The Poems Without Lines

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(',7('%<-$1(021621 British Prose Poetry Jane Monson Editor British Prose Poetry

The Poems Without Lines Editor Jane Monson University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-77862-4 ISBN 978-3-319-77863-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface

In 2002, N. Santilli published the frst full-length critical study of the British prose poem with the telling title: Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature. Today, the book is still unique: although it is in good company with other exemplary critical texts on prose poetry— among the authors of which are Margueritte S. Murphy, Mary Ann Caws, Hermine Riffaterre, Stephen Fredman, Michel Delville, Tzvetan Todorov, Steven Monte, Marjorie Perloff and Ron Silliman—it remains the only book that homes in on the prose poem in English Literature, rather than that of France or America. Since Santilli’s publication, there has been an outpouring of British prose poetry in terms of creative texts, anthologies and solo collections alike, but a comparative dearth of critical material, especially collated, on the British prose poem. British Prose Poetry: Poems Without Lines is assembled to address this imbalance between critical material and the creative output/practice of the form, and to provide the frst single volume of essays on the form and genre, paying particular attention to its narrative and role within British Literature (poetry and also prose) since the nineteenth century through to the twenty-frst. While the essays are predominantly critical, I have included a couple of more pedagogical and biographical essays as part of conveying a necessary and interdisciplinary story of the British prose poem. The fuid movement of the essays, and of the book as a whole, between genres, forms, research, theory, practice, pedagogy, methodology and experience, is fundamental to the unique approach of the essayists towards the topic. Indeed, these precise conversations and

v vi Preface conscious efforts to combine all of these disciplines are vital to understanding the entire narrative of the British prose poem, and also the reason it has undergone a resurgence in British literature in recent decades. In keeping with the focus, each contributor to this book has been chosen for the signifcance of their critical and creative output towards the genre; they have all published leading articles and books on the prose poem, edited anthologies, or had volumes of their own published by both mainstream and independent presses. This book of essays is an opportunity not only for the reader to understand more about the British prose poem—what it is, how it emerged, why its acceptance has fuctuated so much in the UK—but also to learn more about the story of the prose poem from its contro- versial beginnings in the nineteenth century to its notable burgeoning in the twenty-frst via ebbs and fows in the last century. In terms of the book’s focus on British prose poetry, there is a distinction to be made here between British and English literature. The background to this volume’s understanding of the prose poem in Britain is the prose poem in English literature, which is prose poetry written in the English language anywhere in the world. The prose poetry of the English Canon, in this respect, is represented in the translated and American examples that feature in many of the essays. But what takes place once the historical over- view has been established is a dedicated study of prose poetry produced by both British and international writers based in the UK. It is this more recent interest, practice, production, teaching and performance of the prose poem in the UK itself that the essays individually and together seek to question and understand. Further to this, there are numerous and diverse examples of prose poetry in English and several other languages, but why in the UK is the recognition and acceptance of prose poetry so much more recent—and, yet more recent still, the public emergence of international UK-based prose poets? This question is driven by an overarching positive approach towards what is happening now—celebrating the augmentation of the contemporary British prose poem and the international and global infuences that are an intrinsic part of its complex role and status. As part of a more general1 and academic recognition of the British prose poem, there have naturally been questions, conversations, debates

1By general, I mean that the prose poem is now being taken more seriously by mainstream publishers, as well as established independent presses. PREFACE vii and a variety of readers and writers doing their best to work out what it is, why it is, how it is and where it is. The ‘where’ of these questions is important and the one I want to address here, frst, while the others are examined in the rest of the volume. In his 2012 essay for A Companion to Poetic Genre, Andy Brown (one of this book’s contributors) begins the ‘where’ conversation by stating:

Work [has begun] on the widespread appearance of the prose poem in mainstream British poetry. Just as with the critical fxation on Aloysius Bertrand as the ‘originator’ of the form, I believe we need to move on from the avant-garde appropriation of the prose poem as a vehicle of ‘radical’ expression—the appearance of prose poetry in mainstream British writing is a welcome development of its traditions. In 1971 Geoffrey Hill published Mercian Hymns, a book that has become, perhaps, the most celebrated example of the British prose poem. Shortly afterward Seamus Heaney published Stations, a series of autobiographical prose poems some of which are still included in his Selected and Collected Poems. In fact Heaney continues to write prose poetry, with several examples appearing in his recent collection District and Circle. Faber & Faber continue to champion the prose poem—from its early appearance in T. S. Eliot’s oeuvre (‘Hysteria’ in Prufrock) through to the work of Maurice Riordan (The Holy Land is comprised of over half prose poetry) and Alice Oswald, whose acclaimed bookwork Dart blends prose, poetry, documentary, and interview into one of the most radical reworkings of poetry of place. We can clearly see that the ‘radical’ boundary is simply no longer helpful. Nor does it stop there. Mainstream British publishers Jonathan Cape champion the work of John Burnside; the editor at Cape, Robin Robertson, also writes and publishes prose poetry in his acclaimed books for Picador.2

This book supports Brown’s assertion and reviews the possibility that Britain, the very place that has had a nonplussed, hostile, questioning and undiscerning view of the prose poem, is now potentially the very place where it will fourish. As part of this review, each writer here considers the broader context of literary traditions and rules, questioning and probing the tradition of great English poets who have upheld

2Andy Brown, “The Emergent Prose Poem” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 2012), 327–328. viii Preface and exemplifed the time-honoured valued unit and basis of poetry, the line—and, in turn, the break and the stanza. These writers ask directly and indirectly: what place is there for ‘poetry’ that refutes the line-break and takes in hand the sentence and, in turn, the paragraph? Is poetry still poetry when it uses the sentence, rather than the line, as its basic unit? In the twenty-frst century, what has been happening is that the practitioners themselves have long since started and continue to develop these conversations proactively in critical and pedagogical contexts, among them leading authors of the form: Carrie Etter, Ian Seed, Patricia Debney, Lucy Hamilton, Michael Rosen, Andy Brown, George Szirtes, Linda Black, Jeff Hilson, Luke Kennard, Geraldine Monk and Ágnes Lehóczky. In its embracing of both the practice and research of prose poetry, the book aims to appeal as much to Creative Writing students and research- ers as it does to dedicated practitioners of the prose poem wanting to understand more about the history, theory and nature of the form. It will appeal to those asking questions about the British prose poem: its origins, infuences, impact and relationship with other similar genres or forms. This book aims not only to provide a useful single text to gain more insight and advance understanding of the topic—for both tutor and student, but also to provide the opportunity to enjoy the prose poem more widely while regarding its historical narrative, and considering its relevance and possibilities in British literature today. It is not common knowledge that many of the writers explored here—T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Seamus Heaney, David Gascoyne and Roy Fisher—produced prose poems, as well as wrote about this area. Neither is it common knowledge that their work on prose poetry and reconfgurations of the divide between poetry and prose continues to inform and inspire contemporary prose poets in Britain and all over the world. This volume aims to appeal to and encourage writers and readers of poetry, prose poetry and poetics who wish to understand, as well as to try out or continue to practice, this alluring and elusive thing called the prose poem. While this title is the frst of its kind, the long-term view of creative and critical conversations around the prose poem is quite the opposite—we look forward to starting some new discussions and continuing others.

Cambridge, UK Jane Monson Acknowledgements

I would like to give my ongoing appreciation and gratitude to the following friends, family, peers and colleagues for their unwavering support. Invaluable suggestions, time, constructive advice, encouragement and clear perspectives throughout the years have been put into this volume by the following: Cassandra Atherton, Hugues Azérad, Kaddy Benyon, Linda Bree, Cambridge University Press Bookshop, Anthony Cummins, Patricia Debney, Jane de Lozey, Eileen Fursland, Lindsay Fursland, Una McCormack, the Monson family, Lilleith Morrison, Catherine Paterson, Nikki Santilli, the Sotudeh family, Ben Walker, Ann Walsh, Neil Wenborn and Anne Wilson. I extend particular thanks to Patricia Debney for her constant support, belief when momentum was a bit frayed and, as importantly, her dedicated fne-tuning of the Introduction. Huge amounts of appreciation for the advice, patience and extra miles go to my editors at Palgrave: Allie Bochicchio, Rachel Jacobe, Emily Janakiram and, from the early days, Brigitte Shull and Paloma Yannakakis. Warm gratitude for the criticism, suggestions, belief and appreciation of every reader and peer reviewer. Particular and absolute admiration and heartfelt thanks go to all nineteen contributors for the steadfast ways—against quite a few odds—you’ve approached and connected with the whole project, as well as for your individual essays. I won’t forget your support and encouragement along the way, and I hope the next stage serves you all well. It’s been a journey of many human tales and utterly motivating through some of the bleaker hours. Finally, and eternally, love and appreciation are extended to Niki Sotudeh and Sylvie Monson Sotudeh,

ix x Acknowledgements whose calmness, wit and daily inspiration are essential to every one of my undertakings. To the readers of this book: thank you for every borrow, purchase, glance, dive, foray, discussion and prose poem these essays hope to inspire. Copyright Acknowledgements

With thanks to John Wiley & Sons Ltd for the use of excerpts taken from Andy Brown’s essay ‘The Emergent Prose Poem’, in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2012), 327– 328. This edition was frst published in 2012 (© 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd). The right of Erik Martiny to be identifed as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. With thanks to David Caddy for permission to use ‘Hidden Form: The Prose Poem in English Poetry’, previously published in Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry, ed. Tom Chivers (Penned in the Margins, 2010), 103–113. Permission by the author to use with any necessary editing has been granted. With thanks to Elisabeth Bletsoe for the use of the extract of ‘Heyrun, Heron (Ardea cinerea)’, in Birds of the Sherborne Missal, in Landscape from a Dream (Exeter: Shearsman, 2008), and to Vahni Capildeo for use of the extract from ‘Person Animal Figure’, in Undraining Sea (Norwich: Egg Box, 2009). With thanks to Louis Armand and Clare Wallace for Michel Delville, ‘James Joyce and the Prose Poem’, which appeared as a much longer

xi xii Copyright Acknowledgements

(and alternative version) in Giacomo Joyce: Envoys of the Other (eds. Louis Armand and Clare Wallace, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2007). This version is printed here with kind permission of Litteraria Pragensia. Thanks to Faber & Faber Ltd for permission to use ‘Hysteria’, in T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 2002). With thanks also to Faber & Faber Ltd and Coffee House Press for permission to use ‘The Death of Hart Crane’ by Mark Ford, in Six Children (London: Faber & Faber, 2011). With thanks to Ian Seed for ‘Nonsense and Wonder: The Prose Poems of Jeremy Over’, which appeared as a much shorter, earlier version in the journal Tears in the Fence, 63 (April 2016). Permission granted by the author, also the editor of Tears in the Fence. With thanks also to Carcanet Press for kind permission to use extracts from Jeremy Over’s frst collection, A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001) and Over’s second collection, Deceiving Wild Creatures (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009). With thanks to the publisher at The Figures for permission to use Tom Raworth’s poem, ‘Proust From The Bottom Up’ in Tottering State: Selected and New Poems (New Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1984). Thanks to the Estate of Roy Fisher and to Bloodaxe Books Ltd for all primary materials cited in Peter Robinson’s essay ‘Roy Fisher’s Musicians’. Thanks also to Peter Robinson, Executor of the Fisher Estate. Contents

1 Introduction 1 Jane Monson

Part I The Story of the British Prose Poem

2 ‘Hidden’ Form: The Prose Poem in English Poetry 19 David Caddy

3 The British Prose Poem and ‘Poetry’ in Early Modernism 29 Margueritte S. Murphy

4 The Flourishing of the Prose Poem in America and Britain 47 Robert Vas Dias

Part II The Early Narrators

5 The Marvellous Clouds: Refections on the Prose Poetry of Woolf, Baudelaire and Williams 73 Michael O’Neill

xiii xiv Contents

6 ‘I Grow More & More Poetic’: Virginia Woolf and Prose Poetry 91 Jane Goldman

7 James Joyce and the Prose Poem 117 Michel Delville

8 T.S. Eliot’s Prose (Poetry) 133 Vidyan Ravinthiran

9 A Weakening Syntax: How It Is with Samuel Beckett’s Prose Poetry 149 Scott Annett

Part III By Name or by Nature?

10 Questioning the Prose Poem: Thoughts on Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns 167 Alan Wall

11 ‘I Went Disguised in It’: Re-evaluating Seamus Heaney’s Stations 177 Andy Brown

12 The Letter-Poem and Its Literary Affect: Mark Ford’s ‘The Death of Hart Crane’ 193 Anthony Caleshu

13 ‘Immeasurable as One’: Vahni Capildeo’s Prose Poetics 211 Jeremy Noel-Tod

14 The Successful Prose Poem Leaves Behind Its Name 227 Owen Bullock CONTENTS xv

Part IV Other Voices, Other Forms

15 ‘Man and Nature In and Out of Order’: The Surrealist Prose Poetry of David Gascoyne 249 Luke Kennard

16 Nonsense and Wonder: An Exploration of the Prose Poems of Jeremy Over 265 Ian Seed

17 Prose Poetry and the Spirit of Jazz 279 N. Santilli

18 Roy Fisher’s Musicians 299 Peter Robinson

Part V Thinking Back, Writing Forward

19 Wrestling with Angels: The Pedagogy of the Prose Poem 319 Patricia Debney

20 Life, Death and the Prose Poem 331 Michael Rosen

Index 337 Notes on Contributors

Scott Annett is a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He has recently completed a project on Samuel Beckett’s poetic experimentation, attending to Beckett’s readings of Dante’s Commedia. Annett has also written on Dante’s poetry, including his Latin Eclogues. He teaches regularly for the Faculty of English, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, and the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He is currently working on translations and transitions between Virgilian ‘pietas’, Dantean ‘pietà’ and Chaucerian ‘pitee’ in the Medieval period. Andy Brown is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Exeter University. He recently co-edited A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine, with Corinna Wagner (Bloomsbury, 2016). He also edited and contributed to the critical book of essays and interviews The Writing Occurs as Song: A Kelvin Corcoran Reader (Shearsman, 2014). His many poetry books include Medicine to the Dead (Worple, 2018); Watersong (Shearsman, 2016); Exurbia (Worple, 2015), The Fool and the Physician (Salt, 2014), Goose Music (with John Burnside) (Salt, 2008) and Fall of the Rebel Angels: Poems 1996–2006 (Salt, 2006). Owen Bullock has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Canberra, where he currently teaches, and is a member of the Prose Poetry Project, hosted by the International Poetry Studies Institute. His research interests are semiotics and poetry, prose poetry, collaboration and haikai literature. His scholarly work has appeared in Antipodes, Axon:

xvii xviii Notes on Contributors

Creative Explorations, Journal of New Zealand Literature, Ka Mate Ka Ora, New Writing, Qualitative Inquiry and TEXT. His creative publications include Semi (2017), River’s Edge (2016) and A Cornish Story (2010). He has edited a number of journals and anthologies, including Poetry New Zealand. David Caddy is a critically acclaimed British poet, essayist, critic and literary sociologist. He has edited the international and independent literary journal Tears in the Fence since 1984, and directs the Tears in the Fence annual poetry festival. Caddy founded and organised the East Street Poets, the UK’s largest rural poetry group from 1985 to 2001, and directed the legendary Wessex Poetry Festival from 1995 to 2001. He co-wrote a literary companion to London in 2006, has written and edited drama scripts and podcasts, and regularly contributes essays, articles and reviews to books and journals. Anthony Caleshu is Professor of Poetry at University of Plymouth. He is the author of three books of poetry—most recently, The Victor Poems (Shearsman, 2015), and three books of criticism—most recently as editor of In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). Patricia Debney is a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Her most recent collection, Baby (Liquorice Fish Books, 2016), moves between prose poem and free verse, while two earlier collections, Littoral (Shearsman Books, 2013), and How to Be a Dragonfy (Smith/Doorstop Books, 2005) consist entirely of prose poems. Other recent work includes Gestation (Shearsman Chapbooks, 2014), and she has appeared in Tears in the Fence, Best British Poetry 2015, The Forward Book of Poetry 2014 and The Sunday Times. She has also published a novel (bluechrome, 2007) and written libretti for opera, chamber groups and solo voices. Michel Delville teaches English literature, American literature and comparative literature at the University of Liège, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. He is the author of The American Prose Poem (1998), J. G. Ballard (1998), Hamlet & Co (with Pierre Michel) (2001), Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism (with Andrew Norris) (2005), Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde (2009), Crossroads Poetics: Text, Image, Music, Film and Beyond (2013), The Politics of Notes on CONTRIBUTORS xix

Hunger and Disgust: Perspectives on the Dark Grotesque (with Andrew Norris) (2016) and Undoing———- Art (with Mary Ann Caws) (2017). He has also co-edited several volumes of essays on contemporary poetics. Jane Goldman Reader in English at Glasgow University, is a General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. Her books include The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf (1998), The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (2006), and ‘With You in the Hebrides’: Virginia Woolf and Scotland (2013). She is also a poet, published in Gutter, Blackbox Manifold, Tender and elsewhere. Her frst volume is Border Thoughts (Leamington Books, 2014), ‘a little theat- rical box of spectacle and light […] the living underworld of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera translated into raucous girlish post-war wayward ways’ (Hix Eros). Luke Kennard is a poet, novelist and academic who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Exeter and lectures English and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. His latest collection of poetry, Cain (Penned in the Margins, 2016) was shortlisted for the 2017 International Dylan Thomas Prize and his frst novel, The Transition (4th Estate, 2017), was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fction. Jane Monson is a poet and academic based in Cambridge. She works as a Mentor at the University of Cambridge and was Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. She edited the frst anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry, This Line is Not for Turning (Cinnamon Press, 2011), praised by Pascale Petit as ‘necessary and ground-breaking’, and has two collections of prose poetry Speaking Without Tongues (Cinnamon Press, 2010) and The Shared Surface (Cinnamon Press, 2013). Her Ph.D., Crossed Tongues: The Crisis of Speech in the Prose Poems of Francis Ponge (Cardiff University, 2008), focused on Modernism and the French prose poem. Margueritte S. Murphy Hobart and William Smith Colleges, USA, is author of Material Figures: Political Economy, Commercial Culture, and the Aesthetic Sensibility of Charles Baudelaire (2012) and A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (1992), and co-editor (with Samir Dayal) of Global Babel: Questions of Discourse and Communication in a Time of Globalization (2007). She has published broadly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and fction, xx Notes on Contributors on literature and economics, and most recently on community-based learning. At Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she currently serves as advisor/faculty liaison to the Center for Community Engagement and Service-Learning. Jeremy Noel-Tod is Senior Lecturer in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia . His poetry criticism has been widely published and, since 2013, he has been the poetry critic for The Sunday Times. His publications as an editor are The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2nd edn, 2013), the Complete Poems of R. F. Langley (2015) and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018). Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at Durham University. Recent books include (with Madeleine Callaghan) The Romantic Poetry Handbook (Wiley Blackwell, 2017) and, as editor, John Keats in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His third volume of poetry, Gangs of Shadow, was published by Arc in 2014 and Return of the Gift (Arc, 2018). Vidyan Ravinthiran teaches at Birmingham University. He is the author of Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014), shortlisted for several frst collection prizes, including the Forward; and Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015), winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Literary Criticism. He is an editor at Prac Crit and also an author of fction, represented by the Wylie Agency. His literary journalism has appeared in Poetry, the Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books, among other publications. Peter Robinson is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading, an award-winning poet, short story writer, trans- lator from the Italian, and literary editor for Two Rivers Press. His recent publications include The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (2007), winner of the John Florio Prize; The Returning Sky (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Foreigners, Drunks and Babies: Eleven Stories (2013); The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013, paperback 2016); and September in the Rain: A Novel (2016). His Collected Poems 1976–2016 appeared in 2017. Michael Rosen is Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmith’s, London, and a former Children’s Laureate. He went to state primary and grammar schools, tried doing Medicine for two years before studying English Literature at Wadham College, Oxford. Rosen worked at the BBC and since then as a freelance writer, performer and broadcaster. Notes on CONTRIBUTORS xxi

He wrote We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (with Helen Oxenbury), Quick Let’s Get Out of Here and Sad Book (both with Quentin Blake). His prose poetry memoirs include Carrying the Elephant (Penguin, 2002) and In the Colonie (Penguin, 2005). He presents the BBC 4 Radio programme Word of Mouth. N. Santilli was awarded a Ph.D. (Kings College London) for her research on the prose poem. Subsequently published as Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature (2003), it remains the only full-length treatment of the subject. She was invited to edit collections of contemporary British prose poems by ‘SENTENCE’ (2005) and Poetry International (2006). Nikki is an independent scholar and vernacular jazz dancer/teacher in London, with a rich, eclectic, portfolio from scriptwriting to electronic text editing and dancing to poetry. Ian Seed is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Chester and author. Seed’s books of prose poems include Identity Papers (2016) and Makers of Empty Dreams (2014), both published by Shearsman. They were featured on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. He translated The Thief of Talant (2016), the frst translation into English of Pierre Reverdy’s innovative Le Voleur de Talan (Wakefeld Press). Robert Vas Dias is a tutor at the Poetry School, London, and has published ffteen collections in the UK and USA, the most recent of which are a collaborative artist’s book with the Portuguese artist Teresa Gonçalves Lobo, Unstill/Inquieto (Permanent, 2017), Black Book, with Julia Farrer (Shearsman, 2016) and Arrivals & Departures: Prose Poems (Shearsman, 2014): ‘necessary reading for anyone following contemporary developments in the prose poem’ (David Caddy). His poetry and criticism have appeared in over one hundred magazines, journals, and anthologies in both countries. He was General Secretary of The Poetry Society in the mid-1970s. Alan Wall is Professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Chester and RLF Co-ordinator. He is the author of novels, poetry and books of essays, and his work has been translated into ten languages. His most recent novel was Badmouth (Harbour Books, 2014), and his most recent book of essays was Labyrinths and Clues (Fortnightly Review, 2014). Wall’s book Jacob, written in verse and prose, was shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize and Endtimes (Shearsman, 2013) was launched at Swedenborg House in London to considerable acclaim. He was elected a Fellow of the English Association in 2012. List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Virginia Woolf, ‘BLUE & GREEN.’, Monday or Tuesday (London: Hogarth, 1921) 101 Fig. 16.1 From ‘Wunderkammern’ 275

xxiii CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Jane Monson

While examples of prose and poetry merging in English literature—or, at the very least, the two genres occupying the same space—can date back as far as the tenth century,1 we have to wait until the nineteenth century for a more notable fusion of the two forms and the twenty-frst for the prose poem in name and practice to be positively recognised in Britain. This book aims to look at the form’s narrative between the examples of prose poetry (as opposed to poetic prose) in nineteenth- century English literature and the current century’s resurgence of British prose poetry. A question underlying the leaps in time between prose poetry (and, indeed, poetic prose) found in widespread English literature and prose poetry written and produced in Britain, is, of course: why English Literature frst and Britain later? By way of background,

1 See, for example, The Vercelli Book—one of four keystone old English manuscripts, Vercelli was composed in England, but not discovered until centuries later in Italy, where its existence was made public in 1824. Vercelli features 6 poems and 23 prose Homilies, and the consensus is that, while many of the pieces can be dated to the tenth century, others are harder to determine, but were possibly composed even earlier.

J. Monson (*) University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 1 J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_1 2 J. MONSON the historical timeline tends to follow a particular narrative,2 more or less between Baudelaire, via the Decadent and Symbolist movements through to modernist writers of poetry and prose in America, Europe and the UK, and landing in a host of contemporary writers of prose and poetry—all genders, all races, all classes, both traditional and experimental, among them the writers listed earlier, but with many more emerging.3 In the twenty-frst century, prose poets are indebted not only to current writers and academics working in this feld, but also to a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and their incisive questioning of conventional ideas of prose and poetry. Crucial to the shifting or

2 The prose poem was introduced to the UK during the fn de siècle through the Decadent literature of Ernest Dowson, William Sharp and Oscar Wilde, and, in turn, to them by an English translation of Stuart Merrill’s anthology of French Prose Poems, Pastels in Prose, 1890. Demonstrated most prominently at Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trials with his so-called obscene letter to Alfred Douglas that Wilde wrote and defended in court as a “prose poem”, the form for the mainstream Victorian audience was deemed distasteful, subversive and ostentatious, and thereby associated with all the un-restraints of French decadence. In 1917, T.S. Eliot wrote and had published one of his very few prose poems, “Hysteria”; then, in the same year, he issued “The Borderline of Prose”, a damning article on mixed genres, defaming the genre as “unmasculine”. During the early part of the twentieth century, lesser-known poets had prose poems published in the “little magazines”, which were essential, independent publications for experimental work that gave major modernists their frst print opportunity. They were published in the UK and America, and in America—partly through their distribution—from the mid-twentieth century onwards, the prose poem had a relative surge of recognition, practiced and published by poets such as Ginsberg, Ashbery, Simic, Wright and Edson. In the UK, the uptake has been slower and—outside of the negative infuences/associations of Wilde, Eliot, British traditional values of prose and poetry, and the marketing challenges the form poses—we are still examining why. 3 I am aware of the absence of many of these emerging British writers, including from Scotland, but space is restricted and often, too, there is not enough critical material on which to base an essay. I am also aware of the sweeping and conservative mainstream nature of this oft-repeated timeline of the British prose poem up until the present century. It is one which very much assumes a conservative British reading public governed by Victorian sensibilities that, in turn, were a leading part of a flter-system as far as what was written, published and read was concerned. However, the summary does convey some of what the prose poem faced regarding association with the “purple prose” of Decadence and Aestheticism. If—again, as common knowledge would have it—prose during the Victorian Era was the most popular genre among the reading public and poetry was deemed as “high art” through which the reader could derive some moral lesson, what place was there for a form that crossed genres, combined opposites and was associated with a dissident and marginalised society? See Murphy’s Tradition of Subversion, for an illuminating contextual exploration of the prose poem during this era and afterwards. 1 INTRODUCTION 3 blurring of boundaries so central to the prose poem’s identity or reputation, we are fnally acting upon assertions and questions that have long ago been raised by and between key English authors. Wordsworth and Coleridge4 most notably provided the reader with the earliest, most persuasive examples of critical responses by and between poets exploring how and why prose and poetry can be seen at all as two distinct, separate genres and languages. These crucial debates helped break down boundary lines, or at least change and disseminate entrenched understandings of generic boundary lines. Their questions brought about changes to how both reader and writer alike can approach a piece of literature. Underneath these changes, the prose poem continued to evolve through experiment, but was not recognised defnitely and clearly as the ‘prose poem’ in the works of several modernists—among them Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. They wrote short prose, plays, prose lyrics and lyric essays and, above all, consciously and critically drew attention to the fuid correspondence between poetry and prose in their texts, coming close to producing what we now regard as prose poetry, or at the very least helping us recognise what it is and what it can do. In the twenty-frst century, we have gained an unprecedented appe- tite for short forms, on- and off-screen, and arguably the prose poem can be read with greater frequency and in far more congenial territory than was offered in the past. It appears that both British writers and critics alike are beginning to appreciate the possibilities of this hybrid form with increasing rigour and focus—that the prose poet’s distillation and organisation of music, image, metaphor, and complex but economical use of juxtaposition merged with aspects of narrative technique, dialogue, point-of-view and even plot and character are particular crafts in and unique to the prose poem. Further to this, that the prose poem

4 See Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, for a defning argument in English Literature debating the essential differences between prose and poetry, and the non-sense as much as the sense behind these formal divides. As much as the apparent differing views of the poets, both texts are helpful for framing further debates around the prose poem’s complex role and identity in English and British literature. Of particular relevance when considering critical and creative manifestations of the prose poem is where Wordsworth famously said in Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that “there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition”, and Coleridge responded that ‘a poem contains the same elements as a prose composition, but “the difference … must consist in a different combination of them”. 4 J. MONSON can become a genre in itself in British literature is fnally being acknowledged—at least in terms of digital and print exposure, where it is being published, taught and discussed steadily in the independent streams, and more frequently recognised by centrally established authors, publishers, panels and judges. With the presence, rather than absence, of the prose poem very much in mind throughout this book, the complex backstory to the prose poem in the UK, where it could have disappeared entirely, seems all the more important to remember. Many critics place T.S. Eliot in the frame when it comes to compounding the damage done during the prose poem’s association with Wilde and Decadence. I quote from one of this volume’s contributor’s, Michel Delville, in the introduction to his seminal book on the American prose poem, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre, to put this point and Eliot’s criticism in context:

One of the frst critical responses to such a conception of the prose poem as a piece of stylized and ‘poeticized’ prose (Ernest Dowson’s 1899 collection of prose poems was quite appropriately named Decorations in Prose) was voiced by T.S. Eliot in 1917. In an essay entitled ‘The Borderline of Prose,’ Eliot reacted against the prose poems of Richard Aldington, which he saw as a disguised attempt to revive the stylistic preciousness and technical ‘charlatanism’ of the Decadents (‘Borderline’ 158). In contrast with the prose poems of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen and the ‘pure prose’ of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which he admired, Aldington’s hybrid prose poems were condemned by Eliot on the ground that they ‘seem[ed] to hesitate between two media’ (159). As became clear in a second essay on the subject, published in 1921, Eliot did not object so much to the prose poets’ endeavors to create a hybrid genre as to the terms ‘prose poem’ and ‘prose poetry’ themselves, to which he preferred the more neutral expression ‘short prose’ (‘Prose and Verse’ 6). That Eliot’s ferce condemnation of the formal hybridity of the prose poem did a lot to discourage other early modernist poets from even trying their hands at the genre is beyond any doubt—if Eliot had been the lesser poet, and Aldington one of the most respected and infuential men of letters of his time, the history of the contemporary prose poem in English may have taken a totally different turn.5

5 Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre (Florida: University Press of Florida, 1998), 5–6. 1 INTRODUCTION 5

In many ways, this volume is a response to two things that T.S. Eliot said at the beginning of the twentieth century in one of the earliest published examples of a poet and essayist critiquing the British prose poem. Eliot’s frst opinion more or less condemned or heavily refuted the prose poem; the second implied that the prose poem might do better were it regarded as short prose, rather than a prose poem. While these questions of form and identity are addressed, what emerges through these essays is that, as part of tracing the prose poem’s story in Britain, we need to turn as much towards the UK itself as outwards towards other literary, cultural and societal values in which the prose poem has been able to play a more readily and naturally accepted role in education, publishing, literature and performance. Throughout the world there are examples of prose poets in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa, the Caribbean, Russia, Japan, China, Syria, Portugal, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, Spain and Greece, and it appears that the form—or at the very least the blending of poetry and prose—is far more stitched into their mainstream literatures and curricula. It is for another editor and writer to produce a literature survey of prose poetry across the globe and go much further towards ascertaining the manifold traditions, rules and approaches towards poetry and prose, and how they have governed the prose poem’s role and status accordingly. Through acknowledging and being aware of the international differences as far as the status of the prose poem is concerned, the contributors here focus on writers based in the UK who have globally and locally infuenced and developed the prose poem, through dedicated practice—raising its profle in teaching, publishing, performance and public debates. As a result of this creative and professional momentum coor- dinated to encourage a correspondence between conventionally separate disciplines, forms and contexts, the British prose poem is thriving. And yet, in spite of this resurgence, there is still criticism and confusion reminiscent of Eliot’s questioning. What are we marketing? What is this form? What defnes the prose poem? How would we recognise one? It is still in many ways the ‘impossible genre’ in spite of its recent success. While it has been defned, within that defnition (or defnitions), practitioners have had their own idea of what constitutes prose poetry, from length to use of sentence, look and sound. In a handful of critical texts—notably Jonathan Monroe, A Poverty of Objects (1987); Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose (1990); Margueritte S. Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion (1992); Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem (1998); 6 J. MONSON and Steven Monte, Invisible Fences (2000)—there are some defnitions, many of which are useful and directive. More signifcantly, however, these writers’ texts raise discussions around defnition and the various takes on what a prose poem is or is not, as well as ask: to what extent is a defnition helpful and to what extent is it pointless, or even detri- mental, to a form that is so closely associated with so many other terms and forms? There are, of course, many examples of prose poems given in this volume but, if we work with the most recognised characteristic of a prose poem—which is that the sentence is used as the unit, rather than the line—can we then see the examples all falling into the same genre? Clearly not. So, how do we commonly account for what they are; what they are doing with language, image, thought, rhythm and form? For an important essay on questioning the prose poem with astute reference to Geoffrey Hill, see Alan Wall’s essay in this volume. Among Wall’s questions, he asks of a passage from Dickens’ Bleak House: is this a prose poem? In language, turn of phrase, focus and density, this is a hall-mark prose poem, he acknowledges, but, as Wall concludes, it is not a prose poem, because it is an intrinsic part of a larger piece of fction. This begs another question: is there room in the genre for found prose poetry, or is the prose poem a prose poem because it works in a far more self-contained and autonomous manner? This essay raises and draws attention to ongoing arguments and opinions around defnition that, to a point, pitch against some of the views in other essays and certainly will continue debate in the poetry and prose poetry communities. It is essential that questions about, as well as common understandings of, prose poetry are represented here in order to refect today’s mix of contradictory and broad takes on the prose poem. Its exposure and survival is dependent on these articulated differences; they are an essential part of the questions that need to happen around the prose poem, not only to gain more of a critical understanding of the genre and variations of the form within that genre, but also to gauge whether the prose poem is a form that opens up more opportunities for new forms within other genres. Can it exist, for example, as embedded and waiting to be found within larger works of fction as much as be created according to its own rules? For the purposes of at least having a foundation on which to stand or leave and to help answer these questions, one of the more useful working defnitions and important synoptic accounts which both practitioners and critics have been able to draw on is to be found in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: 1 INTRODUCTION 7

PROSE POEM (poem in prose). A composition able to have any or all features of the lyric, except that it is put on the page—though not conceived of—as prose. It differs from poetic prose in that it is short and compact, from free verse in that it has no line breaks, from a short prose passage in that it has, usually, more pronounced rhythm, sonorous effects, imagery, and density of expression. It may contain even inner rhyme and metrical runs. Its length, generally, is from half a page (one or two paragraphs) to three or four pages, i.e., of the average lyrical poem. If it is any longer, the tensions and impact are forfeited, and it becomes—more or less poetic-prose.6

Characteristic of many defnitions, while it gives a good idea of the prose poem—as opposed to poetic prose—this is as prescriptive as it is safe: ‘usually’ ‘may’ and ‘generally’ draw attention to the fact that the prose poem is hard to summarise precisely and that there are other defnitions or interpretations within what constitutes a prose poem itself. Some writers avoid defnition for this reason and prefer to speak more broadly about the relationship between the two genres. Peter Riley puts it well, simply saying he is interested in ‘prose as a support to poetry’.7 Likewise, it is helpful to keep in mind Russell Edson’s aim to seek ‘a poetry freed from the defnition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of fction’8 in order to even entertain the idea that a third form is possible when the two genres merge. Of equal signifcance when thinking about the formation and defnition of the prose poem are infuences from other disciplines outside of poetry. The prose poem is not only at the behest of changing attitudes and ideas of what constitutes prose and poetry, but also part of experiments in architecture, urban environments, technology, photography, painting, advertising, journalism, social media and digitalised ways of communicating more generally. So, for example, if we focus here on the digital or physical frame/box-like shape that many of these different forms inhabit, aesthetically and stylistically—given the prose poem’s

6 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke and O.B. Hardison, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 664. 7 Peter Riley in conversation with Keith Tuma: http://jacketmagazine.com/11/riley-iv- by-tuma.html. See further discussion of this idea in the Riley section of Owen Bullock’s essay in this volume. 8 Russell Edson interviewed by Mark Tursi in Double Room, 4 (Spring/Summer 2004), http://www.webdelsol.com/Double_Room/issue_four/Russell_Edson.html. 8 J. MONSON material also being created, organised and presented within a square- ish frame or border—is the prose poem the literary equivalent of the (short) flm, the photo, the painting, the post-war building? Recently, the BBC had one of this volume’s contributors, Ian Seed, on their Radio 3 programme The Verb, where he gave a memorable reading of his prose poetry and discussed the form in relation to the development of new towns in postwar Britain. Seed aptly compared the prose poem to urban architecture—blocks on the outside, concentrated and distinct homes and lives on the inside. In the poet’s own words:

Each prose poem is like a little block … like houses all the same on the surface, but if you go behind the walls, the doors and the windows, each house will have its own world. So these prose poems might look quite similar on the page – little square blocks, rectangular blocks – but if you go inside, each one has its own world, but that world might be quite a fragmented, subjective world, it could be quite an atomised world and often I think of these prose poems actually as being kind of atoms and the atoms come together in an accumulative effect, if you take the trouble to go and look at them and see what is there behind the doors …9

The subsequent comparison by the interviewer, Ian McMillan, of a prose poem (from a distance) to a ‘slab’, a ‘brick’, a ‘breezeblock’, until you get close enough to examine differences and details, does highlight the issue of the prose poem’s reception and acceptance as poetry, in that it does not immediately look like poetry; the reader has to advance several steps closer before even considering the fact that poetry might be in there somewhere. In other words, we frst approach the prose poem either as brief prose or as something else entirely. Approaching the prose poem through doors other than poetry, however, is useful thinking that has been discussed before in relation to the prose poem in Russia, via the term Minimalism. In Adrian Wanner’s book Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story (2003), minimalism was used most fashionably during the 1960s in relation to the plastic arts created by New York artists, among them Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. The point of Wanner’s discussion of minimalism when applied to both the plastic arts and poetry is not so

9 Ian Seed in discussion with Ian McMillan, “New Towns”, The Verb, BBC Radio 3, March 2016. 1 INTRODUCTION 9 much to do with the potential similarities between minimal concrete and abstract forms in art and literature, but that minimalism when applied to texts forces us to revisit our assumptions about genre:

Minimalist texts defy traditional generic expectations, constituting themselves as literature by fat rather than by adhering to any received literary assumptions. By doing so, they force the reader to revisit personal assumptions of generic classifcation.10

Wanner goes on to illustrate this point with reference to the American poet, art critic and curator John Perreault who describes ‘the generic shifts produced by minimal art forms’ (6) in a way that is reminiscent of McMillan’s discussion of Ian Seed’s blocks of prose:

Paradoxically the closer an artist gets to the mythological ‘essence’ of his particular medium the faster his medium becomes something else. Frank Stella’s shaped canvases become a kind of fat sculpture for the wall. Cage’s ‘music’ becomes theatre. Concretist poems become graphic art. Prose becomes poetry or music.11

Perreault’s particular angle on the transformative nature and implied fuidity between forms—where poetry can become prose under what Wanner calls ‘conditions of extreme brevity’ (6)—is another helpful way of understanding the prose poem and accepting it as much for what it is as what it is not. Keeping Wanner’s ‘conditions of extreme brevity’ in mind, the essays in this book also help us review the prose poem not only in relation to various takes on prose poetry, but also in relation to short/ compressed prose and the experiments of prose writers reconfguring borders between genres. For some, a radical approach to the prose poem has been far more in keeping with its nature and story in Britain. Take the view, for example, of documentary maker Humphrey Jennings and poet Charles Madge whose prose poems during their establishment of the twentieth- century British Mass-Observation movement openly rejected generic categorization. Extrapolating from Eliot’s condemnation of the prose

10 Adrian Wanner, Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-story (Northwestern University Press, 2003), 5–6. 11 John Perreault, in Russian Minimalism, 6. 10 J. MONSON poem in ‘The Borderline of Prose’ (1917) where ‘poetry is written in verse and prose is written in prose,’ in the 1930s Madge and Jennings worked together to collate three pieces of prose from novel extracts into reports.12 One of this volume’s contributors, Jeremy Noel-Tod, has written an article on the Mass-Observation movement and prose poetry, called ‘Mass illuminations: Jennings, Madge, Rimbaud and the ‘popular’ prose poem’. The article gives the reader another context and perspective towards understanding the role of poetry and the prose poem in British society, and helps us think about the possibilities of the prose poem when found in prose and literally extracted from the every-day, rather than written within recognisable poetic parameters by a poet:

For the left-wing Madge and Jennings, though, the idea of a poetry liberated from the restraints of verse form, lyric voice and logical argument had opened up the possibility of democratically transcribing, rather than authorially ‘inscrib[ing]’, the poetic consciousness of a people. In ‘Poetic Description and Mass-Observation’, Madge presented three pieces of prose ‘collected’ by Jennings – an extract from a novel, a Pandaemonium- style account of an industrial discovery, and a Mass-Observer’s report – and made his case for the latter as a method that produced ‘a poetry which is not, as at present, restricted to a handful of esoteric performers.’13

Irrespective of whether we are or are not in agreement that scientifc, journalistic or narrative-based writing can be guiding disciplines towards prose poetry, what we can take from Noel-Tod’s article is the signifcance of a social movement in Britain that helped re-shuffe categorical rules used to organise and separate genres. As a social experiment collecting every-day details of people’s lives in Britain, rendering them in the form of short pieces and presenting them as ‘reports’ otherwise considered prose poems, the Mass-Observation movement sheds a unique light on the story of British

12 “Jennings actually planned to call a volume of his poems of the 1930s that never came out, Popular Narratives, and in any case he habitually ascribed his prose poems of the 1930s to the genre of ‘reports’. The notion of the poem as ‘report’ and of the poet as ‘reporter’ is one of the things that links Madge’s and Jennings’s procedures as Surrealist writers with their activities as Mass-Observers.” Extract from: Bourgeois News: Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge, Rod Mengham. This piece frst appeared in New Formations, 44 (Autumn 2001): 26–33. 13 Jeremy Noel-Tod, “Mass Illuminations: Jennings, Madge, Rimbaud and the ‘Popular’ Prose Poem,” Critical Quarterly, 57 (2015): 51–65, https://doi:10.1111/criq.12209. 1 INTRODUCTION 11 prose poetry. Indeed, I would recommend any student or researcher of prose poetry to read the ‘reports’ of Madge and Jennings, as part of a contextual understanding of defning moments and infuences in the history of the British prose poem. Their approach, in turn, helps us continue to question the accepted terms around distinctions between prose and poetry: namely, sentence and paragraph or line, metre and stanza.14 Whatever your understanding of the prose poem’s nature or formation, it is important to understand that the prose poem does not just cross literary boundaries, and neither is it simply a meeting between one genre and the next; it is a dialogue between a host of other disciplines and recognised polarities. The genre-breaking or blending is a natural result of the form’s relationship with its content, whether it is science meets art, journalism meets essay, dream meets reality, politics meets every-day bus-stop conversation, object meets thought, animal, human, space, landscape and so on. Perhaps because there are so many ways of regarding the prose poem and the processes by which the prose poem can be made, the form defes a single, satisfying defnition. Although it seems entirely appropriate to think about it from all of these different angles, thoughts and disciplines, would it be enough simply to call it a poem in sentences, without the use of the traditional poetic line and line-breaks? Or, as many understand it, short prose? This latter comparison is not just particular to British

