Question #19) Nathan Parker on being drawn
to prose poetry: “Prose
poems tend to be my favorite thing to come across when browsing
through lit journals… I think that this is because, ironically,
they have a marked absence of pretense. I don’t know, maybe
they do tend to be absurd or surreal or witty or wacky or what-have-you,
but after reading a bundle of good prose poems, no matter what
their subject, I think the presence the careful reader soon becomes
aware of is one of honest urgency. Sorrow, even.”
I think poems in prose cause poetry to flatten out in away. A poem
in verse is a standing text whose “posture” on the
page is noticeable; a prose poem tends to melt into the indifference
of the page. It doesn’t sing in the same way. To all appearances,
there’s nothing noteworthy about it. Still, it’s
been finely wrought and stretched. It’s prose that stretches
out towards poetry. It watches it, it observes it. It seeks it
out. It examines it. I like the idea of honest urgency that Nathan
Parker proposes, and the idea of sorrow, too…. Indeed,
everything happens as though the prose poem is endeavoring to
understand what’s at stake within the poetic: where it
comes from, what it can do, where it’s going. In the final
analysis, the prose poem stands closer to real life, though it
never loses sight of what Mallarmé called the “instinct
for sky”, what I would call “the melancholy of ink”.
Bios:
Jean-Michel Maulpoix was born
on November 11, 1952 in Montbéliard, France. His writing finds its roots in a
sort of critical lyricism, and he characterizes it as an on-going
dialogue between prose. He is the author of poetic works such as
Une histoire de bleu (A Matter of Blue), L’Instinct de ciel (Instinct
for Sky) and, most recently Pas sur la neige (Snow
Steps).
He has also penned critical studies on a variety of French poets,
including Henri Michaux, Jacques Réda and René Char,
along with more general essays on poetry, La poésie malgré tout (Poetry
Despite it All) and Du lyrisme (On Lyricism). Jean-Michel
Maulpoix is director of the quarterly literary journal Le nouveau
Recueil as well as professor of modern and contemporary poetry
at the University Paris X-Nantere.
Dawn Cornelio received her PhD in French from the
University of Connecticut in 2001, where her thesis was entitled
Understanding Lyrical Circulation: Reading and Translating
Jean-Michel Maulpoix’s Une histoire de bleu. Since 2002 she has been
assistant professor of French Studies at the University of Guelph
(Ontario), and was recently named to a three year appointment as
Coordinator of the College of Arts and College of Human and Applied
Social Sciences’s Women’s Studies Program. She has
published numerous brief literary translations in Sites: The
Journal of 20th Century French Studies, along with Stallone, Friday
Night and Switchblade by Emmanuèle Bernheim and Jean-Michel Maulpoix’s
collection of poetry Monologue de l’encrier/The Inkwell’s
Monologue. Her research interests include both the theory and practice
of literary translation and contemporary French women’s writing.
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