How to Write a Prose Poem
Creativity and Metaphor in Continuous Writing
"Prose-poem" (like "deep-fried ice cream") sounds like a contradiction in terms. It's a type of composition that can suffer from lazy writing, and lack the richness and structure of either poetry or prose. But if you understand its purpose, it can be a useful addition to a poet's repertoire. Here is a short history of the form, followed by some suggestions on how to write your own.
Characteristics and History
A prose poem is a short piece of creative writing (generally consisting of sentence or sentence fragments) that looks like prose because it is continuous and does not have regular line breaks.
According to Chris Baldwick in the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: University Press, 2008), it was pioneered by Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud in France in the 19th century. A prose poem uses rhythm, internal rhyme, imagery and other poetic devices. Robert Bly is a contemporary American writer known for his prose poems (see for example, The Morning Glory, New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
Writing a successful prose poem requires tapping into the unique strengths of the form and avoiding the easy way of fading into unpoetic language and passionless structure.
Three Things to Consider When Writing a Prose Poem
The poem needs a purpose, beginning and end. Baldwick points out that a prose-poem is self-contained, not just a burst of colourful language in the midst of a paragraph. Like other lyric forms, it expresses the thoughts or feelings of a single speaker or character. To reinforce the sense of a self-contained work, it is useful to compare your draft prose poem with an ode or a haiku, which could be alternative forms for a "concept" that works well as a prose poem.
The strength of the prose poem is in the power of the sentence -- that the writer can use sentences to convey thoughts and advance subtle ideas in ways that would be constrained by line breaks. For example, Ingrid Horrock's Wonderful Things is essentially a list of aspects of Japanese culture, but each single observation evokes a response from the reader.
"--A temple without a sign. The last red leaves float on the pond. There is an old man sweeping but he does not utter any wise words". (In B. Manhire's Mutes and Earthquakes. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997).
The prose poem is also a strong enough form to sustain "turns" or surprises, although unlike the sonnet, it does not depend on them.
Writing Passionately
Although there are no restrictions on the subject matter of the form, it's worth bearing in mind that the prose poem is not a diary. The danger in writing something that looks like prose is that one can fall back on memories or "interesting people I have met". A prose-poem is not a blog or a simple record of an incident. Like all poetry, it needs to connect to something richer and deeper.
Poets make this connection by enriching their work with imagery and using other literary devices such as repetition. Prose poems tend to be vivid and intense in the manner of haiku. They are also acutely observed.
The jacket cover of the Robert Bly book makes the point: "An ancient tradition holds that those who long for what is beyond sight have to look more closely at what the eyes can see". Manhire, a respected New Zealand teacher of writing as well as a poet, comments, "What writers notice can be far more important than what they think".
To highlight the difference between a diary-type account and a prose poem with its added dimensions, here is an excerpt from Bly's The Hunter. Bly has been conversing with a cook who has been gathering octopus on the Pacific seashore and has asked to touch the dead creatures. This is his final observation:
"So the octopus is gone now from the mussel-ridden shelf with the low roof, the pool where he waited under the thin moon, but the sea never came back, no one came home, the door never opened. Now he is taken away in the plastic bag, not understood, illiterate".
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