place, its doors locked. Outside in the moving air is where things happen.... / / The orange butterflies speckled black or brown, that vanished with the first rain.

*

But there is an immediacy, a smoking chimney, somebody looks up from the news. The singing is unstoppable. A gecko runs across the wall-o.

*

We are reduced to a single moment, a shout of denial, a syllable in the night. Then we are finished.

*

The clear picture, the better articulation, the linear spread. Lord it is lonesome among poor remnants of success, struggling to recognise the world.

*

The answering, the brightened heart, a refuge because a resource, and a resilience, a burgeoning, a dazzling sanity.

*

...look / at it there, the plurality shining in the night / seeking questions for its answers. 

*

...the secular complexity devolving on hope / the lyric of everyday....

*

Arriving at dawn in the foothills of Taigétos / the dark shapes becoming known, sense / unfolding from the eastward slopes, a little misty, beginning to breathe /

*

Whitethroated sea / discursive light / pale red wine holding / a gleam in the glass / Dionysiac calm

*

Conversing with the dead at another entrance to Hades, continuous with the sky.

*

And lyric redeems narrative, and hand in hand on the edge of the sand . . . / The small boat entering the harbour, turning the engine off, drifting to the quayside, carrying home, by the light of the moon.

Purchase Peter Riley's Greek Passages directly from the publisher, Shearsman Books, here.

And so National Poetry Month begins!

After all that build-up seeking fellow poets to join me in writing a poem a day, the month has arrived, and fortunately, I'm still on spring break. This time I have several projects I'd like to continue with: Gretel, 'open field' poems that tell the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale from her point of view, in third person; The Modie Box, a prose poem about my mother and her death, focused on the box file in which I keep her letters and cards to me, my letters to her, and various mementos (Modie is the first name I called her, perhaps clearer as Moddy). Additionally, I'd like to replace one of the Imagined Sons in my manuscript of the same name with a new piece, and so plan to try to write several new Imagined Sons poems. I also want to prepare a couple poems for themed contests and magazine issues, including this important competition raising money and awareness of cardiac risk in young people. I hardly need any additional inspiration to make it through the month! 

But I always have ideas for poems and don't understand writer's block per se. That won't keep me, however, from offering prompts for those who find them useful. I'll start by promoting a couple of favourite forms, the pantoum and the prose poem. If you haven't written one of them, give it a go. For more on the pantoum, see this page at the Academy of American Poets; here's their page on the prose poem. On the latter, I'd also be glad if you explored my site Sudden Prose, devoted to both prose poetry and flash fiction, with many splendid examples.

What plans do others have for National Poetry Month? I'd be glad to hear.

Homecoming (Dancing Girl, 2013)

After admiring for years Dancing Girl's handmade chapbooks and focus on women poets, I was delighted when, some months ago, I realized I had a manuscript that might suit. Last night I learned that they--or rather, she, editor Kristy Bowen, agreed, and would be publishing Homecoming in the second half of 2013. Focusing on home, family and death (no, it's not cheery work), the poems have appeared in Court Green, New Welsh Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Warwick Review. I guess that list suggests that this manuscript's been some time in the making; in fact it is the basis for a collection in progress, The Weather in Normal. Anticipating a question from my Sudden Prose and other prose poetry students, I'll add that one third of the poems are in prose, two thirds in lines. As the press is based in Chicago I expect I'll buy a goodly stock to sell at readings and by post in the UK--just let me know if you'd like one.

Self-Censorship and Writing in and out of the Classroom

Yesterday at the annual NAWE conference (the National Association for Writers in Education, UK), I spoke on a panel with Bath Spa colleague Steve May and Columbia College Chicago comrades Randy Albers and Alexis Pride. Titled "Revelation and Transgression: Moving Past Self-Censorship," we spoke both about our own experiences overcoming self-censorship and about trying to get students to overcome it in their own writing. 