14 See Simon Armitage’s online discussion, “Where is British poetry today? British Academy Literature Week 2013”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v LchDRe8HF40. = Armitage outlines what goes on behind the scenes of poetry competitions and mainstream poetry publishers in the UK, and how dated, entrenched rules of poetry are homogenising rather than refecting the diversity of contemporary British poetry. Armitage says: “Poetry prizes are not always a good indicator or barometer of the current trends and many voices and styles that are being practiced in British poetry today … Winning poems and non-winning poems according to Forward, Eliot, Costa and UK’s main individual poetry prizes, tend to conform to a kind of industry standard over the last couple of decades, outlined recently by Nick Laird in a comment piece in The Guardian. Essentially he disparaged poems with: Illuminated initial letters in the shape of herons, poems in italics or capitals, handwritten poems, poems in any ink other than black, poems centrally justifed, poems about pets, poems printed on top of photographs of pets, and so on and so forth. By extension, winning poems would be those clinging to the left hand margin like a non-swimmer at the side of the baths with stanzas in either military or dance troupe formation using recognised systems of punctuation and grammar.” He continues: “what we fnd however, if we widen the lens, is a poetic landscape far more varied and divergent than those prizes and the fve mainstream poetry publishers would have us believe”. 12 J. MONSON prose poetry, but also applies to the prose poem across many borders: in Japan, through its kinship with haibun and haiku; in Russia, through the short parables of the anti-story and Russian Minimalism; through to the short prose of key European and English Modernists. It could be argued that, even today, the prose poem is more popular now due in part to the rise of the short form—fash fction, short prose, micro-fction, the short- short, the six word story—rather than due to any fundamental or rigid proximity to poetry. Whether viewed through a prosaic or poetic lens, this book is far more interested in the prose poem’s existence—the form’s prevalence in Britain—rather than in its absence or misconstrued identity. As a result, the book moves defnitely and clearly towards where we can fnd prose poetry, and engages with the impetus of contemporary prose poets. Beginning in the nineteenth century and moving through to the twenty- frst, the contributors examine the story and history of the British prose poem and how the contexts in which it has appeared, and the individuals who have praised or defamed it, have served to disable and, more importantly, enable its popularity. The book is divided into fve parts. In Part I, The Story of the British Prose Poem, three essays set the stage. The contributors discuss the prose poem’s overarching story and history from the nineteenth century through to today, and how, as David Caddy refects, the prose poem has gone from a debatably ‘hidden’ form in English poetry to a signifcantly emerging one. Caddy’s opening essay is, in many ways, a preview of the entire book and a follow-on from this Introduction. It mirrors the arc of the book’s narrative, refecting on the compromised identity and role of the prose poem in English literature and ends with the resurgence of British prose poetry. Margueritte Murphy’s crucial essay then places the beginnings of the British prose poem in the context of early modernism and opens up questions of the prose poem’s possibilities and relevance within modern advances in technology, thinking and expression. Robert Vas Dias offers a lucid, detailed narrative and bridging history of the form’s travels between signifcant transatlantic fgures and movements in modernist and contemporary literature. Part II, The Story’s Early Narrators, focuses ever more closely on particular modernists in fction and drama. Michael O’Neill takes us back to go forward by examining Virginia Woolf, Charles Baudelaire and William Carlos Williams. His essay enables the reader to view the British prose poem succinctly through three of its most signifcant infuences 1 INTRODUCTION 13 in French, American and English literature. Jane Goldman focuses on Virginia Woolf, whose short fctions are discussed for their commonality with prose poetry. Here, Goldman crucially examines the aesthetic and political stakes in claiming Woolf as a poet in prose, rather than as a poetic novelist. Next, Michel Delville eloquently illuminates a little- known but signifcant corner of Joyce, while Vidyan Ravinthiran refreshes our reading of Eliot and ‘Hysteria’, and raises critical questions around the prose poem’s form in relation to content and around gender in relation to form. Finally, Scott Annett re-examines Beckett’s short prose piece How it is, focusing on Beckett’s ‘syntax of weakness’, and offering the reader an original perspective on one of modernism’s most intensely regarded and scrutinised fgures. If Part II examines the pivotal role these well-known authors played within the prose poem’s development within modernism, Part III, By Name or by Nature?, inves- tigates further twentieth- and twenty-frst-century writers and fgures who have fundamentally infuenced its prevalence in modern British literature, including Seamus Heaney, Mark Ford, Geoffrey Hill, Claudia Rankine, Peter Riley, Simon Armitage and Vahni Capildeo. The success of their infuence has not been without questions and misunderstandings over the name and nature of the work itself, however. These necessary and incisive essays by Alan Wall, Andy Brown, Anthony Caleshu, Jeremy Noel-Tod and Owen Bullock reframe, challenge and resitu- ate our understanding or assumptions about the form, the name, the poets, the works, the criticism around the works, and the form’s relation to broader questions of diversity and boundaries. Their questions, their particular references to counter-forms, identity, genre, divisions, race, sex, place, culture and society, expand our knowledge of the prose poem, refresh preconceptions about the work of these authors and encourage us to revisit past and contemporary writers. In Part IV, Other Voices, Other Forms, Luke Kennard compels us towards Surrealist prose poetry and dynamically revisits David Gascoyne’s repertoire, while Ian Seed delves into the nonsense and wonder of Jeremy Over, offering not only a rare discussion of Over’s work in this context, but also usefully including an interview with Over himself. In this section, too, Nikki Santilli and Peter Robinson explore the role of music and the prose poem. Santilli contributes an unprecedented essay on jazz and the prose poem, pointedly illustrated with prose poems by Roy Fisher and Patience Agbabi, while Peter Robinson focuses exclusively on Fisher’s The Ship’s Orchestra to give a detailed and inspired essay in which writer and reader alike can appreciate this work specifcally 14 J. MONSON in the context of British prose poetry. These two essays also pair well in their direct and indirect respect for Baudelaire’s famous ambition for the prose poem—now almost a mantra in the form’s archives—of a ‘poetic prose that is musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness’.15 Part V, Thinking Back, Writing Forward, is the book’s pedagogical and biographical section in which Patricia Debney and Michael Rosen conclude with material that is moving, useful and motivating. Between them, they afford the reader the opportunity to think specifcally about the form in relation to mortal- ity, trauma, change and education—to consider the next generation and the prose poem, while refecting on their own personal experience. In the twenty-frst century we have teachers, critics, students, future voices and writers combining to explore its potential and raise awareness of its relevance. Debney currently teaches a dedicated prose poetry module at BA level; this is unique in the UK. Rosen writes prose poetry for both children and adults; his recognisable output and reach to both audiences is an unusual and important chapter in the story of the prose poem. This section concludes the underlying movement of the book—reaching back into the prose poem’s past to understand, recognise and celebrate its present and future. Indeed, the subjects of this book, as well as the essayists themselves, are writers who have practiced, or continue to practice, teach, edit, criticise, promote, market and publish the prose poem. The shift in the prose poem’s increasing acceptance is at the hands of all of them. In other words, the pedagogical debates are inseparable from the decisions made in publishing and the critical, academic and biographical conversations. Prose poetry is making a slow, but encouraging appearance at all levels of education and it is as important for the genre to be given room pedagogically and through practice as it is to be given more space in literary criticism. This turn in attitude or approach to the prose poem has been aided by several important moments in its recent history. Notably, in 2015 the Forward Prize was awarded to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, interchangeably referred to as a lyric essay, a prose poem, or, at

15 Indeed, many of the essayists in the book reference Baudelaire, still widely considered the pioneer of the prose poem in nineteenth-century France, and it is important to think again about a “pioneer” of the form and where that remains useful or misleading in our understanding of how it functions within literature today. 1 INTRODUCTION 15 least, boundary-bending and positively celebrated for its straddling of forms, rather than criticised for not knowing where to put its feet. Citizen was also short-listed for the T.S. Eliot prize; through this level of exposure, yet more conversations about prose poetry have continued and started. Simon Armitage’s collection, Seeing Stars (Faber & Faber 2010) was discussed and reviewed as either prose poetry or story poems on many occasions; the author himself did not categorize the book as such, but it is signifcant that so many readers did and still do. In summary, while the tentative beginnings of prose poetry in English Literature can date back as far as Anglo-Saxon literature, the actual story and history of the British Prose Poem only starts surfacing from the nineteenth-century onwards through the creative and critical work of the Romantics, Decadents and Symbolists, Modernists and Surrealists then experimenting with the form. Throughout, writers began consciously to address the borders and futile distinctions between prose and poetry and to start the necessary conversations around hybrid or blended genres and interdisciplinary methods. Today, writers and critics focus these ideas around fusion, crossover, mergence and shifting borders, and put them into unprecedented practice—consequently, the British prose poem today is comfortably at its most successfully marginal. The necessary questions and experiments in poetry and prose fashioned by the previous century’s writers continue to play their part in diversifying voices, styles and genres within British literature generally. We acknowledge those writers as a fundamental part of the prose poem’s successes: whether writing ‘prose poems’ in name, these writers’ supple and sharp- eyed movements between poetry and prose have taught us how to go one stage further, and have helped establish the prose poem as a genre and form in its own right. Poetic prose, fash fction and short prose may continue to be part of the way we try and understand the prose poem, but the rise of the contemporary British prose poem in practice and critique is making these comparisons less engaging and relevant as we gather increasingly diverse examples within prose poetry itself and appreciate what it is doing differently. Signifcantly, the prose poem—as a form which naturally opens up discussions around fusion, division, boundaries, migration, in-between places, cross-gender and a host of related terms and subjects— is being discovered as an increasingly pertinent and manageable container in which to explore and probe ongoing and complex issues and themes. Indeed, the rapidly growing archives, as well as the rise in current debates and performances of prose poetry, cannot but help shore up our ideas and questions around the British prose poem when it comes to questions of 16 J. MONSON identity, form and status—for now and the future. To this end, the essays in this collection are not only a narrative map of the British prose poem and its vibrant existence in this country, but a sustained dialogue with its relevant and indispensable global heritage. PART I

The Story of the British Prose Poem CHAPTER 2

‘Hidden’ Form: The Prose Poem in English Poetry

David Caddy

The view that prose poetry evolved through French poetry is a partial one.1 Such a perspective doubtless has its origins in the impact of that evolution on American, Polish and other traditions. Certainly, there is a distinct line of development through Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit (1842), Charles Baudelaire’s immensely popular Petits Poèmes en prose (1869), and on through Rimbaud, Laforgue, Mallarmé to Gertrude Stein, the Surrealists—especially Francis Ponge and Max Jacob, all of whom found it a useful tool in the quest for imaginative liberation. These modernist poets have their equivalents in the German and Spanish traditions, as well as later examples in Greek, Russian, English and Japanese. Early English modernists appear to have followed T.S. Eliot’s view that this was a no man’s land for the aspiring poet, who should be concerned with formal verse. An alternative viewpoint had

1 David Caddy, “Hidden Form: The Prose Poem in English Poetry.” Previously published in Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry, ed. Tom Chivers (Penned in the Margins, 2010), 103–13. Permission by the author to use with any necessary editing has been granted.

D. Caddy (*) Portman Lodge, Durweston, Blandford Forum, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 19 J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_2 20 D. CADDY been suggested by Shelley’s observation that the King James Bible was an example of prose as poetry. Indeed, English mainstream poets seem to have regarded the prose poem as a peculiarly foreign affair and one to be avoided, apart from those times when there was a public questioning of identity and language. I do not think that we would have seen a prose poem such as Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945) published, for example, in 1925 or 1955, when the literary establishment and publishers were less open and frmly anti-internationalist. Indeed, Smart’s work, reissued in 1966, became a classic in the 1960s and 1970s when it was possible to read the prose poems of Baudelaire, Neruda, Paz, Kenneth Patchen, the Surrealists and the Beats, as well as the open-feld poetics of Charles Olson. There was also interest in the work of David Jones, and his epic prose poem about the First World War, In Parenthesis (1937), at this time. It is this re-emergence of the prose poem, and its possibilities, into English poetry that I wish to discuss. The prose poem can be seen as a site of struggle and potential subversion within an evolving and shifting variety of poetic forms and discussion of those forms. It is part of a counter-discourse through its lack of general visibility within mainstream English poetry. There are very few histories of the English prose poem, and a relative lack of essays and journals devoted to the subject. Yet, it has been a constant that has been seemingly re-discovered and developed by individual late modernist and avant-garde poets and writers. The origin of that struggle can be traced from Oscar Wilde’s description of his so-called ‘obscene’ letter to Lord Alfred Douglas as a ‘prose poem’ in 1893 and subsequent association with French decadence, sexual deviance and immodesty in the mind of the English reading public. This was reinforced and clarifed by T.S. Eliot’s 1917 essay, ‘The Borderline of Prose,’2 based upon his criticism of Richard Aldington’s The Love of Myrrhine and Konallis and other Prose Poems (1917). The essay essentially concerns defnition and possibility. More generally, it can be linked to his aversion to Ernest Dowson and Oscar Wilde’s appropriation of French symbolism. Eliot recognised the ‘unexplored possibilities’ of both poetry and prose, but urged writers to write one or the other

2 See also T.S. Eliot’s 1917 essay “Refections on Vers Libre” and 1936 introduction to Djuna Barnes’ poetic novel, Nightwood, which he claimed was not poetic prose as it did not have suffcient rhythm and music. 2 ‘HIDDEN’ FORM: THE PROSE POEM IN ENGLISH POETRY 21 and not mix them. What constitutes the borderline and boundaries of poetry and prose thus became, and remains, a continuing debate. The prose poem substantially entered English poetry through the impact of French symbolism and early modernism. I recall my own discovery of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen translated by Louis Varése (New Directions, 1970) in 1975, tracking down his Wine and Hashish poems, and my fascination with this alien genre.3 There has been a continuous interaction since then as English poets have fed off and entered into subsequent French poetic discourse, and French translations have arrived in England. A partial list since Dowson and Wilde would include Samuel Beckett, David Gascoyne, Norman Cameron, Charles Tomlinson, Roy Fisher, Peter Redgrove, Lee Harwood and John Ash. The prose poem—often associated with the modern world, unoffcial language and thought—can, through its hybrid nature, present unsettling and unfamiliar aspects of that world, which these poets have seized upon. The prose poem, seen here as a poem without line-breaks, retains the tension between line and sentence structure without the use of line-endings. It has the potential to build pace, rhythm and music, and to produce meaning as much as free verse, only it has to generate tension, drama and crises through sentence structure, relationship and language use alone. It is, in a sense, a freedom to open possibilities and to move away from a stultifying rigidity and closure. Eliot objected to the pseudo-archaic style of the Decadent prose poem and, by implication, indicated that the prose poem could not rely upon only emulating the musicality of verse in one narrative. Alternatives needed to be found. His own effort, the prose poem ‘Hysteria’, does show the way towards fabu- lism in its use of burlesque and fantasy. Notwithstanding, Eliot’s censure, the apparent failure of the Decadent prose poem, led to clear thresholds in English poetry in the 1920s and 1930s. Clearly, later, the Movement and their successors have a dualistic attitude to the questions of identity and the formal constraints of language and verse that runs counter to an opening up of the world and a discovery of variance through language. Don Paterson’s T.S. Eliot Lecture, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’ (2004), is

3 For an interesting discussion of the impact of Thomas De Quincey on Baudelaire and the development of the prose poem, see N. Santilli, Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature (USA: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 87–97. 22 D. CADDY shot through with it: ‘Only plumbers can plumb, roofers roof and drum- mers drum; only poets can write poetry.’4 I mentioned that the prose poem is part of a counter-discourse. I think that this can be seen, in part, in the criticism of Roy Fisher and his prose poem The Ship’s Orchestra (1966).5 Up until recently (and including this volume), there has been limited attention paid to Fisher’s poem in light of prose poetry. In the critical volume on Fisher edited by John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson, Robert Sheppard in his essay refers to the work as ‘the nearest Fisher has approached to prose fction’.6 Similarly, Robert Sheppard in his study The Poetry Of Saying neglects to include this major work in his discussion of Fisher.7 There is no mention in Sean O’Brien’s The Deregulated Muse,8 or by Andrew Duncan in Origins of the Underground.9 Santilli and Robinson both invaluably discuss the poem in the tradition of prose poetry later in this volume but, here, I want briefy to highlight the key qualities that render it as a classic of its kind within prose poetry. There is a high degree of poetic technique in the form of rhythmic compression and musicality in sentences of varying length with considerable tension, drama and varying thematic repetition. It has a narrative symmetry that prompts memories of reading Kafka and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. There is, for example, pressure from the narrator to fnd unity and to become another: ‘To be somebody else: to be Amy’, and ‘If only we could all play together on one single instrument!’10 The exact location of the musicians within the ship narrative is a state of mind. All the action takes place in the mind of a fexible character that has authentic piano player indeterminacy. He is a drinker, seer, liar, slacker, trying to fnd his place as a musician at sea in a band

4 Don Paterson, “The Dark Art of Poetry,” T.S. Eliot Lecture, 2004, https://www.poet- rylibrary.org.uk/news/poetryscene/?id 20. = 5 Roy Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra (London: Fulcrum Press, 1966). 6 Robert Sheppard, “Making Forms with Remarks: The Prose,” in The Thing about Roy Fisher, ed. John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 134. 7 Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents 1950–2000 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 77–102. 8 Sean O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British & Irish Poetry (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1998), 112–22. 9 Andrew Duncan, Origins of the Underground: British Poetry between Apocryphon and Incident Light 1933–79 (Cambridge: Salt, 2008), 62–70. 10 Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra, 43, 44. 2 ‘HIDDEN’ FORM: THE PROSE POEM IN ENGLISH POETRY 23 that is not allowed to play. His view is partial, cubist. It is at once bohemian, quirky and in the twilight of sensory perception:

Think of what all the people you see taste like and you’d go mad: all those leaping, billowing tastes through the world, like a cemetery turned suddenly into damp bedsheets with the wind under them. So the possible taste of a person is a small thing, just a ficker of salt, putrescence, potatoes, old cardboard across the mind, behind the words, behind the manners. And the actual taste, if you go after it, is something that’s always retreating; even if it overwhelms, there’s an enormous stretch of meaninglessness in it, like the smell of the anaesthetist’s rubber mask in the frst moments – it ought to mean, it ought to mean; but how can anything mean that? There must be a taste about me that could be sensed by others. Somebody as skilled as a dog could recognise it as mine; yet I cannot. If I try to get it from myself I just get the double feeling of tasting and being tasted all in one, like being in a room with an important wall missing. Hold hands with myself as with another person; the hands disappear from my jurisdiction. Looking down, I see moving effgies; the hands that feel are some way off, invisible. There is an image of me that I can never know, held in common by certain dogs.11

It is intensely physical and shot through with poetic externalisations. Thus, Merrett’s saxophone is a husk and Amy’s trombone is an axe.12 In essence, the poetry and prose are woven together through the mutability of the narrator seeing from ‘far down’ the ship’s superstructure and seeing the world of the ship ‘like cake’. He gets drunk, vomits, sees a mer- maid, hears Amy play the trombone, and sees the ship as a structural and purposive unity proceeded with music. However, that is not how it is. The musicians do not play and the ship is not a unity, and the musicians sink further into themselves and into a world of claustrophobia and para- noia. The ship becomes a symbol of societal constraint and the musicians clearly want to break free and play.13 Again, the poetry bursts through the prose as fne-tuned externalisations of inner emotions. The narrator is ‘something that has been pushed out of Amy’s body’, with ‘no legs’, ‘no arms or hands’, and ‘pushed out of Merrett’s body in his sleep’ with

11 Ibid., 11–12. 12 Ibid., 8. 13 Ibid., 39. 24 D. CADDY

‘no head’ and thinks he is yellow.14 He contracts to this limbless creature that can journey between ‘Amy’s breasts by caterpillar tractor.’15 The heightened poetic language serves to subvert the prose through the mutable and refractive narrative producing, at once, a shocking and surrealistic poem. Prose poetry seems to have evolved out of sentence structure long before it was designated as such and interrogated by Eliot’s either/or thinking. The Surrealists and Ethnopoets seem to have no trouble opening the reader to new possibility. As an early example of this trend, consider the poem The Nine Herbs Charm, featured in Jerome Rothenberg’s 1968 anthology Technicians of the Sacred (347–349) as a poem.16 This tenth-century Anglo-Saxon magic text, with ingredients from and parallels in German and Norse, has been translated with and without line breaks. It relates to paganism and mythology, and doubtless has been subjected to Christian interference; it takes the reader into another world and has power as poetry when chanted aloud. It is this quality that marks it as one of the earliest prose poems and reminds us of the potential connection and connotation that a prose poem can muster:

A worm came creeping, he tore a man in two, then Woden took nine Glory-Twigs, then struck the adder, that it few apart into nine bits. … Woden established the nine herbs and sent them into the seven worlds, for the poor and the rich, a remedy for all, it stands against pain, it fghts against poison, it avails against three and against thirty, against foe’s hand and against noble scheming, against enchantment of vile creatures.17

Prose poetry was certainly formed as a hybrid to shock and innovate against poetic tradition. Once the idea of introducing non-literary prose into poetry had been accepted as a form of modernist subversion, then the genre spread as a strategy and innovation kicked into the extent that,

14 Ibid., 46. 15 Ibid., 50. 16 Bill Griffths’ version of the The Nine Herbs Charm (Tern Press, 1981) emphasises its sound and prose qualities. Moreover, Griffths’ Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic (Anglo-Saxon Books, 1996) makes a case for many Old English texts as list poems that can be translated with or without line breaks. Griffths, of course, was a poet intensely concerned with questions of identity, language and power. 17 https://www.wapedia.mobi/en/Anglo-Saxon_paganism. 2 ‘HIDDEN’ FORM: THE PROSE POEM IN ENGLISH POETRY 25 by the 1980s, it became a growth area; by the 1990s, it was an established way of writing poetry in American poetry. The prose poem in England has never really disappeared. However, it is currently enjoying a renaissance in Britain, with expansion of possibilities and recognition. Younger poets such as Luke Kennard, Vahni Capildeo, Patricia Debney and Elisabeth Bletsoe have joined older poets such as Gavin Selerie, Elizabeth Cook, Peter Riley, Brian Catling, Martin Stannard, Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey in this revival. Kennard won an Eric Gregory Award for his prose poem collection The Solex Brothers (Stride, 2005) and his second book, The Harbour Beyond The Movie (Salt, 2007), was nominated for the 2007 Forward Poetry Prize. His third collection of prose poems, The Migraine Hotel (Salt, 2009), has seen Kennard gain more critical recognition. Todd Swift, for example, in Poetry London 65, credits Kennard with introducing ‘an entirely new and distinct style to poetry in the UK—one capable … of handling any subject or language it wants to’.18 While it is not entirely new, one immediately thinks of Martin Stannard’s deadpan humour and wide range, and Gary Boswell’s idiosyncratic comic monologues, as well as many others, as being precursors; it is clearly distinct and seemingly more acceptable. Kennard has successfully applied French and American prose poem strategies into an English idiom. Here is the beginning of ‘A Dog Descends’:

Before I was born the seer predicted, ‘You will be inaudible in the laughter of many doctors.’ When I was born they tied a red ribbon around my ankle and glued fur onto my back so that my blind father could tell the difference between me and the dog – a hairless breed. This didn’t work as the fur just wouldn’t stay on, so I had to learn to touch-type whilst drinking from a dog bowl and sleeping amid the scraps. Mother kept saying, ‘Father knows best.’ When I protested, father would scream, ‘WILL SOMEONE SHUT UP THAT INFERNAL TALKING DOG?’ When the dog barked my father would shout, ‘WILL SOMEONE TEACH THAT INFERNAL BOY TO SPEAK?’19

This combines fable and narrative into tight comic lines that are self-contained and engaging. Kennard can be overtly self-conscious and

18 Todd Swift, “Catering to the Perfumed Cannibal,” Poetry London 65 (Spring 2010). 19 Luke Kennard, The Migraine Hotel (Cambridge: Salt, 2009), 48. 26 D. CADDY self-deprecating in the manner of Dave Allen or Gerald Locklin and, like them, can be very funny. The prose poem is susceptible to a wide range of strategies, as shown by Brian Clements and Janey Dunham’s Introduction to the Prose Poem. This American anthology, with English contributors such as Rupert Loydell, Geraldine Monk and Gavin Selerie, identifes twenty-four strategies ranging from anecdote, object, image, aphorism, list, repetition, fable and on, to surreal imagery/narration, rant, essay, epistle, monologue, dialogue, hybrid, sequence and so on. It also shows in the structural analogue strategy section how the prose poem can absorb a wide range of discourse.20 English poets today are grasping the possibilities that the prose poem offers and the form shows little sign of disappearing in the UK, or anywhere else. On this note, I will end the essay with two examples by writers carrying the form forward in this country and abroad, as well as taking it in new directions. The frst is from Elisabeth Bletsoe’s ‘Birds of the Sherborne Missal’ sequence in her Landscape from a Dream collection,21 which has been anthologised in Carrie Etter’s Infnite Difference anthology.22 Bletsoe’s narratives weave around the Sherborne Missal’s marginalia of birds employing religious iconography and local observation in short and very short vibrant sentences. The second is from Vahni Capildeo’s ‘Person Animal Figure’ featured in her Undraining Sea collection and the dramatic interior monologues render the world in a fresh and exciting way, managing to be simultaneously breathtaking and mildly disturbing. Bletsoe and Capildeo herald the form as a genre in its own right, while retaining a respectful nod to its relationship with other forms; it is this fttingly dualistic approach that may well be key to ensur- ing a secure place for the prose poem in British literature:

20 Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham, eds., An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Western Connecticut State University, Firewheel Editions, 2009), 233–54. 21 Elisabeth Bletsoe, Landscape from a Dream (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008), 49–57. 22 Carrie Etter, ed., Infnite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010), 85–86. Mentioned here as an important and complementary resource to this volume, in terms of other exemplary female writers practising prose poetry and experimental poetry in the UK. 2 ‘HIDDEN’ FORM: THE PROSE POEM IN ENGLISH POETRY 27

From ‘Birds from the Sherborne Missal’: VIII. ‘Heyrun, Heron (Ardea cinerea)’ A page that encompasses the whole sky folds down to the shape of a heron, fying. Avian blood-cells a reliquary from cretaceous days; the serpentine throat, the gist of reptile. Pterodactylar span devouring land gifted by Athelstan as barter for the soul’s yearly mass; to Aenna’s Pool, the Coombe of the Pigsty, Ecgulf’s Tree, Aetta’s Dean, ‘for all time’. Pastures garlanded with wire & electricity. Barbed & tanged. Bird fesh that waxes & wanes in lunar synchrony with the lady’s smock, vacilla- tory cress-hordes at the margins of the parish water-meadow. Fons limpi- dus. River-ephemera gather at Smear’s Bridge: pollen spicules, forets of eltrot, a meniscoid bulging. The circumspect gaze; irides chrome-yellow, orbits naked, livid. From the banks of the Yeo, a stone frieze of three Magi, one bearing apparently a head, severed. A boy bringing to school a heron killed while attempting to swallow a live vole; the children of Bradford Abbas being “deeply interested in this riverside tragedy.”

water glancing light; the long patience.23 * From ‘Person Animal Figure’ The animal who kisses persistently is much to be avoided. The more it is avoided, the more it comes back. It will seek out its prey in the middle of dreams about castles in nowhere, and make its catch before the staircase in the upper servants’ hall. The animal is known to feel like a peach that has been rained on. It carpets itself and plasters itself but insists that it does not cling. The degree of wildness that characterizes this animal has yet to be ascertained. It announces itself with popping sounds like a champagne bottle being opened on the roof. To determine the whereabouts of this animal, it is advised to make a fresh cup of tea and leave it about as if forgotten. With a loud slurp the top of the tea will be taken off. A second slurp, if permitted – and it seldom can be avoided – will put away half the cup. That is the way that the animal who kisses persistently strengthens itself in preparation for the attack.24

23 Elisabeth Bletsoe, “Birds of the Sherborne Missal,” in Landscape from a Dream (Exeter: Shearsman, 2008). This extract from Etter, Infnite Difference, 85–86. 24 Vahni Capildeo, “Person Animal Figure,” in Undraining Sea (Norwich: Egg Box, 2009), 57. 28 D. CADDY

Works Cited Bertrand, Aloysius, and Jean Palou. Gaspard de la nuit: fantaisies a la maniere de Callot et Rembrandt. Paris: La Colombe, 1962. Bletsoe, Elisabeth. Landscape from a Dream. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008. Capildeo, Vahni. Undraining Sea. Norwich: Egg Box, 2009. Charles, Baudelaire 1821–1867. Petits poemes en prose / [by] Charles Baudelaire. Robert KoppÉd. critique / par Robert Kopp. Paris: Librarie J. Corti, 1969. Clements, Brian, and Jamey Dunham, eds. An Introduction to the Prose Poem. Danbury: Western Connecticut State University, Firewheel Editions, 2009. Duncan, Andrew. Origins of the Underground: British Poetry between Apocryphon and Incident Light 1933–79. Cambridge: Salt, 2008. Etter, Carrie, ed. Infnite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010. Fisher, Roy. The Ship’s Orchestra. London: Fulcrum Press, 1966. Kennard, Luke. The Migraine Hotel. Cambridge: Salt, 2009. O’Brien, Sean. The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British & Irish Poetry. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1998. Santilli, N. Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem English Literature. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Sheppard, Robert. “Making Forms with Remarks: The Prose.” In The Thing about Roy Fisher, edited by John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. ———. The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents 1950–2000. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. Swift, Todd. “Catering to the Perfumed Cannibal.” Poetry London 65 (Spring 2010), http://www.poetrylondon.co.uk/magazines/65/article/ catering-to-the-perfumed-cannibal. CHAPTER 3

The British Prose Poem and ‘Poetry’ in Early Modernism

Margueritte S. Murphy

In ‘Songs of London,’ Mr. Furst has quite a personal note; he is caustic and humorous, gay, grave and sentimental, and can be read with pleasure. Most of his sketches would read better if they had been written as little sketches in prose. In Paris this is an art by itself. —F.S. Flint, ‘Recent Verse,’ The New Age, February 11, 1909

I open with this quotation from the English Imagist poet F.S. Flint, regarding a now forgotten work, as a telling remark about a role the prose poem could play at this time. Flint sees a revisionary function for these ‘little sketches’, a re-creation through casting off versifcation. There is also the intimation in ‘sketch’ that the work has a close representational relationship with a subject. Flint, like many poets and critics unhappy with the current state of poetry, saw a need to depart radically from the vague and sentimental verse of the late Victorians, and to revi- talize English poetry as he reviewed ‘Recent Verse’ in issue after issue in The New Age. The prose poem became one vehicle for such reform that, with vers libre, put the entire notion of what constitutes poetry in question.

M. S. Murphy (*) Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY, USA

Although the prose poem in Great Britain frst came into prominence during the fn de siècle, the form takes on a more experimentalist, avant- garde cast with the next generation, especially with poets whose work appears in the little magazines of the frst two decades of the twentieth- century. As the genre raised questions about the very nature of ‘poetry’, consequent re-defnitions opened the way to further innovation. Thus, the modernist prose poem would serve not only as a vehicle of formal experiments, but afforded the exploration of what would constitute ‘poetry’ for the new century as writers strove to represent a new ‘real’ in a manner informed by twentieth-century sensations and sensibilities, and the experience of urban modernity. The early twentieth-century prose poem in England had a legacy that perhaps was more of an obstacle to further development than an encouragement. As I discuss in A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery, the prose poem in English in the 1890s often relied on archaic diction, conjuring past eras for poetic effect, and borrowed Baudelairean themes like ennui, escapism through drugs, and the lure of the exotic. Unlike Baudelaire’s prose poems, however, the British prose poems of this era were rarely refections of urban modernity and did not employ the resources of contemporary speech. Perhaps even more damning was the reputation of the prose poem in the wake of Oscar Wilde’s trials. At all three, a letter to Alfred Douglas was presented as evidence; Wilde defended it as a ‘prose poem’ and his conviction exposed the rift between the hegemonic prosaic culture of late nineteenth-century Britain, that of legal briefs and business letters, and the aesthetic productions of Wilde and his circle. Hybrid genres such as the prose poem came under attack; Irving Babbitt condemned them as ‘unmasculine’ for blurring ‘frm distinctions’ in The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (1910). T.S. Eliot was among Babbitt’s students at Harvard, and the conclusion of Babbitt’s book was delivered to his students during the time that Eliot attended Harvard and studied under Babbitt. Eliot himself composed two prose poems but, in 1917, published an attack on the genre, ‘The Borderline of Prose’, in The New Statesman. While Eliot did admire Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and later translated St.-John Perse’s long prose poem Anabase into English, he never took up the form again as a creative writer. Although no major British poet lent prestige to the form in the early twentieth century, many lesser-known poets did write prose 3 THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM 31 poems, many of which appeared in the little magazines of that era. As Julia Nelsen documents, ‘[b]etween 1910 and 1930, the prose poem found a home on the pages of nearly all the “major” little magazines in Britain and the United States’ while few collections of prose poetry in book form were published.1 Such publication suggests alliances with the artistic circles and movements affliated with the journals. They are not always called ‘prose poems’—indeed, they seldom are. Nelsen observes:

Perhaps one of the reasons why many critics have claimed that the form went missing in the early 1900s is because the term prose poem itself largely disappeared. Those writing prose poems for the little magazines rarely employed that label, preferring more ambiguous, inclusive terms to set their texts apart from the poème en prose and refect the pluralistic artistic possibilities of the medium. The titles of the vast majority of prose poems appearing in modernist journals evoke other forms of the language arts, as well as painting and music: Fragments, Impressions, Sketches, Etchings, Prints, Notes, Improvisations.2

Yet, the comparison of prose poems to other art forms dates back to its frst appearance as a genre with Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, the work that Baudelaire claimed as his model in the dedication of Le Spleen de Paris: Petits poèmes en prose. Rimbaud famously referred to his Illuminations as ‘coloured plates’, according to Paul Verlaine.3 The frst major collection of French prose poems translated into English by Stuart Merrill was titled Pastels in Prose, appearing in New York in 1890. Clearly, as many critics have noted, parallels with the other arts, especially the visual arts, have been part of the prose poem’s self-defnition from the start and indicate a particular claim to pictorial representation. Such freedom in labelling, such self-defnition and departure from generic identifcation, also implies a role in literary experimentation. In this essay, I will explore that role. During this time of dissatisfac- tion with the legacy of the previous century, the prose poem as ‘poetry’

1 Julia Nelsen, “Modernist Laboratories: The Prose Poem and the Little Magazines,” Letteratura e letterature 4 (2010): 49. See Nelsen, 49–53, for an enormously helpful over- view of this production and its context in the little magazines of Modernism. 2 Nelsen, “Modernist Laboratories,” 59. 3 See Suzanne Bernard, “Notice,” Illuminations, by Arthur Rimbaud in Oeuvres (Paris: Garnier, 1960), 246. 32 M. S. MURPHY in prose brought the opposition of poetry to prose to the fore, fuelling speculation about what each meant in this new century. The form provided a space for the exploration and production of ‘poetry’ unmoored from the constraints of versifcation, a capacity it shared with free verse. Further, ‘poetry’ in prose form offered a vehicle for capturing the sensation of the modern that seemed to ft the accelerated pace and fragmented sensations of the early twentieth-century city. First, how did discussion of the nature of poetry, much of which revolved around the introduction of vers libre, refect upon the prose poem? Lines are often drawn between poetry and prose to demonstrate that free verse is poetry, not prose, although the meaning of the distinction varies. T.E. Hulme’s ‘Lecture on Poetry’, given in 1908 to The Poets’ Club in London, provides an infuential example of a lecture often deemed foundational to the emergence of Imagism:

To test the question of whether it is possible to have poetry written without a regular metre I propose to pick out one great difference between the two. I don’t profess to give an infallible test that would enable anyone to at once say: ‘This is, or is not, true poetry’, but it will be suffcient for the purposes of this paper. It is this: that there are, roughly speaking, two methods of communication, a direct, and a conventional language. The direct language is poetry, it is direct because it deals in images. The indirect language is prose, because it uses images that have died and become fgures of speech. The difference between the two is, roughly, this: that while one arrests your mind all the time with a picture, the other allows the mind to run along with the least possible effort to a conclusion.4

So, the immediacy of language, its capacity to evoke things directly, is at stake, and Hulme proposes that the vivid, direct image signals poetry as opposed to the dead metaphors of prose. A similar distinction appears in Rhythm, the little magazine edited by John Middleton Murry, in the opening piece of the Spring 1912 issue, ‘The Return to Poetry’ by Laurence Binyon: ‘Prose accepts, poetry rebels. In the prose view of the world all is fxed, matter is fnality; in the poetic view, all is energy,

4 T.E. Hulme, “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” in The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994), 55. 3 THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM 33 relation, change. Prose observes, poetry divines.’5 Here, prose is aligned not only with a static use of language, but also a conventional perspective on the world, even a different epistemology from poetry. As the same issue includes two prose poems in French (‘Voyage’ and ‘Une Vie’ by Claudien), clearly Binyon’s ‘prose’ does not include the prose poem, but the prose of the world, for instance, the journalism that Murry and Katherine Mansfeld excoriate in the next issue: ‘The journalist himself cannot even dream of freedom, for he is the slave of the unreality of his own making.’6 So, ‘poetry’ in prose implies writing in prose form that incorporates the qualities of poetry: ‘direct language’ with ‘arrest[ing]’ images (Hulme); a dynamic, energized and relational take on the ‘world’ (Binyon). Of course, these were not the only re-defnitions. Another way to understand differences among defnitions is to separate the camps rede- fning ‘poetry’ according to the other art form that would serve as model: music (emphasis on rhythm, metricality, recalling Pater’s ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ from The School of Giorgione) or painting (emphasis on image and picture). Undoubtedly, such a division risks oversimplifcation. After all, even Ezra Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’ in Poetry (March 1913) addresses both image and rhythm, or, as F.S. Flint summarizes in the essay that precedes Pound’s in the volume: ‘Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective’, and ‘As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.’7 But, for some practitioners and critics, the musicality of poetic prose was defnitional as opposed to an unmediated presentation of modern life. The American poet Amy Lowell’s ‘polyphonic prose’ is a case in point. In ‘Miss Lowell’s Discovery: Polyphonic Prose’, John Gould Fletcher praises the ‘orchestral quality’ of her work, concluding that ‘it seems ftting that a new name should be given to these poems of hers, which, printed as prose, or as prose and verse interspersed, display all the colors of the chromatic palette.’8 Other critics were less convinced; Harriet

5 Laurence Binyon, “The Return to Poetry,” Rhythm 1.4 (Spring 1912): 1. 6 John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfeld, “The Meaning of Rhythm,” Rhythm 2.5 (June 1912): 19. 7 F.S. Flint, “Imagisme,” Poetry 1.6 (March 1913): 199. 8 John Gould Fletcher, “Miss Lowell’s Discovery: Polyphonic Prose,” Poetry 6.1 (April 1915): 35. 34 M. S. MURPHY

Monroe, in reviewing the second Imagist collection, Some Imagist Poets—An Anthology, remarks that ‘Miss Lowell’s “polyphonic prose” in The Bombardment remains for me scientifc and artifcial, an interesting experiment rather than a new poetic form.’9 Lowell herself attempts distinctions, noting that ‘it is the fashion today to call everything which is without metre vers libre.’ She answers any confusion of verse and prose (of which Fletcher’s remark is an instance) with such a metrical approach, mapping a spectrum of rhythmic distinctions with ‘pure prose and pure poetry’ as the extremes, and ‘metrical prose’ and ‘vers libre’ as ‘steps’ in between.10 In the end, her divisions are at best tendencies: ‘Now as prose is a long curve with very little return, and poetry is a much shorter curve with a very sharp return; so metrical prose may be considered as a slightly more curved line than is usual in prose, with a return beginning to be felt, and vers libre as curving still more markedly, and the return becoming pronounced.’11 T.S. Eliot, in ‘The Borderline of Prose’, takes a similar tack in criticizing Richard Aldington’s prose poems as failures in that they incorporate both prose and verse rhythms. Eliot quotes a passage from a prose poem by Aldington, then critiques the opening phrases: ‘For my sake Eos, in a cloudless sky, gliding from the many- isled sea, must be more tender and more thrilling.’ Eliot objects to the difference between the verse rhythms of ‘For my sake Eos, in a cloudless sky, gliding from the many-isled sea’ and the prose of ‘must be more tender and more thrilling.’ Eliot’s distinctions are even less defned than Lowell’s; he simply labels what are prose rhythms and what are verse to his ear.12 Defning the prose poem according to its rhythms refects a strain of Modernism that turned its critical focus onto the formal aspects of literature.13 It is telling to what degree these sorts of distinctions are a dead end for the Modernist prose poem. In this brief example, Aldington seems to seek poeticity through heightened rhythms and refrain, and

9 Harriet Monroe, Review of Some Imagist Poets—An Anthology, Poetry 6.3 (June 1915): 152. 10 Amy Lowell, “Vers libre and Metrical Prose,” Poetry 3.6 (March 1914): 213. 11 Lowell, “Vers libre and Metrical Prose,” 216. 12 T.S. Eliot, “The Borderline of Prose,” The New Statesman, May 19, 1917, 158. 13 I refer here to a focus directly on literary form itself, not more complex formalisms in which, for instance, the text is seen as ultimately autoreferential, although the impulse towards sequestration of the literary from other writing is shared in these approaches. 3 THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM 35 through an archaic idiom suited to such rhythms.14 After noting the relegation of the previous wave of prose poems to the dustbins of the fn de siècle, Eliot intones:

I have remarked recently a recrudescence of the poem in prose—not only in France, but in England; not only in England, but in America; not only in America, England, and France, for the tide of civilization may now have carried it in the wake of Strindberg and Ibsen to the shores of Japan. It is noticeable that poetry which looks like prose, and prose which sounds like poetry, are assured of a certain degree of odium and success.15

What does it mean for prose to ‘sound like’ poetry? This is, in part, the question Eliot raises in quoting the passage by Aldington, although he leaves it unsettled. Eliot does praise Rimbaud’s Illuminations, while calling them ‘in form, pure prose’: ‘The Illuminations attain their effect by an instant and simple impression, a unity all the more convincing because of the apparent incongruity of images.’16 The emphasis on the instan- taneous recalls Pound’s defnition of an image: ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.’ But Rimbaud’s prose poems are the only examples that Eliot singles out for praise and, as ‘pure prose’, he seems to imply that they are positioned more as an outlier than a model for a burgeoning genre. In other words, prose ‘which sounds like poetry’ may well deserve ‘a certain degree of odium’ in Eliot’s estimation. Clearly, it is the imagistic effects of Rimbaud’s Illuminations that draw Eliot’s commendation, not their form per se. Amy Lowell was, of course,

14 Contemporary critics of using bygone language to invoke poeticity include Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford). In “Impressionism—Some Speculations,” Poetry 2.5 (August 1913), he is critical of ‘literary jargon’ in England which limits vocabulary or diction (178), calling instead for the rendering of modern life in modern terms: “I may really say that, for a quarter of a century, I have kept before me one unfinching aim—to register my own times in terms of my own time, and still more to urge those who are better poets and better prose-writers than myself to have the same aim” (179). Although he is not referring specifcally to prose poems, his attack on the hackneyed and the sentimental is apposite to the prose by Aldington that Eliot quotes. 15 Eliot, “Borderline,” 158. 16 Ibid. As Nelsen points out (“Modernist Laboratories,” 49–50), Helen Rootham’s translations of The Illuminations appeared in several little magazines between 1916 and 1919, so Rimbaud’s prose poems could well serve as examples for poets experimenting with the genre in English. 36 M. S. MURPHY a prominent Imagist, and Aldington fnds similar strengths in her work: in his words, she is ‘a modern poet, … she simply records, “presents” as accurately and as precisely as she knows how, the most interesting moods, the most emotional moments, the most poignant observations of her life, and in doing so she unconsciously records for us her world, etches for us her personality.’17 (Aldington goes on to quote from and particularly praise her prose poem, ‘The Bath.’) My point is that, at a time when the nature of ‘poetry’ itself was being contested and redefned, the ‘prose poem’ served as one point of contestation and, in the process, was redefned as prose in which ‘poetry’—newly defned— appeared. The view that poetry should be composed of images evoking discrete moments and emotional states with utmost directness was in accord with challenges to make modern life the stuff of modern literature. To seek musical qualities in prose complicated the incorporation of contemporary speech into this new poetry. And as the prose poem found its greatest resources in the play with and against other forms of prose,18 metrical or musical qualities were hardly defnitional and were merely a way for some practitioners of the form to assert a traditional notion of poeticity. Here, we might return to Hulme’s early lecture. When speaking of the prose of dead metaphors, Hulme clearly does not have the prose poem in mind. Rather, it is conventional prose, prose discourse that the prose poem may mimic and subvert. To be ‘poetry’, in Hulme’s terms, ‘[t]his new verse resembles sculpture rather than music; it appeals to the eye rather than to the ear. It has to mould images, a kind of spiritual clay, into defnite shapes.’19 This is a Modernist aesthetic, focused on the verbal as visual object, to which this short prose form could also aspire. Indeed, if we frame the British prose poem of Modernism within a broader trend of urban writing, reasons for the valuing of image over sound become clearer, as does the jarring effect of an archaic language that borrows its diction from earlier poetic traditions instead of contemporary speech. Andreas Huyssen, in Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film, describes a genre formation that emerges from the specifc conditions of modernity, especially the ‘crisis

17 Richard Aldington, “The Poetry of Amy Lowell,” The Egoist, July 1, 1915: 110. 18 The argument of A Tradition of Subversion, as well as Richard Terdiman’s and Jonathan Monroe’s studies. 19 Hulme, “Modern Poetry,” 56. 3 THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM 37 of perception and experience’ in rapidly modernizing cities, new reading practices with the growth of newspapers, specifcally the feuilleton form, and new technologies that compete with literature—photography and cinema. The ‘metropolitan miniature’ is ‘a paradigmatic modernist form that sought to capture the feeting and fragmentary experiences of metropolitan life, emphasizing both their transitory variety and their simultaneous ossifcation.’20 Huyssen sets Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Petits poèmes en prose as the point of departure for this genre as a transformation of the ‘impressionistic and discursive urban sketch in the tradition of Mercier’s Tableau de Paris.’21 Huyssen envisions, however, a form that exceeds the poème en prose tradition and encompasses texts by Bloch, Benjamin, Kracauer and Adorno, as well as overtly literary writing by Rilke, Kafka, Benn, Musil and others. Huyssen notes how many of these writers were at a loss to name the form, which ‘emerged as anti- form, then, resistant to the laws of genre as much as to systemic philosophy or urban sociology, crossing the boundaries between poetry, fction, and philosophy, between commentary and interpretation, and, centrally, between the verbal and the visual.’22 This ‘instability of genre’, Huyssen proposes, is due to ‘remediation in reverse’; that is, the reas- sertion of an older medium (literature) before the challenge of a new technology (e.g. photography and flm in the Modernist period) by ‘critically working through what the new medium does and does not do.’23 Hence the prominence of the visual in these short texts, which reveals a representational lack: ‘On the one hand the miniature refected on the prevalence of the new visual media; but on the other it recognized the visual media’s mimetic insuffciency and lack, which it tried to transcend literarily in images made up of words.’24 This tension brings us squarely into the aspirations of Imagism, and how short prose pieces wrestle with mimetic possibility and insuffciency.

