Perspective

In the painting the perspective is all wrong, distant breakers towering over people strolling the foreground unafraid.  This could be my nightmare, the one that occurs again and again, the one where the waves and water rise and rise up over the beach, above the dunes, and I scramble as high and far as I can, then awake in sheets drenched in sweat, dream wisping away in tiny spirals too slowly to still the staccato of the muscle clenching and unclenching in my chest.  J, drowsing beside me, says it has something to do with the proximity of the sugar bowl to the ketchup on the dinner table; K, more pragmatic, simply suggest less carbs before dozing.  Meanwhile, the sea is climbing the back steps, exploring gaps in the area under the door jam, sending wet tendrils to laugh at our futile discussions.

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I’m taken by the prose poem (in case you haven’t noticed).  Here is some information on it by those who want to know what has so captured my imagination.

Robert Miltner

1. “Prose walks but poetry dances.  Which is why a prose poem moves to funny on the page.”
2. “Non-disruptive prose poems rarely make history.” (nice tie in with the feminine whether or not he meant to)
3. “Back-flipping, frisby-catching, bungie-jumping and hood-surfing: those prose poems are crazy.  Wild form, man, Kerouac used to say.”

David Lazar

1. “Prose poetry is to prose or poetry as mongrel is to AKC pedigree.” “Take the simple object and describe it in blocks of short prose…Rain, a pebble, a door.”
2. “…somewhere between the obvious and the revelatory….because we realize that we’re used to just seeing the rain as uniform.
3. “…sentences that revealed what had been hiding, lurking in the edges of meaning”
4. “…fabric of loss and desire,” “surrealism implicit in the genre,” “aphoristic sentences,” disastrous conclusion,” “tightly wound, perhaps one could say high strung,” “guilt, confession, taboo,” “Compression,” “brief monologues,” “pieces that resist closure” “elasticity.”

I just ordered a bunch of books by Francis Ponge who was an early adapter to the genre.  You can google him and find his poems and see if you like them.  They are all in translation – he wrote in French.  I ordered a book with both.  I have barely remembered H.S. French but I thought it would be a fun way to play with language some stormy afternoon.

Other names;  Bertrand is credited with creation of the form, followed by Baudelaire ( notes of the prose poem:  “…striking enough to suit lyrical movements of the soul, undulations of reverie, the flip-flop of consciousness..”  Really, if you like the stretch of possibility in language, how can you not like this form?!

I need to work harder at making mine longer.  That will come.