Question #12) Elizabeth
Robinson: “I am interested in poetry – be it prose
or lyric – because of the way it engages with processes
of patterning. As patterning is also constitutive of narrative,
poems, like narrative, are always playing at reality-making
at history-making.”
Question #13) Ever Saskya on technique: “The poetic techniques in the
prose poem are a combination of decocting and expanding. Poetry
attempts to heat apart—(often) break down/disjoint the assimilation
into parts—what narrative often infers in expanse. The most
instinctive part of the prose poem, for me, is the appearance of
wholeness, which is not actual; this instinctive part allows me
to disjoint and assimilate the parts into a heterogeneous work,
created from fragments, which appears homogeneous; the narrative
quality of the prose poem allows this assimilation to have expanse,
and the disjointedness to adhere in pieces and present a whole/fixed
space of utterance within the swirling.”
I hope I can be allowed to respond to two statements, as they
both address the way prose poems create, simultaneously, a particular
process of “assimilating/patterning/reality-making” and
a perceived solidity of words/images that comes from being in the
shape of a block. Both Saskya and Robinson make me think of Francis
Ponge, who directed his words toward reality in such a way that
his work was both and neither prose and poetry. And that makes
me think of how the prose poem has become for many French poets,
such as Nathalie Quintane, a way to chronicle unchronologically—and
sans narrator—the banality and absurdity of reality. I could
put reality in quotation marks, but will not, because I believe
much of the vitality of the poetic word, whether in verse or prose,
comes from the poet’s effort to move outside herself towards
that mysterious yet real “other,” whether it is language
or weather. I’m unconvinced, however, by Saskya that, even
though prose poems present themselves in a certain shape, they
can be a “whole/fixed place.” Rather, as they typically
miss the perfect square by a few lines over or under, they often
seem to trail off into the next prose poem, like misshapen bon-bons.
Prose poems can pretend to be solid, but the expected “action” is
truncated and the narration obfuscated or non-existent. Instead,
they can act as elongated and luminous windows into some sort of
intersection between reality and language.
Bio:
Marcella Durand is the author of Western
Capital Rhapsodies (Faux Press, 2001). Her chapbook, The
Anatomy of Oil, will be published this winter by Belladonna.
She is co-editing with Kristin Prevallet and Olivier Brossard
an
anthology of French poetry (which includes many prose poems),
forthcoming from Talisman House, and is currently the editor
of the Poetry Project Newsletter.
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