Prose Poem - The Poetic Mutant

Comic books are filled with the transformed, people and animals remade to arise as a new creation – usually the result of someone's not-so-benign tinkering. These mutants occupy a no man's land between the possible, and the improbable. Much like prose poems.

What is a prose poem? After much reading, research and angsting over this seemingly simple question, I've made my decision.

Damned if I know.

A form unto themselves, prose poems don't like to be constrained by little things like rules and regulations. The only non-negotiable I could get a consensus on was that prose poems generally don't use line breaks.

Encyclopedia Britannica had this to say about prose poems: "a work in prose that has some of the technical or literary qualities of a poem (such as regular rhythm, definitely patterned structure, or emotional or imaginative heightening) but that is set on a page as prose."

Prose poems aren't about fitting between boundaries, but about poking at those restrictions with a pointy stick. If I had to sneak up and assign characteristics to prose poems without getting caught, I would say they should have internal cohesiveness, possibilities contained in the rhythm and word choice, and a way of approaching language that isn't ordinarily seen in prose. Where poems are made of lines, prose poems build upon sentences. Where poem forms like a sonnet or villanelle can be a form of beach front posturing, a prose poem is often the Incredible Hulk, flexing out of conventional clothing without a thought to propriety.

Like mutants, prose poems aren't quite normal – which leaves us a bit afraid of their potential. Straddling fine-line limitations, prose poems jump into unknown territory and shake up our traditional verse expectations. Don't hate them because they're troublemakers, after all, a long time ago, in a country across the ocean, a sestina was once a monster too.



Forever

by David Ignatow


I do know that birds continue to live and procreate as long as the weather is amenable and the food there—as if it were a deal between them, the weather and the crops. No questions asked. And the birds are in earnest about it, as I am in earnest about finding a reason for their lives, for what reason I myself do not understand. So I too in my way am ignorant of myself, my purpose, to perform simply the role of questioner.

If I were to say that it is because I want to know, I will again surely be carrying out my function of questioner, as the birds carry out theirs of eating and procreating.

I must call it good because to deny it is not one of my functions, or is it? And here I am asking a question once again, carrying out the function I have been assigned.

Meditation is its name, to meditate on practically nothing and to find something to say about it, this that I have written, its own purpose in being, for the sake of living with questions forever.


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