Prose Poem

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a lyric essay! It’s a poem!

A prose poem is written with all the poetic considerations of metaphor, terseness, and beauty of a poem, but without line breaks, rhyme, or repetitive structure. What’s the difference between a lyric essay and a prose poem? I don’t know. The question reminds me of people saying a tomato is a vegetable or a tomato is a fruit. Does it really matter? I think people who write essays call the form a lyric essay and people who write poems call them prose poems. Or vice versa. People who write essays might say they write poems, too, but only prose poems. To be either, the work is usually short, distinctly concise, and insightful in some way. It’s not a long expository essay and it’s not a long epic poem.

The French poet Aloysius Bertrand is credited with the first book of prose poems Gaspard of the Night, 1836. He was followed by Baudelaire and Rimbaud. The form has had a resurgence of late. If you want to write one, don’t worry about line breaks or rhyme, but make sure your language is as poetic as poetic can be.

Here are a few examples. First a link to “Howl” by Allen Ginsburg. Not a short poem, but a powerful one. Howl by Allen Ginsberg | Poem - Poetry (poetrysoup.com)

And another rather long one published in 2003 The Prose Poem by Campbell McGrath - Poems | Academy of American Poets.

 

The morning coffee    Ron Padgett

The morning coffee. I'm not sure why I drink it. Maybe it's the ritual of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the day on. It's something to do between being asleep and being awake. Surely there's something better to do, though, than to drink a cup of instant coffee. Such as meditate? About what? About having a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear's porridge, just right. Papa Bear looks disgruntled. He removes his spectacles and swivels his eyes onto the cup that sits before Baby Bear, and then, after a discrete cough, reaches over and picks it up. Baby Bear doesn't understand this disruption of the morning routine. Papa Bear brings the cup close to his face and peers at it intently. The cup shatters in his paw, explodes actually, sending fragments and brown liquid all over the room. In a way it's good that Mama Bear isn't there. Better that she rest in her grave beyond the garden, unaware of what has happened to the world. 

Ron Padgett, "Prose Poem" from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2013 by Ron Padgett. 

 

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