20 Andreas Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 3, 5. 21 Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis, 23. 22 Ibid., 11. Like Franco Moretti’s “modern epic,” Huyssen’s “metropolitan miniature” is a “genre” understood only in hindsight, the product of specifc historical conditions, practices, perspectives, epistemologies, and institutions. 23 Ibid., 8. 24 Ibid., 17. 38 M. S. MURPHY

Jessie Dismorr, a visual artist and poet, represents well a practitioner of the prose poem infuenced by a visual aesthetic and committed to avant-garde experimentation. Affliated frst with Murry’s Rhythm, she later signed the Vorticist manifesto. To the second number of BLAST, she contributed both prints (‘The Engine’ and ‘Design’) and prose poems, informed by a Vorticist aesthetic with attention to angles and exaggerated perspectives. Her ‘London Notes’ fts Huyssen’s ‘metropolitan miniature’ quite literally, as it is composed of several short paragraphs designating different places in the city: ‘In Park Lane’, ‘Hyde Park’, ‘The British Museum’, ‘Egyptian Gallery’, ‘The Reading Room’, (the last two as if moving into The British Museum for interior shots), ‘Piccadilly’, ‘Fleet Street.’ It mimics a series of postcards from a day’s excursion with the title replicating the role of photo caption, but the views are hardly conventional. These short prose pieces evoke discrete places from a particular perspective, snapshots from an unusual angle, urban fragments. Here are three of the ‘notes’, the frst, the second, and the seventh and fnal: IN PARK LANE. Long necked feminine structures support almost without grimacing the elegant discomfort of restricted elbows. HYDE PARK. Commonplace, titanic fgures with a splendid motion stride across the parched plateau of grass, little London houses only a foot high huddle at their heels. Under trees all the morning women sit sewing and knitting, their monoto- nous occupation accompanying the agreable muddle of their thoughts. In the Row. Vitality civilized to a needles-point; highly-bred men and horses pass swiftly in useless delightful motion; women walk enamoured of their own accomplished movements. … FLEET STREET. Precious slips of houses, packed like books on a shelf, are littered all over with signs and letters. A dark, agitated stream struggles turbulently along the channel bottom; clouds race overhead. Curiously exciting are so many perspective lines, withdrawing, converging; they indicate evidently something of importance beyond the limits of sight.25

25 Jessie Dismorr, “London Notes,” BLAST 2, July 1915 “War Number,” 66. 3 THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM 39

In the frst ‘note’, architecture and women meld suggesting buildings as confned as women, women rigid as architecture, and necks below elbows to render a distorting perspective. The tension of holding a pose is associated with disguised pain. There is also an insinuation of a shifting dimension: are these buildings reduced to the scale of the feminine body, or are they women blown up to the size of palatial buildings? The second piece, ‘Hyde Park’, begins with a close-up on people that renders the buildings drastically reduced in scale. Yet, the second paragraph returns to a sadly human scale with women seated ‘under trees’ at a ‘monoto- nous occupation.’ The third paragraph begins with a sentence fragment, ‘In the Row’, suggesting a pivoting to another view. Comically insin- uating that the breeding of men and of horses are on a par, this third part focuses again on movement. The overall structure is a descriptive sandwich of motion–stasis–motion, with the feminist subtext of the static reducing women, fguratively, and perhaps literally, to an ‘occupation’, sewing and knitting, that supports the ‘muddl[ing]’ of ‘their thoughts.’ The sequence of ‘cuts’ suggests a flmic medium. In the fnal ‘note’, ‘Fleet Street’, miniaturization occurs through comparison of houses to ‘books on a shelf’, and the framing or containment of a scene by a stream at the bottom and clouds on top, both in motion as if racing against one another, a pattern which repeats the motion– stasis tension of ‘Hyde Park.’ The houses are ‘littered all over with signs and letters’, a sense of how the city is already ‘written’ with the words of advertisements (evocative of Cubist collage). The third paragraph makes evident the tie to the visual arts, with ‘so many perspective lines, withdrawing, converging’ to draw the eye outside this scene, a dynamism that would transcend the pictorial.26 Dismorr’s ‘London Notes’ are not only miniature in form, but a fore- shortened perspective is also part of the perceptual experience of the passer-by in the city that she evokes. London houses are miniaturized both through the perspective taken and through simile, a shelf of books to be read, with the words of advertisement diverting the reader from

26 Nelsen, “Modernist Laboratories,” discerns here an “ekphrasis of a Vorticist painting” (63). 40 M. S. MURPHY other meanings. That the ‘commonplace’ is also ‘titanic’ betrays a secret of the city: the everyday constitutes the new colossus; yet, at the same time, size does not necessarily signify importance. The viewer should mistrust not only the words she reads, but also the apparent dimensions she views. And yet it is the visible through which the city is available for interpretation; the artist/prose poet may tilt the perspective to plumb its realities, read its pain and anxieties, and suggest takes on the city beyond the conventional. The next prose poem in this issue, ‘June Night’, also records moments and scenes in the city, but perceived during a bus ride with a lover.27 Here, the narrator, as if strangely separate from herself and inten- tionally resisting emotion, observes her own reactions minutely. Again, the commodifed city is literally highlighted by the bus’s illuminated advertisements28:

No 43 bus; its advertisements all lit from within, foats towards us like a luminous balloon. We cling to it and climb to the top. Towards the red glare of the illuminated city we race through interminable suburbs. These are the bare wings and corridors that give on to the stage. Swiftness at least is exquisite. But it makes me too emotional. Amazing, these gymnastic agitations of the heart! Your blindness, my friend Rodengo, is your most intelligent attribute.

The narrator is exhilarated by the speed of the ride, yet resists emotions that accelerate apace. The literal speed slows as the bus makes its stops:

27 Peter Brooker, Nelsen, and Miranda Hickman all provide astute feminist readings. Brooker fnds urban landscapes that are a combination of “modernist form with more overt expressions of female sexuality;” see “‘Our London, My London, Your London’: The Modernist Moment in the Metropolis,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 125. Nelsen sees a women artist fnding her voice (“Modernist Laboratories,” 56–57). Hickman, too, reads the prose poem as an allegory of Dismorr’s vocation in choosing Vorticism in order to reject a “debilitating” form of femininity; see “The Gender of Vorticism: Jessie Dismorr, Helen Saunders, and Vorticist Feminism,” in Vorticism: New Perspectives, ed. Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 128. 28 The prose poem covers a page and a half in BLAST 2. I quote only sections and phrases here. 3 THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM 41

We stop for passengers at Regent’s Corner. Here crowds swarm under green electric globes. Now we stop every moment, the little red staircase is besieged. The bus is really too top-heavy. It must look like a great nodding bouquet, made up of absurd fowers and moths and birds with sharp beaks. I want to escape; but Rodengo is lazy and will not stop warbling his infuriating lovesongs. Ribbons of silver fre start into the air, and twist themselves into enormous bows with fringes of tiny dropping stars. Everybody stands up and screams…

The bus as ‘a great nodding bouquet, made up of absurd fowers and moths and birds with sharp beaks’ is comically reduced, but its energy has the capacity to frighten its passengers. Affected by the throb of the vehicle and of her lover’s voice, she fees the bus, seeking ‘[c]ool nor- mality and classicalism.’ The speeding bus on a hot June night and an operatic lover fgure as romanticism, while choosing to walk alone on ‘spacious streets of pale houses’ is the classical: ‘Surely I have had enough of romantics! their temperature is always above 98½, and the accelerated pulse throbs in their touch.’ With her lens on own emotions, she rejects the romantic for the classical, deploying Hulme’s binary from ‘Romanticism and Classicism.’ But, by 1915, and this is the ‘war number’, romanticism has been associated with German culture,29 and thus a strain of thought or cultural movement that eventually led to war. Is emotional restraint an effect of war, a way of saving her integrity as she is besieged by an overly eager lover, an aesthetic choice, or a separation from the crowd who makes the bus ridiculous? In ‘the precincts of stately urban houses’ she chooses prose over ‘poetics’ and ‘restraint’ takes on a positive connotation in association with buildings that she deems ‘the last word of prose’ and ‘inanimate’ teachers. Eventually, she realizes how she does not belong in these quiet precincts:

Now the pool of silence reaches unplumbable depths. My dropping footsteps create widening circles of alarm. After all, I do not know why I should be here, I am a strayed Bohemian, a villa-resident, a native of conditions, half-sordid, half-fantastic. I am the style of a feuilleton cherishing a hopeless passion for Latin prose. This is an interlude of high love-making. I must get back to the life of the thoroughfares to which I belong.

29 The lead “Editorial” in this number, for instance, states “Germany has stood for the old Poetry, for Romance, more stedfastly [sic] and profoundly than any other people in Europe,” followed by an explanation of what this means. See BLAST 2 (July 1915): 5. 42 M. S. MURPHY

Referencing the feuilleton brings in the relationship with the journalistic: the feuilleton is the space of faits divers and serialized novels. She desires, however, ‘Latin prose’, an ironic double-entendre as she has fed her Latin lover.30 While she identifes with ‘the style of the feuilleton’, this is the story of an abandoned romance, not ‘high love-making’ and she feels called ‘back to the life of the thoroughfares to which I belong.’ In other words, this writing, parrying the insipid feuilleton against a high Latinate style, is fnally a prose poetry of the urban streets, a record of disjointed moments and scenes. In Dismorr’s ‘Matinee’, published in The Little Review in 1918, there is again a sense of ars poetica as she claims the dynamic, the in-motion, ‘The static cannot claim my approval. I live in the act of departure.’ She turns her lens on the microscopic, values ‘pattern’ and ‘detail’, and compares this writing to the telegram: ‘I spell happiness out of dots and dashes; a ray, a tone, the insignifcance of a dangling leaf.’ An instance of Huyssen’s ‘remediation in reverse’, the prose flls out the telegraphic code with words that denote image and sound (‘a ray, a tone, the insignifcance of a dangling leaf’), inscribing a feeting moment defned by ‘departure’, the movement from one insight or brief scene to the next, simulating the fickering succession of scenes and images of cinema. In the end, however, she admits the possibility of ossifcation of even this dynamic art: ‘I proclaim life to the end a piece of artistry, essentially idle and exquisite. The trinkets stored within my coffn shall outlast my dust.’31 The power of this fragmentary writing is tied to new sensations in the city and consequent anxieties, and even informs prose poems set elsewhere. John Rodker’s ‘Three Nightpieces’, published in The Little Review in July 1917, depicts three discrete episodes at different moments in the night. The frst ‘nightpiece’ has a somewhat hallucinatory natural setting as the narrator ‘leav[es] the room rapidly’ to ‘go out on the terrace of the house and look over the weald.’ He recalls his youth and ‘wrongs done to this one and that one’ in a confessional tone reminiscent of Baudelaire’s ‘À Une Heure du Matin’ from Le Spleen de Paris.32

30 It is worth noting that some of the translations of “the Latin poets of the Italian Renaissance” by Aldington appeared in prose form in The New Age in the November 28, 1912 and January 9, 1913 issues. 31 Dismorr, “Matinee,” The Little Review 4.11 (March 1918): 31–32. 32 John Rodker, “Three Nightpieces,” The Little Review 4.3 (July 1917): 16. 3 THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM 43

The subject of the pieces is his marital relationship and, in the frst, at eight in the evening he wants distance in reaction to extreme bodily closeness (the closeness made visceral through evocation of his own body odour shifting to an awareness of her scent). Vision fails, however, outside where fnally ‘there is only the dark’ and a cacophonous wilderness.33 The second scene takes place in bed as he awakens to his wife shrieking at about two o’clock in the morning from a nightmare that, when told, accuses him of ‘devilry’ that creates in him a sense of ‘loathing’ for her.34 The third is a narrative of his nightmare on another night, after he ate cucumber at supper. Although the setting of these prose poems is not urban, the experience conveyed feels anxious, fragmentary, with a focus on immediacy, discrete moments, and the narrator’s raw reactions and heightened emotional state. As with Dismorr’s prose poems, there is an observation of emotion that seeks to reject emotion because it is so alarming: ‘my heart thumps louder in my breast and my pulses throb like a tide thundering and sucking at some crum- bling jetty. I gulp deep breaths of air to steady myself, but it is of no good.’35 Rodker employs a contemporary vocabulary of nerves and metaphors of war: waking as if ‘shot by a cannon’, followed by ‘after-waves of the shriek’ still ringing in his ears.36 Although the narrator of ‘Three Nightpieces’ is shell-shocked by love, not war, the impact of the Great War and its technologies reverberate, coupled with the investigation of the unconscious, dreams, and emotional life as a code to be read by the suffering subject. Huyssen notes that it is Baudelaire’s prose poems that introduced ‘jolts of consciousness’ that ‘escalate into terror’, infuencing works by ‘Rilke, Kafka, Jünger.’37 Rodker’s ‘Three Nightpieces’ strive to produce such an effect out of interpersonal crisis and the reaction of the unconscious refected in the disturbing medium of dream. In The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson describes a dialectic of ‘sources’ of realism and their temporalities: between récit, the ‘narrative impulse’, with a temporality of past–present–future, and the ‘present of consciousness’, the realm of affect, ‘the body’s present’, or the ‘scenic present.’ The frst constructs an individual as a character with a destiny,

33 Rodker, “Three Nightpieces,” 17. 34 Ibid., 18. 35 Ibid., 16. 36 Ibid., 17. 37 Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis, 24. 44 M. S. MURPHY while the latter is ‘impersonal’, existing in an ‘eternal present’, ‘singl[ing] out a painterly moment in which the onward drive of narrative is checked if not suspended altogether’, as he puts it.38 While Jameson’s focus is the nineteenth-century novel, he posits a full swing towards an impersonal present of affect in modernism. The focus on ‘the body’s present’ or the ‘scenic present’ is central to these prose poems, as the writers strive to present the new ‘real’ and its impact on the subject as directly as possible, tracing an affective experience of yet unnamed emotions. Like the novelistic experiments of modernism by Woolf, Joyce and Proust, these texts explore new modes of seeing, incorporate ways of viewing informed by new technologies and means of transportation, and new modes of feeling. But from the perspective of the early twentieth-century, these texts also participate in a redefnition of ‘poetry’ as the medium for the presentation of lived fragments, of direct emotion, and of images whose newness resides in a dynamic take on modernity rendered in contemporary language.

Acknowledgments I am indebted to the Modernist Journals Project of Brown University and the University of Tulsa for access to digital copies of BLAST, The Egoist, The Little Review, Poetry and Rhythm; all citations from these journals may be found at http://www.modjourn.org/journals.html.

Works Cited Aldington, Richard. “The Poetry of Amy Lowell.” The Egoist (July 1, 1915): 109–110. Bernard, Suzanne. “Notice.” Illuminations, by Arthur Rimbaud in Oeuvres. Paris: Garnier, 1960. Binyon, Laurence. “The Return to Poetry.” Rhythm 1.4 (Spring 1912): 1–2. Brooker, Peter. “‘Our London, My London, Your London’: The Modernist Moment in the Metropolis.” In The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, edited by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, 117–131. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dismorr, Jessie. “June Night.” BLAST 2 (July 1915a): 67–68. ———. “London Notes.” BLAST 2 (July 1915b): 66. ———. “Matinee.” The Little Review 4.11 (March 1918): 31–32. Editorial. BLAST 2 (July 1915): 5–6.

38 Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 8. 3 THE BRITISH PROSE POEM AND ‘POETRY’ IN EARLY MODERNISM 45

Eliot, T. S. “The Borderline of Prose.” The New Statesman (May 19, 1917): 157–159. Fletcher, John Gould. “Miss Lowell’s Discovery: Polyphonic Prose.” Poetry 6.1 (April 1915): 32–36. Flint, F. S. “Imagisme.” Poetry 1.6 (March 1913): 198–200. Hickman, Miranda. “The Gender of Vorticism: Jessie Dismorr, Helen Saunders, and Vorticist Feminism.” In Vorticism: New Perspectives, edited by Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein, 119–136. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hueffer, Ford Madox (Ford Madox Ford). “Impressionism—Some Speculations.” Poetry 2.5 (August 1913): 177–187. Hulme, T. E. “A Lecture on Modern Poetry.” In The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, edited by Karen Csengeri, 49–56. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994. Huyssen, Andreas. Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. Lowell, Amy. “Vers libre and Metrical Prose.” Poetry 3.6 (March 1914): 213–220. Monroe, Harriet. Review of Some Imagist Poets—An Anthology. Poetry 6.3 (June 1915): 150–153. Monroe, Jonathan. A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. Murphy, Margueritte S. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Murry, John Middleton, and Katherine Mansfeld. “The Meaning of Rhythm.” Rhythm 2.5 (June 1912): 18–20. Nelsen, Julia. “Modernist Laboratories: The Prose Poem and the Little Magazines.” Letteratura e letterature 4 (2010): 47–65. Rodker, John. “Three Nightpieces.” The Little Review 4.3 (July 1917): 16–18. Terdiman, Richard. Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. CHAPTER 4

The Flourishing of the Prose Poem in America and Britain

Robert Vas Dias

Un peu de ciel bleuit au versant de nos ongles. St.-John Perse.

In recognition of the modernist prose poem in English originating with the avant-garde writers of the early 1920s, this essay follows on from Murphy’s discussion of key British infuences during this time, and draws attention to transatlantic fgures and infuences. Prominent among the poets I discuss are Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Lee Harwood, Roy Fisher, Gael Turnbull and several others.1 Beginning

1 An important precursor, the Nobel Prizewinner St.-John Perse (1887–1975), wrote the prose-poem work Éloges [Praises] in French in 1911; it was translated into English by Eugène Jolas in 1927 but didn’t attain wider recognition in English until Louise Varèse’s translation (New York: Norton, 1944); Bollingen Series LV (New York: Pantheon, 1956). Louise Norton, as she then was, and her husband Allan, edited the little magazine Rogue, published in New York from March to September 1915; it contained the work of Mina Loy, q.v., among others.

R. Vas Dias (*) Poetry School, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 47 J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_4 48 R. VAS DIAS with Stein, in her infuential essay, Narration: Lecture 2 (1935), she describes one of the characteristics of modernist writing and discusses the place of prose poetry. Stein begins by referring to a sign she read ‘as we rode on a train from Atlanta to Birmingham’: ‘Let’s make our four meal and meat in Georgia’, and asking herself, ‘Is that prose or poetry and why.’2 She concludes, ‘Well believe it or not it is very diffcult to know whether that is prose or poetry and does it really make any difference if you do or do not know. This.’3 One might be forgiven for thinking that this is either a refusal to grapple with that thorny question, or a justifcation of her own method of writing. I think the latter is more pertinent. Using the example of the Old Testament, she points out, ‘In the beginning there really was no difference between poetry and prose in the beginning of writing in the beginning of talking in the beginning of hearing anything about anything.’4 She rejects the idea of writing necessarily having a beginning, middle and end: ‘Sentences are contained within themselves and anything really contained within itself has no beginning or middle or ending’5 and, by extension, she rejects a binary difference between prose and poetry. Referring to the Making of Americans, she writes: ‘I called it this and this is what is happening, American writing has been an escaping not an escaping but an existing without the necessary feeling of one thing succeeding another thing of anything having a beginning and a middle and an ending.’6 It is this reiteration which hearkens back to Mallarmé’s prose poetry (‘I want, with only myself in mind, to write as it struck my poet’s eye, one Anecdote, before it is disclosed by reporters jockeying to assign to each thing its common character.’)7 that prefgures the theories and practice of the open-form poetry of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and others of the Black Mountain and New York schools; the work of the Language poets is hardly conceivable without Stein’s infuence. The British poet and artist Mina Loy said of Stein’s reiterative method: ‘Gertrude Stein

2 Gertrude Stein, Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald M. Allen and Warren Tallman (New York: Grove, 1973), 104. 3 Stein, Poetics of the New, 114. 4 Ibid., 112. 5 Ibid., 107. 6 Ibid., 111. 7 “Introduction,” Mallarmé: The Poems, trans. Keith Bosley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 39. 4 THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN 49 was making a statement, a reiterative statement…basic and bare…a statement reiterate ad absurdum, were it not for the interposing fnger of creation.’8 Concepts such as the non-linear, non-hierarchical development of the poem/prose poem, a preference for open-ended writing rather than an obvious closure, the use of counter-expectation or absurd, subversive propositions, and a dissociative, discontinuous structure, all are characteristic of much contemporary and post-modernist prose poetry. David Lehman, editor of Great American Prose Poems, quotes the critic Marjorie Perloff on works by several contemporary prose poetry writers: ‘In these prose compositions, a given sentence, far from following its predeces- sor or preparing the way for the sentence that follows, remains relatively autonomous, continuity being provided by word and sound repetition as well as by semantic transfer, in what the Russian Formalists called the ‘orientation toward the neighboring word.’9 Deservingly, Lehman calls Stein ‘the mother of the American prose poem’ and the following examples from Tender Buttons (1914) are indicative of features such as dissociative, discontinuous structure, counter- expectation, and non-linear, open-ended development, which have infuenced the composition of many contemporary American and British prose poems. From Objects:

NOTHING ELEGANT A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest.10

This prose poem’s opening proposition goes against expectations, as does the frst part of the second (‘If the red is rose…’); ‘a gate surrounding it’ at frst seems counter-factual (a gate is an opening, a fence

8 “Gertrude Stein,” in The Last Lunar Baedecker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Highlands: Jargon, 1982), 289. 9 David Lehman, ed., Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (New York: Scribner Poetry, 2003), 21. 10 Gertrude Stein, “The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein,” last modifed March 17, 2005, http://www.gutenberg.org/fles/15396/15396-h/ 15396. 50 R. VAS DIAS or wall surrounds something) unless one considers a gate as a potential to allow something in, or out (‘if inside is let in’): isn’t ‘inside’ already ‘in’? But ‘inside’ has mysteriously changed; perhaps it’s inside the house, inside one’s consciousness. ‘Places’, that is, a garden, the house, one’s perception, change, and the result is a judgment of the colour red’s value in ethical and behavioural terms, as distinct from the doubtful value of ‘charm’. The poem ascribes a different value to the perception of colour than one would expect; theories of colour psychology account for cultural and individual variations in responses to colour, and Stein’s highly individualistic responses to everything anything everywhere could well be the subject of psychological analysis, which is beyond the scope of this paper.11

A FEATHER A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

Instead of the feather used as trim, commonly on women’s hats (e.g. the cartwheel) in the period leading up to the First World War, Stein reverses the idea to visualize the feather itself as being ‘trimmed’ in various ways, including by its appearance on the headgear of cavalry parading to brass bands (‘loud volumes’). The word ‘cohesive’ can refer to its function in making a costume cohere, or to an object that itself displays coherence. (I think of Mallarmé’s objective in his prose poetry, to counter the ‘reporter’s’ need to ‘assign to each thing its common character.’) From Food: ROASTBEEF There is no use there is no use at all in smell, in taste, in teeth, in toast, in anything, there is no use at all and the respect is mutual.12

Monte refers to the development of the prose poem in late nineteenth-century France as ‘a covert attack on “authoritative” prose

11 See, for example, the impressive prose poem “Color,” by Barbara Guest, in Great American Prose Poems, 73. 12 Gertrude Stein, http://www.gutenberg.org/fles/15396/15396-h/15396. 4 THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN 51 discourses’,13 and this prose poem, in its series of outrageous assertions, certainly illustrates that feature; it’s also a good example of Stein’s humour, displayed throughout Tender Buttons. I will return to this feature when later I consider the work of Lydia Davis. As, if not more, infuential on later generations of writers—the Black Mountain poets, Ginsberg, and the British poets Tom Raworth, Gael Turnbull, Roy Fisher, and Adrian Henri, who will be discussed later— was William Carlos Williams, who experimented with the prose poem in Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920, 1957). Since Stein’s work was little- known outside avant-garde circles at that time, and the prose poem in English equally so, Williams was diffdent about the form, as well he might have been (bear in mind, too, that Joyce was just putting the fn- ishing touches to Ulysses, 1922):

But what was such a form to be called? I was familiar with the typically French prose poem, its pace was not the same as my own compositions. What I had permitted myself could not by any stretch of the imagination be called verse. Nothing to do but put it down as it stood, trusting to the generous spirit of the age to fnd a place for it.14

Much of Kora is characterized by intuitive or associative ‘jumps’ and parataxis—the juxtaposition of dissimilar or disparate images without obvious coordination or subordination, often based on immediate personal association—as in the following:

XXVII, 3 Sooner or later as with the leaves forgotten the swinging branch long since and summer : they scurry before a wind on the frost-baked ground—have no place to rest—somehow invoke a burst of warm days not of the past nothing decayed : crisp summer !— neither a copse for resurrected frost eaters but a summer removed undestroyed a summer of dried leaves scurrying with a screech, to and fro in the half dark—twittering, chattering, scraping. Hagh !15

13 Steven Monte, Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2000), 89. 14 William Carlos Williams, Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1970), 29. 15 Williams, Kora in Hell: Improvisations (Boston: Four Seas, 1920), 85. California Digital Library—digitized by the Internet Archive, 2007. https://archive.org/stream/ korainhellimpro00willrich#page/84/mode/2up. 52 R. VAS DIAS

Most of the prose poems were followed by prose commentaries explaining their origin or intention, since Williams felt they would otherwise be misunderstood or obscure. It took a later generation to ‘fnd a place for it’ in the USA, a generation stimulated by the example of the French Cubists, Surrealists, Dadaists and the Russian Futurists, and by the writing of Stein, Borges and Beckett. The poetic reputation of Mina Loy (1882–1966) has grown remarkably in recent years as studies and critical appreciation have proliferated. Now recognized as one of the pioneering Modernists, she was born in London but spent most of her life in Paris, Florence and New York; she died in Aspen, Colorado, a year after Paul Blackburn and I interviewed her.16 In the interview, which was taped, she read a number of her poems, but no prose poems. Nevertheless, the originality of her language and her approach—her polysyllabic diction, precise description, collage composition, and phrasal development—make her inclusion here imperative, all the more so because her contemporaries (including Ezra Pound) admired her extravagant poetry and daring poetics. In the section ‘Satires: 1914–1923’, of The Last Lunar Baedecker is the following, from ‘Summer Night in a Florentine Slum’.

I have a woman at home with four children—and she is big again. A hair- strewn fury—swished down past them—accusing with a back-fung gesture—purest operatic—a hungry tram conductor—expecting supper—of being unfaithful—‘By God the executioner!—I’ll eat your heart.’17

This extract displays acute, quick observation, dialogue, parataxis, and collage; of Stein, Loy observed: ‘It has become the custom to say of her that she has done in words what Picasso has done with form. There is certainly in her work an interpenetration of dimensions analogous to Cubism.’18 The same can be said of Loy’s own work. It is puzzling why the prose poem in Britain did not achieve visibility until the 1960s under the impetus of American exports, given the

16 Mina Loy, “Interview with Paul Blackburn and Robert Vas Dias,” in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, ed. Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma. Introduction by Carolyn Burke (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1998), 205–243. 17 Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Highlands: Jargon Society, 1982), 81. 18 Loy, Last Lunar Baedeker, 291. 4 THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN 53 brilliant example of David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937), which combines poems, prose poems and expository prose. A reason often adduced is that his reputation as a visual artist eclipsed that as a poet; the British are ambivalent about artists who are accomplished in more than one feld (e.g. witness critical reaction to the writing of another early modernist artist, Wyndham Lewis). Another reason is that Jones’s poetry developed a reputation as being diffcult, hardly the case with In Parenthesis, as the following indicates; the scene describes Jones’ (in the person of his alter- ego John Ball) frst experience of war’s destructive power:

He stood alone on the stones, his mess-tin spilled at his feet. Out of the vortex, rifing the air it came—bright, brass-shod, Pandoran; with all-flling screaming the howling crescendo’s up piling snapt. The universal world, breath held, one half second, a bludgeoned stillness. Then the pent violence released a consummation of all burstings out; all sudden up-rendings and rivings-through—all taking-out of vents—all barrier-breaking—all unmaking. Pernitric begetting—the dissolving and splitting of solid things. In which unearthing aftermath, John Ball picked up his mess-tin and hur- ried within; ashen, huddled, waited in the dismal straw. Behind ‘E’ Battery, ffty yards down the road, a great many mangolds uprooted, pulped, congealed with chemical earth, spattered and made slippery the rigid boards leading to the emplacement. The sap of vegetables slobbered the spotless breech-block of No. 3 gun.19

The impressive originality of language and image-making in this excerpt from Part 2 of the work are informed by the acute visual sense of an artist and transforms into memorable prose poetry what in other hands might be a futile attempt to describe an artillery bombardment. Whatever the reason for the non-recognition of Jones as a powerful prose-poem progenitor in English, clearly a critical study needs to be done on his prose poetry and how it works in tandem with his poetry in this ‘work of genius’, as T.S. Eliot called it. In many ways, the contemporary prose poem in English can be said to have received its post-Second World War imprimatur more directly from the surreal writing of Kafka and from Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s work crosses boundaries, as prose poetry typically does, however one looks at it; his extraordinary concentration, even obsession, on the quotidian,

19 David Jones, Arduity, “In Parenthesis: Pts 1–4: Part Two, Chambers Go Off, Corporals Stay,” http://www.arduity.com/poets/jones/inparenthesis.html. 54 R. VAS DIAS and his orchestration of the sound qualities of language is most evident when one reads the work aloud. His notorious love of minute particulars (‘Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars’— Blake, and ‘Close inspection namely detail all over to add up fnally to this whole not still at all but trembling all over’20—Beckett), his rhythmical variation of words and sounds, and his use of silences were hugely infuential, not only in his dramatic works but on literary writing generally. The following is the beginning of the long prose poem ‘Still’; when reading it aloud, it is best to build in silences after the full-stops:

Still Bright at last close of a dark day the sun shines out at last and goes down. Sitting quite still at valley window normally turn head now and see it the sun low in the southwest sinking. Even get up certain moods and go stand by western window quite still watching it sink and then the afterglow. Always quite still some reason some time past this hour at open window facing south in small upright wicker chair with armrests. Eyes stare out unseeing till frst movement some time past close though unseeing still while still light. Quite still again then all quite quiet apparently till eyes open again while still light though less. Normally turn head now ninety degrees to watch sun which if already gone then fading afterglow.21

Although the piece is called ‘Still,’ it is characterized by a subtle, discrete, ‘trembling’ movement, which the critic Professor Peter Murphy expands on:

The tremulous equilibrium into which hand and head are brought in the second half of ‘Still’ is not merely self-refexive, but rather a recognition of the need for a connection between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ worlds. The self must come face to face with its bodily reality and with the world of nature outside the ‘open window.’ Even in the dark the self cannot avoid seeing itself: there is no refuge from the ‘suffering that opens a window on

20 Peter Murphy, “Orpheus Returning: The Nature of Myth in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Still’ Trilogy,” The International Fiction Review, 11.2 (1984): 110, https://journals.lib.unb.ca/ index.php/IFR/article/viewFile/13704/14786. 21 Samuel Beckett, “Still,” in Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950–1976 (London: Faber, 2010), 155. 4 THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN 55

the real, and is the main condition of the artistic experience,’ as Beckett asserted in his early study of Proust.22

But, all this said, there are some key writers that bridge the gap between the Beckettian infuence and the Steinian one: most crucially, Lydia Davis. An American writer of short fction (and prose poems), Davis clearly displays affnities with Stein’s and Beckett’s work in their concentration on detail and play of language and, in the case of Stein, her humour (rather than the dark comedy of Beckett):

From: ‘A Mown Lawn’ She hated a mown lawn… A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan… Lawn also contained the letters of law… Law and order could be seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans… Did more lawn in America make more lawmen in America?… So often, she said, Americans wanted more mown lawn. All of America might be one long mown lawn… Let the lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.23

Arranged as a prose paragraph, ‘A Mown Lawn’ displays many of the characteristics of poetry: its play on words, its sound correspondences, or internal rhymes, based on extending, reversing, and riffng on the initial phrase, ‘mown lawn’. The humour and irony result from a deliberate confation of terms (‘Law and order could be seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans.’); it employs personifcation (‘a mown lawn made a long moan’), synecdoche (‘All of America might be one long mown lawn’), and repetition. This prose poem is typically short, economical, and makes its impact by means of its poetic use of language and its subtly subversive point of view—a critique of contemporary American conventional mores. Along with Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, through the translations of Norman Thomas Di Giovanni and others, was responsible for a growing awareness of the possibilities of the prose poem in English, particularly

22 Murphy, “Orpheus Returning,” 110. 23 Lydia Davis, From “A Mown Lawn,” in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 314. 56 R. VAS DIAS its surrealistic character, in 1960s America and Britain. Borges was part of the surrealist zeitgeist of the early and mid-twentieth century and was the forerunner of the Latin American magical realists Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Julio Cortázar (also translated by Paul Blackburn) and Alejo Carpentier. The British poet Lee Harwood (1939– 2015) acknowledged Borges as having been particularly important to his development as a poet when he learned the ‘complexities of language’ and ways of ‘mapping it out’ when just out of his teens.24 Harwood also translated the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara. The frst work in his Collected Poems is a prose poem, ‘Cable Street’ (1964)—actually, a sort of hybrid haibun comprising ‘straight’ prose, prose poems, poetry, quotations from newspapers and the London County Council, and erotic lyrics to his lover. Harwood wrote prose poems, including found passages, quotations and defnitions throughout his work. He is renowned for his literal, descriptive, deceptively straightforward style, and accounts of his travels and celebrations of domestic scenes:

From, ‘The Beginning of the Story: Questions, iii’ Late on a summer evening we fnd ourselves in the leafy suburban streets of some small town whose name we don’t as yet know. There is a velvet darkness that brushes our lips and cheeks with great sen- suality. This darkness is only broken by the vague pyramids of white light around the rare street lamps, and the opaque yellow glow from some curtained windows where people are still about. The silence hisses and crackles, it is so near complete.25

Harwood is arguably one of the pivotal fgures in the development of the prose poem in Britain; Collected Poems contains a large variety of them, many of which were generated by collaborative exchanges with friends of postcards, photographs and wine labels. In his young adulthood, he spent time in the USA, where he came under the infuence of John Ashbery and other writers of the New York School, such as James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara. Most critics have viewed him as having been a follower of Ashbery, but Mark Ford points out that Harwood’s work

24 Lee Harwood, foreword to Collected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman, 2004), 12. 25 Harwood, Collected Poems, 290. 4 THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN 57 bears a close affnity with that of James Schuyler;26 ‘A Vermont Diary’, for example, which combines poetry and prose poetry, abounds in closely observed, sometimes homely detail in the American’s account of walks in the November countryside:

November 6 Another right-hand turn there, through the hamlet, past the school and Marian Anderson the postmistress’s house and the dairy farm and its close-cropped, stony, uphill pastures. Two shaggy horses with heavy rumps were standing around looking solemn, and a lot of long clouds like old-fashioned trolley cars were going along overhead, some kind of osier was a vineyard beside the road and I thought, I wouldn’t want anything to be different about this day—a sudden wonderful feeling of accepting things as they are, even the things you don’t like…27

‘Accepting things as they are’ could be said to be a distinguishing mark of Harwood’s poetry, along with the almost literal descriptive and straightforward narrative style; there is little evidence of Ashbery’s quirky stylistic bravado. Harwood was very much part of what was, at frst, a counter- cultural movement of British poetry in the 1960s, the ‘British Poetry Renaissance’, what the poet and publisher Ken Edwards once termed the ‘parallel tradition’: its various formations in the UK being the British Poetry Revival (Eric Mottram’s term), the Cambridge diaspora, and what has sometimes been called ‘linguistically innovative’ poetry— all overlapping categories. There was also a common interest in post- New American Poetry, Language Writing and related North American felds.’28 While it’s true to say that the American counter-culture, especially the Beat poets, at frst in the person of Allen Ginsberg, quickly fed into the British scene—Michael Horovitz’s International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall took place in 1965, and the frst

26 Mark Ford, “Emerging Glorious from the Clouds,” review of Collected Poems, by Lee Harwood, Guardian Review, September 18, 2004, 25. 27 James Schuyler, “Vermont Diary,” in The Crystal Lithium (New York: Random House, 1972), 55. 28 Ken Edwards, “Valediction,” under Reality Street, July 12, 2016, http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/reality-street-blog/valediction. 58 R. VAS DIAS edition of The Mersey Sound poets Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten was frst published in 1967—by the end of the decade the work of the New American Poetry poets was being disseminated by a number of British poet-publishers. Gael Turnbull started Migrant29 as early as 1957; Tom Raworth started Matrix Press in 1961, publishing the work of Black Mountain poets such as Edward Dorn, as well as the Beats and New York poets, and, with Barry Hall, he co-founded Goliard Press in 1964, publishing Olson’s work for the frst time in Britain; Nathaniel Tarn took over Goliard in 1967 as Cape Goliard Press under the aegis of Jonathan Cape; Asa Benveniste (an American) co-founded Trigram Press with his wife Pip in 1965; Andrew Crozier started Ferry Press in 1964, whose frst book was by the Black Mountain writer Fielding Dawson; and Stuart Montgomery published many of the new American poets in the fnely produced books of his Fulcrum Press starting in 1965. The King’s College London American Studies scholar, poet, and academic Eric Mottram took over the editorship of Poetry Review in 1971, publishing the work of the British Poetry Revival poets as well as many American poets. This publishing phenomenon—and it was phenomenal, given the conventional poetry publishing programs of mainstream publishers— was instrumental in getting the work of mould-breaking British and American writers circulated, though it must be said that it took many years for these British writers to become widely known; the exceptions were the Liverpool poets, and Roy Fisher and Basil Bunting—the latter, even today, relatively neglected (and I will discuss these later). Gael Turnbull (1928–2004), another pivotal fgure, was one of the earliest poets responsible for the introduction in Britain of the new post- war American writing. He had moved back-and-forth between Canada, Britain and the USA during and after the war, and after qualifying as an anaesthetist at the University of Pennsylvania, he moved to Canada where the American poet and editor of Origin, Cid Corman, met him. Origin30 was one of the most infuential little magazines of The New

29 An eye-opening comprehensive exhibition, Migrant and the Poetry of Possibility, was curated by the poet Richard Price in 2007 in the Folio Gallery, The British Library. 30 See Cid Corman, ed., The Gist of Origin: 1951–1971: An Anthology Edited by Cid Corman (New York: Grossman, 1975). 4 THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN 59

American Poetry before that ground-breaking anthology, publishing Olson in its frst series, as well as British poets, Turnbull among them in 1954. Corman was a far-sighted, if eccentric, editor who promoted the work of the Black Mountain poets. A good case can be made that Turnbull, an early practitioner of the prose poem, was encouraged by the example of Olson, whose work combined a variety of material including prose passages; before him, of course, was the example of Pound’s Cantos. The following is from Turnbull’s long prose poem ‘Twenty Words: Twenty Days’, which begins with a quotation from a letter, and is arranged in prose lines interrupted by extra spacing:

VIII described by Miss Ann Dart, as he was visiting Bristol, while still a youth: Turner— “…not like other young people but singular and very silent…no facility for friendship but never other than pleasant…seemed uneducated, diffcult to understand…sometimes going out sketching before breakfast and again after supper… desirous of nothing but improvement in his art…”

a VALENCY— defned as: an expression in terms of small digits of an ability to unite with other like integers—

a ratio, denoting a specifcity, an exaction— and at approximately 4:45 p.m. a child brought into the hospital that had tripped, struck her head— not much more than dazed at frst, then slowly lapsing, until rapidly depressed, the breathing almost arrested— “linear fracture of the skull in the left temporo-parietal area”31

31 Gael Turnbull, From “Twenty Words: Twenty Days: A Sketchbook & a Morula,” in A Gathering of Poems 1950–1980 (London: Anvil, 1983), 69–70. 60 R. VAS DIAS

The combination of quotation, precise defnition and personal experience is characteristic of the kind of prose poem being written in America at that time by Olson (the poem dates from the end of 1963). The word ‘VALENCY’ was the word Turnbull selected by chance from the dictionary for that day; it also has the meaning, in physics, of ‘energy, active force’ (The Shorter Oxford Dictionary) which, of course, can apply to Turner, or any committed artist, as well as to a highly competent professional, which Turnbull was. The third pivotal fgure was the late Tom Raworth (1938–2017), who was ‘instrumental in bringing an entire tradition of American poetry to English [read ‘British’] readers’,32 mainly the work of the Black Mountain poets. He was visiting lecturer at the University of Texas- Austin and the University of California-San Diego before moving back to England in 1977.