I think students feel or obtain such permission largely by example, by the reading they're assigned or recommended and by the instructor's own work. For example, Alexis spoke movingly about how the literary weight given in the classroom to Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye made African-American experience seem welcome subject matter; and after sharing some of the poems that have arisen from my own experience as a birthmother (as in my pamphlet/chapbook The Son), I've had students seek me out to discuss writing and sharing their own work on subjects they consider taboo. The same thing has happened with my experimental poetry--sometimes once a student finds it on her own or comes to a reading I give from it, she'll come to me to find out about experimental writing more generally and how to get started writing it.

The topic lingers in my mind as I consider how I might improve my teaching by broadening such models, perhaps especially in my Sudden Prose module with a wider array of flash fictions and prose poems. Your thoughts and recommendations are most welcome!

Sunflowers is out!

Sylph Editions' Nobile Folio of Peter Coker's painting, "Sunflowers," is out, with my series of prose poems, "Meditations." The series intermingles responses to Coker's painting with thoughts on my late mother and flowers; the piece as a whole is dedicated to her memory. You can learn more about the folio on Sylph Editions' website here.

Catching Up / Current Issues

With my overwhelming workload this past academic year, I haven't had as much time to blog as I'd like, but with classes over, I hope to change that. It's been a long time since I've given an update on magazines, but now's a great time with a flurry of appearances. In the UK, poems are in the current or next issues of Domestic Cherry, New Welsh Review, The Rialto, Shearsman, Under the Radar, and The Warwick Review.  In the US, poems are forthcoming in the next issues of Hayden's Ferry Review, Notre Dame Review, and The Same. 


Additionally, my series of prose poems for Sylph Editions' folio for Peter Coker's painting, "Sunflowers," is at the printer's now, I understand, and from the PDF I've seen, it appears beautifully produced. I also have a short essay on prose poetry coming out in the summer issue of Poetry Review.

A prose poem from Ellie Evans' The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess

Line Ending

He was always plagued by line-endings. This was why he didn't lift his pencil off the paper, but kept on and on, writing more and more slowly. And his writing got smaller. When words stopped forming, he let the line go and it drew him after it, as it drew petals, the scroll of an ear, a foetus like a conch-shell. At the same time, the line annotated all these in tiny script, written backwards to bewilder him. Still he was running as the line left the page and spiralled over walls to doodle staircases, camels, a banyan tree...then off down corridors, ambulatories, even cannons and aeroplanes. But all he had ever wanted to do was make a lion: it walked towards the king as if to attack, then opened its mouth. And it was filled with lilies.

Ellie Evans

The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess

Seren Books, 2011

You can purchase The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess from The Book Depository with free worldwide shipping. At the moment of writing, it's 26% off!

Linda Black, Root (Shearsman, 2011)

She liked the space on the landing

Where the stairs turned, as if it were extra, a place in which she might pause, leaning her back against the wall, where the sun might shine, as on the lawn at her grandparents’ house, briefly. The lawn she had wished for her children to run on in abandon. When she sees a photo of the children she thinks, how familiar, how familiar these children in their clothes and their faces, as though she could open a door and see them standing there with their voices and their little feet.

Linda Black

Root is available directly from Shearsman Books or from The Book Depository.

"Purchase," a fresh draft of a prose poem

Taken down after a few days, as usual....

Another epigraph for Divining for Starters

I came across this today in reading some of prose poet Killarney Clary's work and thought it would have made a good additional epigraph for my most recent collection, Divining for Starters: "We who could divine what is from what is, pull any one way with purpose, win or lose at dice, laugh in the mirror, wish through the tunnels. Risk is juggled into difference."

