My coldness toward the prose poem, and narrative poetry in general, stemmed from the desire to be legitimate. I was not the first person to believe in the superiority of lyric poems; the kind that seemed to flutter above their contexts, the kind that were described as music. Unfortunately, my own drafts—the poems that became Reveille—had a strong aboutness to them. I felt the urge to chronicle and convey. Although I ultimately decided to trust that urge, I hoped, at first, to conceal it through treacherous line breaks and whirling syntax; it seemed the only way my stories could register as art.
My life at the time I decided to write turned out to be full of upheaval. I had already been taking care of my sick mother for a few years and knew I would have to balance the reading and writing with my responsibility for her. A few months into my attempt at this balance, it became clear that she would begin hospice sooner than expected. Caring for her at home absorbed almost all my energy. When she died, there was grief, but I was confident I would manage to cope, eventually; death being the logical end to long illness. When my youngest sister died 8 months later due to a drug overdose, all the stories I didn’t realize I was surviving on up to that point were called into question. In the defamiliarized territory of shock and grief, the impulse to narrativize life felt delusional. There was no story.
Wallace Stevens expressed what seemed like the ideal poetic stance in his poem, “Mozart, 1935:”
Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.
If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.
That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto…
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.
Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.
Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.
We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.
I wanted to obey the poet’s imperative but knew I was the body carrier. Hospice wasn’t war, and neither was the problem of addiction in my family and community, but they created an atmosphere of crisis. It made me wonder if I would always be too practically entangled to write the kind of poetry that transcended the constraints of my life.
Once I began reading prose poems (Zbigniew Herbert’s, specifically), I began to detect their possibilities. A person may not manage to be seated at the piano and carry the body at the same time, but a poem might. I had felt it was impossible for my voice to originate anywhere but my experience, and suddenly, that was fine. Now, it seems paradoxical that the experience that caused my disillusion with narrative is also what compelled me to tell stories.
In my prose poem, “Hope,” I notice two main qualities. I began writing it with the goal of conveying content. If I could say in one perfect sentence what had happened, I might use that sentence to fortify my belief in reality. The knowledge that people die did not prepare me for two very different losses. I have never suspected that life is a dream or a projection or a reflection; yet, in the wake of those deaths, it seemed I would lose my grip on reality if I didn’t announce it to myself. So, I wrote sentences that simply try to document experience. When my editor sent me proofs of the book, he noted that the designer had typeset my prose paragraphs as fully justified blocks. This was the shape of news, ordinance, proclamation; nothing about the words’ intention was concealed.
The second quality of the prose in “Hope” involves myth. I found myself comparing my chronicle to an event that never and couldn’t possibly have occurred. My invented story does not exactly represent any myth I have read, but I feel it echoes the big bizarreness of those myths. Many have noted that myths provide us with archetypal stories that help us explain our lives to ourselves.
Some myths are meant to help us imagine a future for humanity that might be different. It didn’t bother me that myths that try to shape the future usually foretell impossible events; the common, foreseeable, and even preventable events of my family members’ deaths felt impossible too. Impossible and unbearable. Allowing the outlandishness of myth into my poems expanded my vision of reality to include death and the possibility of a different future.
The two categories of prose I have mentioned, call one practical and the other myth-like, tend to have separate rhythms. In “Hope,” I notice that I employed the rhythm of a metered form, the ballad, which I associate with fable or myth, in some of the phrases that document my experience of taking care of my mom. The sentence that follows tells a story of something that never happened. The story is clearly almost impossible—but how amazing would it be if such a thing took place? This fabulist departure unfolds in the kind of anti-rhythm I would expect from more objective prose, which engenders a different kind of trust than a ballad’s music. Although a rhythm swap like this could enliven the rhetoric in a poem of any form, I don’t know that such a transference would have happened in my work if the different sentences were not entrenched together in a block of prose.
