PROSE 3

Sentenced to Poetry: Fullness as Accumulation and Rebellion in the Prose Poem

by Amanda Earl

"I began to long for complex sentences, for the possibility of digression, for space. The space of a different, less linear movement: a dance of syntax. The prose paragraph seemed like the right kind of space where form could prove ‘a centre around which, not a box within which’ (Ezra Pound)." (Rosemarie Waldrop, “Why Prose Poetry”)[1]

The first prose poems I read were Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (1869). I was an eighteen-year old, studying French at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College, in downtown Toronto, going gaga over attractive young men and being influenced by a Turkish friend who spent all her days in the café knitting when she wasn’t buying jewelry. Suddenly I was surrounded by strangeness, people who floated convention, who spoke languages other than English, who had travelled. 

I was already mesmerized by the poems of Baudelaire and Rimbaud in many ways, the wildness of them, but I especially liked the way Baudelaire’s prose poems move away from rhyme but still contain a musicality in the sentence, still portray a speaker who wants to be drunk, who wants to explore creativity as something untameable, compatible with the poet’s restless spirit. There is something about the prose poem that feels out of control, not constrained by line breaks that is liberating and makes for endless possibilities of whimsy, exploration and connection.

As a young woman surrounded by fascinating students from exotic places, given the opportunity to wander the streets of downtown Toronto on my own, the rebelliousness and cosmopolitan nature of these poems and the author had a certain appeal.  

Sentence

 Prose poetry can be a way of conveying the fullness of language and human experience, of playing with the sentence. Lisa Robertson creates memorable and eccentric poetry out of the sentence. Her book, the Weather (New Star Books, 2001), is an assembly of weather reports but also a playful and lyrical collection of sentences and fragments. Each clause builds upon the next by means of rhythm, repetition and accumulation of detail to create a crescendo with sound and imagery:

"A beautiful morning: we go down to the arena. A cold wintry day; we open some purse. A day is lapsing; some of us light a cigarette. A deep mist on the surface; the land pulls out. A dull mist comes rolling from the west; this is our imaginary adulthood. A glaze has lifted; it is delusional space. A great dew; we spread ourselves sheer-like. A keen wind; we’re paper blown against the fence. A little checkered at 4 PM ; we dribble estrangement’s sex. A long soaking rain; we lift the description."

I just started reading Lisa Robertson’s Cinema of the Present (2014), which feels like an homage to the sentence. As does  Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, the Codex, Melancholy, Lucretius, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias (2012) a book of essays, a book of essay-poems.

I am enthralled with the way the sentence in prose poems or essay-poems can be accumulative. On occasion, whenever I damn well feel like it, I have been known to subscribe to horror vacui, filling up a blank space with detail, rather than trying to be as spare as possible in my writing. Perhaps as a type of rebellion from the standard viewpoint that poetry should be minimal or the realization that human behaviour isn’t minimal; it is sloppy, overflowing and wordy. I spend a great deal of time eavesdropping on conversations and trying to find ways to translate awkward behaviour of strangers onto the page. I’m not always sure that minimalism is the best way to do so. Even as a reader, sometimes I want to be drunk on language and imagery.

In Juliana Spahr’s “thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs” (University of California Press, 2005), the sentence, by means of repetition and accumulation, becomes incantatory. The section entitled “poemwrittenafterseptember11/2001” begins as seven minimal lines made up of one sentence with lots of space in between. Spahr crowds more and more text onto successive pages until near the end of the poem when she has a paragraph of  twelve lines made up of one sentence and then back to two-line sentence at the end, “How lovely and how doomed this connection of everyone with lungs.”

The sentence can be long or short. It can be minimal or full of detail.  It can reflect the breath, the body. In “Je Nathanaël” (BookThug, 2006), Nathalie Stephens (now Nathanaël) moves between short, staccato sentences and run on sentences without punctuation to create a tone of restless sensuality. The book deals with the inability of language to articulate human experience but also the inability of the body to represent the self:

Scatalogue

"Books don’t show the way but insist on remaining. So how to leave the book and enter directly into the body ? We are jealous of one another’s bodies yet we each have one. I would undress my tongue and dip it willingly into ice cold water would invite you to meet me where the body becomes transparent where nothing is for sale and everything is given away. I would invent rude words for your mouth to show you the true colour of blood. Love in the raw is life renewed. But of this write nothing down not a thing. Be wary of the heat that emanates from the unwritten page. Everything remains to be said so long was we have said nothing. Most importantly do not fear dirtying yourself. love washes the body clean of perfection.”[2]

Stanza-based poetry often leaps from one image or theme to another without any kind of obvious transition. When it’s done in prose poetry, it feels like a form of rebellion against conventional prose. As soon as we are taught to write, we begin to learn the importance of logic, of clear transitions between ideas. Prose poetry fucks with that. Take for example, the brilliant and versatile Anne Carson.

