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| Response & Bio | Richard Garcia |
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Question #1) In issue #3 of Double Room,
Ron Silliman suggests that it is erroneous to assume “that a signature feature of
the prose poem is its brevity.” He calls this misguided
assumption, Jacob’s
fallacy, and he further argues that considering the differences
between the prose poem and the flash fiction is “like trying
to identify the border between, say, Korean & Portuguese,
similar insofar as each is a language.” Do you agree with
Silliman’s assessment? In contrast, Ava Chin suggests that
she wrote flash fiction during a period when she was extremely
overworked: “their jarring method and brevity, their element
of surprise, lent themselves well to my shortened yet heightened
attention span.” Chin seems to suggest that the brevity
aided and enabled a new kind of invention for her. Do you think
that prose poetry and flash fiction do have some kind of compression
or brevity as a related characteristic? When you write in this
form, the pp/ff, do you place any space or length restrictions
on yourself?
I do not think prose poems are limited in length, but as a writer or a reader I prefer brevity. It is a matter of the intensity of the prose poem -- to me they are dense, rich and highly musical, more sipping whiskey than beer. That is why I prefer them in small doses. Bio: Richard Garcia is the author of Rancho Notorious (BOA
Editions). His poems have recently appeared in the web publications Perihelion,
The Blue Moon Review, The Cortland Review, and
in the print journals
Sentence and Pool. His web site is www.richardgarcia.info. |
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