In that kitchen, a writing exercise (NaPoWriMo, day 25)

Three days of NaPoWriMo, I've begun anew an exercise I came across in a listserv's archives: Begin with "In that kitchen," continuing writing until you're stuck, and when you reach that wall, write "In that kitchen" again and continue accordingly for 10-15 minutes; this becomes the first draft of a prose poem. In my three pieces, the kitchen is always the kitchen at 220 Arlington Drive, Normal, Illinois, the kitchen I knew as my family's from the age of five, the kitchen I may not see again if the house is sold soon. I was surprised to feel how much a kitchen can be the axis of a family; I suppose ours especially, as it was connected to the garage on one side and was open to the dining room on the other. For those struggling with coming up with a poem a day, I strongly recommend the exercise and urge people to try it with the kitchen they knew in childhood: it's amazing what strands of relationships, family, place, and development arise and mingle.

Jane Monson's Speaking without Tongues, second selection, and launch tonight in Cardiff

Tonight former student Jane Monson launches her first collection, Speaking without Tongues (consisting entirely of prose poems), while Alison Bielski launches her latest, one of our skylarks, at the Wales Millennium Centre at 7 p.m. The event is free--say hello if you join me!

Here's a second selection from Jane's collection.

Kierkegaard’s Chairs

When Kierkegaard was eight, his father made his son eavesdrop on the conversations of his dinner guests, then sit in each of their chairs after they had left. Nicknamed ‘the fork’ at home, because that was the object he named when asked what he’d like to be, the seated boy would be tested. The father wanted to hear each of the guest’s arguments and thoughts through the mouth of his son, as though the boy was not just one man, but as many as ten. Almost word for word, ‘the fork’ recounted what these men had said, men who were among the finest thinkers in the city. The tale is chilling somehow. Not least because his father at the same age, raised his fists to the desolate sky of Jutland Heath, and cursed God for his suffering and fate. Not least because of the son sitting in each of those chairs, their backs straight and high, rising behind him like headstones, while the words of others poured from his mouth, his father at the head of the table, testing his son like God. Not least because when asked why he wanted to be a fork, Kierkegaard answered: “Well, then I could spear anything I wanted on the dinner table.” And if he was chased? “Well then,” he’d responded, “then I’d spear you.”

Jane Monson

Speaking without Tongues

Cinnamon, 2010

Jane Monson's Speaking without Tongues, first selection (Cinnamon, 2010)

Speaking without Tongues is the first collection of Jane Monson, a former student of mine from The Poetry School. In Spring 2005, I had one of my best teaching experiences giving a ten-week course on the prose poem at the BT Poetry Studio in London; one of the sixteen students, Jane was already knowledgeable and passionate about prose poetry, studying for a PhD that focused on the form. To learn more or order the book, please visit Cinnamon Press's page for it.

Hatching

They would land in the middle of the plate, sometimes on top of the peas, spiders which had lost their grip on the light-shade and fallen. She grew up comparing the glue of a web to a cheap envelope. Her mother, at such dinners, would go red in the face and curse their life; the sound was of flies repeating themselves on a window-pane. The daughter would sit quietly, and ask for each fly to be caught. Be careful what you bloody well ask for, her mother once said, and shot the girl a look that landed in her stomach. She had no recollection of speaking aloud, but from that moment started to bite her lip whenever she had these thoughts. Teeth-marks began to form on her mouth, and more flies on the tongue of the mother.

Shadowtrain 34 is out...

...with contributions by Claire Crowther, Rupert Loydell, Steve Spence, and yours truly, with three prose poems. Take a look.

Jennifer Moxley's The Line (Post-Apollo Press, 2007), second selection

A little context from the blurb by Rosmarie Waldrop: "We're in the state between sleep and waking, where consciousness resists the tasks of reason and routine but instead views, from the perspective of darkness, the whole span from newborn promise to the old mammals, erosion of muscle."

"Morning after morning while you lay sweatily wedged between weary physicality and tedious selfhood the punctilious programs of the already dead tromp heavily through your mind."