From No + On Noon (Except When Refected) = window stops at the edge of window and door at the edge of the door: the observer shuts his eyes and continues the journey. memories eat away at the idea. wall runs into ceiling runs into fex runs into bulb runs into light. already the morning screams come from other rooms. dreadful as it may be it is not so. dreams are sellotaped loosely on to the ten pictures of ‘loved by children’ characters, all of whom look the same way. Chummily, their eyeballs roll towards you. It splits like slate or mica: or a thin sheet of dream takes the place of a feather in a golden oval. how to see people without their clothes.33

We see in this poem not only the fgure of Beckett lurking in the background, but also the Surrealists and Dadaists. The structure of Raworth’s poetry became increasingly disjunctive and prefgured the Language poets though, as Marjorie Perloff points out, ‘He is, for example, much more allusive, more “literary,” than the U.S. language poets.’34 The other major fgure of this ‘frst generation’ of poets who featured the prose poem in their work was the late Roy Fisher (1930–2017).

32 “Tom Raworth,” The Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems-and-poets/poets/detail/tom-raworth. 33 Tom Raworth, Act (London: Trigram, 1973), [unpaginated]. 34 Marjorie Perloff, Review of Collected Poems, by Tom Raworth, Times Literary Supplement, May 30, 2003, http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/articles/raworth.pdf. 4 THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN 61

In his Collected Poems 1968 is a poem called City, which is composed of both poems and prose-poem sections, and was originally published by Gael Turnbull’s Migrant Press in 1961. Turnbull, who was invited to guest-edit a British number of Origin, had originally asked Fisher for poems to be included in the magazine, and this led to a life-long friendship. The indeterminate, open-ended form is a prominent feature of Surrealist writers of the prose poem, as are many of Fisher’s. Of City, he wrote that Michael Shayer, partner with Turnbull in Migrant, ‘looked at my great heaving mass of odds and ends that I was writing about Birmingham, which was Rimbaud at one end, and, say, hard prose at the other, and saw that this material could be used as a kind of collage work; which he could see, and I couldn’t.’35 Collage, of course, is a typical surrealist technique, evident in literary work that refects the methods of Cubism. Fisher’s later work becomes more experimental, depending more on parataxis in its structure than the relatively straightforward description and observation that characterizes City. The prose poem Also (with Derrick Greaves) is a good example of the latter:

also there was another story/ a bird suddenly crossing a frame of sky to alter/ I had no window, the darkness moulded me/ it said the messages were settled/ we must be crossing a frame of sleep, the sunlit screen over the matted shadow where the cloud had fallen and gone down lost among the folds/ and searching for loss more faint than the frst loss/ and then to alter everything by passing it by, asking nothing, expecting nothing to alter/ alter/ / also there.36

This poem’s use of the forward stroke, and the use of spacing to indicate pauses and syntactical units, derives from the practice of some of the Black Mountain poets and Paul Blackburn (who always maintained he was not a Black Mountain poet, though for a time he was New York editor of The Black Mountain Review). Fisher talks about coming into contact with these poets and was struck by their ‘demanding aesthetic’, though ‘I didn’t particularly want to follow the patterns they were

35 Roy Fisher, Interviews Through Time & Selected Prose, ed. Tony Frazer (Kentisbeare: Shearsman, 2000), 47. 36 Roy Fisher, Poems 1955–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 100. 62 R. VAS DIAS working on. I certainly didn’t want to follow the mannerisms.’37 The poem is also one among a number of collaborations with artists, including Ian Tyson (Tetrad) and, notably, Ron King (Circle Press). Much more can be said about Fisher’s prose poetry—see Peter Robinson’s essay in this book—so, rather than devote more space to Fisher, I shall proceed to a poet who is equally noted as an innovator but in an entirely different aesthetic than the previous four. The poets of The Mersey Sound—Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten—arrived on the scene at the beginning of the 1960s, before that famous anthology (1967), and they came from a different place aesthetically and geographically than the preceding four poets. Though they can be considered as part of the British Poetry Revival, they reached a much wider audience through performances and through the anthology, which sold over 500,000 copies in its many editions. As Eric Mottram wrote, the performances ‘showed that there could be an audience for poetry outside the study, the university and the tradition-bound class- room’.38 The conventional explanation of the origin of their aesthetic is the American Beat poets, particularly Allen Ginsberg, but it is also true to say the fact that they came from a different place is equally signifcant: Henri wrote, ‘I cannot imagine what it would have been like to be a poet and not live here; or, indeed, whether I would have become a poet at all.’39 Henri refers here to Liverpool 8, a centre of the physical and musical environment for these poets. The Beats can be said to contribute two main ideas to the ‘Merseybeat’ poets: frst, as Helen Louise Taylor writes, ‘seeing a movement so frmly based in the recording of experience and the importance of the everyday, it made it acceptable for these Liverpool poets to do the same thing with their own lives’.40 This approach not only characterized the Beats such as Ginsberg and Michael McClure, but others of The New American Poetry (1960), such as the West Coast poets, prominent among them Gary Snyder, and the New York poets, mainly Frank

37 Fisher, Interviews, 46–47. 38 Helen Louise Taylor, “Adrian Henri and the Merseybeat Movement: Performance, Poetry, and Public in the Liverpool Scene of the 1960s.” PhD dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2013, https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/ fles/17852529/2013TaylorHLPhD.pdf, 12 39 Taylor, “Adrian Henri,” 47. 40 Ibid., 60–61. 4 THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN 63

O’Hara. The anthology was as much a revelatory handbook for the Liverpool poets as it was for American writers. It should also be said that Henri was at pains to insist that the Mersey poets ‘didn’t do it like the Americans did it, you did it like you would do it; so you didn’t pretend you were coming from San Francisco or New Jersey, when you actually came from Birkenhead or Bootle. So you did it with your own voice, not theirs. And that was the great breakthrough.’41 The following example of one of Henri’s prose poems called ‘City’ illustrates well the ‘voice’ of the Merseyside poet:

Walking through dead leaves in Falkner Square going to the Pakistani shop with Tony in the October afternoon sunlight thinking of you being woken up in the two a.m. Blue Angel rock‘n’roll darkness by Carl who I hadn’t heard singing thinking of you thinking of you drinking in the Saturday night everyone waiting no party pub walking with another girl holding cold hands in the autumn park thinking of you walking home everynight in Blackburne Place twilight thinking of you thinking of you.42

‘City’ displays a number of features of Henri’s writing: the musicality of the language—each phrase could be a line (or a title) of a pop song lyric; the fowing of one thought-image immediately into another, recapitulat- ing stream-of-consciousness (and illustrating one of Olson’s precepts in ‘Projective Verse’ (1950): ‘one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception’); and the repetition of words and phrases, like a refrain, making this an ideal performance piece. ‘In ‘Notes on Painting and Poetry,’ from Tonight at Noon, published in 1968, Henri directly cites Ginsberg as one of the poets whom he admired, who used ‘a repeating or running phrase to link an image-sequence’43 (‘thinking of you’ in the above prose poem). The prose poem ‘Without You’44 is also a typical example. The second main contribution of the Beats to the style of the Liverpool poets was the long or paragraphic line—derived ultimately

41 Ibid., 12. 42 Ibid., 57. 43 “Extracts from Adrian Henri, Notes on Painting and Poetry (1968),” http://www. adrianhenri.com/writer-ah-extracts-notes-painting-poetry.html. 44 In The Mersey Sound, Penguin Modern Poets 10, Revised and enlarged edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 29–30. 64 R. VAS DIAS from Whitman via Ginsberg—and composition by breath-unit, exemplifed by the poetry of Olson and William Carlos Williams. ‘The “breath- and-speech measure” is particularly relevant for a poet for whom performance was so important.’45 Here, there is a fascinating corol- lary to Ginsberg’s poetics that relates to the prose poem: Taylor notes that the ‘paragraphic feel of the text was crucial to the experience’ of Ginsberg’s infuence; she goes on to quote from a letter Ginsberg sent to Ferlinghetti on 3 July 1956 complaining that the printer of the frst printing of ‘Howl’ re-lineated the lines: ‘The one element of order and prearrangement I did pay care to was arrangement into prose-paragraph strophes: each one defnite unifed long line. So any doubt about irreg- ularity of right hand margin will be sure to confuse critical reader about intention of prosody. Therefore I’ve got to change it so it’s right.’46 Even a cursory glance at ‘Howl’ reveals the nature of the ‘prose- paragraph strophes,’ whose indented lines (after the frst fush-left line of each paragraph) are justifed. ‘Howl’ is, in effect, an early postwar American prose poem. Equally, it should be noted here that not all the lines of prose poems must be justifed: there are plenty of prose poems whose lines are ‘ragged’ at the right-hand margin. I will conclude with three poets who could be called the ‘second generation’ of twentieth-century British poets who signifcantly advanced the concept of the prose poem and in many ways raised its profle as a genre in its own right: Peter Riley, David Chaloner and Gavin Selerie. Peter Riley (1940–) is identifed with that loose grouping of poets around Cambridge which, of course, is called the Cambridge School, whose chief proponent is J.H. Prynne. Riley was the co-editor (with Andrew Crozier and others) of the important poetry/poetics journal The English Intelligencer (1965–1968). His meditative and descriptive writing is largely concerned with the English landscape, and with peoples and geographies of other countries in which he has travelled.

This hollow globe is incapable of inaccuracy. Reward lines it. And at once the closed landscape wrapped in tough grass held tightly to the earth, our

45 Taylor, “Adrian Henri,” 84. 46 Ibid., 82. 4 THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN 65

single star, is held among us as it slowly dawns on us, our prize is the earth.47

The next prose poem, as Riley writes, is from a collection of ‘180 prose poems with a lot of quoted text from nineteenth-century reports of the excavation of prehistoric burial mounds in the north of England, set intermittently against fragments of old (mostly ffteenth and sixteenth Century) love songs and other ancestral texts. Meditations among [in] graves.’ From Excavations

10/273 Red in a white matrix the fre stars, lives rendered to a point and sealed in the blue clay dome, to hover over the theatre of memory a fnely ground and polished plate of almost transparent fint in front of the face My feerfull dreme / falling angels, hands in front of faces swirling into darkness / to where no earth or sky or any mortal claim has any place nevyr forgete can I love’s harm.48

A wide frame of reference, woven into the fabric of his texts, together with the intensity of inward refections, informs Riley’s poems, as in Excavations. Riley is a major innovator of the prose poem in our time. David Chaloner (1944–2010), whose untimely death cut short brilliant careers as both poet and designer, received early publication by Andrew Crozier’s Ferry Press and was included in Michael Horovitz’s Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969). The outstanding feature of his poetry and prose poems is their language: its precise nature recapitulates a literal reality that shades into the hyper-real and abstract:

Once the decision is formulated you prepare to establish the means by which you will gain favour in order to carry out the plan to its full extent. But it is this very purpose, so fresh and exact, deters your impulse for

47 Peter Riley, “(prose poem),” The Derbyshire Poems (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010), 45. 48 Riley, “10/73,” Excavations (Hastings: Reality Street, 2004), http://www.aprileye. co.uk/books.html. 66 R. VAS DIAS

action. What is needed is … The truth of your action lies in the … A safe distance must be maintained between … Whoever appears frst shall have the full beneft of … The locality has since become far too public and will require … Motives are an essay in the … Hot fushes damage the cool scene and … For this reason we are not at liberty to divulge the source of our information, but can say… Having approached the problem thus far you reach for an enlightened … Displaced yet eradicating confdence that …49

Here, Chaloner employs the language, the diction, of bureaucracy and memoranda to obfuscate rather than clarify, becoming meaningless fller. Phrases begin a thought and do not complete it. The passage depends on irony and satire, and also humour: the sentence, ‘Hot fushes damage the cool scene and…’ is thrown into the mix to hilarious effect. Chaloner’s language in his poetry and prose poems is curiously formal, expositorially correct and seemingly logical, yet the end result of many of his pieces, as in this one, is that you have arrived at an end that is not an end; that the words don’t add up to a conventionally coherent work. In this sense, Chaloner is a highly original writer, one who uses the everyday language of business, government and academia to wriggle and confuse—something with which we are all too depressingly familiar. Gavin Selerie (1949–), who was also a prime mover in the British Poetry Revival, is a leading British writer of the book-length poem; these include Roxy (1996), Le Fanu’s Ghost (2006), and his latest, Hariot Double, with Alan Halsey (2016), on which he worked for ten years. In the words of the poet and critic Robert Hampson, Selerie is ‘probably one of the most obviously scholarly of contemporary British poets’ and a poet of ‘constant formal inventiveness’.50 Selerie has written on several American poets in the Riverside Interview series, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and Jerome Rothenberg. The following prose poem is from Strip Signals:

Acquired stock electronically confgured, a generating station, night and day a furious courier, a lottery of upstart authority with sweat appraisal.

49 David Chaloner, “Risks,” Fading Into Brilliance (London: Oasis, 1978), 24; reprinted in Collected Poems (Cambridge: Salt, 2005), 176–177. 50 Robert Hampson, “Gavin Selerie’s ‘Roxy’ and ‘Le Fanu’s Ghost’.” Jacket Magazine 36, 2008, http://jacketmagazine.com/36/r-selerie-rb-hampson.html. 4 THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN 67

The city’s golden boy, doubling values in an information stream as people with carrier bags over their heads yell at traffc. A jobber’s notebook flled with strange characters: Mzazo Ozlacim, Ozazm Micalzo. 30 calls yet to come. Cross-match, convert to yield. By suppression or removal these fragments will speak, marble, agate under dust. Wake Cleopatra to force out spoil, outperform the index. Shush-ort hedge bet placed ticktack. A toolbox of derivatives, solids thinner than air with the glint of arrival. Bang on target, just hang in to force-connect and quit. Hide any strong seething over terms or partner pitch.51

In this prose poem, Selerie conveys a specifc contemporary language— here, that of trading and fnance—by means of noun phrases and verbs in the imperative, to create a matrix of language as it is spoken by representative specialists of our culture: but the more formal constructs segue into witty descriptive sentences that underscore the irony and satire. Selerie is a modern master of this kind of text. As we approach the third decade of the twenty-frst century, we fnd the prose poem in rude health, thanks in part to the work of preceding generations. Notable British prose poetry writers of the ‘new’ generation include Luke Kennard, Linda Black, Lucy Hamilton and Ian Seed. It will be noticed that most of the books in the twentieth-century which contain prose poems were published by the so-called ‘alternative’, or small, presses. This is not surprising when considering that the poets who wrote prose poems were generally of the British Poetry Revival. Nowadays, it appears that the major trade publishers, who publish very little poetry anyway (as is the case in the USA), still leave it to the small presses to disseminate prose poetry. It is also true that, since the early days of the British Poetry Revival, some of these small presses have become much larger ones, their books relatively widely distributed. Perhaps the form still makes trade publishers in Britain nervous; in the USA, a book such as Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (published by the independent, non-proft Graywolf Press), was picked up by Penguin Random House in the UK after it won an impressive array of awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward

51 Gavin Selerie, Strip Signals (Newcastle upon Tyne: Galloping Dog, 1986), 14; reprinted in Music’s Duel: New and Selected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009), 124. 68 R. VAS DIAS

Prize. Perhaps we shouldn’t complain: dozens of small presses and many periodicals in both countries are publishing prose poems and, as far as practice is concerned, it stands as a fourishing contemporary form.52

Works Cited Allen, Donald M., and Warren Tallmann, eds. The Poetics of the New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press, 1973. Beckett, Samuel. “Still.” In Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950– 1976. London: Faber, 2010. Chaloner, David. “Risks.” Fading into Brilliance. London: Oasis, 1978. Reprinted in Collected Poems. Cambridge: Salt, 2005. Corman, Cid, ed. The Gist of Origin: 1951–1971: An Anthology. Edited by Cid Corman. New York: Grossman, 1975. Critchley, Emily, ed. Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK. Hastings: Reality Street, 2015. Davis, Lydia. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Edwards, Ken. “Valediction,” under Reality Street, July 12, 2016. http://www. realitystreet.co.uk/reality-street-blog/valediction. Fisher, Roy. Poems 1955–1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. ———. Interviews Through Time & Selected Prose. Edited by Tony Frazer. Kentisbeare: Shearsman, 2000. Ford, Mark. “Emerging Glorious from the Clouds.” Review of Collected Poems, by Lee Harwood, Guardian Review. September 18, 2004. Hampson, Robert. “Gavin Selerie’s ‘Roxy’ and ‘Le Fanu’s Ghost’.” Jacket Magazine 36, 2008. http://jacketmagazine.com/36/r-selerie-rb-hampson. html. Harwood, Lee. Foreword to Collected Poems. Exeter: Shearsman, 2004. Henri, Adrian. “Extracts from Adrian Henri, Notes on Painting and Poetry (1968).” http://www.adrianhenri.com/writer-ah-extracts-notes-painting-poetry.html. ———. The Mersey Sound, Penguin Modern Poets 10. Revised and Enlarged Edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

52 See, for example, two contemporary anthologies: the impressive Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK, ed., Emily Critchley (Hastings: Reality Street, 2015), in which no less than 20 of its 44 contributors are represented by prose poems or pieces that combine poems and prose poems; and Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms, ed. Alan Ziegler (New York: Persea, 2014). 4 THE FLOURISHING OF THE PROSE POEM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN 69

Jones, David. “In Parenthesis: Pts 1–4: Part Two, Chambers Go Off, Corporals Stay,” 1937. http://www.arduity.com/poets/jones/inparenthesis.html. Lehman, David, ed. Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2003. Loy, Mina. “Gertrude Stein.” In The Last Lunar Baedecker, edited by Roger L. Conover. Highlands: Jargon, 1982. ———. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Edited by Roger L. Conover. Highlands: Jargon Society, 1982. ———. “Interview with Paul Blackburn and Robert Vas Dias.” In Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, edited by Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma. Introduction by Carolyn Burke. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1998, 205–43. Mallarme, Stéphane. “Introduction.” In Mallarmé: The Poems, translated by Keith Bosley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Monte, Steven. Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2000. Murphy, Peter. “Orpheus Returning: The Nature of Myth in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Still’ Trilogy.” The International Fiction Review, 11.2 (1984): 110. https:// journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/viewFile/13704/14786. Perloff, Marjorie. Review of Collected Poems, by Tom Raworth, Times Literary Supplement, May 30, 2003. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/articles/raworth.pdf. Perse, St.-John. “Éloges” in Éloges and Other Poems. Translated by Louise Varèse. New York: Pantheon, 1956. The Poetry Foundation. “Tom Raworth.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems-and-poets/poets/detail/tom-raworth. Price, Richard, curator. Migrant and the Poetry of Possibility. Folio Gallery, The British Library, 2007. Raworth, Tom. Act. London: Trigram, 1973. Riley, Peter. “10/73.” Excavations. Hastings: Reality Street, 2004. http://www. aprileye.co.uk/books.html. ———. “(prose poem).” The Derbyshire Poems. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010. Schuyler, James. “Vermont Diary.” In The Crystal Lithium. New York: Random House, 1972. Selerie, Gavin. Strip Signals. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Galloping Dog, 1986. Reprinted in Music’s Duel: New and Selected Poems. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009. Stein, Gertrude. Poetics of the New American Poetry. Edited by Donald M. Allen and Warren Tallman. New York: Grove, 1973. ———. “The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein.” Last modifed March 17, 2005, http://www.gutenberg.org/fles/15396/15 396-h/15396. 70 R. VAS DIAS

Taylor, Helen Louise. “Adrian Henri and the Merseybeat Movement: Performance, Poetry, and Public in the Liverpool Scene of the 1960s.” PhD dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2013, https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/fles/17852529/2013TaylorHLPhD.pdf. Turnbull, Gael. A Gathering of Poems 1950–1980. London: Anvil, 1983. Williams, Carlos William. Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1970. ———. Kora in Hell: Improvisations. Boston: The Fours Seas Company, 1920. California Digital Library. Digitized by the Internet Archive, 2007. https:// archive.org/stream/korainhellimpro00willrich#page/84/mode/2up. Ziegler, Alan, ed. Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short- Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms. New York: Persea, 2014. PART II

The Early Narrators CHAPTER 5

The Marvellous Clouds: Refections on the Prose Poetry of Woolf, Baudelaire and Williams

Michael O’Neill

Historically, the prose poem has been considered or ignored as a chimera, even a fabulous unicorn among literary forms; neither anecdotal fsh nor symbolic fowl, but a new species; neither parable nor fable, though it may offer some of the feeting gestures towards insight and story offered by those genres; neither aphorism nor pensée, though there are moments when Pascal, Rousseau, Nietszche and Wilde seem to antic- ipate or shadow forth or complement its possibilities. Pascal writes:

As I write down my thought it sometimes escapes me, but that reminds me of my weakness, which I am always forgetting, and teaches me as much as my forgotten thought, for I care only about knowing that I am nothing…1

1 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. with intro. A.J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), no. 656, 240.

M. O’Neill (*) Durham University, Durham, UK

When he does so, he brings us close to the quick of a quirk of thought, its simultaneous ability and inability to inhabit the moment at which it occurs. The refection turns on itself as it pivots on ideas of memory and forgetting; it has a refexive rapidity as it speaks to and emerges from the fow of consciousness which is observed, rather than arrested. It trembles on the verge of being a prose poem, but it stays within the precincts of the aphorism—partly because, in the end, it is less the creative fact than the philosophical or theological meaning of the utterance which has pri- ority. The prose poem proper, if one dare risk such an assertion, is more continuously interested in language’s unfolding of its own experiential life and of its capacity for embodying perception. It is, as Margueritte S. Murphy remarks, ‘associated with an aesthetic that valued shock and innovation over tradition and convention’.2 And yet its fnest effects call into question the absolute validity of that tempting opposition, reliant, as the prose poem is, on ‘traditions that it subsequently disrupts’.3

1 Given the form’s interest in the ghostlier demarcations of genre, it may be suitably—rather than merely—perverse to open refections on the prose poem by looking at the practice of a writer, Virginia Woolf, normally associated with the novel, albeit the novel handled with experimental urgency and brio. Towards the end of Woolf’s The Waves, Bernard asserts: ‘I rose and walked away—I, I, I; not Byron, Shelley, Dostoievsky, but I, Bernard. I even repeated my own name once or twice’.4 That sense of ‘I’ as what Bernard goes on to call ‘the inheritor’, ‘the contin- uer’, is one of the energies that drives the prose poem where that form is a means of conveying the immediacy of subjective experience. One notes that Bernard includes among his discarded cloak-selves two British Romantic poets and one Russian novelist, as though he and his creator were indifferent to generic bifurcations. Certainly, prose for Woolf’s Bernard takes on a hardy, quicksilver life as it responds to the fact or impression (the two words melt into one another in the book)

2 Margueritte Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 2–3. 3 Murphy, Tradition of Subversion, 67. 4 Virginia Woolf, The Waves, intro. Jeanette Winterson and Gillian Beer (London: Vintage, 2004), 169. 5 THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY … 75 that ‘I took the blow; the mixed sensations; the complex and disturbing and utterly unprepared for impacts of life all over, in all places at the same time’.5 The Woolfan punctuation of pausings and turnings, signalled by the semicolons and comma, communicates a rueful semblance of pride here. Such pride invested in the ‘I’ in prose poetry precedes a self-lacerating fall that may also be a stay against self-contempt. A good example is offered by the contemporary writer John Freeman. Freeman fnishes one prose poem, ‘Dissent’, with a turn in which the speaker fnds fault with an egotistical ‘famous novelist and theorist’ who compares his ‘depress- ing short story’ with Middlemarch:

Your story is very bad, I said. Withdraw, murmured my shocked colleagues. I couldn’t, for the sake of everything I believed in. But I sat help- less, hearing what I had said through their ears.6

That is too disconcertingly raw for the novel, which has to have some posture of judgement towards a speaker, and too fast moving, even in its shocked stillness, for the poem. The clause ‘hearing what I had said through their ears’ might occur in a poem, but placed as it is it works to spark off the sensation, the frisson of quotidian epiphany as only a prose poem can. There are subtleties of cadence and sound here: the movement from ‘story’ to ‘withdraw’ and then to ‘hearing’ and ‘ears’; the balance between principled resistance in the penultimate sentence and involuntary acquiescence in the last. But these effects, though observable in the poem or fctional story, take on a different tone, life and nuance in the space of the prose poem, unmoored as that is from the constraints of conventional narrative or from the demands of a form that seems in some way to jostle, often productively, with the matter, as in a poem. If the prose poem obeys the behests of the frst person pronoun, this pronoun is often perplexed about its identity, the relationship of self to others, of self to itself. The Waves, Woolf’s ‘playpoem’, of which Stella McNichol writes, that ‘She has so saturated the novel with poetry that it almost ceases to be a novel’, springs from her wish to present a vision ‘of

5 Woolf, The Waves, 170. 6 John Freeman, “Dissent,” in This Line Is Not for Turning: An Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry, ed. Jane Monson (Blaenau Ffestiniog: Cinnamon, 2011), 67. Qtd. with permission of author, editor and publisher. 76 M. O’NEILL life, itself’, in McNicol’s words, ‘the great universal which contains and sustains the individual’.7 The six individual voices to whom we listen at various stages of their lives are fgured as petals on a single fower.8 But no simplistic mystic oneness is insisted on or offered. The italicised interludes describing the rise and setting of the sun imply a vast amplitude of natural harmonies and dissonances. They operate as keen observation (‘Meanwhile the concussion of the waves breaking fell with muffed thuds, like logs falling, on the shore’) that suggests an irresistible impulse to rein- terpret the world fguratively: here the waves, in their sounds, sound like solid things, ‘like logs falling’.9 They also intimate an overarching backdrop against which the individual lives voice their apprehensions and perceptions. Through cunningly simple devices such as statement piled on statement, Woolf depicts the natural world as blending massive solid- ity with tremulous process, as when she writes, in the same passage, that ‘the dew dancing on the tips of the fowers and leaves made the garden like a mosaic of single sparks not yet formed into one whole’.10 There, the language sways to and fro—between the hard, worked surface of ‘mosaic’ and the suggestions of quasi-Shelleyan ‘single sparks’, if one thinks of the ‘Ashes and sparks’ (67) to which Shelley compares his scattered words towards the close of ‘Ode to the West Wind’.11 The fnal phrase, ‘not yet formed into one whole’, suggests how, in her ‘playpoem’, Woolf wants to, and does not, turn experience into ‘one whole’, delighting in and absorbed by what is ‘not yet formed’. It is as though, for Woolf, the poetic prose of her great work expresses continually and with supple fuidity two contrary impulses or meanings: that language needs to be at its most subtle and creative to convey the living immediacy of what it is to be, to possess or be possessed by a subjective experience; and that language needs, too, to be aware that there is a pattern, or shape, or order, or design, to which, at its most fulfll- ing, subjective experience belongs. Phrases build on phrases with complicated results as, asking ‘how to describe the world seen without a

7 Stella McNichol, Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990), 119, 125. 8 See McNichol, Virginia Woolf, 127. 9 Woolf, The Waves, 16. 10 Ibid. 11 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 5 THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY … 77 self?’,12 Bernard contrives a thought-experiment (a term which might be a synonym for many prose poems) in pursuit of ‘voiceless, characterless expression’13:

There are no words. Blue, red – even they distract, even they hide with darkness instead of letting the light through. How describe or say anything in articulate words again?—save that it fades, saves that it undergoes a gradual transformation, becomes, even in the course of one short walk, habitual – this scene also. Blindness returns as one moves and one leaf repeats another. Loveliness returns as one looks, with all its train of phantom phrases.14

Words are alien to this world from which the self seeks to banish itself, and yet they register that feeling of alienation, too. The moment of habituation is turned uncannily inside out, so that it breathes a fresh newness. What ‘returns’ and ‘repeats’ seems to present itself for the frst time, and the very seductiveness of the phrasing both concedes and belies its allegedly ‘phantom’ status. A bravura rush of awareness in a preceding passage makes of Bernard experiencer and analyst, sufferer and recorder. Woolf uses the resources of poetic prose to convey Bernard’s sense of having reached a terminus, a point at which he feels that ‘Life has destroyed me’, that he is ‘A man without a self’, both a being and identity-less, part of a dreary totality uncharged by meaning, a parody of some ultimate unity, one in which all adds up to ‘clouds and phantoms made of dust’.15 But, in that very wording, in the cadencing of the writing, Woolf draws attention to the perilous recompense offered by the words that Bernard professes to mistrust. Those clouds, for instance, quickly gain in the act of losing, or as they ‘lose and gain and take gold or red and lose their summits and

12 Woolf, The Waves, 192. 13 Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 87. My thanks to my colleague Patricia Waugh for drawing my attention to this work and other relevant critical studies of Woolf. I disagree with Hussey that The Waves is a “failure” which he says “is partly due to” its “inwardness” (88); it is that inwardness, its way of working so that, in James Naremore’s words, “the reader almost drowns in the language” (qtd. Hussey, 92), which makes it exciting as an extended prose poem. 14 Woolf, The Waves, 192–93. 15 Ibid., 190–91. 78 M. O’NEILL billow this way and that, mutable, vain’. The last word crosses notions of emptiness with suggestions of writerly vanity, yet the passage as a whole manages to fascinate and absorb us in the task undertaken by ‘a shadow … sedulous to take note of shadows’.16 The prose poem seems peculiarly attuned to what in one mood seems ‘mutable, vain’ and in another processes that ‘lose and gain and take gold or red.’ With a peculiar urgency, it pits words against silence, what is living and changing against what is fnished, over. Recognising this fght, the fnal sentence of Bernard’s last speech advocates in its very syntax a hurling of the self against a force continually held at bay in the prose poem: ‘Against you I will fing myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’17 Here, a near-chiastic sound patterning—‘Against’ and ‘Death’ as the off-rhyming A-terms, ‘fing’ and ‘unyielding’ composing the sandwiched B-terms—suggests the courage and the possibly unavail- ing nature of that ‘finging’. The next and fnal sentence of the book, the last in the set of italicised interludes, reads ‘The waves broke’,18 stamping the novel with a seal of fnality, the dubious rapture of possible rupture. Woolf is a crucial practitioner because she places the prose poem at the heart of the novel, inviting us to see as culturally central a form that can parade a near-dandifed eccentricity. What is central? What is peripheral? The questions are posed by the prose poem as it faunts its affnity with and difference from the passage of heightened prose or the poem that wears its studied arrangements like a famboyant cloak or even, in the case of vers libre, a fesh-coloured body stocking. More than this, Woolf recovers a sense of connection with the Romantics who call into question simple distinctions between prose and poetry. In a diary entry of 1940, she expresses her admiration for Coleridge and Shelley in a sentence whose changing, supple lights and shades shape prose into poetry: ‘How lightly and frmly they put down their feet, and how they sing; and how they compact; and fuse, and deepen’.19 In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley, referred to on many occasions in The Waves, especially in Rhoda’s use of his poetry as what Woolf calls ‘an amulet against

16 Ibid., 191. 17 Ibid., 199. 18 Ibid. 19 Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (San Diego: Harcourt, 1981), 324. 5 THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY … 79 disaster’,20 writes: ‘The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error’ and that ‘Plato was essentially a poet’ who ‘sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action’, and ‘for- bore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style’.21 The Waves is a distant but signifcant heir of this proclamation, and Woolf’s acknowledge- ment of a Romantic lineage is present, too, in her powerful if guarded tribute to De Quincey in her ‘Impassioned Prose’. Here, Woolf admires De Quincey’s capacity to take prose away from ‘facts’ and provide, in Suspiria de Profundis, ‘descriptions of states of mind in which, often, time is miraculously prolonged and space miraculously expanded’: a miracle her own prose contrives, through its prolongations and expansions, to reproduce.22

2 Baudelaire, in his Petits Poèmes en prose, has infuenced the prose poem as practised in the UK in innumerable ways. This section returns to his example and practice in an attempt to single out features of his work which, in the present author’s judgement, have shaped and might continue to inspire the work of many writers of prose poems in English. The great French poet voices the hope shared by many practitioners of the prose poem when he asks famously:

Quel est celui de nous qui n’a pas, dans ses jours d’ambition, rêvé le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez sou- ple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience? [Which of us has never imagined, in his more ambitious moments, the miracle of a poetic prose, musical though rhythmless and rhymeless,

20 Qtd. in Jane de Gay, Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 164. This book contains a helpful discussion of Woolf’s use of Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley in The Waves. 21 Leader and O’Neill, Shelley, 679. 22 Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, ed. with intro. and notes David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 56, 61. 80 M. O’NEILL

fexible yet strong enough to identify with the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs and fows of revery, the pangs of conscience?]23

Francis Scarfe’s serviceable translation, given in brackets above, misses the beat-skipping speed of ‘musicale sans rythme et sans rimes’, where the French certainly has its own swaying rhythm even as it eschews rhyme, avoiding the clunky ‘though’ which the translation adds. And ‘ebb and fow’ is less nuanced than the French ‘ondulations’, which manages to be simultaneously ebb and fow. Yet, we note Baudelaire’s emphasis on the prose poem’s sensitivity to the vagaries of consciousness, to the graph traced by ‘the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs and fows of revery’. We note, too, as Sonya Stephens has pointed out, the fascination with the city, expressed in the same letter, and the abiding concern of the prose poems, in keeping with the fact that they have what Stephens calls ‘an oxymoron for a name’, with opposites. Everywhere the poems are built out of ‘doubling’, ‘polarity’ and ‘dualities’, as the same critic observes.24 Baudelaire’s prose poems negotiate between self and world, and refect on the nature of their own discourse in a way that the prose poem seems peculiarly suited to doing, holding before its reader the fact of itself, as though it were both a text and a lamp lighting up its identity as a lamp. Stephens speaks of the opening piece, ‘L’Étranger’, as involving a rejection by the stranger of ‘an ideological, and by extension, a discursive system’.25 Here is the work:

Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis? ton père, ta mère, ta soeur ou ton frère? – Je n’ai ni père, ni mère, ni soeur, ni frère. – Tes amis? – Vous vous servez là d’une arole dont le sens m’est resté jusqu’à ce jour inconnu. – Ta patrie? – J’ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située.

23 The Poems in Prose with “La Fanfarlo”: Baudelaire, vol. 2, ed. intro. and trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil, 1989), 25 (French phrases on p. 24). 24 Sonya Stephens, “The Prose Poems,” in The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, ed. Rosemary Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 72, 74. 25 Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16. 5 THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY … 81

– La beauté? – Je l’aimerais volontiers déesse et immortelle. – L’or? – Je le hais comme vous haissez Dieu. – Eh! qu’aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger? – J’aime les nuages … les nuages qui passent … là-bas … là-bas … les merveilleux nuages!26

The to-and-fro of this heterodox catechism is a tribute to the speaker’s slantingly wistful individuality and refusal to conform (and we observe, not for the only time in Baudelaire, the jab at secular progressivist com- placencies in ‘Je le hais comme vous haissez Dieu’). Immensely beguiled by the original, the present author found himself versioning this prose poem into something more regularly versifed and came up with the following:

The Stranger (After Baudelaire) ‘Whom do you love most – Your father, mother, sister, or your brother?’ ‘I have no father, mother sister, brother.’ ‘All right, which friend do you like best?’ ‘You use a word whose sense remains a riddle to me to this day.’ ‘Does your country tug your heartstrings then?’ ‘Where such a place might be I couldn’t say.’ ‘Do you love beauty best?’ ‘I’d love her if she were divine and real.’ ‘Money?’ ‘Fills me with a fervour of hate – the way you hate God.’ ‘So what do you love, you peculiar stranger?’ ‘I love clouds … the clouds that move … there and there … each magnifcent cloud.’

26 Baudelaire, Poems in Prose, 29. 82 M. O’NEILL

This process of versioning suggested to me how closely aligned the prose poem is with the poetic shapes it spurns. Baudelaire’s original tempts translation into lines through elements of repetition, through its sardonic parody of near-liturgical or catechistic question and response. It manages to be edgy and abrupt, through the switch between tu and vous, the stranger always employing the distancing latter,27 and through the brevity of the questions: ‘Tes amis?’, for example. I found in producing my version that I wanted to amplify, make less terse the questioning attack of the original speaker as I sought to bring the original closer to an English couplet poem that swirled round an iambic design and a set of near-rhymes, leaving one word ostentatiously unrhymed, the word ‘real’, my downplayed equivalent to ‘immortelle’. My intuition was that Baudelaire had shaped a form that consciously reminded one of a traditional poetic shape, even as it astringently eschewed such a shape, and my enjoyably self-defeating task was to remind myself of his extraordinary achievement by converting it into something more manageable for my own ear and sense of rhythm and sound. This is to stray dangerously close to narcissistic refection on the pleasures and perils of translation and versioning. But it’s intended to suggest how the prose poem contains within itself the ghost of a more evidently rule-governed poetry in the process of freeing itself from traditional forms. And the effort made me highly conscious of the unique, unparaphrasable nature of the original; the sharply antagonistic answers break free from their sardonic cover yet confrm their hostility to the questioner’s conventional values as, self-mockingly, they utter praise of ‘les nuages’, placed in that tantalising space that the Baudelairean prose poem opens up, somewhere, ironically, ‘là-bas … là-bas’. The exhilara- tion derives from the sudden outpouring, broken by suspension poems, of the fnal utterance. The appeal of the clouds lies in their opposition to what’s preceded them, their swoopingly assertive proof of the prose poet’s ability to summon ‘merveilleux’ images to his mind’s eye. The prose poem, in Baudelaire’s hands, can turn anecdote into witty or melancholy parable, as in ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, or statement of poetics into self-mocking exhibitionism, as in ‘Le Confteor de l’artiste’, or awareness of duality into brilliant Manichean meditation, as in ‘La Chambre Double’. All three poems display the possibilities of the form.

27 See Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, 17. 5 THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY … 83

In ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, Baudelaire offers his own conduct towards the glazier as an example of fnding a maniac epiphany, a way of divining ‘dans une seconde l’infni de la jouissance’ (infnite pleasure in a split second)28; he asks him to bring his ‘fragile merchandise’ (fragile merchandise) up fights of rickety stairs, only to reject him for having no ‘vitres qui fassent voir la vie en beau’ (tinted glass that makes life look more beautiful), before destroying his glass ware by throwing a ‘petit pot de feurs’ (small fower-pot) from his window.29 The poem works like a cross between a mock-erudite fable and a shaggy dog story, and it crys- tallises its effect through rapid juxtapositions of tone and perspective, and a memorable summary. The poem offers a brief equivalent to a second’s experience of ‘jouissance’. Long before Roland Barthes pointed up the word’s explosive power in Le Plaisir du texte, Baudelaire makes ‘jouissance’ a focal point of creative energy.30 Evading the novel’s love of rational disentangling of motive or the poem’s constructed and carefully formulated insight, the prose poem rides the current of its own being; the very randomness of experience fnds an appropriate form in the scintillating, self-saddened prose. In ‘Le Confteor de l’artiste’ Baudelaire evokes and deconstructs a seemingly ardent experience of ‘certaines sensations délicieuses’ (certain delicious sensations). Irony and aesthetic rapture entwine round one another in the original, single-sentence paragraph, before a Romantic yet post-Romantic celebration of ‘Solitude, silence’ follows, sublime encounters in which ‘toutes ces choses pensent par moi, ou je pense par elles (car dans la grandeur de la rêverie, le moi se perd vite!)’ (all these things think through me, or else I think through them—for the ego is very soon lost in the vastness of revery). The verbs turn in imitation of the refexive sense that the self may be medium as much as origin. And the recognition that it can be overwhelmed by ‘un malaise et une souffrance positive’ (discomfort and positive suffering) emerges in the third section, until, in the fnal section, the defeat of the artist by nature takes over. Yet, the defeat is a form of dialectical victory as the prose poem yields a formulation that feels unavailable in any other mode ‘L’étude du beau est un duel où l’artiste crie de frayeur avant d’être vaincu’ (The study

28 Baudelaire, Poems in Prose, 51. 29 Ibid., 49–50. 30 Borrowing is noted by Helen Vendler in The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 19. 84 M. O’NEILL of the beautiful is a duel, in which the artist protests in terror, before defeat). The prose poem itself ‘crie de frayeur’, then enacts through its glissade into the fnal phrase recognition of being ‘vaincu’, the last syllable recalling ironically the same sound running through ‘étude’ and ‘duel’.31 In this piece, one senses, as often in Baudelaire’s prose poems, a ves- tigial trace of the Petrarchan sonnet, with its four units; elsewhere, the volta typical of the sonnet form fnds expression. Such a turn can be far more lingeringly imminent in the prose poem than the fourteen-line sonnet, as is shown by ‘La Chambre Double’, which takes a whole page (in Scarfe’s edition) before the inevitable reversal: ‘Mais un coup terrible, lourd, a retenti à la porte’ (But suddenly a terrible, heavy thump resounded on the door).32 At this point, the fantasy world in which the room is ‘véritablement spirituelle’ (truly spiritual) and in which ‘L’âme … prend un bain de pareses’ (the soul enjoys a bath of stillness) gives way to the erasures and cancellations, and anxieties of everyday life, including in one haunting moment that takes one into the artist’s atel- ier, ‘les manuscrits, raturés ou incomplets’ (the manuscripts riddled with cross-outs or left half done).33 The prose poem, one might say, allows for more attention to the erasures and incompletions involved in the artistic prose than is often found in the novel or the poem. Moreover, in this poem the attention given to each syllable means we feel inside our listening skulls the inexorable ticking away of the ‘secondes … for- tement et solennellement accentuées’ (Seconds … powerfully and sol- emnly stressed) that dominate the writer’s imagination at the poem’s close. Baudelaire delights in staging a prolonged descent into disillu- sioned diminuendo as crude reality obliterates the world of dreams. As he itemises this obliteration, in effect, however, he explains why the world of fantasy came into existence in the frst place: what he calls ‘ce parfum d’un autre monde’ (that otherworld perfume) could not have pervaded the opening paragraphs with such sensuous luxuriance, the reader realises, unless there was a ‘fétide odeur de tabac mêlée à je ne sais quelle nauséabonde moisissure’ (fetid stench of tobacco blending with

31 Baudelaire, Poems in Prose, 32–33. 32 Ibid., 38–39. 33 Ibid. 5 THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY … 85 a nauseating stink of damp).34 The very nostril-quiver of disgust there in ‘je ne sais’, omitted by Scarfe in his translation, sings with an artful yet idiomatic trill; it takes us to the impulse that quickens imaginings of escape.

