The Writing Life:

IN CELEBRATION
April: National Poetry Month

(The Democratization of Poetry)

PROSE POETRY

Since this is Poetry Month in America, I thought I might review, for myself and others, just where I’m coming from when poetry enters the conversation today.

My requirement of a poem is simple: anything and everything but boring.

I still nourish a Whitmanesque concept: that poetry should be a free and democratic thing. To speak out loud (in public) or quietly (on paper), both your mind and your heart. That the poet should feel free to play at it with a net firmly in place (as Frost once suggested…certain boundaries and strictures---rhythm and rhyme: iambics and anapests: and “Oh, let’s get down to particulars write a sonnet.” You know, make the words (and the world) fit a pattern.

OR…let’s chew on this: Poets should feel free to play without a net (as Frost accused Carl Sandburg of doing)---just letting it all hang out, loosely, talking it out, crying it out, howling it in a Kerouacean /Ginsbergian sort of way:

“I SAW THE BEST MINDS OF MY GENERATION DESTROYED BY MADNESS, STARVING HYSTERICAL NAKED/…dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…”

OR, perhaps even letting it out slowly in a bluesy, Langston Hughes(y) sort of way.

”Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,/Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,/I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night/By the pale dull pallor on an old gas light/ He did a lazy sway…/He did a lazy sway…/To the tune of those Weary Blues.”

There’s a line from Sandburg that I love and often quote: “I will be the word of the people…I will say everything!”

I like “everything.” Not to mention the idea of the poet being “the word of the people.” Which he once was-Sandburg, in his time. But no more, sad to say. And probably never again, in this culture. But that’s another topic for a rainy day.

I would also suggest that there is such a thing as “poetic prose” . And, furthermore, there is also “the prose poem”. I occasionally lapse into poetic prose in my own work, in both fiction and nonfiction. It’s not something intentional. Nothing I ever studied or set out to do when I’m writing a personal essay or a short story, or a novel. It just something that happens. The words begin to find a rhythm of their own, and I listen, feel, and follow them.

Critics may accuse or compliment a writer in these instances by referring to one’s writing as ‘lyrical.’ So be it. Let me also say that if ‘lyrical’ is something a writer aspire to, there’s no teacher or workshop in the world that can instruct anybody in the process. I’ve taught long enough at this point to know that there’s very little, almost nothing, I can teach about writing. But I’m a good, dependable guide. I can show some writers (I emphasize ‘some’), in the right direction. Hopefully.

If you want to write more lyrically, put more poetry in your prose, my only suggestion is to read. Read more poetry, more prose (novels , stories and essays) where you sense and feel the poetry in the lines. Among the writers whose style of poetic prose seemed to seep into my brain in my early years: Nelson Algren’s stories and novels-especially his classic, CHICAGO:CITY ON THE MAKE--and Dylan Thomas’ short stories.

Both prologues in my two Chicago books (CHI TOWN and NEIGHBORHOOD) are heavily dosed with poetic prose: Or so critics and readers tell me. And so they sounds to my own ears, hearing the rhythm when I read them aloud to audiences. Again, I never planned for it to happen. But the beauty of poetry (once you’re tuned in to it) is the surprise in brings to our lives-whether we are readers or writers---or both.

The Visual Poem

Continuing the theme of THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF POETRY, I would add that sometimes I like the poem writ LARGE. That I’m all for poems placed on billboards, poems in/on subway cars, busses, written in the sky, even poems graffiti-ed on old buildings, sidewalks, and bathroom walls. I once did a whole series of painting (exhibited in Santa Fe) based on the art of the Berlin Wall-which was one, long, historical graffiti-poem-painting to freedom

I’m all for found poems, lost poems, collage poems, poems written on paintings. the manner of Blake, Patchen, Henry Miller and others. Which is what my one and only book of poetry to date , PAINT ME A PICTURE, MAKE ME A POEM, is all about. An attempt to capture one’s personal history in the every day poetry of living from the 1960’s through the 80’s.

I’m ready for a new book of poems, and I think I’ll have one in another year or so. I want to make it a big book…so packed full you can hardly close it. Poems sticking out between the pages. Falling on the floor. A big, thick, juicy burger book of poems. All kinds of stuff.

I took 2 of my own

wildly romantic CIGARS
a Creative Trench Coat
a Long-stemmed American Woman
3 RED delicious Apples
pieces
& patches of the MOON
A BLUE smile
and waited for
a small room TO WRITE in
in-between

-n.b.

The Prose Poem

differs from poetic prose in that ‘the prose poem’ is an entity unto itself.

It looks like any normal paragraph of prose, composed of sentences with period and other forms of punctuation. But once you’re into the first or second sentence-you realize “you’re not in Kansas anymore.”

The landscape of the line is very different. The language is highly charged. Sometimes it’s all image. Sometimes it’s solidly surreal. Often it’s impossible to ‘interpret’ on first reading-or ever, for that matter. But it calls you back, because it makes you see and/or feel something . Something deep. Something unusual. Something you can carry back to your everyday world. Something worth remembering.

In An Empty Field

The land is flat open. And awaits...the raven's wing, the lover's nakedness, the angel's shadow.
Deep in the horizon, the eye abandons the looker's gaze and floats above the field.
The field falls from the sky.
Nobody sees you.
The more distant the tree the more beautiful.
The field underfoot in all seasons remains scraggly, remains stone, remains stubble, patched earth. The lay of the land listens to itself, the death rattle of weed again -bronzed, burnished. Unyielding but supple in dying. Moving like wind over lake water. Lifting milkweed down across the field like the stillness of first snow when earth patterns present themselves again: wheel ruts, stone fences, fox cavities, nests, rusted barbed wire wrapped around white stone, ring junipers evergreen and reeling.
January white earth. Morning fog. White birches, creamy stone fences, snowy owl, opalescent moon.
Ice.
Everything far afield is more beautiful.
Trees reach closer conclusions.
The mystery of a field reveals itself in dispossession, absconding with you without your knowing.
Mist lifts the field from the earth into the hands of angels.
The field at night absolves the sinner.
The darker the night, the surer the step. The clearer the view.
The field says you will never arrive. You belong here near the meadowlark's nest and the heart shaped stone.
You are missing.
No one will ever hear of you again.
A branch has lashed your eye: you see a field of tears, winter white.
Kneel.
Dig.
Bury
the thought-bone deep.
The truth is we love this cold rain
hard earth
bare branches
roots, leaves, stones,
nakedness
feather, fur, bone,
dark angels,
ravens raining on an empty field.
--n.b.