Poems posed as prose

In the age of endless information, the lack of newness under the sun can be dispiriting. Hop on your computer or iPhone to find that any of your novel ideas have already been well-formulated elsewhere.¹ I coined in my mind the somewhat revolting term prosetry this morning to apply to the style of writing I’m prone to lately. Not prose, not poetry, you get it. Perhaps you’ve thought of it already. To no surprise, I have been beat to the punch by you then, and other luminaries too.² It gets worse! Not only the term already invented, but also a knife-sharp definition offered.

Richard Wilbur: ‘The standard awful poem of the last forty years … a sort of artless diary entry in free verse.’

Myfeelings feel seen!

It’s looking like there were a lot of accomplished trad poets out there equally unimpressed with this free verse / prose mashup style that might be passed off as poetry.³ Ah well, they are mostly dead. With minimal deference to the grumpy poets society, I’m finding more space in my heart for prosetry all the time. And I believe it’s not for any expert to dictate the rules of meaning-making; isn’t that the fair enterprise of all beauty-beholders? Gauging by the few books of poetry I have on the shelf, vers libre has won the day at least for our lifetime.

I realize I’m kind of mounting an offense for a battle that was won ages ago, but here it goes anyway; a quickly-off-topic soliloquy on prosetry (rolls off the tongue, does it not!) for posers like me. A preamble to later installments here sure to include original … prosems? (yuck, an even less pleasing term!) … proems? (also ewww) …

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Ambiguities vex me. Free verse I struggle with. I guess I’m not different than those old grumpy poets. Form poetry was an orderly refuge from the chaos. Consider the sonnet, prescriptive meter and a repeating rhyme scheme. Hip hop. Formal structure. Precision and deftness. Conveying end-to-end some sort of story or moral truth within a tight rule set. But for poetry, the free kind, seemingly lacking in discipline or utilitarian value, I’ve internalized an ugly derisiveness; normative and maybe gendered. Language is meant for conveying ideas, concisely (ok not mine) and like trains on time (neither mine). It is the lines of code to be compiled in the minds of others for predictable cognitive outputs. Building blocks, cellular matter for a narrative body.

Free of constraints, we are talking confusing speech in an already confusing world. Words are meant to pin down flighty ideas into an orderly overview, like an entomologist’s cork board full of exotic moth specimens. Grammar and syntax and rules for verse are the Velcro backing on utensils and hand tools that otherwise float dangerously within an orbiting space station,⁴ fixing this mess of things to the walls and counters so the vessel isn’t hopelessly cluttered with drifting flotsam.

Formless poetry and aimless prose don’t pin things down. They don’t demand outputs from words. They don’t have to be always tethering ideas and images together sequentially to produce struts and fasteners, trusses and sheathing, in service of larger constructions. Instead they may be contemplations of, admirations for, the materia itself. Matter.

Exempli gratia: Matter. Materies (substance; also lumber, wood). Materior (to fell timber; to procure wood). Madera (lumber (Spanish)). Madre. Mater. Mother! Wood fibers, the mother of matter. For erstwhile jungle primates, the matter that matters most. The tree mother. All packed in a single word that when unraveled, like genetic code in solution, reveals impossibly rich layers of information — the history of a whole species. One word, matter, like Leibniz’s monadic reflections — a single point in space projecting all the truth of one surrounding universe.

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OK then, words (and feelings!) suffice. No rules for assembly required. Begrudgingly I allow that some of this stuff I’m working with is meant for poetry. Or something else. A formless form. And a nameless one (better nameless than prosetry that’s for sure). Imprecise. Undisciplined. Hallucinatory. Or perhaps the last gasps of lucidity before a psychiatric patient succumbs to the dulling effects of a tranquilizer. Yes please! Dilating pupils darting in fits, then fixing on a point a million miles away. Still.

Curvy sinuous natural fibers, these words.
No straight thing then, these crooked timbers, made of words.
Not fit for structural lumber, not my words or timbers anyway.

Hey, if you made it this far, why not shiver my timbers with a message, or better yet a comment for the enjoyment of all the other proets (no!) that make their way here.

Mon petit chou chou…

1. This problem of diminishing novelty by the way seems bound to get worse. Novelty in terms of intelligible thought captured by human language might at last be completely wrung out of the universe with only minimal advances in current technology. Take the processing power and energy profligacy of a few modern server farms, add quantum computing and a garden-variety large language model, and perhaps we will have finally arrived at the monkeys + typewriters + infinity moment. Banging keys, or humming drives, et voilà. King Lear and all other past and possible future works of language spontaneously instantiated. Seems a cheap discredit to monkeys to compare them with such a setup; even if AI Shakespeare bot succeeds, it will do so more mindlessly than a monkey doing anything at all, I reckon.

2. Geoff Ward: When poetry became ‘prosetry’: a brief history of free verse

3. T S Eliot: ‘no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job’

W H Auden: ‘One of the things you so often notice when looking at a lot of poems in free verse is that you can’t tell one author from another, far from thinking one more original.’

4. Yes, I’m reading Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, and you should be too!