Her writing dances from subject to subject. The transitions aren’t always straight-forward. This is not a careless mistake, but rather a deliberate technique, a way to accumulate and balance, to create a collage of wonder. This method has given me permission to leap in ways that conventional writing environments do not. 

Her ability to transcend the boundaries of genre is liberating. Float (Knopf, 2016) is a kick-ass example of such: 22 chapbooks that float from poetry to essay to fragment, often within the same chapbook. The work is versatile, playful, thoughtful and full of language that is straight-forward, not high-fallutin, nor academic-sounding.

In Cassandra Float Can, one of the chapbooks in Float, Carson is interested in “cracks, cuts, gashes, splittings, slicings, rips, tears, conical intersects, disruptions, etymologies.” She talks of the veils that cover so-called reality, how translation and even the writing of the sentence itself can be an act of covering or cutting through surfaces.

I am currently reading Mary Ruefle’s My Private Property (Wave, 2016), another blend of essays and prose poems, reminiscent of Anne Carson’s Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992) in that each poem takes one subject and goes off in unexpected directions.

The sentence in prose poetry is the conveyor of leaps. Its rhythms evoke Miles Davis playing horn on Bitches Brew: long, echoing brass or short trills. It is versatile, rebellious and adventurous.

Reading this over, I’m starting to worry that I’m saying I don’t like stanza-based poetry. That isn’t true. Whatever serves the work, even song lyrics. Hey, didn’t Bob Dylan just win the Nobel Prize for Literature for his lyrics? This means I can talk about music as poetry. Hell, I would have anyway. But thank you, Sweden.

Some of my favourite poetry blends lines and sentences, poem and prose poem. Works such as Oana Avasilichioae’s We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012) move from single lines on a page to lines that transcend linear space, moving up the page diagonally to blocks of prose punctuated with periods. When this sort of thing happens, publishers have a hard time categorizing a book as poetry or prose. This, I think, is my favourite kind of literary rebellion, a work that is unclassifiable, that doesn’t fit into a pigeon hole.

Wouldn’t it be great if genre didn’t matter? It doesn’t. Fuck it.  

Amanda Earl is a poet, publisher and fiction writer, living in Ottawa. Amanda is managing editor of Bywords.ca and fallen angel of AngelHousePress. Her books include “A World of Yes” (DevilHouse, 2015), “Kiki” (Chaudiere Books, 2014), “Coming Together Presents Amanda Earl” (Coming Together, 2014). Further information is available at AmandaEarl.com or contact Amanda on Twitter @KikiFolle.

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[1] Rosemarie Waldrop, “Why Prose Poetry” in Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetics, edited by Reginald Shepherd (Counterpath Press, 2008).
[2] Nathalie Stephens, “Scatalogue” in Je Nathanaël (BookThug, 2006).

PROSE 2

The Erotic Essay Not Written

Geneviève Robichaud

“...my pleasure never felt done – even when I came, there were parts stuck inside.

Pleasure clung to my stomach, it swelled up my throat.” (Tamara Faith Berger, Lie with me)

I think it is not you I desire but how your mouth feels as I say yes.

I find myself thinking, again, of the kind of erotic essay I’d write. What kind of essay that would be. Perhaps because of this, I am rehearsing the part where one body theoretically kisses the other body. There are several versions of this, each one marked by subtle variations: a spot on the neck where moans slip out of open mouths, lips pressing into lips, bones pressing into flesh. The form isn’t logical or argumentative but associative: one part links or leads to another. I have this image of you. You are leaning in. Your outline is soft. I am thinking that because method also means path, kissing is a kind of pathology: I imagine kissing you and where it might lead.

 In different texts, I find myself writing then erasing a kiss should resemble nothing. In older notebooks, there are places where the paper is thin and worn and pilling from the tiny eraser at the top of my pencil. In those places, a kiss should resemble nothing is very soft, almost transparent.

There is very little that is actually transparent, especially not words, those parts stuck inside. Even the invisible ones. It makes me wonder if longing alone makes them exist, or if needing them, the way one needs them written down, is a way of making them slip onto the skin, glistening. Se mettre à fleur de peau. In this I seem to have transmuted the task of the essayist into pure obsessional desire, which is arguably the work of poetry.