3 Baudelaire is very much the artist in his superb prose poems: exulting, despairing, the subject and medium of reverie, the coiner of images, the designer of scenarios, the shaper of proto-Calvino-esque structures of imagination. The American writer William Carlos Williams appears to react against the poet as aesthetic hero in his attempt to question traditional understandings of the roles played by poetry and prose: ‘appears to react’ because he is as preoccupied in his way with the poet’s function and status as Baudelaire is in his. Williams at once plays up and down the difference and connection between imaginative modes. His poetry is more than half in love with mannerisms associated with prose; it repu- diates ‘crude symbolism’, the distortions attendant on rhyme, and what, in Spring and All, his wildly eccentric, modernist equivalent to Dante’s Vita Nuova in its mix of poetry and accompanying prose, he calls ‘layers of demoded words and shapes’.35 And yet it asserts, through its preoccupation with the line and line-endings, a belief in forms of poetic control not readily available to the user of prose. Already, in Kora in Hell: Improvisations, Williams had experimented with a mode of prose poetry that combined a trust in whatever emerged through improvisatory uses of language and an impulse, both qualifed and respected in the fnal work, ‘to adjoin to each improvisation a more or less opaque commentary’.36 The interplay between ‘improvisation’ and ‘commentary’ suggests Williams’s double interest in the prose poem as a mode of evocation and a vehicle for meta-creative refection. Section XX summons up a farm-scene, but does so in a way that defes the reader’s sense of perspective; as often in the sequence, we are thrust up against the grain of things (‘so much bulls’ fodder’) only to discover

34 Ibid. 35 William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, https://archive.org/stream/spring_ and_all#page/n23. 36 Williams, Kora in Hell: Improvisations, https://archive.org/stream/korainhellim- prov00willrich#page/19. Further page references will be given in the text. 86 M. O’NEILL we’re inhabiting a mischievous parable that won’t yield up its meaning, a parable in which we’re climbing a wall that’s no longer there towards a sky that hardly exists, for all the narrator’s insouciant assurance: ‘(Au moins, you cannot deny you have the clouds to grasp now, mon ami!)’ (73). The playful tone includes, in its use of French, a witty suggestion that Williams has absorbed the lessons of Rimbaud and others, whilst subliminally mocking any imaginative fights of transcendence in, say, Illuminations. This teasing mock-parable is followed by two others: all three receive the following po-faced comment: ‘A poem can be made out of anything. This is a portrait of a disreputable farm hand made out of the stuff of his own disreputable environment’ (73). This is comically reductive as a modernist ‘moral’ or meaning, and incites us to look back at the way the poem has been ‘made of anything’. Williams cunningly subverts the didactic form he adopts: of evocation followed by commentary. He encourages the reader, rather, to interweave the two modes of discourse, until they seem cut from the same ‘disreputable’ cloth of puck- ish, free-fowing imaginings. Indeed, to avoid being ‘mechanical’, in his Prologue he inserts passages of commentary before we have read the improvisation (19). In one case at least, relating to ‘VI. No. 1’, this process involves two versions of the same improvisation (23). In the improvisation proper, Williams begins with his conclusion: ‘Of course history is an attempt to make the past seem stable and of course it’s a lie’, the weary rightness of the insight confrmed by the repeated use of ‘of course’. He goes on to note that ‘though killies have green backs and white bellies, zut! for the bass and hawks!’ (44). The suggestion here is of an inevitably predatory use of power. In the Prologue, where we fnd a commentary on this passage, Williams gives a measured reworking in which a ‘young man’ is shown ‘Observing’ the ‘barren truth’ that the colouring of a fsh allows it to swim ‘about in safety’. This observation stimulates less a meditative discovery than a rejection of ‘barren truth’, as the young man ‘rejects with scorn the parochial deductions of history and as scornfully asserts his defance’ (20–21). Such rejections and assertions galvanise the verbal and conceptual life of Kora in Hell, making it one of the most original twentieth-century examples of the prose poem sequence. 5 THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY … 87

When Williams concludes his poem V (‘Black winds from the north’) of Spring and All with the lines:

How easy to slip into the old mode, how hard to cling frmly to the advance—37 his lineation is central to his meaning, its way of heightening attention to its own verbal comportment. The ease of the slipping, the hardness of clinging frmly: each action of the poem is, in no mechanically determined way, carried into the consciousness of the reader through the dar- ingly well-judged line-breaks typical of Williams. Yet, the poems are part of a work that is also prose and prose poetry. ‘There is no point in trying to classify the book’, writes Webster Schott, since, as he goes on, ‘It is neither fction, criticism, poetry nor fact.’ But his subsequent assertion, ‘It is all—or parts of all’, shows how hard it is wholly to dispense with generic descriptors.38 Williams’s prose sections in Spring and All participate in the work’s overall creative impact—and they do so as more than commentary, exe- gesis, or poetics, though they contain ‘parts of all’ these things. The ability of the prose poem to serve a self-refexive function, noted in the previous sections on Woolf and Baudelaire, is central to the entire Romantic and post-Romantic tradition of the prose poem. Evident in Shelley’s evocation, in a passage that earns the title of prose poetry through its richness of imagery and cadence, of the ways in which the meanings of ‘A great Poem’ go on ‘overfowing with the waters of wis- dom and delight’,39 it is apparent, too, in Williams’s wittily paradoxical celebration of ‘the imagination’ as ‘drunk with prohibitions’: ‘Yes, the imagination, drunk with prohibitions, has destroyed and recreated everything afresh in the likeness of that which it was. Now indeed men look about in amazement at each other with a full realization of the

37 Williams, Spring and All, https://archive.org/stream/spring_and_all#page/n29/ mode/2up, 24. Further page references will be given in the text. 38 Webster Schott, intro. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1971), 86. For valuable discussion of another work by Williams, Kora in Hell, as prose poem, see Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion, chapter 3, 96–136. 39 Leader and O’Neill, Shelley, 693. 88 M. O’NEILL meaning of “art’”. (9). That fnal phrase alludes deftly to the close of Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, and the excitement registered by the Romantic poet about stumbling on to a new way of viewing reality fnds its way into the American modernist’s prose. The imagination is ‘drunk with prohibitions’ rather than inspirations. It is as though Williams is taking heed of Baudelaire’s advice to ‘get drunk’ in ‘Enivrez-Vous’ and is seizing on the possibilities present in ‘prohibitions’. Incited to do new things as an artist by being told not to do them, he fools round with non-sequential chapter numbers, unfnished sentences, illicit typographical fourishes, interrupting exclamations (‘Good God!’), a recklessly joyous use for secular purposes of a born- again, apocalyptic language (8):

Now at last that process of miraculous verisimilitude, that grate copying which evolution has followed, repeating move for move every move that it made in the past — is approaching the end. Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD IS NEW. (11)

The effect may, superfcially, be one of blustering assertion. But Williams enacts sinuously and with comic gusto the termination of a time when ‘evolution’ (poetic as well as biological) was ‘repeating move for move every move that it made in the past’. If the conclusion is mere fat, it reminds us that will can go hand-in-hand with the unleashing of new energies, delighted, fresh discoveries. In part, the passage works as a prose poem because it reaps the fruits of the previous images—time as ‘a wild horse’ fnally reduced to ‘a heap of skin, bones and ragged hoofs’ (where a Pan-like image just lurks in the background)—and syntactical enactments of a stilled, kinetic ‘progress’ (11). Its use of repetition with difference is an instance of a comparable technique: ‘is approaching the end’ picks up and builds on and extends the previous phrase, ‘at last SPRING is approaching’ (11). In the work of Williams, as of Woolf and Baudelaire, the prose poem is a locus where new meaning is always sensed as ‘approaching’.

Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. The Poems in Prose with “La Fanfarlo”: Baudelaire, vol. 2. Edited with introduction and translated by Francis Scarfe. London: Anvil, 1989. 5 THE MARVELLOUS CLOUDS: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROSE POETRY … 89 de Gay, Jane. Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Freeman, John. “Dissent.” In This Line Is Not for Turning: An Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry, edited by Jane Monson. Blaenau Ffestiniog: Cinnamon, 2011. Hussey, Mark. The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986. McNichol, Stella. Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction. London: Routledge, 1990. Murphy, Margueritte S. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translated with introduction by A. J. Krailsheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Major Works. Edited by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Stephens, Sonya. Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. “The Prose Poems.” In The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, edited by Rosemary Lloyd, 69–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Vendler, Helen. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Williams, William Carlos. Imaginations: “Kora in Hell,” “The Great American Novel,” “Spring and All,” “A Novelette and Other Prose,” “The Descent of Winter.” Edited by Webster Schott. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1970. ———. Kora in Hell: Improvisations. https://archive.org/stream/korainhellimprov 00willrich. ———. Spring and All. https://archive.org/stream/spring_and_all. CHAPTER 6

‘I Grow More & More Poetic’: Virginia Woolf and Prose Poetry

Jane Goldman

Did Virginia Woolf ‘grow more & more poetic’ in the course of her writing career? In June 1924, having published her ground-breaking experimental novel, Jacob’s Room (1922) and composing her next, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), she records that she at least thinks she is doing so, as she takes stock of her own ambitions in comparison with her friend E.M. Forster’s on the publication of his novel Howards End (1924):

What was I going to say? Something about the violent moods of my soul. How describe them, even with a waking mind? I think I grow more & more poetic. Perhaps I restrained it, & now, like a plant in a pot, it begins to crack the earthenware. Often I feel the different aspects of life bursting my mind asunder. Morgan [E.M. Forster] is too restrained in his new book perhaps. I mean, what’s the use of facts at our time of life? Why build these careful cocoons: why not say straight out—yes, but what?1

1 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf (hereafter D), ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977–1984), vol. 2, 304.

J. Goldman (*) University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland

Elsewhere, Woolf metonymically associates the earthenware pot with the fact-based realism of the founding novelist in English, Daniel Defoe: ‘There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot.’2 She seems to be describing an impulse toward lyric prose, in not wishing to fashion any more such self-contained, or containing, factual earthenware pots; she wants to crack them open, to admit ‘the violent moods of my soul’ which require her to become ‘poetic’, admitting, too, ‘the different aspects of life bursting [her] mind asunder’. The discourse of feeling, mood, mind and the soul suggests a defnition of poetry not connected to strict poetic form (presumably another restrictive kind of pot). Such a defnition is in keeping perhaps with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum, in ‘The Poet’ (1844), ‘it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem’.3 But is Woolf, here, following Emerson’s connected assertion that ‘the thought is prior to the form’?4 Her refection closes with a question, itself framed as a lyric out- burst: ‘why not say straight out—yes, but what?’ The buckled syntax of this exclamatory question challenges any such notion of thought or content prior to language and form. If ‘why not say straight out’ suggests a desire for a transparent linguistic signifer to express content prior to language with as little opacity as possible (the language of information), the syntax of the clause that this question inaugurates is skew- ered at the very point of the message it is to deliver, by the long dash intervening with that affrmatory, contradictory ‘—yes, but what?’ The concreteness of language itself is thereby exposed on the very cusp of its own utterance. The medium becomes the message with ‘—yes, but what?’; to ‘say straight out—yes, but what’ may therefore be understood, not as the desire to make language transparent, but to make it all too apparent, opaque and concrete. The very quiddity of poetry may be in that, perhaps incidentally, iambic utterance inscribed as it is in mono- syllabic words in a private diary entry and only posthumously published (accented syllable of each iamb is in bold): ‘why not/ say straight/

2 Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf (hereafter E), 6 vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie (vols. 1–4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5–6) (London: Hogarth, 1986–2011), vol. 5, 379. 3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” (1844), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2010), 623. 4 Emerson, “The Poet,” 623. 6 ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY 93 out—yes,/ but what?’ Returning to the frst clause of the sentence, ‘Why build/ these care/ful coc/oons:’, we may read it as a catalectic trochaic tetrameter (although there is a case for the whole line as iambic). If the accent falls on the ‘ful’ of ‘careful’, the sense of words as themselves vessels of meaning is ironically enhanced, and a sense of this word containing ‘care’ as both artifce and feeling is also foregrounded along with a sense of containment to brimming plenitude (care full). The accent falling on the word ‘these’, in the previous foot, enhances the crisis of the deictic—does ‘these’ apply back to Forster’s ‘new book’, or to this very word ‘these’, and these very words? But is it only by our formal abstraction from its prosaic ground and its ‘careful’ arrangement into two lines of poetry that this found utterance in autobiographical prose becomes poetic, or ‘more poetic’?

Why build these careful cocoons: Why not say straight out—yes, but what?

In thus abstracting and arranging, we may be potting and containing and diminishing Woolf’s lyric prose; paradoxically, doing blunt, un-lyric, violence to the very ‘violence of my soul’ she so carefully seeks to express. On the other hand, to attempt such liberties with Woolf’s prose may be the very form of active, creative reading and research that her dialogical writing seems to demand, for she understands the reader to be the ‘fellow-worker and accomplice’ of the writer. The ‘quickest way to understand […] what a novelist is doing is not to read’, she advises in ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ (1926), ‘but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and diffculties of words’ (E5 574); and ‘the time to read poetry’, she recognizes, is ‘when we are almost able to write it’ (E5 577). Her reader, encouraged by the very questions the writing poses, is obliged to pause and attend to the form of that writing, to experiment with that writing, pulling it out of shape in order to appreciate more fully the shape it is in: ‘Why build these careful cocoons: why not say straight out—yes, but what?’ Is this sentence said more ‘straight out’ in prose or poetry? Or is it always and already poetry, even in prose form, strung between the chance fuidity of prose margins, and in original context? Are the two tetrameters above somehow actually the less poetic in forcing the sentence to obey the one margin, the regulatory meter, of a set poetic form? 94 J. GOLDMAN

This essay begins by considering how we might claim Woolf as a poet in prose and a writer of prose poetry, prose poems, of poet-prose books, rather than as a poetic novelist, and it closes with a poem sourced in her numerous journal and diary entries on poets, poetry and poetics.5 One thing evidenced by this poem’s systematic, chronological, harvesting of her every utterance on poetry in her journal and diary is that Woolf did ‘grow more & more poetic’. She acknowledged a growing need for poetry, to read and to write, or at least to infuse into her writing, as she matured, declaring in 1924, at the age of 42: ‘By the way, why is poetry wholly an elderly taste? [….] It is poetry that I want now—long poems. […] I want the concentration and the romance, & the words all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose. [….] Now it is poetry I want, so I repeat like a tipsy sailor in front of a public house’ (D2 310). And the greatest accolade a reviewer could pay her experimental prose was to deem it poetry: ‘[Time and Tide] says I’m a frst rate novelist & a great lyrical poet’ (D5 67). From childhood, Woolf was a voracious reader of poetry as well as prose. In adulthood, she became a pioneer publisher of modern poetry and famously set the type for the Hogarth Press edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. She also published the Hogarth Living Poets Series One and Two, the Hogarth anthologies, and the Hogarth Essays series. In these appeared work by Hope Mirrlees, Gertrude Stein, Robert Graves, John Crowe Ransom, Vita Sackville-West, Nancy Cunard, Edwin Muir, Edith Sitwell, C. Day Lewis, Rainer Maria Rilke, Michael Roberts, Dorothy Wellesley, Stephen Spender, Frances Cornford and many others. Her novels, To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), were conceived by her as a new form of lyric—indeed, elegiac—writing, and were received as such by numerous critics and readers. Her fction and essays, and autobiographical writings, are all a-shimmer with a rich poetic allusiveness, and evidence her deep and sustained reading in, and mining of, poetry, both canonical and contemporary. Her archives contain a few sparse attempts at conventional poetry; and many of her infuential modernist and feminist manifestos and essays refect on the technical differences between and functions of poetry and prose. Although, in conversation with poets, she often insists on distinguishing herself

5 Jane Goldman, “Poetry Woolf” (2016), in Appendix below. This poem is one of a series of Woolf poems, the frst of which is “Discovery Woolf,” in The Voyage Out: An Anthology, ed. Kirsty Gunn and Gail Low (Dundee: The Voyage Out Press, 2016). 6 ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY 95 from them as a writer of prose, she nevertheless clearly harbours ambitions to transmute the two genres in her practice: ‘It may be possible that prose is going to take over – has, indeed, taken over – some of the duties which were once discharged by poetry’ (E4 434). In preparing her fnal novel, the posthumously published Between the Acts (1941), for the composition of which she drafted a series of lyric poems, Woolf discloses her plans to ‘dream a poet-prose book’ (D5 276). We might speculate on what form of prose-poetry this entails. Is she planning an extended, book-length, prose poem (a contradiction in terms, perhaps, given the short lyric qualities of that genre), a further fnesse of or departure from the lyric novels for which she had become critically acclaimed? ‘Some prose writers are to be read as poets’ (E4 324), Woolf observes on dipping into Charles Lamb’s Letters for her essay ‘On Being Ill’ (1926). How far might we think of Woolf herself as a poet, of her writing as poetry, or prose poetry? And what did she understand by the term ‘prose poem’? ‘The term “prose poem” has been applied irresponsibly’, according to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, ‘to anything from the Bible to a novel by [William] Faulkner, but should be used only to designate a highly conscious (sometimes even self-conscious) artform.’6 Strictly speaking, then, a prose poem ‘differs from poetic prose in that it is short and compact, from free verse in that it has no line breaks, from a short prose passage in that it has, usually, more pronounced rhythm, sonorous effects, imagery, and density of expression. It may contain even inner rhyme and metrical runs.’ 7 On the other hand, any example of ‘fne writing in excelsis’, according to Walter de la Mare’s published lecture Poetry in Prose (1935), may be deemed ‘prose poetry’, its dreaded nemesis being the ‘purple patch’.8 Rhian Williams has helpfully refected on the ‘confusion as much as defnition’ inherent in such attempts to categorize prose poetry, marking de la Mare’s contempt for ‘the examples of “prose poetry” he fnds in the excesses of women’s fashion magazines or wine-tasting notes’.9 In these cases, the prose poem has become the eyesore of the ‘purple patch’.

6 Alex Preminger, ed., Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, enlarged edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 664. 7 Preminger, Encyclopedia, 664. 8 Walter de la Mare, Poetry in Prose: Warton Lecture on Poetry (London: British Academy, 1935), cited Rhian Williams, The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 130. 9 Williams, Poetry Toolkit, 129, 130. 96 J. GOLDMAN

Woolf, too, shows a certain disdain, or at least ambivalence, for ventures into prose poetry and the purple patch. ‘It is true that prose writers are daring; they are constantly forcing their instrument to make the attempt’, she remarks in one of her key essays examining and comparing the capacities of poetry and prose, ‘Poetry, Fiction, and the Future’ (1927; also known as ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’). ‘But one always has a feeling of discomfort in the presence of the purple patch or prose poem’ (E4 437). Comparing the ‘amateur’ prose style of her friend Roger Fry, Bloomsbury visual artist and formalist critic, for example, with that of the great aesthetes Arthur Symonds and Walter Pater, she notes that his lack of ‘instinctive affection’ for the writer’s ‘medium’—that is for writing itself—meant ‘he was saved some of their temptations. He was not led away to write prose poems.’10 If Woolf scorned the prose poem and the purple patch, what are we to make of those italicized interludes in The Waves, short passages of highly poetic language that punctuate the series of highly stylized, equally poetically saturated soliloquies that form the main bulk of the work? The only instances of the old-fashioned work of narrative occur in the connecting ‘said Bernard’, ‘said Rhoda’, and so on, marking out the juxtaposed speeches of the six directly voiced characters. Differently textured, differently structured, they may be, it is diffcult to argue that one is more poem or purple patch than the other. Even the prosaic ‘said’s become poetic in the repetition. Compare, for example, the frst couple of lines of the opening interlude—‘The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.’11—with the frst words of the opening soliloquy that follows after a blank space, on a fresh page: ‘I see a ring’, said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light’ (W 7). But, to be clear, Woolf’s ‘objection to the purple patch, however, is not that it is purple but that it is a patch’ (E4 437). She wants a sustained, book-length purple patch, then, an extended prose poem. She fnds her model in the work of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ‘a book full of poetry, but we never notice it; it is a book stained deep purple, which is yet never patchy’, in which one sees ‘poetry changing easily and naturally into prose, prose into poetry’ (E4 438). This sort of sustained fusion means that ‘some renunciation is necessary’, and Sterne ‘forfeits his right to the more substantial vegetables that grow on the

10 Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (hereafter RF) (London: Hogarth), 106. 11 The Waves (hereafter W) (London: Hogarth, 1931), 6. 6 ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY 97 ground’, for it is not possible to ‘cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands’ (E4 438). Composing poetry using Woolf’s texts as source may cause a con- verse ‘purple patch’ effect whereby poetry takes back some of its tools, or extracts the (or a) poetry from the poetry-infused yet not quite unpoetic prose, turning it back to the prosaic foil of the new poetic blade. Does such a gesture imply that the new poem throws into relief its source as not yet a poem? Conversely, it may even make the most radical and experimental of such sourced poetry look old-fashioned in some respects. Jackson Mac Low’s ‘Ridiculous in Piccadilly’ (1985), for example, is certainly avant-garde in its ‘diastic’ compositional methodology of drawing on Woolf’s The Waves:

After fnding the title phrase in line 4, p.88, of the frst American edition […] I drew one word for each of its letters. Beginning with the phrase itself, I culled only words in which the letters occupied corresponding posi- tions (I disregarded hyphens): ‘ridiculous Piccadilly.//end stain/bookcase,/reassuring brutally/eating-house.//eating-house.//waitresses […] Having spelled the phrase out once, I began again, & did so repeatedly12

Mac Low’s scrupulously aleatory numerology generates a series of eleven short lyric poems that is ‘spelled out’ from an apparently random selection of Woolf’s words in The Waves. This work is, in fact, as (if not more) strictly ordered and organized into lines and stanzas as any poetry adhering to traditional, fxed metrical or stanzaic form. As her ‘fellow-worker and accomplice’, Mac Low takes Woolf’s advice to make one’s ‘own experiment with the dangers and diffculties of words’ to virtuoso heights. Yet, the poems are also somewhat conservative in their adherence to poetry’s traditional left-hand margin, whereas the source text, The Waves, itself is already testing much more provocatively the fuid margins of prose into poetry. The frst of Mac Low’s poems, described above, begins thus:

Ridiculous Piccadilly.

12 Jackson Mac Low, The Virginia Woolf Poems (Providence: Burning Deck Press, 1985), 162. 98 J. GOLDMAN

end stain bookcase, reassuring brutally eating-house.

eating house. waitresses, in and plates right included.

We might compare this with Yeats’s treatment of Pater’s prose in The Renaissance (1873) by which he renders the opening of Pater’s essay on the ‘Mona Lisa’ into a free verse poem, making variegated poetic lines of clauses and phrases. The resultant poem is his opening work for The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (1936):

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; Like the Vampire, She has been dead many times, And learned the secrets of the grave13

‘Which is the prose, which the poem and which the “prose poem” is muddied in such a treatment’, Williams rightly observes: ‘Yeats implies the existence of prose poetry (he chooses a piece of prose when pick- ing a piece for a verse anthology) and yet denies it (he “turns it into” a free verse poem).’14 Yet, as well as opening up debates about categorization of prose and poetry, encouraging writers and readers to inhabit new generic borderlands and ever more precariously built bridges between them, Yeats’s exercise in found poetry is also encouraging actively, attentive and creative methods of reader response to writing of any sort (as well as to the rest of the contents in his modern anthology). ‘Time Passes’, the middle section of To the Lighthouse, was early understood as a series of ‘prose poems […] like those of [Stéphane] Mallarmé, grotesque, fantastic or romantic, pervaded with a delicate mingling of irony and melancholy.’15 And, indeed, Woolf read Mallarmé

13 William Butler Yeats, ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (1936), cited Williams, 131. 14 Williams, Poetic Toolkit, 131. 15 B.G. Brooks, “Review Article,” in Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (London: Routledge, 1975), 457. 6 ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY 99 in French, and was intimately acquainted over many years with Fry’s sustained project to translate Mallarmé’s poetry, which she understood as characteristic of Fry’s interdisciplinary practice of ‘making raids across the boundaries’ (RF 239–240). She also read the great leading practitioners of the prose poem, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. When Fry’s translations of Mallarmé were eventually published, however, none of the prose poems were included.16 The tendency to raid is something she also admired in the painter Walter Sickert, one of those artists ‘always making raids into the lands of others’ (E6 45). An advocate of such raiding, Woolf herself has been celebrated as ‘a hybrid writer who raided the other arts’.17 ‘Woolf is also a raider’, Diane Filby Gillespie insists. ‘So is the novel as she redefnes it.’18 Yet, some of her writing might be snatched even from the very maw of the protean raider-novel, that ‘cannibal […] which has devoured so many forms of art’ (E4 435). The publication of a draft of the prose-poetic ‘Time Passes’ in Charles Mauron’s French translation, ‘Le Temps Passe’ (1926) (in the French Symbolist magazine, Commerce), prior to its appearance in revised form in To the Lighthouse, might suggest her novel’s partial or diffcult diges- tion of French symbolist prose-poetry. Unlike the short pieces composed in relation to her previous novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) (some before, some after its publication), ‘Time Passes’ has not been collected in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, or elsewhere since, as a ‘short story’—neither in its English typescript draft, nor in its French version. Is it excluded on grounds of being an avant-texte to the novel? If so, then why include ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, also published in a magazine (the Dial in 1923) prior to the novel that reworks it? On the other hand, what is the precise literary genre of the eight short prose pieces Woolf published under the title Monday or Tuesday (1921), the ‘only volume of stories and sketches’ published in her

16 Stéphane Mallarmé, Poems, trans. Roger Fry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936), a copy of which is in Woolf’s library (Washington State University Library). So, too, is a copy of Mallarmé, Poésies, 5. éd. (Paris: La Nouvelle revue française, 1915), which is inscribed to Leonard Woolf from Roger Fry, and accompanied by a translation of Mallarmé’s poem “A la nue accablante tu” by Roger Fry, beginning “To the overwhelming bleakness, thou”. 17 Diane F. Gillespie, “Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Painting,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. Maggie Humm (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 136. 18 Diane F. Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 1. 100 J. GOLDMAN lifetime?19 While the eighth of these, ‘The Mark on the Wall’, was frst published as one of Two Stories in 1919, the Hogarth Press’ frst publication, there is no such obvious or easy generic identifcation of the contents of Monday or Tuesday, which Eliot for one approvingly termed ‘experimental prose’.20 Might this highly stylized hand-printed book, sporting no actual list of contents but set with distinctively experimental woodcut images by Vanessa Bell, the avant-garde artist and the author’s sister, be a volume of prose poems? Certainly ‘BLUE & GREEN.’, comprising two paragraphs of densely imagistic prose, arranged in reversed order, ‘GREEN.’ and ‘BLUE.’, on facing pages in the frst British edition is a contender (Fig. 6.1).21 As much a celebration of the visual pleasure of the roughly hand- set print medium itself—see, for example, the stylized use of full-stops in the title and subtitles—as of colour and light in abstraction, ‘BLUE & GREEN.’ playfully draws attention to the mirroring effect of the facing pages, intruding between ‘A String Quartet’ (MT 59–65) and ‘Kew Gardens’ (MT 68–78), whose titles suggest (music and greenery) the synaesthetic stimuli of sound and vision at play in the ‘harsh cries’ of painterly ‘parakeets’ among ‘green needles’ of ‘GREEN.’ and the ‘slushing’ of the ‘water’ ‘dowsing’ the prose ‘blue’ in ‘BLUE.’ Perhaps this piece owes something to the play of light, colour, land and seascape of Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘Venus and the Fool’, in which: ‘It seems as though an ever-waning light makes all objects glimmer more and more, as though the excited fowers burn with a desire to rival the blue of the sky by the vividness of their colours; as though the heat, making per- fumes visible, drives them in vapour towards their star.’ Perhaps it nods to his ‘superb country of Cockaigne’ in ‘Invitation to Voyage’, or to Mallarmé’s ‘Winter Shivers’ and ‘White Water Lily’. Yet, in many respects it seems to resemble not so much any of Mallarmé’s prose poems but, rather, to constitute a vivifying and infusing, erupting chromatic response to the monochrome lyric, his short lyric poem on an eclipsing ‘blackness’ and a ‘sepulchral shipwreck’, translated by Roger Fry as:

19 Susan Dick, “Introduction,” in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1985), 2. 20 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth, 1972), 88, cited Dick, 3. 21 Woolf, Monday or Tuesday (hereafter MT) (London: Hogarth, 1921), 66–67. 6 ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY 101

Fig. 6.1 Virginia Woolf, ‘BLUE & GREEN.’, Monday or Tuesday (London: Hogarth, 1921)

TO THE OVERWHELMING BLACKNESS HUSHT:

To the overwhelming blackness husht Base of lava and basalt Up to the echoes enslaved By a virtueless trump What sepulchral shipwreck (you Know it, foam, but only slaver) Supreme one among the fotsam Abolished the disclad mast Or that which furious (in default Of some high perdition With all the vain abyss let loose) In the so white dragging hair Will have drowned in niggard wise Some young siren’s infant fank.22

22 Mallarmé, Poems, trans. Fry, 282. 102 J. GOLDMAN

Woolf’s ‘Blue.’ seems to disgorge a chimaeric male sea creature, part sailor, part siren (‘Thrown up on the beach he lies, blunt, obtuse, shedding dry blue scales’), perhaps in response to the ‘young siren’ destined to drown at the close of Mallarmé’s poem. The menacing indifference of her ‘cold’ ‘cathedral’, ‘incense laden faint blue with the veils of madon- nas’, seems to be casting a mocking veil of matriarchal colour (blue is the symbolic colour of the Madonna) over Mallarmé’s monochrome ‘Sepulchral shipwreck’. His shipwreck is reduced to her ‘wrecked row- ing boat’. Not only is his restricted palette exploded by Woolf, so, too, his containing poetic line is ‘let loose’ into the motile prose margins of her ‘BLUE & GREEN.’, nevertheless rendered, of course, in the black and white of her printed book. Unlike those active accomplice readers/writers, such as Yeats and Mac Low, Woolf is here traffcking in the other direction between poetry and prose. Yet, however we choose to label her writing it seems itself to be insisting itself, as Mallarmé’s does even in its most pioneering experimental form, to be poetry. For example, his more famous ‘shipwreck’ poem, perhaps itself disgorged by his ‘overwhelming blackness husht’, and which is known usually by its subtitle—‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’—is, in fact, more properly titled ‘POÈME’ (1897, 1914).23 First published in book form in 1914, POÈME: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, may well inform Woolf’s increasing ambition to become ‘more poetic’ in this modern, concrete sense, to ‘dream a poet-prose book’. Recognizing in Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s long poem ‘Aurora Leigh’ (1856), in an essay of the same title (1931), ‘a brilliance and a continuity, owing to the compressions and elisions of poetry, which mock the prose writer and his slow accumulations of careful detail’, Woolf fnds that ‘if we compare the prose novel and the novel-poem the triumphs are by no means all to the credit of prose’ (E5 266); and she wonders ‘why it has left no successors’ (E5 267). On the other hand, Woolf, the advocate of thinking ‘poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact […] but not losing sight of fction either’,24 understands that such a line continues not in poems

23 Mallarmé, POÈME: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (Paris: La Nouvelle Revue Francais, 1914), https://math.dartmouth.edu/~doyle/docs/coup/scan/coup.pdf. 24 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (hereafter AROO) (London: Hogarth, 1929), 56–57. 6 ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY 103 that take on the work of prose, but vice versa, in novels that take up poetry’s tools. Notice how ‘fction’ here is aligned with poetry against ‘fact’, the essential work of prose as writing in the language of information. And this is the main thrust of her feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own (1929), which sets out a materialist argument for the coming of the messianic ‘Shakespeare’s sister’, that is, a woman poet to rival the poetic calibre of Shakespeare. The character ‘Mary Carmichael’, is one of those who is ‘work[ing] for’ the arrival of Shakespeare’s sister: ‘She will be a poet, I said, putting Life’s Adventure, by Mary Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in another hundred years’ time’ (AROO 142), a somewhat cruel joke at the expense of the pioneer scientist of birth control Marie Stopes, whose similarly titled Love’s Creation (1928) was published under the nom de plume Marie Carmichael and who was, in fact, already a published poet. The narrator does not favour ‘the less interesting branch of the species’, as she calls Mary Carmichael ‘the natural- ist-novelist, and not the contemplative’ (AROO 132–133). Given the envisioned genesis of a new feminist poetics from the grounds of prose, the poetry of Shakespeare’s sister will presumably not take the traditional form of poetry that hugs the left-hand margin. This evolutionary arc of progress from prose to poetry, applied to women’s writing in A Room of One’s Own, is also traced and applied more generally to the progress of the novel itself in a substantial essay Woolf published the same year, ‘Phases of Fiction’ (1929). The frst of the not entirely distinct or chronological phases is that of ‘The Truth- Tellers’ such as ‘[Daniel] Defoe, [Jonathan] Swift, [Anthony] Trollope’ et al. (E5 42–49); the second phase, ‘The Romantics’, such as Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Ann Radcliffe (E5 49–55); the third phase, ‘The Character-Mongers and Comedians’, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and George Eliot (E5 55–63); the fourth phase, ‘The Psychologists’, such as Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoevski and Henry James (E5 63–71); the ffth phase, ‘The Satirists and Fantastics’, such as Thomas Love Peacock and Laurence Sterne (E5 71–76); the sixth and fnal phase is that of ‘The Poets’, including Sterne (again), Tolstoy, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë, Herman Melville and (again) Proust (E5 76–84). In this fnal section, Woolf puts forward different kinds and modes of poetry in the novel. In Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, it is a kind of quietist poetry: 104 J. GOLDMAN

the poetry of situation rather than of language, the poetry we perceive when Catherine […] pulls the feathers from the pillow; when Oak watches the sheep by night; when Natasha […] looks out at the stars. And it is signifcant that we recall this poetry, not as we recall it in verse, by the words, but by the scene. The prose remains casual and quiet enough so that to quote it is to do little or nothing to explain its effect. Often we have to go far back and read a chapter or more before we can come by the impression of beauty or intensity that possessed us. (E5 77)

In formalist terms, ‘the poetry of situation’ resides in the ‘fabula’ of these novels; that is, the events of the story and its other ‘products’, and not in the ‘sujet’ of the story, its concretely arranged verbal representation, the actual ‘words’, its precise linguistic shape, which constitute the poetry ‘of language’, a quality more frequently associated with strikingly quotable verse. We might distinguish the ‘poetry of situation’ from the ‘poetry of language’ as that of the signifed distinguished from that of the signifer. This classifcation extends back to traditional (including verse) poetry itself, in which ‘situation’ or ‘language’ may dominate, as well as to prose poems. Woolf identifes a poetry of ‘whole mood and temper’ in Wuthering Heights or Moby Dick (E5 78–79), but in Proust’s work, however, she fnds a ‘poetry of a different kind’, which ‘comes, not in the situation, which is too fretted and voluminous for such an effect, but in those frequent passages of elaborate metaphor, which spring out of the rock of thought like fountains of sweet water and serve as translations from one language to another’ (E5 79). This metaphoric prose is closer to the novel’s ‘poetry of language’ than ‘poetry of situation’ since it openly, or self-consciously, displays its metaphoricity, acknowledging the literary device that communicates itself as a concrete language that presents itself as both vehicle and tenor, signifer and signifed. Woolf’s examination of Proust in these terms takes us to the brink of glimpsing a new kind of literature. A prose poem sustained as a novel of book length that fore- grounds itself in the mode of the signifer (as also its own signifed) and breaks open its own metaphoricity, celebrating the opacity of the vehicular, would be a work of pure ‘poetry of language’, rather than ‘of situation’, recalled not ‘by the scene’ but ‘by the words’. If it is the case that Woolf’s writing becomes ‘more & more poetic’, then, it is in this aspect, as ‘poetry of language’ recalled ‘by the words’. In extending the prose poem—or, indeed, ‘purple patch’—to book 6 ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY 105 length form (in at least every novel from Jacob’s Room to Between the Acts),25 a form of unpatching the purple patch, she has redefned both poetry and prose. Her journals and diaries record a lifetime of refections on her compositional processes, and offer considerable evidence to support the idea of such a trajectory. As a form of research by creative practice, and in keeping with Woolf’s preferred reader as ‘fellow-worker and accomplice’, I have composed the poem, ‘Poetry Woolf’ (2016),26 by taking a line of fight through these documents, using a search engine to record every instance of her usage of ‘poet’, ‘poetry’ and ‘poetics’. I have thus traced that trajectory, and anchored it neither in poetry’s left- hand margin nor in prose’s fuid double margin, instead aligning those cognate terms vertically through the poem in chronological order of appearance. And every instance that I have plucked ‘by the words’ from her journals and diaries, I made sure to trail with it an enclosing ring of language on each lateral line. The poem voyages from frst mention by Virginia Stephen, aged ffteen, in the early journal of 1897 to fnal mention by the ffty-nine-year-old Virginia Woolf in her diary of 1941:

Finished & despatched Dorethea’spoems pillars of smoke—One ought to be apoet No one—save apoet—can express *** ‘genius’. Had we read hispoems? I think I grow more & more poetic It is poetry that I want now—long poems. re-reading her poem to choose a title *** I’ll also dream a poet-prose book (there are the poems in MS all waiting) Tom’s last poem “didactic”, & he left Hot, I repeat, & doubt if I’m apoet. proving their existence as poets

Here, we see crystallized a young woman’s recognition of her own poetic potential, fred both by early exposure to poetry through a

25 Woolf’s ten novels are: The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), The Waves (1931), Flush: A Biography (1933), The Years (1937), Between the Acts (1941). 26 See Appendix. 106 J. GOLDMAN father line (Lowell)27 and by secretarial apprenticeship in a mother line (Dorothea).28 This erupts into a sustained, markedly feminist impetus to forge a new gender-sensitive poetics (‘his poems’/‘her poem’).29 At the other end of her career, shortly before her death, Woolf envisions a universalist ‘poet-prose book’ (D5 276) while also defecting from clear identifcation as ‘a poet’ and abdicating from a still dominant patriar- chal poetry made by others, perhaps including ‘Tom’ (T.S. Eliot),30 still ‘proving their existence as poets’ (D5 355).31 She performs a startling, new feminist poetics, paradoxically emphatic in a declarative utterance of heated emotion yet trembling at the very edge of disavowal: ‘Hot, I repeat, & doubt if I’m a poet’ (D5 315). How those dental fricatives ricochet in this pentameter trouvé. How the passions and intellect dance among phonemes from the violent moody trochaic, ‘Hot, I’, via the ‘eat’ of ‘repeat’ and the ‘out’ of that assertive ‘doubt’ before landing so gently, yet so assuredly, on ‘poet’. These gleaned lines I hope give insight into Woolf’s lifelong engagement with poetry and poets, and poetics in prose.