* * *

"It is my belief that this tedium all started when the elusive present you so longed to possess at last became all that was left."

from "Mortal Aurora"

"Is this the reason old houses comfort you? Their sleep allows for mysterious things--filmy journeys over ethereal banks, star-by-star stone-stepping, beneath your feet soft waters of nothingness and centuries of hidden thought--events that work your defeatist will into a strange elation."

last stanza of "The Milky Way"

"The gift of minor eternity, on a brief mammalian scale, is not this relentless coming to be but the tale you will later tell about it. It is a kind of love, insofar as it moves you."

last stanza of "The Sadness of Old Mammals"

"I sleep with approximately 14,000 days sitting on my chest. A slow hour many years old pushes aside yesterday's appetites and enters as a whisper through an unmuffled ear: 'remember me, remember me, remember me!'"

from "The Periodic Table"

"What an idiot! Why did he choose inevitable defeat by picking the fancy solution?"

end of "The Mattress Raft"

"Why does this poem exist? Nobody knows. But it seems to be mourning the ideal."

end of "The Wrong Turn"

"The lives of the rich are so fabulous! The destruction of the poetical lies heavily on their hands, as on their swollen notion that we are always watching. There is nothing behind the mask. Nothing suffocating under its pressure, no human essence trying to get out."

* * *

"It is easy to lose, through meddling or neglect, an entire aspect of existence. And sometimes, to cultivate a single new thought, you need not only silence but an entirely new life."

from "The Atrophy of Private Life"

"You are plagued nightly by memory-pictures of a time that no longer exists. Admit it, some illogical part of you secretly believes you can go back. The place hasn't vanished, perhaps it even looks the same, but the angle of time that became what you laughingly call your 'experience' is gone. Except in the deceitful subjunctive."

opening of "The Cover-Up"

Jennifer Moxley's The Line (Post-Apollo Press, 2007), first selection

Jennifer Moxley's outstanding book, The Line, is one of the best books of prose poems I've ever read. I'd like to copy here the following poems in their entirety: "The State," "The Endless Conscription," "The Pitiful Ego," "The Interruption," "The Clock" and "The Railing." You'll just have to read those for yourself, as I don't want to infringe on copyright. Here is a first set of selected passages. This sentence from Alice Notley's blurb gives some useful context: "These prose poems tell the story of sleeping and waking, of this very bout of writing, of the search for the line of time and the poet's immortality."

"Newborn, palpable loneliness shakes you from even the deepest sleep. Against the cold air and shadowed darkness flooded with sudden consciousness the vulnerable flesh recoils. In the liminal all times converge. Severed memories long for the text, the comfort of dialectic."

first half of "The Promise"

"The heartbreak of time is not that it passes but rather the language yoke. By grace of grammar alone the moment's fleeting existence."

from "In One Body and One Soul"

"How many more days will you awaken? The flesh envies the word's longevity but not its delayed effects."

* * *

"You are asleep before belief, held captive mid-metamorphosis."

from "Awake"

"Yesterday was exhausting, yet there is no meaningful reason to think you are lost for good. Though sometimes you do."

from "Address"

"You have accepted that this repetition will kill you, though it remains your only hope."

* * *

"With no new experience to feed it your amulet mind seeks asylum in imaginary visions of a falsified past."

from "Experience"

"True faith does not need the state to enforce it. It makes neither hope, nor a shroud."

"You will walk out of the visible and learn to accept the darkness. You will find the line. It extends backward eternally into the past and forward into the future. The utterance cup, the gentle metric, old words new mind lost time and loves."

* * *

"In other words, write. Find time in words. Replace yourself cell by letter, let being be the alphabetic equation, immortality stay the name."

from "The Line"

"You step off the curb into nothingness where the line offers itself to your hands. Grab hold or fall. Happy in the thought you might never recover you consign your trust to this flimsy thread that nobody else can see."

end of "Mystical Union"

In the UK, Jennifer Moxley's The Line is prohibitively expensive. In the US, you can obtain it from Small Press Distribution, but its UK shipping charges are high because they use FedEx, so I have to recommend Amazon.com, which will charge $15 for the book and $3.99 for international shipping. So, who wants to borrow my copy first?