Lately, each time I sit down to write, I stumble into words I had not meant to put on paper. They appear there like old lovers who, walking in a city none of them properly belong to, happen on each other at some street corner. Do you know I’ve been looking for you? If I hadn’t called out you wouldn’t have recognized me. You haven’t changed.

I find the words bifurcating into two performances, not necessarily simultaneous: here the essay carries something outward – its fantasy is that of the caesura, of a deep and audible breath / a withdrawal / each time thinking the arrival will claim a new departure; meanwhile, there is always the hope that the end will make everything that preceded it meaningful.

The writing was more monastic than erotic. I woke up early each morning to write under the measure of a few devotional hours. That part was easy until the darkness of the winter months arrived. I sacrificed many words in favour of sleep. I have not measured this against any feelings of regret even though, as a perfectionist, I tended to think of sleep as a word-eater. At night I struggled to keep my eyes open long enough to catch the end of a film, only to then lie wide awake. It was as though in not starting my day with words I was somehow unable to end my nights.

Every day was different of course. Some mornings the words came easy. Other days, I had to face my impotence and my whole body wringing itself out to put one word in front of the other. Sometimes, if I were home, I would take books from the shelves in the dining room; if already seated in the library, I would wander into the stacks. This seemed a form of recompense for not racing to the end of a line but allowing my thoughts to float as though the contrast between the air in the room and the texture of the books, as I skimmed through them or ran my fingers over their spine, would reveal which questions to ask next.

Does it make it cinematic to imagine it happening to somebody else?

There’s one book in particular. The End of the Story. I keep coming back to it. The constancy of my return resembles something of a love affair. The novel welcomes this. It is itself about the measure of desire, the measure of writing. I cannot tell if it’s because I am deeply infatuated with the writing, but I often find myself thinking it is a perfect novel. I admire the way Davis’s sentences seem to work toward a vanishing point. Like they’re assembled around an empty middle, a husk or sheath or shell, which is not really empty – more like what language cannot carry.

When I go to a reading, I find myself distracted and imagining a lively dialogue between us. You are saying something like what are you doing, only you are saying it in French. Je pense au roman érotique que je vais écrire. Mais pourquoi en anglais? Autrement ça risque d’être trop sentimental. Tu ne trouves pas que l’érotisme se marie bien à la sentimentalité? Non, je ne trouve pas. De toute façon en écrivant en anglais je me tromperai moi-même. Ça sera un moi à côté d’un autre. Il me viendra plus facilement de m’imaginer une double vie, même d’écrire contre mes propres expériences. Quand je dirai je ce ne sera pas tout à fait vrai, et je le ferai si bien que personne ne pourra dire que je n’ai jamais fait l’amour en anglais.

Does it show that I want you? That I am writing around the parataxis I’ve made of your body: a form of writing like kissing where the mouth is its own kind husk or sheath with words inside. At least that is my fantasy.

We kissed each other for a long time. The simile dissolving.

I wanted to mark, to write down a great deal more than what I’ve offered up here. This is not the essay I imagined. I had wanted to make this, this text (except perhaps not the one you are presently engaged in reading), a gift to all the others that have moved me in some way. An essay that writes through and bows to what is not mine. A writing alongside of. A lover’s essay. It was not a grand gesture. I wanted the essay to be about love. I’ve been thinking of Renée Gladman’s sentences a lot. Especially Calamities. I have begun reading each essay out loud, mouthing the words so that it takes time.



Geneviève Robichaud is a PhD candidate in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at the Université de Montréal. Her chapbook, Exit Text, was recently published by Anstruther Press.

PROSE 1

Every Year A Christmas Tree

        Christopher McCarthy

At the Christmas tree farm, two middle-aged men burn a brush fire. Families newly arrived and hangers-on stand beside the warmth. Everyone waits for the tractor to come back and take us up the hill to the harvesting field—row upon row of balsam fir.

      We’ve all paid fifty dollars to be driven up the hill, to select our own best tree, to cut it down and have the tractor bring it back. It’s an additional two dollars to have it wrapped in netting afterwards.

     The men burning deadfall build up their tower of sticks. It crackles, sap sizzles and pops. Jolly music plays in the background. The fire and, at its edge, see a child’s snow suit. Yellow, green, and purple, mock primary colours. Orange dances around it. The snowsuit’s collision of colour, its block pattern alone, tells its age.

     The arms of the jacket are just back far enough from the box of flames that they are changing colour, darkening a shade, and stiffening.

     Daylight fire bright which star will we see tonight? 