27 The poet and critic James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) was a close friend to Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, who made him her ‘sponsor’, a secular or quasi-godfather. See Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, ed. Mitchell Leaska (London: Hogarth, 1990), 50. 28 In fact, Dorothea Fitzjames Stephen (1871–1965) was Woolf’s cousin on her paternal side. See Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice, 102. 29 The “genius” poet in question (“his poems”) is, in fact, Edmund Charles Blunden (1896–1974) (D2 297); and “her poems” (D2 297) refers in this instance to Nancy Cunard (1896–1965), whose long poem entitled Parallax was published by Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1925. 30 The diary entry refers to an exchange with Professor Bonamy Dobrée (1891–1974), for whom Eliot’s poem East Coker (1940) is “didactic” (D5 278). 31 In fact, Woolf’s diary entry is on the successful libel case brought by the sibling poets the Sitwells (Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell) against a hostile reviewer in February 1941 (D5 355–356). 6 ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY 107

Appendix

Poetry Woolf (I Grow More & More Poetic)

1. Father gave me Mr Lowell’s poems— exciting and splendid. If I was a poet I type wrote Dorothea’s poems Finished & despatched Dorothea’s poems pillars of smoke—One ought to be a poet No one—save a poet—can express Cowper’s poems, all bescrawled & underlined all the world is mind. Then I read a poem central meaning of the world, & all these poets a bit of Aristotle, the poetics read the poetics all the morning bought JamesThomsons poems on the way finished my Aristotle poetics this morning words of the poets begin to sing & embody themselves Greek things— poems, & temples & statues the simple word Devon is better than a poem sent her the poems which much to his surprise against the embellishments of the poets Once, no doubt, she was a poetess, & trod the fields of Parnassus 108 J. GOLDMAN

2. Hardy’s poems which she can’t re-read his voice alone would dull the fieriest poesy in the world. Nor does he deal in fiery poems thanking him for his poem about Father about Shelley, & poets & their immorality I like the poetic side of L. what I said or didn’t say about Arnold’s poems about nature to be a poet & an eccentricity Hardy’snew poems, but lent them to Philip quite a big boy—with a poetic side She read us a poem called The Old Way for a poet we needn’t complain poetry: “a good commonplace poet” Cecil’s poems, which we have offered to print Cecil’s poems this afternoon. They’re not good The poet Hogben was also there I making rather a mess of the poems The poem which ends “what man has made of man” books in Hiskoke’s. I bought Collins’poems the young poets & painters drift up the poems of Heredia & the poems of Laforgue Her poems are soon coming out. a born poet, as she seems to have known Childe Harold was the best poem ever never as young man believed in his poetry most readable poem of its length ever He wasn’t committed to be poetical “The finest poem in the language too.” Last night, L. read Hardy’s poems aloud. extreme difference between this poem & any other 6 ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY 109

Has any greatpoem ever let in so little light? strong & elaborate it all is! What poetry! Review by me of Edith Sitwell’spoems strong views of his own, & apoetic creed greatpoets, or in the current phrase “very interesting” He produced 3 or 4 poems for us highly organized framework of poetic belief this new poetry flower on the stem of the oldest that remark at the end of a poem Murry’s poem which I found hard to read a plethora of words; his poem short poems of his are to be printed, beautifully do what we like with Murry’s long poem. He asks £4.10 see more of, owing to his poems coming to the end of Eliot’s poems a poet who surrounds herself with sketches a long poem which she wants us to consider “She is a poet— certainly a poet” his poetry, & his standing as a poet Eliot’s poems—our best work so far Murry’s poem with such blots & blurs he is well cropped & brown for a poet A poem is a very sensitive part brought her sister—“the poet”—to dinner I don’t suspect her a poet whether or not to read her poems Stokoe’s poems before Miss Green arrives 110 J. GOLDMAN

3. Four poets are chosen; she’s one of them Paris, a Poem, by Hope Mirrlees We got on to thePoetic Drama confidence in thepoetic drama Eliot has sent me hisPoems I find he thinks himself aPoet The poetess came in—poor hard boiled egg This surlypoet, so we judged him (and hisPoetry is Squire’s poetry) Anything would be better than apoet— than one of Squire’s Poets Clive proposes we should bring out his privatepoems. Morgan goes to India That little man postpones hisPoems the old word shop of the minorPoets make out that this is passion &Poetry —a very bad poet from Hounslow Jack Squire in apoetical villa within a hundred yards Rodmell is a colony for Georgian Poets Clive’spoems have gone today to the Reviewers drowned. & Lord Houghton wrote apoem about em He has written apoem of 40 pages Eliot dined last night & read hispoem. Mrs Shanks (so they say) has left the Georgian Poet one must now be a very first rate Poet to be a poet at all: when there were greatpoets, the little ones caught some of the glow Now there’s no greatpoet. When was the last? not as a philosopher or poet. He wanted Shelley’spoems, & not Shelley the man! describing Edith Sitwell’spoems, but Tennyson is a greatpoet. Certainly he’s apoet, not a greatpoet. I’ve been setting up your poem. It's a good Poem a damned good poem did you say? Well, you’ve improved what I said. But it is a damned good poem. But to continue. Thepoet Rylands was there The oldpoets were right. They made people think an editor to print his poems poets only. I said it should be for critics. ‘genius’. Had we read hispoems? I think I grow more & more poetic It is poetry that I want now—long poems. re-reading her poem to choose a title 6 ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY 111

4. poets use of words, how they fix on to a word the new Chatto & Windus poetess real poets. I say poetry is defunct little story about a man who wrote a poem Waste Land & his other poems—a fact How far will they make his poetry squint? I read her poem; which is more compact great philosophical poets, he says the poet came; a lean boy, nervous, plaintive I have no enormous opinion of her poetry I should have been reading her poem tonight all this goes out he said—his one poetical saying to come again; would read me his poems I said how much I liked his poems not setting much stock by his poems either Can you write poetry regularly? I asked write poems at the same time as your novels No. he said. I wrote a great many poems. had liked some of his poems very much begged him not to give up poetry, “I’m afraid poetry is giving me up” one cant write poetry if one sees people? the doings of the younger poets entirely new ‘a psychological poem’ I think Cowper is a good poet. these serious poetic experimental books very serious, mystical poetical work her poems, but has no knowledge of human nature, only these sudden intense poems I dashed in here: the play-poem idea a prize poem—that’s my fling at it I can’t quite take the talk of poetry & even great poetry seriously her own poems which I promptly throw down the W.C. procession to poets corner; dramatic something abstract poetic next time poem, without any trouble, save that of moving 112 J. GOLDMAN

my legs poetry—by which I mean saturated? poets succeeding by simplifying Poor Tom—a true poet, I think my regret that one ever sawpoetesses in the flesh. For she was a poetess too one or two little poems will survive he says herpoems aren’t worth publishing. —a less touchy poet never was. But can a real poet be an un-touchy poet? he wrote little poems, about Eton apoem about Eton—& then—clap came the war the man’s no poet & cant make one see made out a list of Elizabethanpoets “beautiful”; like a great poet rings to me truer, & is almost poetry he sends me his poems. And I invent greater range than the other poets Julian’s poems are out, & I am relieved love of country life, he is no poet poems we could come back to unsated Milton; it was latinised poetry modern poetry, & the question of the spade himself wrote “thumbnail” poems only thesteam roller. The great age of poetry Poets can only write when they have symbols can only write small fireside poems poems he much admires, & I have never read I vaguely remember in his poems. He said all his systems, philosophies, poetics anything I know, as good a poet perhaps Dotty’s poem I heard a shop bell 6 ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY 113

5. Julian in a stew about hispoems. And so she longs for allpoets in a garden novels simply to express the general, thepoetic I set up some of Dadie’spoems in thenew room “thinnest wall between such a novel &poetry speed of prose & the intensity of poetry” inspired to write a Letter to Young poet at Donne of a morning, & poems all about me. I’ve come to read poetry with intensity Miss Holtby says “It is apoem, more completely” post comes in with Elizabethanpoets there’s my little letter to apoet my Letter to a youngpoet I can take a little book of poems by herself. Time give her Johnson’s Lives of thepoets Dryden’s poems in double columns apoem dedicated to John Penis in the Mount of Venus correct my Letter to a Youngpoet read some hideously obscurepoems Lytton left masses of poems & unfinished plays my poet letter passes unnoticed Coleridge—one or twopoems thinks himself the greatest poet of all time Oh & I shall write apoets book next. Should I bring in a play, letters, poems? introduce plays, poems, letters, dialogues writing; reading, imperfectly, apoem never to me interesting—no poet He’s not apoet, no so what is he to do “. . . That is poetry (written here by mistake—damn)” happy sometimes. What apoem, for 10 minutes a handsome poetic boy to look at spruce as ever; & has left his poems Mr Barker’s poems, chanting, intoning. Barker right in hispoem when he called me fortunate poem, reality, comedy, play: narrative “among the Englishpoets after my death” Julian’s poems. At once she ruffles large faced pale faced man—our greatpoet. And no fire burning in any of us. Then Julian, with his poems, & Quentin. She is apoet, & has won a medal So he can’t be merely apoet, a writer Read his speech. Allpoets are misfits 114 J. GOLDMAN

6. cant swing from the real to the poetic anthology of love poems. Isnt it odd? a girl of 18 I read a poem & thought I understood it all the pose—show myself poetic & unworldly depressed to feel I’m not a poet Up & off again, like the gull in the poem. beautiful if too conventionally poetic young man “Mrs Woolf—you see, I feel youre a poetess” a real novelist, I suspect; not a poet first rate novelist & a great lyrical poet poems are as near poetry as anything I can stand my best book: poetical in the right sense one day in the winter & her poems she’s fine drawn, wd. be poetic too much poetic eloquence 3 Gs is poetic; profound; in my essayists vein poetry beautifully written & lucidly argued communicate rather than a poem Also theres Vita & her poem the moment, as now, lots of little poems “Words” refers partly to Vita’s new poem Dines out & goes to musical teas; reads poems poems (in metre) run off the prose lyric vein That great thick long jowled poet wrote to Desmond about his poetess If a new poem, what should I say? thinks me a poet-novelist, not a fraud fertile. & I suppose poetical his MSS poems—all repetitions Tom sent me his cat poems today. A very wet day. sly & grasping; yet poetic too. And a bore. I’ll also dream a poet-prose book (there are the poems in MS all waiting) Tom’s last poem “didactic”, & he left Hot, I repeat, & doubt if I’m a poet. proving their existence as poets 6 ‘I GROW MORE & MORE POETIC’: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PROSE POETRY 115

Works Cited Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. London: Hogarth, 1972. de la Mare, Walter. Poetry in Prose: Warton Lecture on Poetry. London: British Academy, 1935. Gillespie, Diane Filby. The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Goldman, Jane. “Discovery Woolf.” In The Voyage Out: An Anthology, edited by Kirsty Gunn and Gail Low. Dundee: The Voyage Out Press, 2016. Mac Low, Jackson. The Virginia Woolf Poems. Providence: Burning Deck Press, 1985. Mallarmé, Stéphane. POÈME: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard. Paris: La Nouvelle Revue Francais, 1914. https://math.dartmouth.edu/~doyle/ docs/coup/scan/coup.pdf. ———. Poems. Translated by Roger Fry. London: Chatto & Windus, 1936. Preminger, Alex, ed. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, Enlarged Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. Williams, Rhian. The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry, Second Edition. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Woolf, Virginia. Two Stories. London: Hogarth, 1919. ———. Monday or Tuesday. London: Hogarth, 1921. ———. Jacob’s Room. London: Hogarth, 1922. ———. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Hogarth, 1925. ———. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth, 1929. ———. The Waves. London: Hogarth, 1931. ———. Roger Fry: A Biography. London: Hogarth, 1940. ———. Between the Acts. London: Hogarth, 1941. ———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols.). Edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth, 1977–1984. ———. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Susan Dick. London: Hogarth, 1985. ———. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Andrew McNeillie (vols. 1–4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5–6). London: Hogarth, 1986–2011. ———. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals. Edited by Mitchell Leaska. London: Hogarth, 1990. CHAPTER 7

James Joyce and the Prose Poem

Michel Delville

James Joyce’s frst meeting with William Butler Yeats took place in early October 1902 in the smoking room of a Dublin restaurant.1 According to Yeats’ own account of the interview, Joyce, then a twenty-year- old undergraduate, claimed to have ‘thrown over metrical form’ and succeeded in creating ‘a form so fuent that it would respond to the motions of the spirit’.2 That Joyce declined to call his prose sketches prose poems is hardly surprising, considering his well-known reluctance to be assimilated into any specifc literary tradition. The term ‘prose poem’ (which, in English literature, had so far been applied, somewhat loosely, to a variety of neo-Ossianic eclogues and Wildean contes-poèmes) probably appeared far too restrictive to the young man, whom Richard Ellmann describes as already confdent enough in his talents as a prose writer ‘to feel he might outdo George Moore, Hardy, and Turgenev, if

1 A longer, alternative version of this essay was published in Giacomo Joyce: Envoys of the Other, ed. Louis Armand and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2007). This version is printed here with kind permission of Litteraria Pragensia. 2 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 102.

M. Delville (*) LLM, University of Liège, Liège, Liège, Belgium

© The Author(s) 2018 117 J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_7 118 M. DELVILLE not Tolstoy’.3 Be that as it may, Joyce’s description of the ‘epiphany’, despite its claims to novelty, reads like a quasi-verbatim rerun of Charles Baudelaire’s famous defnition of the genre as ‘the miracle of a poetic prose, musical though rhythmless and rhymeless, fexible yet rugged enough to identify with the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs and fows of revery, the pangs of conscience’.4 A second, even more striking similarity between the Baudelairian prose poem and the Joycean epiphany lies in the capacity of both genres not only to render the fuidity of mental states, but also to give shape to an essentially modern and urban reality. Like Baudelaire’s fâneur, Stephen Daedalus likes to wander through the streets of his native city, gleaning moments of poetic inspiration from seemingly unimpressive and random events. Most of the forty surviving epiphanies were later adapted and used in Joyce’s more extended works of fction.5 Many critics have therefore tended to consider them as merely preparatory material for Joyce’s ‘ambitious’ works. However, the neatly and carefully written manuscripts Joyce left behind him—all of which seem to date from between 1902 and 1904—leave no reason to believe that he did not originally consider them as literary achievements in their own right.6 Joyce even played for a time with the idea of gathering them in a volume and, in a letter sent to his brother Stanislaus in 1903, referred to them as a single work simply entitled ‘Epiphany’.7 In a brief, self-mocking remembrance, Stephen’s reincarnation in Ulysses later dismissed the project as the product of an arrogant and immature mind: ‘Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries

3 Ellmann, Joyce, 83. 4 James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings (London: Faber, 1991), 25. 5 Morris Beja has found fourteen clear uses of the original epiphanies in Stephen Hero, eleven in A Portrait, four in Ulysses, and one in Finnegans Wake (“Epiphany,” 712–713). 6 Twenty-two manuscripts of epiphanies—carefully written on separate sheets of ruled paper by Joyce himself—are housed at the Poetry Collection at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The twenty-fve remaining manuscripts (7 of which are duplicates from Buffalo) are at Cornell University. All but one of these are copies made by Stanislaus Joyce; the remaining one (concerning Oliver Gogarty) is a rough draft in Joyce’s hand. The numbers ranging from 1 to 71 written on the back of the 22 holograph manuscripts currently held at Buffalo suggest that the entire collection ran into the 70s, or more. For a detailed account of the composition of the epiphanies and of the adaptation made by Joyce for his novels, see Ellmann, 83–85, and Beja, 709–713, respectively. 7 James Joyce, Letters: Vol. I (London: Faber, 1957), 28. 7 JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM 119 of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like.’8 Stephen Daedalus’ defnition of the epiphany in Stephen Hero (the earlier version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) as ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself’ points to the existence of two distinct epiphanic modes refected in the extant manuscripts themselves: the one consists in a brief dramatic dialogue, the other in a short descriptive or narrative sketch. While the ‘dramatic’ epiphanies (which include Stephen’s description of an overheard conversation in the above quoted passage) arising from ‘the vulgarity of speech or gesture’ are evidently preparatory, the ‘lyric’ epiphanies9 are in the form of short but relatively self-contained vignettes, often inspired by a dream. Joyce’s early fascination with dreams, which he shared with a number of other Dublin poets such as George Russell and Yeats, suggests that at least one of the original impulses behind his short prose sketches was quite independent from his project to incorporate them into a larger narrative. Richard Ellmann is undoubtedly right in suggesting that, although Freud’s Traumdeutung appeared in late 1899—that is, shortly before Joyce wrote his frst dream-epiphanies—Joyce’s interest in dreams was pre-Freudian ‘in that it look[ed] for revelation, not scientifc explanation’.10 This is not to say, however, that Joyce was not interested in the secret or latent meaning of the oneiric mind.11 As his brother Stanislaus wrote, retrospectively, in My Brother’s Keeper, ‘there is no hint … that [Joyce] considered dreams anything but an uncontrolled rehash of our waking thoughts, though he may have hoped they would reveal things our controlled thoughts unconsciously conceal’.12 Considering the

8 James Joyce, Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 41. 9 Robert E. Scholes and Richard M. Kain, eds., The Workshop of Daedalus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 3–4. 10 Ellmann, Joyce, 85. According to most critics, the 40 extant epiphanies were composed in the years between 1900 and 1904 (Ellmann 83, Scholes and Kain 5, Beja 709, Mahaffey 190). 11 As Ellmann himself remarks, Joyce interpreted of one of his dream-epiphanies to be about Ibsen (85). 12 Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years (New York: Viking, 1958), 127. 120 M. DELVILLE revelatory quality Stephen consistently ascribes to the epiphany, it seems very unlikely indeed that Joyce should have been interested solely in its potential for reproducing the basic rhythms of the unconscious. Just like the ‘dramatic’ epiphanies, the dream-narratives were supposed to deliver one or several ‘evanescent’ moments of insight—the writer’s task was to perceive and disclose their symbolic relevance in the outside world. Epiphany #30 demonstrates quite clearly this dialogical process between the waking and the unconscious mind. Joyce’s dream-vision illustrates his conficting feelings towards his mother country, as well as his fear of spiritual imprisonment. More generally, it outlines the theme of the relationship of the artist to his family, culture and race, which was to preoccupy Joyce throughout the composition of Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man13:

The spell of arms and voices – the white arms of roads, their prom- ise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tales of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone, – come. And the voices say with them, We are your people. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.14

If one refers to Yeats’ description of the epiphanies as ‘a beautiful though immature and eccentric harmony of little prose descriptions and meditations’,15 there is good reason to believe that all or most of the pieces Joyce submitted to him belonged to the so-called ‘narrative’ or ‘lyric’ species. Considering Joyce’s own emphasis on the malleable fuency of prose, the dream-narrative evidently corresponds to the Baudelairian ideal of a form freed from the constraints of metrical verse, one which is capable of reproducing the ‘actual’ movement of consciousness and accommodating the capricious narrative logic of the dream mind.

13 “[The Spell of Arms and Voices]” appears in the fnal section of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (275), in the form of a journal entry written down 10 days before Stephen’s resolution to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race” (276). 14 Joyce, Poems, 190. 15 Ellmann, Joyce, 102. 7 JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM 121

While some dream-epiphanies, such as ‘[The Spell of Arms of Voices]’, are certainly imagined and visionary, others seem rooted in the observation of an everyday incident:

Dull clouds have covered the sky. Where three roads meet before a swampy beach a big dog is recumbent. From time to time he lifts his muzzle in the air and utters a prolonged sorrowful howl. People stop to look at him and pass on; some remain, arrested, it may be, by that lamentation in which they seem to hear the utterance of their own sorrow that had once its voice but is now voiceless, a servant of laborious days. Rain begins to fall.16

Virtually nothing distinguishes this piece from even a fairly ‘realist’ passage excerpted from one of Joyce’s works of fction. In ‘[The Big Dog]’—which Joyce himself interpreted to be about his brother Stanislaus17—the ‘dream-like’ quality of the vignette arises mainly from the absence of contextual elements. Since Joyce’s ‘dreamscape’ appears isolated and independent from a larger narrative or dramatic whole, the type of reading it imposes on the reader is one which encourages what Jonathan Culler has called ‘the expectation of totality or coherence’.18 In the same way as William Carlos Williams’ ‘This Is Just to Say’ turns from a note left on a kitchen table into a self-contained poem as soon as it is set down on the page as a poem, the intimidating margins of silence which frame Joyce’s epiphanies (which were neatly and carefully cal- ligraphed on separate sheets) invite a reading which urges us to assume their inherent totality at the same time as it insists on their incomplete and fragmentary nature. ‘Poems which succeed as fragments or as instances of incomplete totality,’ Culler writes, ‘depend for their success on the fact that our drive towards totality enables us to recognise their gaps and discontinuities and to give them a thematic value.’19 As a result of Joyce’s emphasis on the ‘lyric’ quality of the piece, to the detriment of its narrative progress, the reader has to rely almost exclusively on the (potentially) revelatory nature of the epiphany in order to construe it into a self-contained whole.

16 Joyce, Poems, 168. 17 Stanislaus Joyce, Keeper, 136. 18 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 170. 19 Culler, Poetics, 170. 122 M. DELVILLE

In ‘[The Big Dog]’, this particular interpretive strategy is consolidated by the intervention of an authorial voice, commenting, albeit tentatively, on the reaction of the passers-by, and endowing the dreamscape with symbolic value. More generally, the semi-allegorical signifcance of the dream scene is best understood in the context of Stephen’s project to transmute both the content of the subconscious mind and the raw material of ‘trivial’ everyday experience (here reunited in a single dreamt ‘incident’) into a spiritual ‘manifestation’; a moment of revelation or ‘inscape’ at which the commonplace object delivers a sense of ‘sudden radiance’, which here occurs when the passers-by begin to see in the howling dog an emblem of their own sorrowful lives.20 Giacomo Joyce: Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse

I have the illusion to suppose that by breaking up my discourse I cease to discourse in terms of the imaginary about myself, attenuating the risk of transcendence; but since the fragment (haiku, maxime, pensée, journal entry) is fnally a rhetorical genre and since rhetoric is that layer of language which best presents itself to interpretation, by supposing I disperse myself I merely return, quite docilely, to the bed of the imaginary. —Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

By translating the liturgical meaning of the term ‘epiphany’ into secular (though still Platonic and essentialist) terms, the young Joyce pur- ported to redefne nothing less than the role of the modern artist, who would henceforth seek to grasp, record and transcend the trivial, prosaic incidents and realities of everyday life into moments of extraordinary aesthetic and spiritual signifcance. In Joyce’s writings, however, the stress is often not so much on the moment of insight as such as on the process of apprehension of the object by the individual consciousness. The ‘apprehensive faculty’ of the artist is described by Stephen as ‘the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus’.21 ‘The moment the focus is reached,’ Stephen adds, ‘the object is

20 Note that the term “epiphany”, in Joyce’s writings, variously refers to: (1) the “sudden manifestation” itself; (2) the written record of the moment of revelation; and (3) the verbal strategy used by the artist in order to fnd meaning in the seemingly insignifcant. 21 James Joyce, Stephen Hero (London: New Directions, 1944), 189. 7 JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM 123 epiphanised’—only then can the aesthete hope to recognise the thing in itself, ‘its soul, its whatness’.22 This double process of aestheticisation and interpretation of the real also lies at the heart of Giacomo Joyce, a series of prose sketches Joyce wrote in Trieste between late 1911 and 1914, shortly before the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and at a time when he had already started to work on Ulysses. The manuscript comprises ffty fragments of variable length—ranging from a single line to a little more than one page—painstakingly transcribed onto eight oversized sheets of heavy sketching paper enclosed between the blue paper covers of a school notebook. When Joyce moved to Zurich in 1915, the sketchbook, which bore the name ‘Giacomo Joyce’ on the front cover in an unidentifed handwriting, was left behind in the care of Joyce’s brother Stanislaus.23 The small book remained unknown until 1956, when Richard Ellmann discovered it among Stanislaus’ possessions. Although Ellmann’s biography, published in 1959, featured a discussion of Giacomo Joyce (including a signifcant portion of it), the book frst appeared in its entirety in an annotated edition issued by Viking Press in 1968. Joyce never attempted to have his manuscript published, and the fragments were ultimately ‘recycled’ to form pages of his longer works of fction: both A Portrait and Ulysses contain direct or paraphrased borrowings from Giacomo Joyce. The amount of painstaking care which went into the calligraphy of the manuscript, however, leaves no room for doubt concerning its original status as an independent work. Furthermore, Giacomo Joyce, unlike Stephen’s project of a ‘book of

22 Joyce, Stephen, 190. 23 Ellmann’s comments on the title of the manuscript are rather misleading. In his biography of Joyce, he acknowledges that the name was inscribed ‘in another, unknown hand’, but almost immediately adds that Joyce ‘was content to keep what he had written under this heading’, for the title must have expressed ‘his sense of dépaysement as a Triestine Dubliner pining for requital in two languages’ (342). Ellmann’s account, however, gives us no reason to believe that the name was written before Joyce’s departure for Zurich and, therefore, casts some doubts upon the validity of his interpretation. (Note that the ‘unknown hand’ which wrote the name ‘Giacomo Joyce’ on the sketchbook cover was more than probably Italian, as suggested by the hesitant calligraphy of the letters ‘j’ and ‘y’, which are nonexistent in the Italian alphabet.) For the purpose of clarity and consistency, I shall nevertheless apply the name ‘Giacomo’ to the ‘poetic persona’ of the poem. 124 M. DELVILLE epiphanies’,24 is not merely a forilegium of precious but disparate moments of revelation. It is a collection of lyric and narrative fragments all related to a single subject: Joyce’s infatuation with one of his girl students in Trieste, whom Ellmann identifes as Amalia Popper, the daughter of a Triestine Jewish businessman. The explicitly autobiographical character of the poem and the scabrousness of the subject eventually pre- vented Joyce from publishing the work in its original form. Nevertheless, other considerations of an aesthetic nature may have led Joyce to dis- own a work whose inherent poetics were irreconcilable with his current aesthetic development as a novelist. In other words, Joyce’s prose lyrics may have been, as I will argue, aesthetically embarrassing, as well as bio- graphically compromising. My second purpose is to re-examine the position of Giacomo Joyce, within or outside the Joyce canon, in the context of Joyce’s ongoing experimentations with both lyric and narrative form. In order to do so, I propose to look frst at a number of rhetorical and phenomenological strategies as they operate in Joyce’s use of the fragment, as well as in his changing conception of the lyric self. The generic negotiations at work in Giacomo Joyce will also be given special attention as they account for the text’s ambivalent status as what Henriette Lazaridis Power calls a ‘maggot’,25 a formally and thematically unstable quirk whose hybrid poetics test the validity of our assumptions concerning Joyce’s chief preoccupations as a poet and a novelist.

Who? A pale face surrounded by heavy odorous furs. Her movements are shy and nervous. She uses quizzing-glasses. Yes: a brief syllable. A brief laugh. A brief beat of the eyelids.26

The opening lines of Giacomo are representative of the phenomenological premises of Joyce’s fragments, which often originate in the brief but scrupulous observation of a specifc part of the student’s body. This particular aspect of Joyce’s prose lyrics makes them akin to the epiphanies, whose heuristic potential also results from the artist’s apprehension of a given object or incident in its irreducible spatial and temporal particular- ity. According to Stephen, the frst stage of the epiphanisation of the real

24 Joyce, Stephen, 211. 25 Lazaridis Powers, Henriette. ‘Incorporating Giacomo Joyce’, James Joyce Quarterly 28.3 (1991): 623. 26 James Joyce, Giacomo Joyce (London: Faber, 1968), 1. 7 JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM 125 indeed consists in ‘divid[ing] the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object’. The general presentation of the fragments—a series of short blocks of prose surrounded by white space—is particularly well-suited to Stephen’s desire to grasp the radical ‘integrity’ of things for the sake of aesthetic illumination or Thomist claritas.27 There is no dearth of books and articles on the literary and philosophical origins of the Joycean epiphany. As Ashton Nichols and other critics have shown, its revelatory value originates in the nineteenth century, notably in Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, Coleridge’s ‘fashes’, Shelley’s ‘best and happiest moments’ and Keats’ ‘fne isolated verisimilitude’, all of which similarly revealed the mind’s ability to perceive the hidden meaning of ordinary events and situations. Another possible infuence, that of Ignatius of Loyola, has, to my knowledge, escaped the attention of critics. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, to whom Giacomo appeals for help at the end of the thirteenth fragment,28 occupied a privileged position in Joyce’s Jesuit education. One of his Spiritual Exercises, the ‘composition of place’, which is mentioned in the third chapter of A Portrait,29 recommends meditating upon a physical object as a prelude to the contemplation of a spiritual truth. More than anything else, Loyola’s insistence on the essential role played by the imagination in the self’s attempts to recognise the heuristic potential of the physical world have probably appealed to the young Joyce. However that may be, Joyce’s concern with the self-contained wholeness of the beheld object is as much characteristic of Giacomo as it is an essential element of Imagist poetry, a movement in which Joyce was briefy involved and whose heyday roughly coincides with the composition of the Giacomo manuscript.30 The Imagists’ belief in economy of language

27 Joyce, Stephen, 212. 28 Joyce, Giacomo, 5. 29 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1992), 137. 30 Imagism fourished between 1912 and 1917, from Ezra Pound’s frst printed reference to the Imagist ‘school’ in the appendix to Ripostes, to Amy Lowell’s unoffcial dismantling of the movement. The frst Imagist anthology (Des Imagistes: An Anthology, 1914), edited by Pound, featured Joyce’s ‘I Hear an Army’, which was later included in Chamber Music. Note that ‘I Hear an Army’, which Pound included in his anthology on the grounds of its uncompromising ‘objectivity’, is a far less ‘Imagist’ poem than the fragments of Giacomo Joyce, even by Pound’s own standards. The brevity of treatment which characterises Joyce’s fragments also echoes the brief juxtaposed ‘fashes of inspiration’, surrounded by blankness 126 M. DELVILLE and brevity of treatment, as well as their penchant for short, single images or objects presented for ‘direct apprehension’, may indeed have inspired some of Joyce’s shorter fragments, which—had they been presented in a versifed form—would have ftted perfectly in an Imagist anthology:

A fower given by her to my daughter. Frail gift, frail giver, frail blue- veined child.31 Great bows on her slim bronze shoes: spurs of a pampered fowl.32 My words in her mind:cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.33

The last two haiku-like fragments also bear a striking resemblance to Ezra Pound’s 1913 ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd; /Petals on a wet, black bough’), which also results from the juxtaposition of two images unconnected by any kind of comment or explanation. The unmediated apprehension, ‘hard and clear, never blurred or indefnite’, of images or objects which Giacomo shares with Imagist poetry is made possible by the asyndetic dynamics of the collection through which each single ‘image’ acquires irreducible auton- omy and is framed in a particular lyric moment. In the light of Giacomo’s ever-changing perceptions, Giacomo Joyce, which Ellmann describes as ‘Joyce’s attempts at the education of a dark lady’,34 would, instead, be more aptly characterised as a fragmented and tortured hymn to the meanders of a narcissistic self racked by the all-powerful strategies of its imagination. However, the syn- ecdochial strategies at work in Joyce’s vicarious celebration of the student’s remote sensuousness do not serve merely to refect the complexity of Giacomo’s emotional turmoil. By placing the emphasis on the perceiving consciousness and its attempts to fctionalise the real, the fragmented form of Joyce’s prose lyrics also entails a mise en abyme of the

and silence, of Italian Hermeticism, whose chief exponent, Giuseppe Ungaretti, published his frst collection, L’allegria, in 1914. 31 Joyce, Giacomo, 3. 32 Ibid., 8. 33 Ibid., 13. 34 Ibid., xi. 7 JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM 127 fragmentariness and decenteredness of the lyric self, whose conficting feelings—just like the student’s body—are scattered amongst a number of discrete, metonymically-linked ‘lyric units’. As a result of these multiple (self-)manipulations, Giacomo’s discourse disintegrates into a succession of euphemised moments and temporary resolutions, so that what begins as a fairly coherent and credible frst-person lyric narrative (the ‘I-persona,’ after all, is named Jim and has a wife named Nora) becomes just another exercise in the transformation or ‘epiphanisation’ of the raw material of personal experience into art. The issue of the fctionalisa- tion of autobiographical material is raised several times in Giacomo Joyce, notably by the student herself (or is she merely being cast as a mouthpiece for Giacomo’s lack of self-confdence as a writer?), who, after having ‘touched the pages, foul and fair, on which [his] shame shall glow for ever’,35 expresses her misgivings about the moral and intellectual integrity of Giacomo-Joyce’s writings. Typically, the student’s voice is interrupted by Giacomo’s attempts to regain ironic control over his material:

She says that, had The Portrait of the Artist been frank only for frank- ness’ sake, she would have asked why I had given it to her to read. O you would, would you? A lady of letters.36

In the context of his own development as an artist, Joyce’s ambivalent relationship with the lyric mode in Giacomo Joyce raises the issue of the relationship between the fragments and the longer narrative productions into which they were later incorporated. In this respect, the fragmentary and paratactic dynamics of Joyce’s prose lyrics can be linked with Joyce’s increasingly radical critique of the unifed wholeness and linear dynamics of the traditional nineteenth-century novel. As Vicki Mahaffey has remarked, the structural premises of Joyce’s shorter works—his poems and epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce, and Exiles—give us an outline of the basic design of all of their longer and better-known counterparts. What Joyce’s prose and verse lyrics share with his more extended works of fction, she writes, is ‘the strategy of producing a longer and more complicated text by stringing together a series of formally self-contained units’.37

35 Ibid., 13. 36 Ibid., 12. 37 Vicky Mahaffey, “Giacomo Joyce,” in A Companion to Joyce Studies, ed. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984), 186. 128 M. DELVILLE

Therefore, she continues, ‘the minor works make it much more apparent that Joyce’s technique—even in the longer texts—is in large part an imagist one, adapted from poetry to narrative and massively elaborated in the process’.38 In this respect, an interesting parallel can be drawn between Joyce’s ‘novelistic’ prose lyrics and the defnition of the prose poem put forward by Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884). Des Esseintes, who sees the prose poem as ‘the concrete pith, the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art’, defnes the genre as a concentrated and supremely writerly avatar of the novel: ‘Then the words chosen would be so unpermutable as to substitute for all the others; the adjective, placed in such an ingenious and so defnitive a way that it could not be legally divested of its position, would open such perspectives that the reader could dream for weeks on end about its meaning, at the same time fxed and multiple, could take note of the present, reconstruct the past; could guess the future of the characters’ souls, revealed by the light of that unique epithet.’39 Despite its strong Decadent overtones (the emphasis on stylistic refnement and semantic ingeniousness, in particular), Des Esseintes’ defnition suggests that Huysmans, like Joyce, saw in the prose poem the possibility of turning the concentrated brevity and semantic ambiguity of poetic language into a means of expanding and complexifying the creation of plot and character. In this perspective, also, the prose lyrics of Giacomo Joyce enact the principle of contamination between narrative linearity and poetic closure, poetic ambiguity and novelistic verisimilitude which characterises Joyce’s work and, more generally, the development of a modern tradition of the prose poem. The specifc nature of the ‘elaboration’ of the isolated lyric moments of Giacomo Joyce and the epiphanies into larger narrative units lies outside the scope of the present chapter. Suffce it to say, at this stage, that what in Giacomo remains primarily a means of articulating (albeit in a self-consciously manipu- lative fashion) the sudden bursts of the lyric self subsists in Joyce’s fction within a larger referential system obeying its own internal logic and in which the self tends to be engulfed in the more impersonal arts of irony, satire, allusion, parody and pastiche. When Joyce left Trieste in 1915, leaving behind him the Giacomo manuscript, the fragment and the

38 Mahaffey, “Giacomo,” 186. 39 J.-K. Huysmans, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Crès, 1928), 320. My translation. 7 JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM 129 aesthetics of the frst person prose lyric had already been put aside to give way to the luxuriant anonymity of the third person encyclopedic parody of Ulysses.40 Signifcantly enough, the word epiphany which occurs at the most crucial point of the discourse on aesthetics in Stephen Hero has disappeared altogether from Stephen’s theories in the Portrait. This is hardly surprising since Stephen’s ‘lyric’ metaphor of the epiphany—which still laid the emphasis on the artist’s personal apprehension, unmediated by irony and dramatic distance, of the ‘whatness’ of a given object or incident—would have been inconsistent with Stephen’s own ‘impersonal’ theory (in the Portrait) of the progressive separation of the artist from the lyric impulse. In view of the development of Joyce’s oeuvre as a whole, one may reasonably argue that Stephen is, at least to some extent, a fctional mouthpiece of the author’s younger self and of his aesthetic convictions at the time. As suggested above, the lyric mode was gradually abandoned by Joyce in the years that followed the publication of Stephen’s three-form theory of genres. In the context of Stephen’s ‘three forms progressing from one to the next’, it seems probable that Joyce’s decision not to publish Giacomo was prompted by aesthetic as well as personal reasons. In the same way as Stephen’s theory of the epiphany was replaced, in A Portrait, by another theory concerning the development of the poet away from the raw lyric impulse towards dramatic objectivity, Giacomo’s lyric effusions—for all their paradoxical attempts to enact the failure of the constitution of the lyric self—were soon discarded in favour of the more controlled and detached mode of Ulysses, whose parodic and ironic tenor indeed seems to correspond to Stephen’s ideal of the artist-as-god, ‘refned out of existence, indifferent, paring his fngernails’. Thus, one way of approaching Giacomo Joyce is as an example of the type of lyric epiphanies the Stephen of Stephen Hero and, indeed, the young Joyce would have written and, by the time of Ulysses, abandoned. In this respect, also, Giacomo Joyce and the prose lyric, which stand at

40 It would be tempting to see the sudden appearance of Molly Bloom’s interior monologue at the end of Ulysses as something of a resurgence of the lyric repressed. Joyce, however, did not conceive of Molly’s monologue as a lyrical piece in the strict sense. In a letter to Harriet Weaver, he commented that he had ‘rejected the usual interpretation of [Molly Bloom] as a human apparition’ and had tried to depict nothing less than ‘the earth which is prehuman and presumably posthuman’ (Letters 1: 160). 130 M. DELVILLE the junction of a lyric discourse already on the wane and the genesis of the ‘dramatic’ novel, mark a turning point in Joyce’s career. The very title of the manuscript, itself a dichotomy, carries the implications of a struggle between the lyrico-poetic writing of Joyce’s early work—with its focus on the expression of transitory moods or momentary illuminations—and the ambitions of the mature novelist. Yet, if Joyce progres- sively moved away from lyric brevity towards the impersonality of the monumental ‘dramatic’ novel, the fragments of Giacomo nevertheless testify to the existence of an alternative undercurrent in Joyce’s poetics, one in which the lyric epiphany no longer seems to mediate between the mind and its object but is displaced onto the split consciousness of the speaker. Joyce’s later return to poetry with Pomes Penyeach, a collection of thirteen formally conventional and overtly sentimental poems in verse published in 1927 (despite Ezra Pound’s claim that the poems were not worth printing and belonged ‘in the Bible or in the family album with the portraits’41), confrms that his oeuvre was never really immune to a return of the lyric repressed. In the course of his career as a novelist, Joyce tried to satisfy his penchant for the musical aspects of the lyric through the medium of prose. This tendency reaches a climax in Finnegans Wake, which Joyce— countering accusations of unnecessary obscurity—kept defending on the grounds that it was ‘pure music’ and that the fact that it was ‘pleasing to the ear’ was one of the book’s justifcations.42 From this perspective, the simple and nostalgic songs of Chamber Music and the sophisticated mul- tilingual experiments of Finnegans Wake are not as diametrically opposed to each other as they may seem, and it would be wrong to consider the ‘novelistic’ prose lyrics of Giacomo Joyce as so many lyric ‘snatches’ destined to be recycled and in the increasingly complex narrative structures of Joyce’s later works of fction. As the preceding pages have shown, however, Giacomo Joyce should not be considered solely as a ‘missing link’ in the development of Joyce’s career as a novelist. By resisting the pressures of narrative linearity and poetic closure, Joyce’s prose fragments also emerge as a hybrid form of lyric discourse which seeks to embrace the complex and discontinuous nature of experience and memory and, eventually, offers itself up to the ludic authority of the reader’s desire.

41 Ellmann, Joyce, 591. 42 Ibid., 702–3. 7 JAMES JOYCE AND THE PROSE POEM 131

In this respect, the essentially paratactic relationships between and within the prose blocks of Giacomo are once again reminiscent of Baudelaire’s project of a ‘writerly’ text avant la letter—a literary work which, like the prose poems of Paris Spleen, is ‘both head and tail, alternately and recip- rocally’43 and in which both the writer and the reader are free to participate in the construction and the dispersal of subjectivity, longing for no other form of narrative coherence than that of the movements of the mind itself.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Baudelaire, Charles. The Poems in Prose. Edited and translated by Francis Scarfe. London: Anvil Press, 1989. Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971. ———. “Epiphany and the Epiphanies.” In A Companion to Joyce Studies, edited by Zack Bowen and James F. Carens. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Huysmans, J.-K. Œuvres complètes, Paris: Crès, 1928. Jones, Peter, ed. Imagist Poetry. London: Penguin, 1972. Joyce, James. Chamber Music (1907). London: Cape, 1971. ———. Dubliners (1914). London: Grafton, 1977. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). London: Penguin, 1992. ———. Ulysses (1922). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ———. Pomes Penyeach (1927). London: Faber, 1968. ———. Finnegans Wake (1939). London: Faber, 1964. ———. Stephen Hero. London: New Directions, 1944. ———. Epiphanies. Buffalo: University of Buffalo Press/Lockwood Memorial Library, 1956. ———. Letters: Vol. I. Edited by Stuart Gilbert. London: Faber, 1957. ———. Giacomo Joyce. Edited by Richard Ellman. London: Faber, 1968. ———. Poems and Shorter Writings. Edited by Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson. London: Faber, 1991. Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years. Edited by Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1958.

43 Charles Baudelaire, The Poems in Prose (London: Anvil Press, 1989), 23. 132 M. DELVILLE

Lazaridis Powers, Henriette. “Incorporating Giacomo Joyce.” James Joyce Quarterly 28.3 (1991): 623–30. Mahaffey, Vicki. “Giacomo Joyce.” In A Companion to Joyce Studies, edited by Zack Bowen and James F. Carens, 387–420. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. ———. “Joyce’s Shorter Works.” In The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, edited by Derek Attridge, 185–211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Scholes, Robert E., and Richard M. Kain, eds. The Workshop of Daedalus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965. CHAPTER 8

T.S. Eliot’s Prose (Poetry)

Vidyan Ravinthiran

In the New Statesman of 3 March 1917, T.S Eliot writes, by now famously, that free verse is never free, but always in rhythmic dialogue with form:

The most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fxity and fux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse … We may therefore formulate as follows: the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the ‘freest’ verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse. Or, freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artifcial limitation.1

Eliot’s critical prose touches on scientifc registers. In Tradition and the Individual Talent, for example, he provides as a ‘suggestive analogy’ for

1 T.S. Eliot, “Refections on Vers Libre,” New Statesman 8 (March 3, 1917): 518–19; repr. in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), 34–35.

V. Ravinthiran (*) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 133 J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_8 134 V. RAVINTHIRAN the process of artistic depersonalisation ‘the action which takes place when a bit of fnely fliated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide’.2 This is a way of being modern, up-to-date and impressively disinterested—I speak here of the tonal authority of his critical voice. ‘We may therefore formulate as follows’ is the relevant phrase from the passage above; it appears, for a moment, to turn verse analysis into an exact science, before two references to Hamlet—the ghost, and Polonius hid behind the arras—contribute their imaginative suggestiveness, even ominousness. (The rhyme linking gently through arras, verse, doze, and rouse is crucial to how the argument is made.) Eliot describes the writing of ‘interesting verse’ as an experimenting with available forms—the poet as scientist—yet, if we look closely, we see that the language of ‘taking form’ was already ghostly. If this is verse composition in a laboratory, it also has intimations of a séance. Leaving the fnal sentence about ‘freedom’ in abeyance for the moment, I wish to make a point here about what prose meant to Eliot. It was authoritative because cautious, and offered a wondering music of precision. There was an opportunity for a decisive break with the impressionistic belle-lettrism of nineteenth-century criticism, and for the creation of a startling modern authority—an opportunity which no writer of the early twentieth century seized quite like Eliot. Yet, there were also qualities of that prior criticism which he wished to maintain. The voice he came to concoct, and whose postures became defning for a generation of litterateurs, depended, in fact, just as he claims of verse form, on a ‘contrast between fxity and fux’; an oscillation between bold assertion and imaginative uncertainty. ‘Nothing has suffered more’, writes Adam Phillips, ‘in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, than the idea of the real’, and the spectral scientism of Eliot’s critical prose bespeaks this unsettling transition.3 As he considers, in this passage, how modern poetry should be written, he is also cognisant of the literary form of prose—which isn’t always understood as such. Prose may double as a crisper, sleeker, more curated version of the speaking voice but, as I shall go on to discuss in this essay, Eliot also inherited a perspective which insisted on its structural uniqueness as both a vehicle of thought and an artistic medium as complex as verse.

2 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1999), 17. 3 Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis (London: Faber, 2000), 270. 8 T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY) 135

Eliot’s fnal sentence about ‘freedom’ resembles a sentence in one of his few statements on prose—‘The Borderline of Prose’, also published in the New Statesman, two months later. Here, he concludes that ‘poetry is written in verse, and prose is written in prose; or, in other words, that there is prose rhythm and verse rhythm’.4 It is that lively, spontaneous- seeming ‘or’ which both passages have in common; which suggests in its breeziness the limitations of what can be clearly stated about an elusive reality which must, instead, be experienced to be understood. If Eliot is using prose, in these essays, as an analytic rather than a creative instrument—and insisting, thereby, on a modern style of literary criticism—then at such moments, when he reveals quite casually a possible alternative to what he has already said, another way of putting things, we witness the momentary collapse of that disinterested authority into spoken intimacy. Prose appears, at these junctures, to admit that it really is speech, edited and polished—a man talking, with an awareness of the limits of both his and the auditor’s patience. Although he came to write, in Four Quartets, a type of verse una- fraid to be prosaic, to exploit the assertive tonalities of discursive prose, Eliot published only one prose poem during his lifetime. ‘Hysteria’ frst appeared in Ezra Pound’s Catholic Anthology in 1915, following which it was collected in Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917—the same year in which these essays appeared in the New Statesman:

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost fnally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: ‘If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden …’ I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.5

4 Eliot, “The Borderline of Prose,” New Statesman 9 (19 May 1917): 158. 5 Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 2002), 24. 136 V. RAVINTHIRAN

Hysteria is, of course, a gendered concept, and this is a poem with, inside it, a deep fear of women, or one woman in particular. The speaker of the poem is afraid of ‘becoming involved’ not just with the woman—this has already, alas, occurred—but involved ‘in her laughter’, ‘in the dark caverns of her throat’. Similar anxieties arise in the unpublished poem ‘In the Department Store’, in which the speaker remarks of ‘the lady of the porcelain department’, who smiles ‘at the world through a set of false teeth’, that it ‘is not possible for me to make her happy’.6 What interests me about gender in ‘Hysteria’ is, however, what it tells us about Eliot’s thinking, at this time, about prose; and how we, too, are implicated, for we continue to think about prose in terms of a binary opposition between thought and emotion which this poem fags up. Martin Scofeld, for one, appears both to criticise the poem and to read it very much on its own terms—repeating its conceptual division between analysis and experience. Diagnosing an ‘engulfng sexuality’, he locates ‘the concentrated detachment of the prose (which is far from being a genuine artistic detachment, since one feels the note of desperate stratagem)’ as ‘an attempt to escape this encroachment’; and says that:

What is unpleasant in the poem is the complete withdrawal of compassion for the woman, and her fragmentation into physical items: the teeth, the throat, the ‘shaking of her breasts.’ It is the fragmentation we have seen in ‘Prufrock’ and elsewhere, but here turned deliberately into a defensive (and offensive) weapon. The scrupulous balance of self-criticism which is maintained, in the matter of relations between men and women, in ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady,’ is here abandoned in favour of one- sided irony and distaste, compounded by the chillingly clinical prose.7

I, too, feel Scofeld’s distaste for Eliot’s distaste, and am struck by how it is the form of the prose poem itself which appears to be described here as not only ‘chillingly clinical’, but also a ‘defensive (and offensive) weapon’ turned upon the woman it describes. There is a question here about the relationship between the speaker of the poem and its form. Is this prose poem as a type of dramatic monologue? The speaker of Eliot’s poem may

6 Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. C. Ricks (San Diego, New York, and London: Harvest, 1998), 56. 7 Martin Scofeld, T.S. Eliot: The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 67. 8 T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY) 137 appear to enlist prose as a language of experimental detachment but, in this case, the expertly stage-managed to and fro between authority and uncertainty, assertion and feeling, which characterises Eliot’s literary criticism is toppled by the emotional situation. Then it seeks a recovery. The talk of weaponry might expand to include the woman’s teeth ‘with a talent for squad-drill’; the poem was published during the First World War, and the military tinge to the frst sentence is important:

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.

