The Rise of the Prose Poem

Linebreaks are so last season. All hail the edge of the page! I often daydream I’m walking through Kensington Park with Luke Kennard. Just as we reach the big fountain at the top of the Serpentine, near Lancaster Gate, the postman hammers the door knocker (I don’t have a doorbell — primitive devices contain more music) and breaks my reverie. This time he has brought me two books for review: Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Dust (Dalkey Archive, 2008) and — what a coincidence! — Luke Kennard’s The Migraine Hotel (Salt, 2009).

It is a commonly held belief that there are no coincidences in poetry. Chekhov has been attributed with successfully introducing the idea of randomness — serendipity or misfortune alike — in the short story form, thereby making coincidence a bona fide narrative trope. Poetry has failed to achieve similar resonance with accidents, and this is undoubtedly the reason many poets have turned to prose poetry in recent years. This is especially true of experimental poets, who perhaps need greater excuse for their inexcusables.

A common accusatory dialogue between a common reader (this term is often used relativistically by critics — c.f. Dana Gioia’s misinterpretation of Virginia Woolf) and an experimental poet often runs as follows:

— Yes, but it’s so random, I don’t get it!
— But don’t you like how the orange dress in the third line picks up a surprising fruit resonance with the truckload of plums in the final stanza?
— No, pure coincidence! It’s all monkeys and typewriters!
— But randomness is a valid aesthetic mode!
— Monkeys and typewriters!
— I put a lot of work into —

(At this point the accuser, for lack of any intelligent response, begins to throw excrement at the experimental poet, thereby perpetuating myths that should not be perpetuated about any human being, myths that somehow find more grounding than necessary amongst the annals of history, particular among sections of the British Isles which will remain nameless. To which the experimental poet can only respond:)

— Once is an accident! Twice is a coincidence! Thrice is a technique! With a feeling of synchronicity the perception of velocity begins its slow trickle into our consciousness.

That last part isn’t normally in these arguments — at least not in the ones I’ve had to date. I stole it from ‘Finches’, one of Dragomoshchenko’s ‘essay prose poems’ in Dust. He says things like that from time to time. He also says things like, “Reflections open and close like a white sheet, faithless with flames.”

Something surprised me on reading The Migraine Hotel. Why does Kennard insist on not using exactly the same words as Dragomoshchenko? Their books both arrived at the same time. Admittedly, the postmarks were blurred and I like to shuffle up and down the stairs barefoot, sometimes for days, triggering endorphin releases as I conjure up associations with traumatic experiences in my childhood involving a staircase — so the post often builds up on the space where a welcome mat might have sat if I wasn’t using it to stop myself slipping in the shower, and for some reason both writers have associations with prose poetry in my mind. Why Kennard is associated with prose poetry is dubious because his new collection seems incredibly linebreaky (is that a word? OK, we’ll go with it: linebreaky) for a poet who supposedly knows something about prose poetry — only fifty-nine pages of prose poetry out of the eighty-four in his book. That’s about thirty per cent linebreaky by my count; a surprisingly non-committal divide, especially compared to the unequivocal one hundred per cent prose poetry in Dust. You’d think Kennard would be a little less last season about it; but this is merely splitting hairs in order to spend more time counting.

My point is that, despite the excellent writing in both books, they are decidedly different, while being coincidentally extremely good. I just think it’s a shame that, for people who supposedly strive to write the best words in the best order, they’re being very unempirical about it. Here are some examples.

On page forty-eight, paragraph two, sentence three, Dragomoshchenko says:

Passageways are dimly lit, umbrellas sometimes lie in a pile, ‘just in case’.

In the same location in his book, however, Kennard has a one-sentence paragraph — outrageous! — so not even a third sentence to quote from.

And where, on page sixty-seven, paragraph two, sentence two, Kennard has:

We’ve got twelve of his sculptures.

Dragomoshchenko has:

Moroccan kif-smokers like to speak of ‘two worlds’, the one ruled by inexorable natural laws, and the other, the kif-world, in which each person perceives ‘reality’ according to the projections of his own essence, the state of consciousness in which the elements of the physical universe are automatically rearranged by cannabis to suit the requirements of the individual.

