The
Invoking
Careful not to reveal
the words that confess what she is, busy twisting her ring thinking of the
scattered half-cocked passions of her teens. In the cleave of a myth her
forgetting opens the muscled sky.
It swells to release a
banshee wail and draw a sword against the sea. Strange literacies emerge from
the well of its throat. Here it is, she was empty for something and now it is
here. (Ashley-Elizabeth Best)
On
the heels of their Ottawa issue, Montreal’s Matrix magazine’s latest issue features a healthy section of prose poetry,
guest-edited by Sarah Burgoyne, Nick Papaxanthos and William Vallieres, and
includes new work by Paige Cooper, Mary Ruefle, Gabe Foreman, Hilary Bergen,
Jaime Forsythe, Marie-Ève Comtois (trans. Stuart Ross and Michelle Winters),
Kyl Chhatwal and Andrélise Gosselin, Alma Talbot, Sue Sinclair, Madeleine
Maillet, Jim Smith, Lillian Necakov, Gary Barwin, Nick Thran, Mark Laba, Lee
Hannigan, Melissa Bull, Harold Hoefle and Anna-Maria Trudel. In terms of form,
the mix is quite intriguing, especially given the range of emerging (I’d not
heard of a couple of these writers) to established (Forsythe, Sinclair, Smith,
Necakov and Barwin) to very established (Mary Ruefle) writers, as well as the
inclusion of translated material (although I’m sure there might be some curious
to see the work in the original).
A
Strange Thing
Maybe I read this, or
dreamt it, for my mind wanders as I age, but I have always believed Odysseus,
when he heard the sirens, was hearing the Odyssey
being sung, and in fear of being seduced by his own story he had himself bound.
And he was in even greater fear of hearing the end, for he could not bear the
possibility he might become someone other than who he was now, a war hero of
great courage and unexcelled strategy, trembling against the cords of his own
mast. Or he might become an even greater man, one without a single fear in the world,
one who would balk at a man having to tie himself up in fear of anything, and
then it would be revealed that the man he was now was actually a coward. Either
way, he felt doomed as he sailed past his own story. He sailed past the island,
he sailed past the sirens just as they were coming to the end, and once out of
earshot he did a strange thing, of which there is no record, the story having
ended in some far away sound which was no more distinguishable than an eye
dropped of sweetness in the vast and salty sea. (Mary Ruefle)
I
find Burgoyne’s introduction to the feature, which is itself impressive, rather
curious, as she writes an introduction that does little but really say “here
are some prose poems,” instead of pushing to answer some questions on the form (which,
I suppose, is more of my issue than hers) [see my own piece on the Canadian prose poem up at Jacket2 here]. As her
introduction opens: “One thing I love about the dubiously titled word cage that
is ‘prose poetry’ is the dubi-titley-ness of it. By definition, it’s already
divided against itself. is it poemly prose, or prosely poems? Can any old
poemaster pull one off? These are questions one old poem ghost Mr. Eliot asked
himself in a very difficult-to-find essay he published in The New Statesman in 1917. His conclusion: obscure. He knew at
least bad prose poems came from those who thought the form was somehow a mash
act between two genres. A magic mix. Cookies and dough. (No).” While Eliot’s
response is interesting, has there really been no progress in the intervening century?
I very much like the examples she presents from earlier on in the previous
century, perhaps it is more a criticism on the lack of scholarship/attention on
the prose poem generally that she has barely an example between Charles Baudelaire and Claudia Rankine [her book really is remarkable; see my review of such here] to present (American writer Sarah Manguso, for example, has quite a lovely essay responding to the T.S. Eliot essay Burgoyne references). Given so
much has been done in the form in the decades between (there was even a decade-plus worth of journals produced in the United States, exclusively exploring the form, and the questions of form, of the prose poem), where are all the
other examples? Lisa Robertson, Sarah Mangold, Sina Queyras, Meredith Quartermain and Nicole Markotić, just off the top of my head. What are the
current questions on the form that the prose poem presents? Her introduction
presents the suggestion that this section is presented more of an opening salvo
into those kinds of questions, rather than an exploration of those questions
themselves. And yet, the selection of works does far more than that, presenting
such an array of work that, if not seriously challenging the form, certainly
presents a questioning, and a variety of examples, of what the form of prose
poetry is capable of. Burgoyne continues:
Over the years, prose
poetry has housed kooks like Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Charles
Baudelaire. What connects these poets is perhaps (too simply) possedoffèdness. Was
it just a matter of linebreakennui? Were they saving paper? What did the prose
poem once mean? (Especially today when it’s actually hard to find a poet who hasn’t
dabbled in the chunky realm). Well, once upon a time, the prose poem was
actually a political statement. (Not to say it can’t be now. One need look no
further than Rankine’s 2014 publication Citizen).
But in a day when reading poetry was a popular pastime (let me be clearer:
among the upper class), Baudelaire hurling his unrhymey bricks of prose
(discussing donkeys slouching down the mucky streets of Paris and the
hardworking-workingclass) was hardly a welcome blow for a fine fellow to receive.