‘Squad-drill’ is a matter of following commands within a designated formation: the power-relationship between the man and the woman is important. The speaker’s insistence on his own conscious awareness of what’s going on is, indeed, a defensive action; the shift from ‘becoming’ to ‘being’ is disturbing, since it occurs rapidly, and his realising that he is ‘part’ of the woman’s laughter refers both to a type of, to him, terrifying absorption, and the notion that she is laughing at him. But what I would focus on here is the hinge, ‘until’, which compares with Eliot’s use of the word ‘or’ in his critical prose. In both cases, the connection is necessarily loose and aligned with orality; in the frst, the critic dropped from writing prose to speaking to us, and here the man’s self-consciousness is overturned into poetic associativeness by the woman’s extreme laughter. Awareness ends at this point and the language of detachment is replaced by evocative plurality—the value of the word ‘only’ is uncertain, ‘accidental stars’ is an almost teeth-grinding wordplay, and the ‘talent for squad-drill’ is also a reaching towards a perception, rather than the insight itself. There is also a hint of the dentist’s ‘drill’, as Eliot’s prose doesn’t only describe a disordered imagination, it also gives voice to its eerie slippages. Scofeld’s sense of prose detachment as a ‘desperate stratagem’ (on the part of the speaker) is therefore closer to the truth than his fnal sum- mation of Eliot’s ‘chillingly clinical prose’; the poem provides Eliot—is this more important to him, even, than the emotional situation it both describes and evokes?—with a place to think about prose, and the overlap between discursive and creative registers. Given Eliot’s deep interest in French poetry, how he found in it the beginnings of his profoundly 138 V. RAVINTHIRAN infuential free verse, it’s natural to connect ‘Hysteria’ with the French prose poem, and the much cited Baudelairean ideal of ‘poetic prose.’8 The ‘undulating rhythm’ that is part of this ideal is necessary to the speaker’s conficted imagining of himself within the woman’s mouth: ‘I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost fnally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles.’ Here, the commas of the prose clauses have a fuidity different to that of the verse line-break: they skilfully intimate a gradual and seemingly inevitable annihilation. They are mimetic of the woman’s own ‘short gasps’, and once again reveal Eliot’s deconstruction of written prose into a more formless and immediate—and, in this case, threatening rather than enabling—orality. At the same time, the writing responds to Baudelaire’s formulation in that it carries detached thought beyond itself, into reverie, guilt, despair. Reviewing Arthur Symons’s translation of Baudelaire, Eliot touches on the title of this poem and its organising concept. Symons, he insists, is absolutely wrong to locate ‘hysteria’ as the French poet’s creative source. ‘Was any one ever less hysterical, more lucid than Baudelaire?’, asks Eliot. ‘There is a difference between hysteria and looking into the Shadow.’9 In this poem, the dichotomy between hysteria and the lucid examination of it—the peering beyond individual trauma into a deeper, darker, more aboriginal reality—is deeply unstable. And here I’d have us consider the fact that this is the only prose poem Eliot ever published, which gives it the quality of a one-off experiment. If a poet only writes one poem in a particular form, then we might describe that poem as a meeting, an encounter, a confrontation, with a terminal result. The man is terrifed by the woman, and would withdraw; Eliot tries a prose poem—he allows the fragmentation of his rational style into reverie and association to go further than possible in an essay—but never does so again. Marguerrite Murphy describes the nineteenth-century works of Wilde and Dowson as afficting the form with ‘the stigma of effeminacy, of a lack of strength and virility’; she relates this to Irving Babbitt’s condemnation of it as a mixed genre; and notes that Babbitt was one of Eliot’s tutors at Harvard—one of only two professors who, says Lyndall Gordon, ‘broke

8 Charles Baudelaire, “To Arsène Houssaye,” dedication of Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen), trans. Louise Varese, ix–x. 9 ‘Poet and Saint…’, Dial 82 (May 1927), 427; cited by Ronald Schuchard in Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14. 8 T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY) 139 into his private world and touched a responsive growth’. Babbitt, in ‘assigning gender to aesthetic categories… clearly equates the mascu- line with good art and ethical behaviour and the feminine with poor art and lax morals’.10 That the analytical stance Eliot strikes in his critical prose is also present in ‘Hysteria’—where sharp outlines contend with an overwhelming feminine irrationality—places the poem within a debate about the viability of the prose poem in English. It depicts a binary, but turns, despite itself, hybrid—both analytical and emotional—in doing so, and might therefore be understood as central to the emergence of the twentieth-century prose poem as an undecided and self-conscious genre. Eliot did try to write other prose poems—but he never published them. Christopher Ricks, as editor of The Inventions of the March Hare, characterises two works from Eliot’s notebook as ‘prose poems’. One, ‘Introspection’, is a brief unlineated fragment. The other, ‘The Engine’, is comparable to ‘Hysteria’—it confrms our notion that Eliot only had one prose poem in him, and realised this.11 It is, in two parts, an affect- less description of a train journey, and is remarkable for how its implaca- ble vehicle—‘The machine was hard, deliberate, and alert; having chosen with motives and ends unknown to cut through the fog it pursued its course’—resembles the woman, and her hysteria, in the other poem. For, in both cases, Eliot is fascinated by a force which does not explain itself, and perhaps cannot be explained; which terrifes, for this reason. There is the same attention to colour, the same exact description bordering on the military:

Flat faces of American business men lay along the tiers of chairs in one plane, broken only by the salient of a brown cigar and the red angle of a six-penny magazine.

Citing the Oxford English Dictionary, Ricks observes that one meaning of the word ‘salient’ concerns an area of land ‘held by a line of offence or defence, as in trench-warfare’, and, in particular, ‘that at Ypres in western

10 I draw here on pages 48–49 of Murphy’s A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). Lyndall Gordon makes this remark in Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19. 11 These poems can be found in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, 60, 90. 140 V. RAVINTHIRAN

Belgium, the scene of severe fghting in the war of 1914–18’.12 This oblique reference to the First World War is the equivalent in this poem of the teeth with their ‘talent for squad-drill’ in ‘Hysteria’. There is also comparable phrasing in the second part of the poem, where the speaker contemplates, after the engine ceases, a spider on the wall, and compares its immemorial activity with the ephemeral faces of the passengers: ‘I tried to assemble these nebulae into one pattern. Failing, I roused myself to hear the machine recommence, and then the music, and the feet upon the deck.’ This closing stoicism is common to both prose poems, as is the attempt on the speaker’s behalf to assemble, pattern and control his surroundings. What this suggests is another, counterbalancing force, deeply infuencing of Eliot, which co-exists alongside the French prose poem as an emulable structure. Eliot may have been personally nervous of emotional display but, in ‘Hysteria’, we witness a more than individual uncertainty—an unsureness, really, about the nature of prose as a literary form. Eliot was too invested in prose as an instrument of rational investigation—and the catalyst for an authoritative subjectivity—to entirely throw over its integrity for the sake of ‘the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie’. One reason for this may have to do with a longstanding idea of prose as the manifestation of a cogent individuality: an announcement of the value of the person, rather than a denial and a disintegration. To understand this, we must rescue from critical obliv- ion that understanding of prose suggested by the phrase ‘prose rhythm’, which Eliot uses in the New Statesman. This concept, most extensively articulated by the Victorian-Edwardian critic George Saintsbury in his History of English Prose Rhythm, is positive rather than negative. That is, it refers not only to the absence of verse rhythm, but the presence of something else; precisely that form of positive order which the speaker of ‘Hysteria’ aspires to, yet cannot achieve.13 What comes up against the disorienting vagariousness of the prose poem in French—we see this happening, as we read Eliot’s poem—is his sense of a wider, and saner (and less hysterical) prose culture. By this I don’t refer simply to a notion of prose as straightforwardly truth-telling and fact-oriented; what we fnd, or hope to, in newspapers, or scientifc

12 Ibid., 90 (the poem) and 290 (Ricks’s note). 13 See, for example, Saintsbury on ‘‘pure prose highly rhythmed,’’ in A History of English Prose Rhythm (London and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 344. 8 T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY) 141 literature. Rather, what is held in suspension within the poem is an idea of prose as a clarifed demonstration (to others, and to itself) of the rounded literary intelligence. A form, then, which isn’t ‘chillingly clinical’, as Scofeld has it, but which already includes both thought and feeling in harmonious suspension, and which provides Eliot’s criticism with its much-imitated but, in fact, truly inimitable combination of impersonal assertiveness and individual style. Eliot was closely acquainted with two individuals who, as inheritors of this view of prose, would eventually author monographs about it: Bonamy Dobrée, who published Modern Prose Style in 1934, and Herbert Read, whose English Prose Style appeared in 1946. As editor of The Criterion, Eliot worked closely with both men and, indeed, that magazine became a bastion of rational yet stylish prose. ‘Hysteria’ predates both these books, and his editorship, but is tinctured by an understanding of that medium which all three writers carry out of Victorian and Edwardian criticism into modern letters. They were interested in how models of prose which bespoke, and reinforced, a secure pre-modern understanding of the human personality could be maintained in the twentieth century, with its more fragmented conception of personhood. Both Dobrée and Read’s books are confdent that prose—and with it a secure authorial personality, communicable to the understanding reader—does exist as an intelligible form, the rules for which they articulate with gusto. Here, for example, is Dobrée:

The question of words, however, is largely a matter of the mind; and the mind, we know, is only a part of the personality. But what seems to be outside the control of the writer, or rather what he forges deliberately without knowing why he does so, or should we say for the simple reason that it pleases him better that way, is the phrasing, the rhythm, the general harmony of sounds. It is by these things that we recognize the voice, and with some writers it is quite unmistakable. I suggested earlier that you could not confuse Mr. Shaw’s prose with Dean Inge’s. Why? Is it the words they use? or the things they discuss? Let us see.14

What I wish to bring into contrast with ‘Hysteria’—a poem in which the personalities of two people become riskily ‘involved’, and in which one seeks to protect his individuality from utter absorption—is Dobrée’s

14 Bonamy Dobrée, Modern Prose Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 11. 142 V. RAVINTHIRAN confdence that the prose-personalities of different writers can be clearly distinguished. He begins with a modern knowingness about the relationship of the ‘mind’ to more unconscious sectors of the personality, and touches on ‘what seems to be outside the control of the writer’. Yet, an ‘or’ clause rather like Eliot’s smoothes out and reassuringly clarifes. We are not talking, it turns out, of external events, but of secretive inner motions which, really, the author does organically control, for a paradoxical clause suggests what ‘he forges deliberately without knowing why he does so’; before another ‘or’ clause risks diffusing the meaning of the sentence entirely. This abandonment of meaning is very different to what happens in Eliot’s prose poem. It is, rather, a casualness as to sense, and how it is made, which is designed to reinforce, with its spoken ease, the very idea of the individual ‘voice’ it’s at pains to more concretely delineate. And here we see the idea of prose as an expression of personality, a guarantor of individual difference; a form which may relax at any moment into spoken drift without thereby worrying that it has failed to communicate, or that it has revealed an incoherence amid the tentacular roots of the modern self. Read, whom Jason Harding describes as ‘Eliot’s ‘aide-de-camp’ in the struggles and campaigns of inter-war London literary journalism—he would become the Criterion’s most frequent book reviewer—is especially willing to be prescriptive.15 He writes with a patrician briskness and sure- ness concerning what prose is, whether creative or discursive. He tells us that ‘the history of a word is entirely irrelevant in prose style: its face- value in current usage is the only criterion’; asserting frst that ‘as prose is essentially the art of analytical description, it would seem that metaphor is of no particular relevance to it’, he changes his mind, in a characteristic expansion which seeks to include within prose some sense of the artistic: ‘We may divide all metaphors into the illuminative and the decorative … while both kinds are appropriate to poetry, only the illuminative metaphor will be found appropriate in pure prose style.’ (‘Pure’, here, is another way to widen the net.) And though he is willing to assert that ‘poetry alone is creative’, and the ‘art of prose is not creative, but constructive or logical’, his emphasis on rhythm brings into prose an openness to affective display.16 Once again, as in Dobrée, contradictions are

15 Jason Hardin, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 109. 16 Herbert Read, English Prose Style (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1946), 10, 26, 28, 34. 8 T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY) 143 bypassed by the charm of his own sparklingly spoken prose voice. One has the feeling that when he seeks, yet again, to defne prose through exclusion of qualities which properly belong to speech or to verse, he is telling us really about an individual personality he admires, and even believes himself to manifest. Read described himself as, contrary to Eliot, ‘a romanticist in literature, an anarchist in politics, and an agnostic in religion’; yet, according to his poetics of prose—and that is, no matter how he frames it, what this book puts forward—beauty and charm develop out of scrupulousness and control and a sense of the appropriate.17 Prose as the anarchist’s rational baseline: the medium by which unconventional ideas can be clearly communicated, rather than baffingly embodied. In Eliot’s poem, this ordering movement, however hapless in the face of what has been hysterically jettisoned, is expressed by the waiter:

An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: ‘If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden …’

The waiter wishes to restore the appearance of civilisation; Eliot’s prose, with an eye for the exact perception, looks to counteract the emotional chaos it has evoked, and come in some way to resemble. The assonance tying together elderly, trembling, spreading and checked—it terminates in the repeated word gentleman—has a shaping urgency. It’s a way of replacing what’s going on inside the speaker with reliable facts about the real world. Focusing on the colour of the cloth and the table is how the speaker would remain securely within the present moment. The waiter’s spreading of the cloth prefgures, as a defensive action, the speaker’s determination to resolve the matter, although the overlap between his ‘trembling’ hands and the woman’s ‘shaking’ breasts suggests a force which cannot be contained, which has already escaped into the world, and proliferated:

17 Sewanee Review (January–March 1966), 46–47; cited by Harding in The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks, 109. 144 V. RAVINTHIRAN

I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

Although Scofeld’s point stands, about the sexist disintegration of the woman into her parts, we might subsume under ‘the fragments of the afternoon’ not only her breasts and teeth, but also the coloured cloth and table, and the waiter’s trembling hands. ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ is the more famous, more impressive, verse-line from The Waste Land; yet, this prose poem can give voice to that decision, that safeguarding mentality, in a way unavailable to Eliot’s poetry— at least before it begins to contain prose within it, to become loosely, even fabbily discursive in the Four Quartets:

And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion.18

‘In the general mess of imprecision of feeling’ is a line it was surely painful for Eliot to write, given the mimetic hamfstedness of its clunky double ‘of’; here, as in ‘Hysteria’, verse includes prose at the very moment it alludes to messy feeling. Prose, or the prosaic register, is assumed as a necessary counterweight, the impulse towards precision which must accompany any such disorder, representing an attempt to come to terms with that hysteria or shadow in all its reality, rather than pushing it under the carpet. And, once again, ‘squads’—‘undisciplined’, as soldiers may be, and with ‘shabby equipment’—brings into the verse a historical dimension, a more than individual neurosis. The Four Quartets were published altogether in 1943, and respond to the Second World War, as ‘Hysteria’ responds to the First; they also express the fnal view of literary form articulated in Eliot’s 1958 preface to a translation of Valéry: ‘I no longer believe that any distinction between prose and poetry is meaningful.’19 Here, the need, announced by ‘Hysteria’, to both draw

18 Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962, 69, 190. 19 Paul Valéry The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), xvi. 8 T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY) 145 and trouble boundaries—between people, between different kinds of writing—has disappeared. In ‘Hysteria’, the phrase which captures, right at the end of the poem, something of the urbane prose culture which would manifest in the Criterion—and whose reality Eliot wishes, along with Read and Dobrée, to take as a given—is ‘careful subtlety’. This isn’t scientifc detachment, and we could, indeed, see it as a desperate, ironised stratagem—it isn’t going to succeed; indeed, the very decision the speaker makes may reveal him as contaminated by the hysteria he wishes to allay. ‘Careful subtlety’ is one word too many (the adjective may appear superfuous), which suggests this reading. But we might also see Eliot as wanting not to straightforwardly mock but also painstakingly cherish, even defend, the subtle engaged intelligence which would become characteristic of the Criterion. I speak here of that savviness which connects the power of prose to make sense of the world with its more subjective and stylish—yet reliable—evocation of a cultural wholeness. This is a form resolutely unfrag- mentary, and so unlike The Waste Land; Eliot remarks of the prose of Lancelot Andrewes (it’s a subtle, now-counterintuitive perception) that his ‘sermons are too well built to be readily quotable’; in contrasting that author’s style with that of John Donne, he reveals his own ‘passion for order in prose’.20 Although the disordered speaker of ‘Hysteria’ may at frst glance appear to be trying out an absurd telepathy—as if, withdrawing into himself like a child when his parents argue, he could simply will the hor- rible event to stop—we might see him as deciding, through conversation, to amend, talk out, to recognise his place in, and his responsibility for, his partner’s mania. Isn’t this close to what the therapist does; is it not, also, as a cure by words, how one kind of poet strongly intends their work to affect the society in which they live? It’s how Eliot and Dobrée and Read wrote, with a confdence that things could be made sense of, that lacunae in argument could be healed with charm and spon- taneity. This isn’t, perhaps, a desirable standard for academic scholarship, but it’s a fact of interaction, and not necessarily an unwelcome one once we accept that these qualities aren’t unreal or evasive as much as they are simply human. Denis Donoghue writes sensitively of ‘the obstacles’ in Eliot’s ‘sensibility he had to surmount before he could acknowledge

20 “Lancelot Andrewes” (1926), Selected Essays, 341, 346. 146 V. RAVINTHIRAN motives radically different to his own … The convinced recognition of feelings different from his own and equal in privilege to his own was an experience Eliot had to decide to submit to.’21 Without wishing to press too crudely on what we know of Eliot’s life, and his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, it does seem to me that this isn’t only a poem about fear- ing women, and using them to characterise a modern uncertainty as to the contents of the self. It’s also a poem deeply interested in the possibility of engaging with emotional excess, rather than simply pretending (the poem is coloured by, analyses, this impulse, too) that the awful thing, the crisis of relationship, hasn’t really occurred. Its form as a prose poem is essential to the presentation of this double-mindedness; and the awkward coming together of two ideas of prose—the French prose poem, and an inherited sane discursiveness—makes for a unique moment in Eliot’s body of work, one deeply informed by literary history as well as modern investigations into madness, or, rather, the insanity of everyday life.

Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. “To Arsène Houssaye,” dedication of Le Spleen de Paris. Paris Spleen, translated by Louise Varese. New Directions: New York, 1970. Dobrée, Bonamy. Modern Prose Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934. Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Eliot, T.S. “The Borderline of Prose,” New Statesman 9 (May 19, 1917): 158. ———. The Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode. London: Faber, 1975. ———. Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, edited by Christopher Ricks. San Diego, New York, and London: Harvest, 1998. ———. Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1999. ———. Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber, 2002. Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Harding, Jason. The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter- War Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Murphy, Marguerite. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Phillips, Adam. Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis. London: Faber, 2000.

21 Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 50. 8 T.S. ELIOT’S PROSE (POETRY) 147

Read, Herbert. English Prose Style. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1946. Saintsbury, George. A History of English Prose Rhythm. London and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965. Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Scofeld, Martin. T.S. Eliot: The Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Valéry, Paul. The Art of Poetry. Translated by Denise Folliot. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958. CHAPTER 9

A Weakening Syntax: How It Is with Samuel Beckett’s Prose Poetry

Scott Annett

Comment c’est/How It Is (French 1961, English 1964) stands as one of Samuel Beckett’s boldest formal experiments, pointing back to his earliest work and, in particular, his poetry, which was written mostly in English throughout the 1930s, and yet also anticipating many of the innovations to come in his later prose texts, such as Compagnie/ Company (1980). Indeed, it is one of the oddities of Beckett’s biography that the poetry of the 1930s gradually dried up to be replaced by prose and drama. However, rather than attempting to chart the various twists and turns of Beckett’s formal and linguistic experimentation, this essay demonstrates through close readings the extent to which How It Is might be better understood as a prose poem and, as a consequence, suggests some of the ways in which Beckett’s work may have paved the way for subsequent experimentation in that form. Beckett’s associations with modernism, and the writing of James Joyce in particular, coupled with his interests in French poetry, including his translations of works by Paul Eluard, Arthur Rimbaud and Guillaume Apollinaire, mean that from a literary historical perspective he is ideally

S. Annett (*) University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 149 J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_9 150 S. ANNETT placed to explore this form.1 In fact, it is one of the contentions of this essay that Beckett’s formal experimentation involved an intensifed interest in poetic prose; that is to say, prose that demands the kind of atten- tiveness on the part of the reader normally associated with poetry, whilst at the same time also interrogating such reading practice. Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham have argued that the absence of line endings places an unusual pressure on the prose poet, as ‘pace and rhythm must be built entirely within the sentence itself and in the play among sentences’. They continue:

It is incumbent upon the prose poet to fnd another way to generate tension within the poem – this substitution is frequently achieved via surrealistic anti-logic, bizarre narrative, lushness of language, innovative structure, or experiments with grammar and syntax.2

Adam Piette has already demonstrated the extent to which the sound of prose, or its musicality, is essential to writers such as Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce and Beckett, and this musicality is presumably what Clements and Dunham mean when they refer to the ‘lushness of language’.3 In this essay, I will attend specifcally to Beckett’s ‘experiments with grammar and syntax’, or, as he put it himself in conversation with Lawrence Harvey in 1961 and 1962, the search for a ‘syntax of weakness’.4 Beckett’s weakening syntax allows for an interrogation of the responsi- bilities of readers, the modes in which each individual reader approaches a text, and the various ways in which poetic ambiguity might become a space in which a reader can play. In How It Is, the narrator wonders ‘when shall I say weak enough later some day weak as me a voice of my own’,5 and he later laments the fact that his words are not ‘weak enough most of them not quite

1 Samuel Beckett, The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, ed. Sean Lawlor and John Pilling (London: Faber & Faber, 2012). 2 Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham, eds., An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Danbury, CT: Firewheel Editions, 2009), 4. 3 See Adam Piette, Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, ed. Proust, Joyce and Beckett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 4 Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 247. 5 Beckett, How It Is, ed. Édouard Magessa O’Reilly (London: Faber, 2009), 28. 9 A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S … 151 enough’.6 The narrator’s voice is a ‘faint shrill cry’ while the text has eliminated all ‘fgures’ or characters, leaving only the occasional ‘image’7: ‘then foretaste of this semi-castrate mutter I must bear how long no more fgures there’s another little difference compared to what precedes not the slightest fgure’.8 In Beckett’s earlier Textes pour rien/Texts for Nothing (French 1955, English 1967), the narrator wonders if ‘perhaps it will end on a castrato scream’,9 but in How It Is even the act of cas- tration is incomplete: there is no ‘castrato scream’, only a ‘semi-castrate mutter’. Throughout the text, we are reminded that there is ‘something wrong there’, a text ‘ill-spoken ill-heard’, an ‘invocation’ or ‘prayer’ made without hope, a murmured complaint remembered and uttered in darkness.10 This text attempts to capture the weakened words of the bel- ligerent and sullen, those angry at their existence; it is a series of belittled expulsions, mutterings spat into darkness, or as the narrator puts it, ‘little blurts midget grammar’.11 In searching for a ‘syntax of weakness’, Beckett incorporated key elements of his earlier practice whilst moving beyond the ‘attitude of disintegration’ in which he had written both the Trilogy and (despite his best efforts) the Texts for Nothing.12 H. Porter Abbott argues that, in the opening pages of How It Is, Beckett returns to, and dismisses, an ‘old problem’:

On the very frst page the narrator hesitates briefy over an old problem: ‘me if it’s me no question impossible too weak no importance.’ He brings it up only once again a few pages later: ‘if it’s me no question too weak no interest’ [21–22]. What he does in these remarks is dispose of the very

6 Beckett, How It Is, 111. 7 There are ‘a few images on and off in the mud,’ Beckett, How It Is, 4. 8 Ibid., 43. 9 Beckett, “Texts for Nothing,” in The Complete Short Prose, ed. S. E. Gontarksi (Grove Press: New York, 1995), 153. 10 Beckett, How It Is, 117. 11 Ibid., 66. 12 Israel Shenker, “Moody Man of Letters, A Portrait of Samuel Beckett, Author of the Puzzling ‘Waiting for Godot’,” New York Times, 6 May 1956. Reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London, Henley and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 148. 152 S. ANNETT

question that constantly tormented the Unnamable. The problem of who he really is may be impossible to solve, but it is also irrelevant.13

In the Trilogy, Beckett had explored frst person utterance by experimenting with the language of paradox and failure. However, this experiment only took him so far, as the text itself acknowledges: at the conclusion of The Unnamable, the reader is brought to the ‘threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story’.14 In How It Is, the point of interest has shifted away from identity (‘me if it’s me’) to the creation of a text capable of accommodating multiple voices, of a text ‘weak’ enough to admit the reader. In the opening lines of How It Is, we read: ‘voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me when the panting stops tell me again fnish tell me invocation’.15 If this text is a quotation (‘how it was I quote’), then does each repetition of this phrase (‘I quote’) signal a quotation within the quotation, or is it a reminder that the narrator is repeating another voice, a voice that is heard (‘I say them as I hear them’) and then ‘murmur[ed]’ in the ‘mud’? How can the voice that is heard be ‘without’ and ‘then in me’? In what way is this text an ‘invocation’?16 At the beginning of the third part, the narrator describes the text: ‘this voice these voices no knowing not meaning a choir no no only one but quaqua meaning on all sides megaphones possibly technique something wrong there’. He goes on to state:

wrong for never twice the same unless time vast tracts aged out of recognition no for often fresher stronger after than before unless sickness sorrow they sometimes pass one feels better less wretched after than before unless recordings on ebonite or suchlike a whole life generations on ebonite one can imagine it nothing to prevent one mix it all up change the natural order play about with that.17

13 Porter Abbott, “Farewell to Incompetence: Beckett’s ‘How It Is’ and ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’.” Contemporary Literature 11.1 (Winter 1970), 39. 14 Beckett, The Unnamable in Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable (London: Calder, 1994, repr. 1997), 418. 15 Beckett, How It Is, 3. 16 See also Sophie Ratcliffe, On Sympathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 192. 17 Beckett, How It Is, 93. 9 A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S … 153

Any single reading of the text is ‘wrong’ because the text is ‘never twice the same unless time vast’. Each reading is different, ‘often fresher stronger after than before’, ‘unless’ there are ‘recordings on ebonite’. Furthermore, in contrast to readings of Beckett’s writing that announce the ‘disintegration of language’,18 which is to say, Beckett’s linguistic impoverishment, there is ‘meaning on all sides’. In this text, a multitude of voices (‘a choir’) is packed into a single voice (‘no only one’). The narrator even explains that there is ‘nothing to prevent one mix it all up change the natural order play about with that’, before going on to suggest that the presence of ‘meaning on all sides’ is ‘possibly technique’. Indeed, the effect of this ‘technique’, this gradual weakening, is to loosen the connections between words, allowing them to point both backwards and forwards. Édouard Magessa O’Reilly provides a simple example from the beginning of the text:

Lacking the familiar guides of punctuation, capitalization and prepositional linkage, we must slow our reading and look at each word. We might at frst read ‘voice once without quaqua’ but then we encounter ‘voice once without’ repeated again and realise that it is a unit, that without is an adverb, the opposite of within (‘in me’) and that quaqua belongs to the next unit, ‘quaqua on all sides’, which repeats and clarifes ‘voice once without’. The rhythm of the text begins to insinuate itself.19

This is the ‘tension’ seen by Clements and Dunham to be central to the creation of prose poetry.20 In ‘Text 8’ of the Texts for Nothing the narrator explains that ‘it’s for ever the same murmur, fowing unbroken, like a single endless word and therefore meaningless, for it’s the end gives the meaning to words’.21 As with so much of the Texts for Nothing, and as we’re told in the fnal lines of ‘Text 13’, this statement is ‘true, yes, it’s true, it’s true and it’s not true’.22 Endings provide meaning by both demarcating sense units and guiding tonal infection. However, in How

18 The phrase belongs to Martin Esslin but is reproduced by Stanley Cavel in his essay “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame.” See Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 86 and Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game,” 115. 19 See Magessa O’Reilly, introduction, How It Is, xi. 20 Clements and Dunham, Introduction to the Prose Poem, 4. 21 Beckett, Texts for Nothing, 131. 22 Ibid., 154. 154 S. ANNETT

It Is Beckett’s writing becomes full of false endings, rhythmical pulls that can be heard frst one way, then another, as the prose pushes on and (dis-)qualifes what went before. The ‘tension’ in How It Is, explored but not quite expressed in the Texts for Nothing, lies in its ability to be single (‘always the same old thing the same old things’), and yet at the same time ‘never twice the same’, because on each reading and re-reading, upon each new voic- ing, the text changes. In 1961, Maurice Blanchot published a review of Comment c’est in which he demonstrated alertness to the multiplicity of the French text. Leslie Hill explains that, while the ‘majority of critics at the time saw it as their task to make Beckett’s novel more accessible to its readership’, Blanchot allowed Comment c’est to shape ‘his own critical commentary’:

[Blanchot] responded instead to the unruly, disconcerting strangeness of Beckett’s writing by transforming his own critical commentary into a hesitant and inconclusive dialogue between two (or more) unnamed interloc- utors, each grappling with the problematic challenge of passing judgment on Beckett’s fragmentary, fragmented, disorientating, and sometimes shocking text. […] Criticism, with its abiding appeal to values and truth, had no purchase on the ‘little blurts [petits paquets]’ and ‘midget grammar [grammaire d’oiseau]’ of Comment c’est, which refuse to obey its normative assumptions. Faced with Beckett’s ‘novel’ […] criticism was disabled, forced to carry on, if at all, only by enduring through its own interruption.23

Blanchot’s review is remarkable in its willingness to listen to the multitude of voices muttering within Beckett’s weakened syntax and it takes seriously the implications for reading practice: shifting from discussion of ‘La critique’, one voice asks, ‘Même une note de lecture?’, to which another voice replies, ‘Même la plus courte note.’ Blanchot’s voices acknowledge that ‘La critique n’est pas modeste’, ‘Le critique est un homme de pouvoir’,24 and in the give and take of conversation, they avoid judging ‘la valeur’ of the text.25 Indeed, ‘le dernier mot’ in

23 Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), 18–19. 24 Blanchot, “Les paroles doivent cheminer longtemps,” in L’Entretien infni, ed. Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 478–79. 25 Ibid., 481. 9 A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S … 155

Blanchot’s text is a question,26 and a good one: ‘Mais quelle est cette voix?’27 In describing Blanchot’s review as a ‘critical commentary’, Hill does it a disservice; Blanchot responds to the questions posed by Beckett’s text, to the fact that in How It Is each reader, and so each critic, must admit her or his own partialness, must admit the fact that hesitations, second thoughts, interruptions and misunderstandings are a necessary part of engaging with the complexities and nuances of literary works: they are as much a part of reading (and so criticism) as any ‘appeal’ to ‘values’ and ‘truth’. For some, this is a cause for concern. Sophie Ratcliffe observes that critics ‘cannot but mention the apparent absence of those elocutionary, signalling pauses that usually aid one’s sense of a vocal intonation in a text, thus bringing How It Is ‘perilously close to the unreadable’. In contrast, for Ratcliffe, the ‘lack of tonal instruction could be seen, in part, as a demonstration of the text’s ‘openness’. You can say it as you hear it’.28 Yet, this is where Ratcliffe urges caution: she argues that ‘the assurance that such textual openness is, in some sense, ‘contemporary’ or progressive, belongs to the Beckettian theorists, and not to the author himself’, before insisting that there is, ‘after all, a sign of the author’s hand, “claw- ing for the take” (HII, 54) in the textual breaks of How It Is’.29 Ratcliffe is right. This is a text that has clearly been constructed, indeed one of the concerns voiced within the text is the degree to which it has been constructed; that is to say, the degree to which the author’s hand can be seen (or felt). In other words, and to a large extent because of its hybrid status as prose poetry, How It Is draws attention to both the multiplicity of the interpretive act and the unavoidable compromises involved in interpreting a text, which is itself profoundly creative; while the ‘natural order’ can be ‘play[ed] with’, such playfulness takes place within parameters; language generates meaning within the contours of the ‘weakened’ syntax. As such, far from simply being the product of imaginative ‘Beckettian theorists’, the text’s openness is an attempt to balance the strong presence of the author. Later in her study, Ratcliffe emphasises the

26 Ibid., 478. 27 Ibid., 486. 28 Ratcliffe, On Sympathy, 201. Ratcliffe is quoting A. Alvarez, Beckett, London: Woburn, 1973, 189. 29 Ibid., 202. 156 S. ANNETT importance of The Tempest to How It Is30—in particular, noticing the narrator’s resemblance to Caliban (‘I am not a monster’).31 At the conclusion of How It Is, the narrator claims that the author is looking for a way to disappear, much as Prospero promises to ‘abjure’ his ‘rough magic’ at the beginning of Act 5 of Shakespeare’s play32:

has he not staring him in the face I quote on a solution more simple by far and by far more radical a formulation that would eliminate him completely and so admit him to that peace at least while rendering me in the same breath sole responsible for this unqualifable murmur of which consequently here the last scraps at last very last.33

At least (but not at last) the author has access to ‘peace’, while the text remains ‘sole responsible for this unqualifable murmur’. The author’s role is to recall ‘the essential features’,34 to provide a shape within which the ‘anonymous voice’ of the ‘self-styled’ reader must work: ‘and this anonymous voice self-styled quaqua the voice of us all that was without on all sides then in us when the panting stops bits and scraps barely audi- ble certainly distorted there it is at last the voice of him who before listening to us murmur what we are tells us what we are as best he can’.35 The pseudo-scholarly term ‘quaqua’ turns against the lofty description of the voice as ‘self-styled’; a ‘distorted […] murmur’ is the best a voice can do when reaching towards silence. However, and as Ratcliffe notes, this is not to say, then, that we are in a post-modernist realm of ‘untethered utterances’.36 The text is open insofar as it incorporates gaps and ambiguities in which each individual reader can infect her voice, which is always an impermanent voice amidst the multitude of other possible voices. At the same time, there is a shape within which each reading should be placed, or, as it is put in the Texts for Nothing, there is a ‘pseudo-sculpture’.37 This text is not, to turn to a

30 Ibid., 197–200. 31 Beckett, How It Is, 55. 32 Shakespeare, The Tempest, v. i. 50–57, 1091. 33 Beckett, How It Is, 126. 34 Ibid., 120. 35 Ibid., 123. 36 Ratcliffe, On Sympathy, 192. 37 Beckett, Texts for Nothing, 133. 9 A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S … 157 phrase used by Beckett to describe Endgame, ‘just play’, or at least it is not only ‘play’.38 There is ‘toil’ as well (‘so much toil and play’), both on the part of the author and expected of the reader.39 As O’Reilly argues, the ‘rhythm of the text begins to insinuate itself’ and this rhythm punctuates the text.40 There are variations, but these variations are restricted by the text, by the fact that the text is ‘always the same old thing the same old things’.41 The author’s fngerprints are everywhere and yet the textual space remains inclusive of other voices, voices that are held (tentatively) within the narrative voice. As such, and as Ratcliffe writes, there is ‘not a clear separation between the voice that speaks and the voice it speaks of, nor a spiral of fctional groundlessness, but something between the two’. Beckett’s text is remarkable because it ‘marks the delicate passage from one voice to another’,42 the points of possible contact between self-enclosed subjects as the weakened syntax stretches to accommodate the presences of unknown ‘apparitions’.43 Critics determined to read Beckett’s fction on their own terms have missed the implications of such delicacy. Philip Toynbee condemns ‘the excrement, the blasphemy, the reiterated indifferentism’, and the ‘emotional aridity’ of the writing.44 In addition to this, Martha Nussbaum has been emphatic in her condemnation of Beckett for ‘unwriting’ stories, which she sees as a ‘criticism of emotion’.45 In Nussbaum’s view, stories ‘contain […] and teach forms of feeling, forms of life’.46 However, in making this argument Nussbaum ignores the tendency of readers to lurch into fantasies at the expense of attending carefully to the poetic

38 SB, quoted and translated by Jean-Michel Rabaté. Rabaté, “Philosophizing with Beckett: Adorno and Badiou,” in A Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. S. E. Gontarski, 102. 39 Beckett, Texts for Nothing, 103–104. 40 Magessa O’Reilly, introduction, How It Is, xi. 41 Beckett, How It Is, 93. 42 Ratcliffe, On Sympathy, 194. 43 Beckett, How It Is, 125. 44 Quoted in Ratcliffe, On Sympathy, 185. Toynbee, “Going Nowhere,” Observer, 18 December 1958, reprinted in L. Butler, ed., Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett (Aldershot: Scolar, 1993), 26. 45 Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 308. 46 Ibid., 287. 158 S. ANNETT nuance of a given text. Within How It Is, any such understanding of pity is dismissed:

he the frst to have pity happily to no effect honour of the family to eliminate the little stool regrettable innovation discarded and the idea of the three books set aside where’s the greatness it is there.47

Pity is a ‘little stool’, a ‘regrettable innovation’ to be ‘discarded’, along with the ‘idea’ of the ‘three books’. In the next fragment, the narrator mentions ‘the yellow book’ and argues that it is ‘not the voice of here here all self to be abandoned say nothing when nothing’.48 How It Is evinces scepticism with regard to the ability of texts to elicit emotion or rely upon crude ethical pronouncements, referring to ‘lies about mistle- toe forgiveness’49; Beckett’s prose poem performs the improvisational points of contact between participants, transforming each reader into an author and insisting that, in reading, we acknowledge the range of possibilities presented by the text. Having said this, in rejecting such ‘lies’, How It Is ignores neither the affectiveness of fctions nor the ‘traces of emotion’ and ‘signs of distress’ present ‘within attempts at recall’.50 Early in the text, the narrator is confronted ‘suddenly’ with ‘another image’. Turning once more to the ‘I’/‘me’ grammatical form (‘I see me’, ‘I look to me’), the narrator sees himself ‘about sixteen’, taking a walk with his ‘darling’:

suddenly we are eating sandwiches alternate bites I mine she hers and exchanging endearments my sweet girl I bite she swallows my sweet boy she bites I swallow we don’t yet coo with our bills full.

The voice of the text turns its attention to the object (‘me’) and explores the ‘image’. The ‘fgure’ in the text overlaps with the voice of the text (‘I look to me’) but there is also an uncomfortable gap. The ‘image’ is vivid but fnally wanes (‘we are again dwindling’) and the ‘scene is shut of us’. On the next page, the narrator observes that ‘way off on the right in the mud the hand opens and closes that helps me it’s going let it go I realise

47 Beckett, How It Is, 71. 48 Ibid., 72. 49 Ibid., 73. 50 Piette, Remembering and the Sound of Words, 218. 9 A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S … 159

I’m still smiling there’s no sense in that now been none for a long time now’.51 This moment articulates both our capacity to be moved by our imaginations as well as the senselessness of such emotional responses. Early in the text, the narrator admits: ‘that’s the speech I’ve been given part one before Pim question do I use it freely it’s not said or I don’t hear it’s one or the other all I hear is that a witness I’d need a witness’.52 The narrator is unsure if he can use ‘the speech’ freely, ‘it’s not said or I don’t hear’, and in order to clarify this confusion a ‘witness’ is required. In this moment there is, as Ratcliffe argues, a ‘clear sense’ in which the narrator ‘puts the burden of “understanding”, and of witnessing, upon his readers, and the nuances of their perceptions’.53 Moreover, this act of ‘witnessing’, as in the Texts for Nothing, entails a kind of human contact. The narrator is able to ‘fall asleep within humanity again just barely’, and, for what it’s worth, such human contact also brings happiness: ‘I’m often happy god knows but never more than at this instant never so oh I know happiness unhappiness I know I know but there’s no harm mentioning it.’54 As the phrase ‘happiness unhappiness’ implies, the text is aware that human contact is not without its dangers. Beckett insists upon the complexity of such contact and refrains from providing a moral solution or, as he puts it in conversation with Charles Juliet, ‘les valeurs morales’.55 The narrator makes Pim speak, makes him ‘sing’, by inficting pain upon him. The narrator compassionately (if also twistedly) imagines Pim thinking as he suffers the blows (‘he must have said to himself’) and he suggests that Pim perhaps guesses that the violence is not ‘aimless’: ‘it is not aimless that is evident this creature is too intelligent to demand what is beyond my powers’. Pim might then wonder what he could do to satisfy his torturer and having considered both singing and weeping (‘to sing to weep’), he may even suspect that his torturer wants him to ‘think’. However, this idea is quickly rejected as ‘it comes again’, causing ‘howls’ which are only silenced by a ‘thump on skull’.56

51 Beckett, How It Is, 23–25. 52 Ibid., 13. 53 Ratcliffe, On Sympathy, 215. 54 Beckett, How It Is, 36–37. 55 Charles Juliet, Rencontres avec Samuel Beckett (Paris: P. O. L. éditeur, 1999), 35–36. 56 Beckett, How It Is, 58. 160 S. ANNETT

The howls mentioned in the text are both a response to suffering and an expression of mirth: ‘I have all the suffering of all the ages I don’t give a curse for it and howls of laughter in every cell the tins rattle like castanets.’ In part one of the text, following a summary of the work before him, the narrator appeals to Thalia, the Ancient Greek muse who presided over comedy: ‘Thalia for pity’s sake a leaf of thine ivy.’57 This exasperated request articulates the degree to which the text struggles to be a comedy. The narrator notes: ‘all that happens to be hanging on by the fngernails to one’s species that of those who laugh too soon’.58 Human identity is defned in Aristotelian terms as the ability to laugh. However, the quality of that laughter and its relation to suffering complicates the defnition. In Aristotle, the defnition of human beings as laughing animals is given in the context of tickling: ‘And mankind alone is ticklish both because of the thinness of his skin and because he is the only one of the animals that laughs.’59 In How It Is, the connection to ‘one’s species’ is perhaps fragile (and so requires hanging onto) but the narrator is also clinging quite literally to Pim with his ‘fngernails’, and he is most certainly not tickling Pim’s thin skin. In this text, howls of laughter and howls of suffering are never easy to distinguish because there are ‘a thousand and one last shifts with emotions laughter even and tears to match soon dried in a word hanging on’.60 At the conclusion of How It Is, there is a ‘fnal negation’ which reads as follows61: ‘and all this business of above yes light yes skies yes a little blue yes a little white yes the earth turning yes bright and less bright yes little scenes yes all balls yes the women yes the dog yes the prayers yes the homes yes all balls yes’.62 There is, as we have seen, a controlling presence within the text, a ‘solitary imagination’ conscious of its own presence.63 And yet, while this ‘ancient voice’ shapes the text, it also attempts to weaken itself, to ‘abjure’ the ‘rough magic’ of the authorial

57 Ibid., 31. 58 Ibid., 20. 59 Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, trans. James Lennox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 69. 60 Beckett, How It Is, 81. 61 Smith, “Bearing Witness,” in How It Is, 352. 62 Beckett, How It Is, 127. 63 Ibid., 3. 9 A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S … 161 role.64 As we have seen, the narrator claims that there is a ‘solution’ ‘staring’ the author ‘in the face’: ‘a formulation that would eliminate him completely and so admit him to that peace at least while rendering me in the same breath sole responsible for this unqualifable murmur’.65 In the fnal moments of The Tempest, Prospero releases Ariel (‘Be free, and fare thou well’) before stepping forward and pleading for his own freedom:

Since I have my dukedom got And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands.66

In addressing the audience, Prospero merges the fctional and the real, admitting the audience into the play and placing responsibility for the happy ending in their appreciative (and prayerful) hands. Yet, even in his plea for freedom there is a reluctance to abandon the magical world that he has created. He admits, ‘Now I want / Spirits to enforce, art to enchant’ and his verb (‘want’) suggests both a lack and a desire, so that even in the fnal moments of the play the pull of ‘art’ can be felt.67 The ‘solution’ may be ‘staring [Prospero] in the face’, but that does not mean that he is happy about it, or that the abjuration is quite as fnal, or complete, as he suggests. In How It Is, we are encouraged to acknowledge the presence of other voices alongside our own as the author shapes the text to make room for multiple interpretations; the reader is plural both across persons (your reading will differ from mine), and the re-readings of an individual (when I read the text again, I do so as a different person, noticing different infections within the ‘pseudo-sculpture’). However, in the fnal pages of the text there are repeated acknowledgements that the author’s attempt to relinquish control fails, perhaps that it must fail. We learn that ‘all these words I repeat I quote on victims tormentors confdences repeat quote I and the others all these words too strong I say it again

64 Shakespeare, The Tempest, v. i. 50–51, 1091. 65 Beckett, How It Is, 126. 66 Shakespeare, The Tempest, Epilogue, 6–10, 1094. 67 Ibid., lines 14–15. Both usages are substantiated by the OED and were active when Shakespeare was writing. 162 S. ANNETT as I hear it again murmur it again to the mud’.68 At the close, the narrator wonders if ‘it is still possible at this late hour to conceive of other worlds’:

one perhaps there is one perhaps somewhere merciful enough to shelter such frolics where no one ever abandons anyone and no one ever waits for anyone and never two bodies touch.69

In 1961, Beckett told Tom Driver that ‘the key word of my work is “perhaps”’.70 The narrator of How It Is wonders if there is another world, another ‘perhaps’, ‘somewhere merciful enough to shelter such frolics’. A world of texts and readers, a world in which texts are ‘weak enough’ to admit readers and in which readers are discerning enough to attend closely to the details of the texts, to bring them to life, while at the same time being strong enough, fnally, to turn away (‘all balls’).

