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In an interview with Tom Beckett, Charles Bernstein states, “A task of
poetry is to make audible (tangible but not necessarily graspable) those dimensions
of the real that cannot be heard as much as to imagine new reals that have never
before existed. Perhaps this amounts to the same thing” (184).1 This making
of the real or bringing the real into audible being has been the fascination,
and, often, the primary impetus for many contemporary writers. Of course, the
exploration, via literature, of this connection between the ‘real’ and
what is known or can be known is older than Plato, but a renewed interest in
the way language or narrative participate in and precipitate these explorations
is something that has breathed new life into an old philosophical conundrum.
Language that reinvigorates and reconsiders the tools we use to
construct our world is vital and necessary. This is evident in
the many writers we bring to
you in issue #3. From Stephen Ratcliffe’s experiments with form and structure
to Laurel Snyder’s disjointed and haunting narratives to Peter Richards’s
fragmentary and imagistic intensity to Ron Silliman’s semantic and syntactic
difficulties, these writers examine our ability, or more often our inability
to point toward and name the ‘real.’ “Could it be that language
is as much a part of the earth as of the world? And that this is what is censored?
That the tools we use to construct our worlds belong to the earth and so continuously
(re)inscribe our material and spiritual communion with it?” asks Bernstein
in the same interview. This interest in the materiality of the poem, and the
texture and surface of language that is somehow deeply rooted in our physical
existence and experience drives much of the work in this issue. Where it doesn’t,
the interest and intensity seems less connected to a largely Objectivist aesthetic,
and more rooted in the possibilities and potentials inherent in narrative, but
still interested in the gap between reality and our knowledge of it via language.
Many of the writers in this issue re-order narrative in order to reinterpret
the ways in which we define human experience (or challenge these definitions).
Many of the writers attempt a bit of both. That is, they create narrative structures
and then disrupt them, or, they keep a narrative structure, but disrupt the way
in which this narrative ‘arrives’ via language.
Laurel Snyder and Peter Richards exemplify this mixing – i.e. an intense
interest in language without a rejection of description or narrative. That is,
they maintain an interest in “meaning-making” without the requisite
collapse into plot or transparency. In Richards there exist elements of “visionary
poets” like Robert Kelly, Robert Duncan, and Clayton Eshelman, as well
as the (dis)ordered and ‘erosive’ logic of John Ashbery. What an
amazing combination! In reading Snyder or Lynn Kilpatrick, one might consider
the prose poems of Amy Gerstler and her narrative quality combined with the disjunction
exhibited in Carla Harryman. The humor and irony of Ray Gonzalez and Jamey Dunham
have echoes of James Tate and Russell Edson, as well as the narrative and logical
play of Jorge Luis Borges. In other words, we have, once again, tried to include
an immense variety of work that is radically different. You will see this, for
example, when reading Karla Kelsey or Ginger Knowlton, and, then, clicking over
to read Gary Young, Ava Chin, or Robert Uquhart.
Issue #3 of Double Room features two entirely new sections in addition
to our usual array of fine prose poems/flash fictions, the featured
visual artist, and
our “Discussion of the Forms” section. The two new sections are a “Special
Feature” and “Book Reviews.” The special feature for this issue
is a new transcription of the earliest known manuscript notebook of Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass including numerous corrections and previously unpublished passages.
This will undoubtedly prove to be of tremendous interest to all readers of Double
Room, including poets, fiction writers, historians and scholars, as well as literature
enthusiasts. The way in which we were able to obtain such a rare glimpse at the
notebook and publish the new transcription is an interesting story in and of
itself. Matt Miller, who works at the Walt Whitman Archive, details this unique
literary adventure in his introduction to the excerpt of the Talbot Notebook.
The book review section features reviews of Elizabeth Willis’s Turneresque,
Richard Greenfield’s A Carnage in the Lovetrees, Sean Thomas Dougherty’s
Biography of Broken Things, and Daniel Nester’s God Save the
Queen. Our
featured artist is Nicole Peryafitte, whose work you will undoubtedly find engaging
as well as disturbing.
In terms of our “Discussion of the Forms” section, it continues to
provoke controversy and stimulate a multivalent discussion. Ron Silliman brings
up a very interesting point regarding a common and largely erroneous connection
between prose poetry and flash fiction. In response to one of our questions,
he writes: “Unspoken within that question is one of the deeper & more
misguided presumptions about the nature of the prose poem – what I think
of as Jacob’s fallacy – that a signature feature of the prose poem
is its brevity.” His point is a valid one; some of the greatest prose poems
written by American poets are lengthy works, e.g. Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas
in Meditation and Tender Buttons, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, John Ashbery’s
Flow Chart and Three Poems are just some of the great works of prose poetry in
the American literary canon. Furthermore, Silliman points out one of our greatest
challenges as editors of Double Room: can we, as editors, justify publishing
book length prose poems, but refuse to publish lengthy short stories? That is,
to what extent are our own generic definitions limiting, or to what extent are
they liberating? In our attempt to expand the notion of the prose poem and the
short story, and by insisting upon the formal constraints of prose poetry and
flash fiction—whatever those may be—we knowingly enter an important
and crucial debate over form and genre, and one that we hope will put pressure
on the possibilities offered by either form. Our format is also a challenge of
sorts. That is, it is a challenge to writers to question, expand, discover, explode,
and/or examine the "margins" of prose poetry and flash fiction.
Publishing an excerpt from Whitman’s Talbot Notebook exemplifies
our attempt to understand the development of and possibilities
inherent in the prose poem;
i.e. by including a glimpse of the early work of Leaves of Grass and
one of America’s
first prose poets, we begin to see the formal and generic implications embedded
in the history of American literature. This work forces us to realize that it
is crucial to consider the work of Walt Whitman as prose poetry, and all of the
ramifications that this entails. The typical scholarly debate about ‘form’ in
Leaves of Grass centers around the extent to which the work is epic-lyric or
lyric-epic, but rarely focuses on the choices Whitman made regarding prose or
verse. We hope that by including this new transcription here, it will promote
a discussion about Whitman’s influence as a prose poet and how he has helped
shape contemporary notions of genre.
In A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and
the Politics of Genre,
Jonathan Monroe
argues that the prose poem presents “a kind of struggle within literature,”3 that
parallels the kind of dialogical and antagonistic discourses that class and gender
entail. The prose poem or flash fiction is a site where social and human struggles
seem to coincide with the generic struggle as Monroe argues:
The prose poem is that place within literature where social antagonisms
of gender and class achieve generic expression, where aesthetic
conflicts between and among
literary genres manifest themselves concisely and concretely as a displacement,
projection, and symbolic reenactment of more broadly based social struggles.4
If Frederic Jameson is correct in suggesting that the ideological
message of a text can be identified in and by its form, then, certainly,
the pp/ff reveals a kind of intensity that tends to dramatize antagonism
and struggle. Much of the work in Double Room demonstrates and
manifests this. Genre lines, like lines of defense, are always
permeable, and the actual line is often less interesting than those
who attempt to breach it. What is it that these forms contain and
demand? To what extent are they liberating or constraining? Therefore,
it is with trepidation that we attempt to define or dismantle any
generic distinctions, but it is with certainty that we continue
to provoke and challenge our writers and readers to explore the
possibilities that the prose poem or the flash fiction seem to
require or inspire.
1. Bernstein, Charles. Censers of the Unknown – Margins,
Dissent, and the Poetic Horizon. Poetics, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992.
2. Ibid., 184.
3. Monroe, Jonathan. A Poverty of Objects: The
Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1987.
4. Ibid., 18.
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