Bio & Response

Jamey Dunham

Jamey Dunham is a prose poet and an Assistant Professor of English at Sinclair Community College, where he edits the journal Flights. His poems have appeared in Sentence, Paragraph, Key Satch (el), Fence, Boston Review, and ACM among other journals and his poem “An American Story” was included in the anthology Great American Prose Poems: Poe to the Present. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife and son.

Question #4: Susan Maxwell writes, “The poem furrows a way out of the white by running over it, while still white underneath ink.” Brian Kitely composes “postcard stories” that are, quite literally, started on the back of postcards that are then mailed to friends and family, after which the stories are rewritten and revised. And Bin Ramke finds that, “the necessity to make the tiny announcements that are line-ends in ‘standard’ verse becomes sometimes, often, annoying, arbitrary, and ultimately misleading.” Why do you write pp/ffs? How are your stories and poems brought into the world?

I blame my poems on some hell-bent rodent that emerges from my ear after late-night writing sessions and wreaks havoc on what might otherwise have been perfect iambic pentameter. Instead, I awake to find myself straddling two no-no's of contemporary poetry: surrealism and prose poetry.

I remember reading an essay by Dana Gioia entitled “James Tate and American Surrealism” where he talked of America's artistic introduction to surrealism through the medium of the cartoon. This rang especially true for me. I think my own artistic tendencies toward surrealism arose in no small part from the cartoons I was raised with/by. Such “cartoon logic” serves as a fantastic segue way into what poets like Jacob, Michaux and Queneau were up to and later Americans like Patchen, Edson and Tate. It also serves as a useful tool when looking at predecessors to the prose poem, like the Native American “Trickster” tales and old children’s fables. I have always been struck by the reader's willingness to go along with even the most horrific depictions of violence if the writer simply replaces the word “orphan” or “nun” with a word like “hedgehog”.

I suppose I also agree with Bin Ramke when he said of verse, “the necessity to make the tiny announcements that are line-ends in ‘standard’ verse becomes sometimes, often, annoying, arbitrary, and ultimately misleading.” I write prose poems because I believe the form of prose instinctively lends itself to the techniques that most interest me in poetry. If one is to pull off what Bly refers to as “leaping” in a poem, I think it is best to do so in a form that doesn’t accentuate the penultimate step or point toward where it will land. Of course even this ambiguity, as with so much else in regards to the prose poem, is ultimately an illusion.