     The tractor returns with the bimmelbahn, flatbed cars in tow. The driver circles-semi around the fire, then reverses, bunching up backwards caterpillar-style. Hop everyone of us on except the men burning the fire, and older people from one of the other families who sip luke-warm coffee contentedly.

     The driver knocks down a milk crate for anyone needing a boost onto the platform. ‘All on?’

     We turn away, whiplining straight to go. Brace seated. Ride. UP, UP, UP, snow but more mud, evergreen Christmas around our hectic train. Bumps bump. Look up. See a grey-porcelain winter sky. Feel cold. Hear the choke of the tractor smooth-out as its wheels touch dry terrain. Out.

     Step down (some use the milk crate again). Fairytale style forest appeals to us all. The farmers’ rows of fir—dense and brush-cluttered— make magic this man-made wood.

     Still. There’s no breeze. Jovial talk bursts, through gloom clouds light shines ready for the tree hunt. Families break off. Go. Go. Sun shines.

     Our silence breaks bletchley with the crunch, crunch, crunch of footsteps treading on the backs breaking hundreds of snails. There are thousands of snails (not alive) littered on the forest floor. This is odd. Why?

     Move to the clearing. Blue blue up, dark brown down, a Honda stained with earth from the tire up, parked by the tree line. A yellow sign nailed to a pine reads ‘10’, below it and stump-lined on either side, ‘reforestation area’, and on the ground here is a skull. It looks like a rabbit’s head. Pick it up. Hare skull for an art deco piece—a gift for sister—cleaned and sterilized and some jewels in the eyes. It will stand out on the day with all the other glitter and garland green. In the bag with the saw goes it. It goes.

                            *                          *                           * 

     Hoist up trees and attach them to roofs of cars. Stand around. The bell jingles. ‘Available. Available.’ The tractor driver searches for new passengers. No one in the parking lot pays him any attention.  A horse drawn sleigh carrying several tourists passes down a snowy laneway.

     Gloom gloms blue sky with globular grey. Noon settles. Dirty air smolders with the fire on the far side of the lot. Adults aver the ‘lovely, fresh trees’ they now secure to their roof racks. Our one, nearly six feet from stump to star, lost inches to sawdust. Cut fresh and tie tightly. Bow saw bag and bunny trunk stowed, bundled, we bunch into the back seat. Door swung open to tie.

     More and more families get into cars to go. Dirt mixed with snow makes snirted mox. Down each exit each family, each set of tires scrawk banal, gone. Done. Hold breath for exhaust fumes.

     Only two empty cars in the lot now. The farmer’s Dodge pickup with seven or eight trees strapped in its bed, rusts silently.  Tucked in beside the parking lot attendant’s shelter, a yellow VW Bug—almost fifty years old—wheels removed, up on cement blocks, rusting too. It does not go.

    ‘Blue spruce available on this side and Fraser fir at the other end.’ The bell jingles still.

     The fields edge away to become highway.  

     Arrive home. Untie ties. Stand tree in tree stand. Remove net. Get camera. Snap. Snap. The tree must open up. Leave it alone. Branches drop down.

     Out for lunch. Eat eggs and tomato. Chat. ‘Great tree.’ ‘It is.’ Plan a nightwalk in the Christmas market. Those that want it can drink Glühwein at the entrance as we wait to pay six dollars for tickets to go in. Go. Go. Go. Go.

    It is so dark that the personal only looks personal amidst the false light, the large, fake tree predominant, and all her false glimmering stars rising with floating (hanging) jellyfish up the black sky. Hot pots hiss. Boiling maple syrup is poured to glace over icy snow. Chatter rings. Carollers on stage sing.

     Eat smoked meat and Käse-Sandwich. Eat Bratchäs with pickled pepper, sautéed onions, and Schweineschnitzel on a pretzel bun. Eat Liège style waffles and Kartoffelspiralen swaying on swivels. Eat roasted pecans, cinnamon-glazed, and Gebrannte Mandeln. Eat chocolate dipped, dough-fried dessert.

     Twirl around each and every vendor. Shop in shops. Turn to cross through grounds. Skirt round people standing. Avoid people carrying stacks of gifts not looking. Bear left. Bear right. Skate across snowy, salted brick. Snowflakes dance down and disappear over cooking fires, hot oil, over lit grills. Footstep a snowy ballet set to banter and bouncing Bublé. Crack nuts in teeth. Get back in the car. Nom nom’d in exultation.

     He lies in mystery. See black ice on the dark, dark road.

     Skid snowy. Go toward the median. Jaunt into an otherways turn. Turn again. Turn on your side. Roll. Roll. Roll your oats over. Overmix the porridge, seatbelt jolt. Pick those glass shards out. Crash berry blue. One of us has sicked all over the floor of the smash.