See? Completely different!

This inexplicable difference means that I have to pause for a moment to look at the sky at dusk. It’s particularly beautiful this evening, but you will have to take my word for that. It’s especially peaceful without the wretched magpie that likes to sit in the birch at the end of the garden, cackling every time I write a line: “Crack-at! Crack-ack-ack-Caractacus!” But it’s not there tonight, so I can relax. Good. Now our nerves are steady, we can begin to hypothesise.

One might imagine, from these two examples — the great range, flair, wit and genuine sentiment on display in Dragomoshchenko’s Dust and in Luke Kennard’s The Migraine Hotel — that prose poetry is a genre offering far more exciting language and techniques that one previously imagined. Coincidence is a case in point: whereas coincidence in linebroken poetry is a much-hated concept, prose poetry has successfully forged a trope out of it.

So the Wolf can simply step forward in the footnotes to ‘Men Made of Words’, point the finger at Kennard and say, “most of what you call poetry doesn’t even have linebreaks”. If the footnotes as well as the preceding rondeaux had actually been linebreaky, then the obvious questions would have arisen: oh, so the Wolf just happened to be lurking in the background, waiting to make a comment in the footnotes, eh? Pure coincidence eh? Utterly contrived! One might even think that Kennard is milking the Wolf’s hilarious presence for every comic moment he can get out of it, in as many inventive ways as possible, with nary a thought for how tiresome this is for the lover of linebreaks, who likes their poetry to appear premeditated but not constructed ... deliberate, but with an air of spontaneity. Yet this reader doesn’t bat an eyelid because we are in the context of a prose poem footnote. No, one cannot level criticisms like this at Kennard; he doesn’t use linebreaks (well, he only uses them thirty per cent of the time).

Similarly, who bats an eyelid at this paragraph from the opening of Dragomoshchenko’s ‘Do Not a Gun’?

For the traveller there inevitably comes a moment when his or her memories are converted into small change. This kind of money has the habit of disappearing with a clang as it settles darkly at the bottom of various fountains or in a variety of receptacles along passageways. Passageways are dimly lit, umbrellas sometimes lie in a pile, “just in case.” On occasion there’s even a faint odor of basil in the air.

Aside from the beauty in the observation, readers of this article might be asking themselves: Is it a coincidence that he’s requoted that line about umbrellas? No! This article is also a prose poem and I can get away with anything I like.

The prose poem is on the ascendancy. Dormant for years, it’s now time for the prose poem to assert its authority over language broken by lines into random ink-smudged islands in the middle of the under-used icy expanse. There’s an ecological demand for this also: every page you waste with your piddling little haiku is published to the sound of (albeit renewable) forests screaming.

Soon we’ll see every major poet in the country publishing a collection of prose poems — even Jane Holland. [Not bloody likely: Ed.] The laureate will stand up at Christmas to read a poem, and while the Queen looks on befuddled, waiting for something linebreaky to appear, Duffy will amaze crowds with a wonderful piece that sounds just like prose — but is in fact a prose poem! And as she sits to take her place, the Queen will magnanimously lean across and say, “You know what? My Christmas speech is a prose poem too!” and they’ll share a sherry later and laugh about the coincidence.

Just as Faber, Picador and Cape are releasing anthologies of prose poems simultaneously, the Prime Minister will rise to the podium at an emergency press conference, to announce that we are now at war with Iran. His speech will drone on prosaically for all of three minutes, finish with the deathly gravitas that any declaration towards state-sponsored murder must elicit, and after a brief pause, Brown will mutter, “By the way, that was a prose poem,” and be met by a smattering of nods and polite applause.

The prose poem will officially have become a defunct medium for creative freshness and Kennard will respond by only publishing perfectly-rhymed Petrarchan sonnets, while Dragomoshchenko will cut off both his hands, post them to Medvedev, and disappear into the woods north of Petersburg to translate birdsong into oral folk ballads.

And we can all return to our safe appellation — common readers — satisfied at having crushed the originators of our new movement, having assimilated all newness into the mainstream and dampened the limits of our imaginations.

(By the way, did I mention that this was a prose poem?)