                            *                          *                           * 

     Sit on a bench for a long time gazing at real stars. Shock shocks.  How do you know you don’t have a concussion if you have one but think you don’t?

     ‘Thank God everyone is fine.’

     Thank Him. Give thanks the car is a write-off. Give thanks in secret. Give thanks especially that the saw didn’t loose from the saw bag. Retrieve the bunny head. 

     Arrive home. Undress. Untie bandages. Tie new ones on. Stand by tree. Decorate. No one wants to sleep. We laugh-laugh-laugh. This is the fattest fir we’ve ever had. It doesn’t fit in the room. Its shapeless wide is filled with decades of ornaments. Get camera. Snap. The tree has opened us up. Drop down. Most go to bed.

     Fire glows embers to cinders to ashen nothing.

     Downstairs, in the laundry room, in the deep sink, clean the bunny head. Solvents smell. Scrub the eye sockets. Soak gore. Leave it alone for awhile. Watch TV in the side room. Come back.

     Drain the drecky dark liquid. Dry dry. Work the towel into every hole. Sand smooth. Smooth bumps. Take off grit. Apply linseed oil with a rag. Let dry. Wait. Watch more TV. Hours pass.

     Buff every surface. Go back over it with a higher grade paper. Roughen the sites for the bijoux. Play Bowie’s ‘blackstar’ (at a hushed volume). Stick the fake jewels on. Blacken the eye cavities. Dust the skull with glitter. Dull the shine.  Finish.

     Sleep late, late into the morning of Christmas Eve day.

                            *                          *                           * 

     It’s a shrunken head. Wrapped, balled-up in newspaper, under the tree, tied off at the neck, the gift of a skull. Add a green bow.

     O. Henry. Oh Henry.

     All day is for sitting around. Parents phone insurers. Leave to pick up rental car. Wooziness settles in. Sit around. Get up. Sit back down. Is that the concussion or a head rush?

       Watch heads in duffel bags. Decorate the hall. Watch Donnie Gyllenhaals. Make merry for fish supper. Rally. Wear a blonde wig for most of the evening as a joke. Everyone is marked, saddened by thoughts crashing.   

      Watch more after dinner. Crouch in a ball. Curlcrunch (in human approximation) of suitcase square. Every movie seen a hundred times, watch them again with eyes shut.

       Seat-jolt awake. Still morning still. No stirs stir. Winter birdsong, mist moistens each edge of the basement window. Go up from here.   Up the stairs.

     Grown in the night, she has overwhelmed the gifts nestled at her base. The tree and the living room are one and the same being. She overwhelms every ornament hung in adulation. Her bows and brambles, gold beaded, stretch into the hall, scrape walls, climb stairs, darken windows with the force of ancient forests. Thousands of years of growth, grown at a snail’s pace, are, in an instant, covering our house.  She encloses every corridor in evergreen labyrinth. She covers each sleeping family member, wood on wooding the doors to rooms, greening them, greening them in.

     Step. But step where? False steps fir fall greening green underneath green. Her chokehold is an embrace.

     Every year is a different tree, a different feeling, and this year Christmas is sad. Yes! Our bedrooms, beds, and the living room, the same as it has always been. All the best to make amends in.


Christopher McCarthy | Toronto | 2016

50 Days of Prose

"Gently the woodsorrrel and the dove explained the confirmation and guided my return. When I came out of the woods onto the hill, I had pine needles in my hair for a bridalwreath, and the sea and the sky and the gold hills smiled benignly. Jupiter had been with Leda, I thought, and now nothing can avert the Trojan Wars." (Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept)

Using the quotation above as a dropping off point, for the next fifty days, Flat Singles Press will publish poems & essays on the 'fullness' language in prose. Gently like the woodsorrrel, but explaining like the dove, we hope to include many voices, new & old, in our discussion of The Poetics of Prose (to borrow Todorov's title,) and to probe contradictions, intersections, similarities, transformations (what Brigid Brophy sees as "metamorphosis" in By Grand Central). Why does poetic prose remain apart from verse forms? Why does prose seem apart from poetry generally? Is there indifference? Is there maligning? What is a bad line? Where do we draw the line? How does prose become poetic? 

There are many questions to consider. The answers may take various creative & critical forms. Our aim is to respond in prose. We welcome any submissions, particularly those taking up these questions, new ideas, and the relevant theories & histories through which we may explore the 'fullness' of prose.

***EMAIL all submissions to flatsinglespress@gmail.com with the subject line, '50 Days of Prose'.