Works Cited Abbott, H. P. “Farewell to Incompetence: Beckett’s ‘How It Is’ and ‘Imagine Dead Imagine’.” Contemporary Literature 11.1 (Winter, 1970). Alvarez, A. Beckett. London: Woburn, 1973. Aristotle. On the Parts of Animals. Translated by James Lennox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Beckett, Samuel. Nouvelles et textes pour Rien. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958. ———. Comment c’est. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1961. ———. Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable. London: Calder, 1994, repr. 1997; Grove Press, 1995. ———. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989. Edited by S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1995. ———. Company. London: Calder, 1996, repr. 2003. ———. How It Is. Edited by Magessa O’Reilly. London: Faber, 2009. ———. The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett. Edited by Sean Lawlor and John Pilling. London: Faber and Faber, 2012.

68 Beckett. How It Is, 104. 69 Ibid., 125. 70 Tom Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum 4.3 (Summer, 1961). Reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London, Henley and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, repr. 1979), 220. 9 A WEAKENING SYNTAX: HOW IT IS WITH SAMUEL BECKETT’S … 163

Blanchot, Maurice. L’espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. ———. “Les paroles doivent cheminer longtemps.” In L’Entretien infni, edited by Maurice Blanchot, 478–479. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Clements, Brian, and Jamey Dunham, eds. An Introduction to the Prose Poem. Danbury, CT: Firewheel Editions, 2009. Driver, Tom. “Beckett by the Madeleine.” Columbia University Forum 4.3 (Summer, 1961). Reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London, Henley and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961, repr. 1979. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. London: Methuen, 2001. Harvey, Lawrence E. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Hill, Leslie. Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Juliet, Charles. “Meeting Beckett.” Tri-Quarterly 77. Translated by S. Chamier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1989–1990. ———. Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde. Translated by Janey Tucker. Leiden: Academic Press, 1995. ———. Rencontres avec Bram Van Velde. Paris: P. O. L. éditeur, 1998. ———. Rencontres avec Samuel Beckett. Paris: P. O. L. éditeur, 1999. Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Piette, Adam. Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Rabaté, Jean Michel. “Philosophizing with Beckett: Adorno and Badiou.” In A Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Stanley Gontarski. Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010. Ratcliffe, Sophie. On Sympathy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Shakespeare, William. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. Walton-on- Thames: Nelson, 1998. Shenker, Israel. “Moody Man of Letters: A Portrait of Samuel Beckett, Author of the Puzzling Waiting for Godot.” New York Times, May 6, 1956. Reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. Edited by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman. London, Henley and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Smith, Russell. “Bearing Witness in How It Is.” In Borderless Beckett/Beckett sans frontières: Tokyo 2006, edited by Minako Okamuro. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Toynbee, Polly. “Going Nowhere.” Observer, December 18, 1958. Reprinted in Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, edited by L. Butler. Aldershot: Scolar, 1993. PART III

By Name or by Nature? CHAPTER 10

Questioning the Prose Poem: Thoughts on Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns

Alan Wall

What Is a Prose Poem? Arguably, it cannot be book-length, though enough of them put together can make up a book. The prose concerned should show the same fastidiousness in regard to lexis, and exhibit the same vigour and coherence of rhythm, as verse. So, what then is the difference between a prose poem and verse? Lineation must be foremost. Verse insists that the writer choose the line endings, not the typographer or the word process- ing software. Prose insists only on its punctuation marks, not its lineation (which can be the single most effective form of verse punctuation, when properly deployed). On that basis, is the following a prose poem?

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it fows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog

Some parts of this essay have previously appeared in Agenda. Permission granted by the author.

A. Wall (*) University of Chester, Chester, UK

on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the fresides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fngers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

This has all the qualities adumbrated above, but it is not a prose poem. Why not? Because it is embedded in a larger fctional narrative—that goes by the name of Bleak House. And that precludes its admission into this nomenclature. So, let us try another piece of prose, once again characterised by its startling pertinacity:

Alas, poore Yoricke, I knew him Horatio, a fellow of infnite jest, of most excellent fancie, hee hath borne me on his backe a thousand times, and now how abhorred my imagination is: my gorge rises at it. Heere hung those lyppes that I haue kist I know not how oft, where be your gibes now? your gamboles, your songs, your fashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roare, not one now to mocke your own grin- ning, quite chopfalne. Now get you to my Ladies Chamber, & tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this fauour she must come, make her laugh at that.

Is this a prose poem? It’s hard to think of anything called a prose poem that has ever been better. And yet this cannot be so called either, because the next line uttered is: ‘Prethee Horatio tell me one thing.’ In other words, we are part of a dialogue here, and that dialogue is, in its turn, part of a play. In both our chosen instances, it is the continuity surrounding the enislanded period of prose that classifes it as something other than a prose poem. But, then, what about this?

O Lord God, who has wounded us for our sins, and consumed us for our transgressions, by thy late heavy and dreadful visitation; and now, in the midst of judgment, remembering mercy, hast redeemed our souls from the jaws of death: We offer unto thy fatherly goodness ourselves, our souls and 10 QUESTIONING THE PROSE POEM: THOUGHTS ON GEOFFREY HILL’S … 169

bodies, which thou hast delivered, to be a living sacrifce unto thee, always praising and magnifying thy mercies in the midst of thy Church.

This is as sinewy as prose usually gets, and is compact enough to adum- brate the plague that has recently been laying waste the land in its dreadful vastation, but this is never referred to as a prose poem either, and that is because this is a prayer, one of those contained in The Book of Common Prayer. Much of that book consists of verses from the Bible, a book which in its turn has been compiled of texts, sometimes in verse and sometimes in prose, a hybrid formula also employed by David Jones in many of his writings, which move in and out of verse at will, the prose often being as tight in its sequential concentrations as the verse. But those sections have never been referred to as prose poems. The prose poem, it would seem, needs to be on the short side; should be discrete enough in each section (when it is forming a sequence) not to be accused of being part of a coherent and unifed narrative; and arguably cannot be subsumed into another genre, like drama, epistle, liturgy or prayer, though it has been compared to them all. It should be admit- ted that, in its English usage anyway, it has always been a phrase that elic- its from some the most profound suspicion:

French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and pon- derous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has accordingly resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.1

Thus did Peter Medawar lambast Teilhard de Chardin on the publication of The Phenomenon of Man, a book which managed to convince a lot of people that it had reconciled the fndings of Darwin with the discoveries of modern physics and the teachings of the Church. It evidently did not convince Medawar, whose articulate acidities can at times be as amusing as those of Evelyn Waugh. The frst edition of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, published in 1924, comprised a series of prose poems.2 Small chunks of vivid prose

1 Qtd. in Peter and Jean Medawar, Aristotle to Zoos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 2 Reprinted in Ernest Hemingway, The Collected Stories, ed. James Fenton (Everyman’s Library, 1995). 170 A. WALL alternated with one another. The unity they achieved was not narrative, but thematic, and the theme explored was the parallelism between the daily goings-on inside a bull ring, and what happened during the Great War and immediately after. There is little continuity of place or person- nel; instead, the joint settings revolve around one another, in rhythmic and thematic counterpoint. When Hemingway brought out subsequent editions of In Our Time in 1925 and 1930, the pieces ceased to be prose poems; he had enlarged them into short stories, and they possess the structured narrative necessary to that genre. Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter3 is a work of considerable fragmentation and luminous intensity. That does not make it a sequence of prose poems, however, because the whole text has the characteristic continuity of a novel. We saw how the opening of Bleak House displayed all the requisite qualities of a prose poem, but it isn’t one, precisely because it is embedded in the narrative whole of a novel. James Joyce, between 1900 and 1903, wrote what he took to calling epiphanies, but which appear indistinguishable from prose poems. They were to turn out to be, in Richard Ellmann’s word, ‘preparatory’.4 They provided compressed moments of illumination for longer texts, starting with Stephen Hero. In being so subsumed in a larger literary structure, they lose the stand-alone quality we ascribe to a prose poem. So, what then is a prose poem? Whatever else poetry is, said T.S. Eliot, it is a form of punctuation. Which is to say, as we have seen, that lineation is chosen by the poet not the typographer, or the automated typographic device. Once you say ‘this is prose’, you abandon that right to dictate lineation. But if it is to be a prose poem, then presumably we are indicating prose which has the intensity of poetry, but whose lines go to the end of the page, beyond the control of the writer. We are probably also indicating the lack of any overall narrative, or that there should be at most a series of glancing allusions to such an overarching structure. So, we might have a series of lyric meditations, of fragmentary intensity, as we get in Rimbaud’s Illuminations. If the term never sat easily in English, that might be because the French spirit Medawar lamented could cheerfully (or more likely, mourn- fully) produce sequences of poèmes en prose, but the whole procedure

3 Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter (London: Bloomsbury, 1976). 4 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 85. 10 QUESTIONING THE PROSE POEM: THOUGHTS ON GEOFFREY HILL’S … 171 surely reeks a little of belles-lettres—indeed, of the exquisite nail-pared fashionings of the feuilletonistes. And you cannot get much more French than that, even if you are writing the exquisite pieces in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. There is another problem. The term appears to involve a disparagement of prose itself. If this is prose poetry, then the other sort is presumably straightforward, common-or-garden unpoetic prose: prosaic prose, in fact. The utile stuff. Language as instrument, keeping its extra-utile foregroundings to itself. The medium at its most functional, with no fancy airs and graces, words so rigorously ordered that we are able to use them for purposes of communication, rather than musing. And this raises a problem. The foundation of the modern movement in literature, certainly as represented and expounded by Ezra Pound, with the fgure of Ford Madox Ford right behind him, was based on this simple premise: poetry should be at least as well-written as prose. The prose of Flaubert did not have anything to learn from the verse of Swinburne. If anything, the process should have been the other way about. That great devotee of Flaubert, James Joyce, fashioned his epiphanies in his early years, and they certainly resemble the prose poem, but by the time of his mature work the poetry and the prose have simply become one. In this respect, you cannot point to any moment in Ulysses or Finnegans Wake and say, ‘Now here is a self-contained prose poem worth isolating from the rest’. * The individual units of Mercian Hymns have been referred to as prose poems, but not—noticeably—by Hill himself. When, in his interview with John Haffenden, Hill is asked why he chose to write the sequence in the form of prose poems, he replies: ‘They’re versets of rhythmical prose.’ He then refers to each of them as ‘a pitched and tuned chant’.5 Now a verset, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘a little or short verse, esp. one of the Bible or similar book; a short piece of verse’. So, it has more than a little in common with a pericope, one of those individual sections of the Bible which can be examined (or even memo- rised) separately, but which needs to be understood in the context from which it is being lifted. By insisting on the indentations after the frst line of each paragraph, Mercian Hymns breaks one of the conditions for the ‘prose poem’ mentioned above. This, it would seem, is prose which

5 Geoffrey Hill, interview in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation, ed. John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 93. 172 A. WALL insists upon a type of lineation, and so situates itself midway between verse and prose. Robert Alter in his book The Art of Biblical Poetry says that the verset in its Hebrew form, even in verse, is never exacting either in terms of prosody or form. It is fexible. And it was fexibility, of course, which attracted Baudelaire to the idea of a ‘poetic prose’. French verse, particularly when employing Alexandrines and rhyme, might seem a little constraining, more so than many English equivalents, but Hill can be knotted enough as a versifer, and the ‘freer form’ might have represented an attraction. These are chants then, hymns in fact, and their subject is Mercia, the region reigned over by Offa in the eighth century. The name derives from the Mierce, or boundary folk, and towards the southern boundary of Mercia, as it once was, Geoffrey Hill was born and raised. What he proceeds to do in these versets is to mingle the present-day West Midlands with the Mercia of Offa’s time. If there is a precedent for this, it is probably David Jones in poems such as ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’ and ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’. Hill has often referred to Jones’s work, and must have been aware of these poems (large portions of which are, in fact, written in prose) before writing Mercian Hymns. The latter book was published in 1971. ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’ had frst been published in The Listener in 1958 and ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’ in Art and Literature in 1964 but, more to the point, ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’, along with several other of Jones’ Roman/British poems, was published in a special edition of Agenda in 1967. Agenda, under the editorship of William Cookson, embraced three exemplary poets: Ezra Pound, David Jones and Geoffrey Hill. What Hill seems to have learned from these texts of Jones is how to superimpose one historical regime and time upon another inside a single text. In the case of Jones, the experience was that of the Roman Empire laid over the experience of Britain and of British imperialism, seeing in the soldiers of the British armed forces garrisoned in the British Mandate in Palestine an echo of Roman soldiers who had been garrisoned there long before. Using his knowledge of soldiery and of how soldiers talk to one another (he had been an infantryman in the Great War), he blended the two times and places, often using Roman vocabulary, still in its Latin form, but placing it authentically in the mouths of British squaddies. Hill seems to have seen his opportunity here, and so he inserted into Offa’s Mercia the Midlands of his youth, and even the recently built M5 motorway. 10 QUESTIONING THE PROSE POEM: THOUGHTS ON GEOFFREY HILL’S … 173

The challenge for the writer here is to hold history and modernity together on the same page. Hill opens up a dialogue between past and present, fnding locutions that can place the digging of Offa’s Dyke and the building of the M5 on the same plane of speech. But Hill is not essentially an urban poet; neither is he a poet of the crowd as was Baudelaire (or, for that matter, Eliot). Hill has his Parisian city scene in The Mystery of the Charity of Charley Péguy (though the crowds there are seen signifcantly from behind the bookshop window) and in ‘Churchill’s Funeral’, but it is always solitary voices, solitary images, which lift off his pages. When a crowd appears in ‘Funeral Music’, it is a crowd of corpses. When a crowd of soldiers appears in The Mystery, it is as the celluloid of a cinematic news-reel. Hill is a poet of underlying continuities, though such continuities are not (as at least one of his more imperceptive critics has implied) always of a comforting nature. But where Baudelaire fnds novelty and fresh col- locations in the macadam boulevards, Hill sees in Offa’s kingdom and the contemporary Midlands parallels worthy of contemplation. The technique has an undeniable cunning, in that it discovers within contemporary usage, grandeurs of language (sometimes arch) and lays them beside the abbreviated demotic, thus:

Then he dismissed you, and the rest of us followed, sheepish next-of-kin, to the place without the walls: spoil-heaps of chrysanths dead in their plastic macs, eldorado of washstand-marble.6

The place without the walls cannot but make one think of Golgotha, but also of Gehenna, that dumping ground for burning which starts off our Judaeo-Christian notion of Hell as a human spoil-heap. One can ponder then the etymology of chrysanthemum, and how the Croesus- gold inside that word gestures to the navigator’s gold inside eldorado. Both are a long way from the gold of Yeats’ Byzantium. What is daring, though, is the employment of the demotic ‘chrysanths’ shrouded in the comedy routine of ‘plastic macs’. Without diminishing the otherness that is history, Hill manages in the Hymns to convey something of the menacing intimacy of power:

6 Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns, in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 91. 174 A. WALL

It was there that he drew upon grievances from the people; attended to signatures and retributions; forgave the death-howls of his rival. And there he exchanged gifts with the Muse of History. What should a man make of remorse, that it might proft his soul? Tell me. Tell everything to Mother, darling, and God bless.7

Offa, as far as we can tell, was not a particularly pleasant piece of work. He had Aethelberht, who was an East Anglian king, beheaded while he was a guest at the Mercian court. Some said that this had been done at his wife’s bidding. So, nearly eight hundred years after Salomé and Herod, the subscription beneath any image of regally sanctioned decap- itation still appeared to be: Cherchez la femme. Either despite this, or because of it, Offa travelled under some grand titles: rex Anglorum or even, at times, rex totius Anglorum patriae. We have this information from later documents, nearly all of which appear to be remarkably unreliable. Hill is well-aware of all this, and he presents us with one who is on presentation-terms with Clio, who forgives the dying, who is burdened with biblical injunctions, but still needs tucking up at night, for this little monster is undoubtedly a monster of history—not merely his own, but ours too. If there is a burden to the Hymns, it is this joint complicity in history’s celebrations and cruelties. The associative contingencies of the language we inherit is what we sometimes call tradition. Hill’s vision is also utterly unlike Baudelaire’s, in that his imagination is lit constantly by rural and village landscape, and their inevitable ruin.8 When vehicles appear in this landscape they often take the form of animals:

7 Hill, Mercian Hymns, 92. 8 In fact, in Baudelaire’s various sets of prose poems, the intense Parisian sections, those meditations on crowds and boulevards, on speed and ruin and the annihilation of the old city’s identity, represent a relatively small part of the whole, though arguably by far the most compelling. It was the mixing of human genres that Haussmann’s boulevards involved, which made the poet reach for a new form capable of capturing this promiscuous and inclusive hubbub. The non-stanzaic form allows him an immediacy of response to this mingling of levels of perception, and different types of activity. 10 QUESTIONING THE PROSE POEM: THOUGHTS ON GEOFFREY HILL’S … 175

Cohorts of charabancs fanfared Offa’s province and his concern, negotiating the by-ways from Teme to Trent. Their windshields dripped butterfies. Stranded on hilltops they signalled with plumes of steam. Twilight menaced the land. The young women wept and surrendered.9

Vehicular transport could not be more beast-like:

His maroon GT chanted then overtook. He lavished on the high valleys its haleine.10

The inanimate becomes animate and articulate: ‘The car radio, glim- mering, received broken utterance from the horizon of storms’. As with Hill’s ‘Funeral Music’, even topography becomes organic and heraldic: ‘With England crouched beastwise beneath it all.’ This deliberate confusion of forms and hierarchies is given its ancestry within the text:

Itinerant through numerous domains, of his lord’s retinue, to Compostela. Then home for a lifetime amid West Mercia this master-mason as I envisage him, intent to pester upon tympanum and chancel- arch his moody testament, confusing warrior with lion, dragon-coils, tendrils of the stony vine.11

So, if the latest Grand Tourer, accelerating away and burning its fossil fuels, is confused with a horse, there is a precedent for this. This also is part of the tradition. Hill presents us with a Mercia where the present and the past are intertwined, sometimes snugly, sometimes not. The lexis fickers back and forth between the arch and the demotic. Here are motorways and caffs, as well as the required usages of ancilla and servus. Offa’s province is now one through which charabancs motor, to deliver their cohorts of travellers to appropriate roadside hostelries. One can almost hear the wireless crackling in the corner of an evening, delivering

9 Hill, Mercian Hymns, 103. 10 Ibid., 99. 11 Ibid., 106. 176 A. WALL the Home Service and the cricket results. And so Hill became belatedly the scop of Offa’s court and, simultaneously, the contemporary gleeman of the M5. At the beginning of Une Saison en Enfer, Rimbaud tries to trace his genealogy—racial, cultural, spiritual. He works out what he inherits from his ancestors the Gauls—his pale blue eyes, his narrow brain, his disas- trous clothing. He comes to the conclusion that mendacity and laziness are his main inheritances. But inherit he does, all the same. The land of our birth, he says—as does Hill—is always a region of preoccupation. Others have been there before us. They are the providers of our language and our history. We are obliged to work our way through what they have left us.

Works Cited Dickens, Charles. Bleak House, Project Gutenberg eBook. https://archive.org/ stream/bleakhouse01023gut/1023.txt. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Hemingway, Ernest. The Collected Stories. Edited by James Fenton. London: Everyman’s Library, 1995. Hill, Geoffrey, and Mercian Hymns. Interviewed. In Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation, edited by John Haffenden. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. ———. In Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, edited by Kenneth Haynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Medawar, Peter, and Jean Medawar. Aristotle to Zoos. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter. London: Bloomsbury, 1976. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, 1602. Act V, Scene 1. CHAPTER 11

‘I Went Disguised in It’: Re-evaluating Seamus Heaney’s Stations

Andy Brown

In 1970–1971, while teaching at the Berkeley campus in California, Seamus Heaney began work on Stations, a series of prose poems that would be published in Belfast in 1975 as a limited edition chapbook.1 Heaney prefaced these prose poems as ‘attempts to touch what Wordsworth calls “spots of time,” moments at the very edge of consciousness’ (3). In this chapter, I argue with the existing, often misguidedly negative, criticism of Stations and redress Heaney’s use of the form, following post-Romantic theories of the prose poem—Nikki Santilli and ‘the Romantic Fragment’—and postmodern theories—Stephen Fredman’s ‘generative sentence’.2 Much existing criticism, I contend, misreads

1 By 1975, some of the prose poems had already appeared in The Irish Times. 2 Fredman identifes the “generative sentence” of the prose poem as a hermeneutics of emergence: the sentence emerges in relation to its constituent parts perhaps analogously to someone testing their way out on to the ice. It is “an investigative, exploratory poetry” (Fredman, viii), often choosing “to investigate how things arise from the matrix of language” itself (viii).

A. Brown (*) University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

Stations by not taking the work on its own technical terms from within the prose poetic tradition. By considering Stations in light of the ‘Anecdotal Tradition’ of prose poetry (Clements and Dunham), I argue that Stations works in dialogue with the postmodern American poetics that Heaney had encountered in California3 and his engagement with post-Romanticism,4 just as his use of ‘cloistered’ imagery speaks back to the prose poem’s tradition of ‘frames and borders’ (Santilli). Stations is also seen to lay the ground for prose poems by a subsequent generation of British poets going beyond the narrower frame offered by lineated verse. * Prefacing Stations, Heaney wrote of ‘The excitement of coming for the frst time to a place I have always known completely’, showing a delight in the form that remained throughout his career.5 Yet, he also noted a number of ‘blocks’, including the appearance of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, which had ‘headed off’ the writing and the fact that he was ‘not confdent enough’ to pursue the writing on his return from the USA (3). Luke Kennard’s unpublished Ph.D. thesis offers insightful readings of Stations, exploring their self-mythologising tendencies in relation to Mercian Hymns and to David Jones’s In Parenthesis.6 In the published criticism, Blake Morrison acknowledges that Stations restrains ‘the more dangerously recondite and indulgent elements in the poet’s self-mythologising’ and shows ‘his childhood territory to be intensely

3 Henry Hart describes Heaney’s time in Berkeley (1970–1971) and discusses how the poet “tried to incorporate the expansive forms of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, and Gary Snyder”, and that Heaney was “following the experiments of the Americans” (5). In correspondence with Luke Kennard, Heaney commented, “Early in my Berkeley days, I bought an anthology of prose poems; I may also have been infuenced by soft-edge pastoral stuff in early Robert Bly” (Kennard, 46). 4 Heaney defnes his prose poems to Kennard as “conceived in a late nineteenth-century symbolist blur”, referring to them as “writings” after David Jones’ use of the term in In Parenthesis. 5 Heaney publishing 7 of the Stations sequence in his Selected Poems 1966–1987 and a further 2 in Opened Ground, as well as including prose poetry in North, also published in 1975 and District and Circle (2006). 6 See Luke Kennard, The Expanse: Self-Consciousness and the Transatlantic Prose Poem, PhD thesis, Exeter University, 2009, https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/ handle/10036/49653. 11 ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS 179 political’ (50), while Neil Corcoran deems Stations to be ‘of great interest’ in the work’s approach to sectarianism (252).7 Part of the ‘interest’ comes through the sequence’s personal voice—it is what Anne Stevenson calls ‘a series of psycho-autobiographical sketches’ (47), with evocative local and historical detail. The images are also often striking and symbolic, in the tradition of symbolist prose poetry. The title suggests Christ’s ‘Stations of the Cross’ and the choice of twenty-one prose poems signals them as a coming-of-age number. As Elmer Andrews suggests, Stations is important because it was ‘Heaney’s frst extended use of the Catholic notion of “stations” to provide a structure for a sequence’ (6). And yet the critical response remains, broadly, equivocal, echoing Heaney’s own uncertainty.8 Blake Morrison suggests that this may be why ‘Heaney chose to publish Stations in modest pamphlet form and to include nothing from it when assembling his Selected Poems’ (51).9 Much of the negative criticism concerns the linguistic register of the prose poems. Patrick Crotty reads Stations as ‘lush and somewhat over-fretful prose meditations’ (194), describing Heaney’s ‘diffculty in reconciling the heavy texture of these pieces’ as ‘embarrassing’ (202). Thomas Foster criticises Stations as ‘rarely compelling’ (47) and Morrison calls them pale in comparison to the poet’s celebrated quat- rains, or Hill’s Mercian Hymns (51). Others focus on Heaney’s ‘recycling’ lines from Stations for later verses, concluding that the prose poems must, therefore, be lesser—mere notes towards later verses.10 Morrison, for example, discusses the re-working ‘to better effect’ of phrases from the prose poems in North and Field Work (48–49), while Corcoran, Foster and Crotty all criticise this recycling as signs of their juvenile status. And yet, Crotty also discusses how Heaney heavily reworked many of his verse poems for the New & Selected Poems. Why, therefore, rewriting the prose poems should signify their weakness is very unclear. The formal

7 Further interest in this sectarian dimension can be found in O’Donoghue (xvi). 8 The fnal prose poem, “Incertus”, embodies this very “uncertainty”, as Helen Vendler has noted, “his frst poems were published under the pseudonym ‘Incertus’,” 27. 9 There are, in fact, 7 prose poems from Stations included in the New and Selected Poems 1966–1987, including “Incertus”. 10 “Cloistered” (Stations), for example, contains the phrase “his welted brogues unexpectedly secular under the soutane”, a phrase that re-appears almost verbatim 10 years later in the verse poem “Station Island: III”. 180 A. BROWN prejudice is extended in Foster’s critique, calling Stations ‘mere occasions for nostalgia [or] explanations for the poet’s development’ (97). Elsewhere in his analysis, Foster also implies that prose poetry is per se a ‘mere novelty’ in Heaney’s hands: ‘One would seem to need more than mere novelty to recommend a form as exotic as the prose poem […] yet they also fail to work very convincingly as prose poems – they are often interesting but rarely compelling’ (47), echoing the commonplace British prejudice against prose poetry as a form11; a prejudice which, as we shall see in conclusion, Stations has played an important role in overturning. All this is not to argue that Stations is not without its faults or, indeed, that some parts might have later resurfaced in verse poems. Morrison fairly notes how ‘Heaney himself has acknowledged the justice of the criticism that these poems aren’t realised or thrown free, that they are private family memories’ (50). Yes, some of the heraldic language is reminiscent of Mercian Hymns (see Morrison and Corcoran). Yes, some of the language is at times overblown—‘I was champion of the examination halls, scalding with lust inside my daunting visor’; or, ‘I have wandered far from that ring-giver and would not renegue on this migrant solitude’ (‘The Wanderer’ 19). And, yes, as Kennard notes, ‘when [the past] is recreated through mock-heroism and self-aggrandisement (tongue- in-cheek or otherwise) the reader will likely attribute pomposity and pretence’ (49). Yet, these defciencies strike me more as the faults of a developing writer—one sees such overwriting in much verse, after all— and not as defciencies because they are prose poems per se. Furthermore, to criticise the prose poem for ‘heraldic’ language misses a key linguistic point about the tradition. In both ‘The Sabbath- breakers’ and ‘Kernes’, for example, heraldic language is counterpointed with a questioning of authority—the killjoy ‘roundheaded’ elders of the former poem; the coarse Protestantism of the latter:

Dixon balanced upright on the bicycle, a saddled declamatory king of the castle. ‘I could beat every fucking papish in the school!’ (‘The Sabbath- breakers’, p. 14)

11 In Such Rare Citings, when examining the minority status of the prose poem in Britain, Santilli suggests that “subscribing to the cult of the prose poem introduces a dialectic of orthodox/unorthodox with a political and/or aesthetic choice that most have so far refused to take in the manner of form” (Santilli, 24). 11 ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS 181

In this piece, the young boy’s Raleigh bicycle opens up the sectarian element: ‘‘No surrender! Up King Billy every time!’, the young Dixon shouts, pledging his historic allegiance to the Dutch Prince William of Orange, Protestant victor of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne over the Catholic English King James II (14). The heraldry is used to heighten the problems of sectarianism. When Heaney writes ‘miles downstream from the battle’ (in ‘July’, p. 15), he conjures ‘skeins of blood still lazing in the channel,’ collapsing historical time from the Boyne to the present day. And when he writes of ‘halls in fames, hearts in cinders, the benches flled and emptied, the circles of companions called and broken’ (‘The Wanderer’, p. 19) in a manner almost akin to Beowulf, or Wanderer, it is because of his literary calling to fnd a language that is ‘confdent’ enough to ‘pursue its direction’ in the questioning of denominational confict in Ireland (‘Preface’, p. 3). To criticise the ‘heraldic’ diction per se is to miss the point. In ‘Patrick and Oisin’, we read: ‘Aside from their tenebrous conversation, I sat learning my catechism with its woodcut mysteries and polysyllabic runs, its “clandestine solemnizations”, its “morose delectation and concupis- cence” […] the hard stones of “calumny and detraction”’ (10). Heaney’s questioning of language is integral to his whole project.12 The prose poem ends: ‘The phrases that had sapped my concentration atrophied, incised tablets mossed and camoufaged by parasites and creeping greenery’ (10). Not only does this image circle back to an earlier image in the prose poem—the neighbours’ tongues characterised by ‘a back-biting undergrowth mantling the hard stones’ of their speech—but the ‘incised tablets’ of the Latinate and the ‘greenery’ of vernacular Irish are brought into proximity, so that Heaney can test out his developing allegiances. In some senses, he wishes to fnd and return to ‘the root of their kindly tongues’ (‘Cauled’, p. 4), just as in his verse poems, such as ‘North’, he desires to ‘lie down /in the word hoard’. The heraldic language is entirely appropriate to both form and content. The prose poem, with its roots in ancient religious texts, in later Romantic fragments and, later still, symbolist fguration, has always been heightened in tone, in ways that verse poetry simply is not.13 One must

12 Again, see “Incertus” (24), which throws doubt on the matter by questioning the poet’s own use of a Latinate pseudonym in his early poems. 13 A cursory glance at the originary, symbolist works of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, for example, should settle the matter. 182 A. BROWN criticise prose poetry from within its own traditions and forms, lest one criticise prose poems for not being verse. This is, in fact, the fault of the most critical analysis of Stations—Anne Stevenson’s ‘The Sacred Sense of the Sensitive Self’. In this essay, Stevenson argues that Stations fails to do ‘the work of poems’ despite their ‘skill in language’ (50), erring on ‘sentimentality’ (51) and being ‘rosy with held-back tears’ (51). For Stevenson, they exhibit ‘carefully but artifcially chosen language’ and are more like ‘self-conscious entries in a diary’, leaving the reader ‘wanting either more autobiography, or more art, or perhaps less art and more context, more “reality”’ (50). Stevenson’s judgements are remarkably subjective—why ‘reality,’ as a quality, should be the mark of the success of a prose poem rather than ‘artifce’ is unclear. And why should a prose poem be expected to do the same ‘work’ as verse? Stevenson almost entirely fails to grasp the very nature of the form. Like Foster, she simply betrays a personal preference for lineated verse. In criticising Stations as ‘fragments,’ Stevenson also misses the signifcance of the ‘Romantic fragment’ (Santilli) to the tradition. ‘When we are permitted only tiny, exquisite, pre-chosen fragments of memory, as if in a peepshow’, Stevenson writes, ‘we experience frustration’ (50). But the frustration (Stevenson’s own) is born not so much of ‘not enough reality’ in Heaney’s prose poems (in fact, they abound in the real) but, rather, from misunderstanding the very nature of the form: ‘What is felicitous in the poems of North’, Stevenson writes, ‘becomes suspect in the more artifcial mode of Stations. Perhaps prose-poetry always exhibits this weakness’ (51). Prose poetry here becomes a ‘suspect’ form once again, exhib- iting ‘weakness’, because of some inherent quality.14 Stevenson’s essay ends on the reassuring note that ‘It is good to know that he is translating Dante’ (51)—proper poetry, no less!—that will lead him out of ‘the self- bog’ of his sentimental, self-admiring and ‘suspect’ prose poetry. In order to move on from such misjudged readings, I want frst to establish the relationship of Stations to the tradition of the ‘anecdotal prose poem’.15 The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics

14 The “suspect” nature of the prose poem might be traced back to fn de siècle decadence, notably the trials of Oscar Wilde already referenced in this volume. 15 The word “anecdote” (in Greek, ἀνέκδοτον, “unpublished”, “not given out”) comes from Procopius of Caesarea, the biographer of Emperor Justinian I, whose work Ἀνέκδοτα (Anekdota, variously translated as Unpublished Memoirs or Secret History), narrated short incidents in the private life of the Byzantine court. Novalis defned the anecdote as an “historical molecule or epigram”. 11 ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS 183 includes the ‘anecdotal’ in its description of the ‘extraordinary range of perception and expression’ in the tradition, while in Geoffrey Godbert’s anthology, Freedom to Breathe, several examples can be found of such anecdotal ‘spots of time’, including Walt Whitman’s prose fragment ‘The White House by Moonlight’, James Agee’s A Death in the Family and the prose poems of two other notable Irish writers—John Synge’s The Arran Islands and James Joyce’s Epiphanies, with which, one assumes, Heaney may have been quite familiar if not, at least, aware of. In An Introduction to the Prose Poem, Clements and Dunham extend this account of the anecdotal tradition and give a defnition in the sense intended by Procopius: short, illustrative tales, often in sequence and often involving accounts of real or invented incidents or characters, but presented as though emanating from an historical specifcity. Anecdotal prose poems often reveal truths that go beyond the circumstances of the tale and strike the reader in an instant of revelation, or epiphany (Joyce). These characteristics ‘may help to explain the strong biographical element in anecdote’ (9) or, in Heaney’s case, the autobiographical.16 The second important context for re-evaluating Stations on its own terms as fragments, or ‘spots of time’, is that of ‘the Romantic Fragment’ (Santilli). Stevenson does at least acknowledge that ‘Stations is as clear a declaration as we have of Heaney’s dilemma as a post-Romantic, post-Freudian poet confronted by an impersonal, probably insoluble, national crisis’ (47) and she discusses Stations in light of Wordsworth’s infuence and ‘the public pressure […] to do something about a public situation’ (48). But rather than Stevenson’s ‘psycho-autobiographical sketches’, Heaney’s use of the Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’ places Stations in the tradition described by Santilli—linked to the German Romantic critical fragment. Santilli argues that ‘the contracted sphere of the fragment was to provide the conditions for its [the prose poem’s] appearance’ (31). In Santilli’s terms, the Romantic fragment provides:

the ideological basis for the prose poem form: its concern with the nature of truth; a desire to represent totality as the only possible approximation to

16 Many of the examples cited by Clements and Dunham show this “tendency towards the autobiographical/historical account” (9), including works by Kenneth Koch, Pablo Neruda, Carolyn Forché, and James Wright. 184 A. BROWN

this idea and the fragmentary way in which this is achieved; the principles guiding the parameters of the form and the absence of the work itself are all common properties of both type of composition (39).

For Santilli, the prose poem ‘situates itself ontologically at the intersection of symbol and allegory, which it effects by appropriating the metonymic ground’ (42). It is through the metonymic development of an object, say, in an ‘object poem,’17 that the prose poet parallels the relationship of the prose poem as fragment to its absent whole: ‘Just as the single fgure is logically related to its elliptical whole, so the prose poem projects a text of which it is an attributive (rather than imitative) part’ (41). In a prose poem, then, the lack of context on the page (a decon- textualised ‘spot of time’) sends readers off in search of it. Readers are ‘denied passivity’ and are obliged ‘instead to participate in the lawlessly expansive creation process in order to arrive at a point of interpretation’. Santilli argues that this has resulted in a ‘shift in roles: the writer writes the work, but the reader writes the text by taking control of context’ (101). In other words, the anecdotes of Stations are metonymic fragments through which readers go off in search of the absent whole. The very fragmentary nature for which Stevenson criticises Stations is, in fact, one of their main supporting features. That Stevenson wants Heaney to provide that context/reality, instead of searching for it herself, belies the same misunderstanding displayed in Morrison’s account: ‘It withholds circumstantial information about “where” and “when”’ (50), which, far from being a reason to criticise the poems as prose, is one of the very reasons to celebrate them as prose poems in the tradition of the Romantic fragment itself. What these negative criticisms of Stations actually highlight is the wider-spread prejudice against reading ‘poetry’ in sentences—perhaps because of a hitherto relative invisibility of prose poetry amongst high-profle British poets, the general reader still expects poetry to be lineated in verse. Stations, therefore, plays a signifcant role in redressing this, encouraging readers to read differently by addressing the sentence instead of the line. It also, I shall conclude, encouraged a subsequent generation of poets to be ‘confdent enough’ (‘Preface’, p. 3) to pursue the form for themselves.

17 For example, Francis Ponge and Gertrude Stein. 11 ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS 185

I have written elsewhere of the kinds of rhetorical techniques that feature frequently in prose poetry,18 while Santilli has comprehensively discussed ‘Biblical techniques’: ‘parallelism’ (the same thing in different words), ‘furtherance’ (‘fractional advance’), ‘trailing’ (anadiplo- sis19), ‘leaping’ (see Bly) and ‘regression’ (advance through negation, or absence). Santilli discusses the incremental repetitions and variations of ‘furtherance’, for example, as ‘extension in any direction’ (159); a form of extensive parallelism that inches the sentence forward to ‘the absent context’. Such a generative technique ‘suggests the ground is being comprehensively covered’ (154), without the need for the full descriptions of realist prose. A simple example from Stations comes in ‘Hedge-school,’ in which we encounter the image: ‘Primroses grew in a damp single bunch out of the bank, imploding pallors, star plasm, nebula of May’ (6), where the tricolon of ‘pallors-plasm-nebula’ emphasises the rhetorical furtherance: ‘imploding’ suggests ‘star’ which itself is contained in ‘nebula’. We move logically from fowers to universe in one simple phrase, or image cluster. My third and fnal context for re-evaluating Stations comes from Poets’ Prose: Stephen Fredman’s notion of the ‘generative sentence’. Briefy, Fredman describes the ‘generative sentence’ as one in which ‘grammar leads the writing through a succession of ideas, resisting the gravita- tional pull of the ‘complete thought’’ (55). In simple terms, prose poetic grammar tests its own way, inching the sentence forwards in an emergent fashion. The sentence fnds its own way. Such a description echoes Santilli’s discussion of ‘furtherance’ and invokes the ‘absent context’ of the Romantic fragment—the ‘spot of time’ in tension with ‘the complete thought’. As Santilli describes it, ‘As soon as expression begins it fragments the whole that it represents by the exclusivity involved in naming and ordering, or repetition and furtherance’ (160). To these rhetorical

18 See Andy Brown, “The Emergent Prose Poem,” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 318–29, for a discussion of the techniques of “furtherance” in John Burnside’s “Suburbs”, “trailing” in Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel”, “leaping”: in Robert Bly’s prose poems and “regression” in Samuel Beckett and others. 19 Anadiplosis: the repetition of the last word in one sentence, clause, or phrase near the beginning of the next. 186 A. BROWN strategies, Fredman adds other anti-closure techniques, such as the digressive narrative of Thoreau’s ‘Walking’, or the restless uncertainty of John Ashbery’s Three Poems. To what degree, then, do Heaney’s Stations exhibit such techniques? How do their fragmentary ‘spots of time’ resist closure? In what ways do they inch forwards in a ‘generative’ way to the absent context? How do they make use of parallelism, furtherance, trailing, leaping and regression? The frst prose poem, ‘Cauled’ begins in a fragmented ‘spot of time’, with the phrase: ‘They thought he was lost’ (4), placing the reader straight into a larger story. Who are ‘they’ and ‘he’? Where has he disappeared to? This uncertainty is followed by the phrase: ‘For years they talked about it until he found himself at the root of their kindly tongues’, extending the narrative outside the immediate timeframe into a later one. The piece ends ‘They had found him at the frst onset of sob- bing’—a moment of epiphany, no doubt, but one which resists explanation. A similar device is also found in ‘Hedge-school’ (6), dropping the reader straight into a larger story, without the need for the full character- isation of narrative prose: ‘Their skirts brushed away over the headrig.’ Again, the reader is invited into ask questions. A clear example of furtherance can be seen in ‘Sweet William’, which develops a cluster of images in its frst stanza: ‘In the gloomy damp of an old garden with its gooseberry bushes, strawberry plants and shot leeks, their blooms infused themselves into the eye like blood in snow, as if the clumped growth had been spattered with grapeshot and bled from underneath’ (11). The qualifer ‘shot’ for leeks (bolted, overgrown), furthers to ‘blood in the snow’ and ‘grapeshot,’ with the ‘fruitiness’ of that last word also trailing back through ‘strawberry’ and ‘gooseberry’. The images of death and violence in this frst stanza pay dividends in the second, which leaps to the language of military action: ‘Sweet William: the words had the silky lift of a banner on the wind, where that king with the crinkling feminine black curls reached after the unsheathed fare of his sword—and that was heraldry I could not assent to’ (11). In these phrases, Heaney again evokes William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne, using associative resonance to leap from fowers to the king and a seminal moment in the struggle for Irish independence; ‘the very fowers’ whose ‘aura could be and would be resisted’ (11). The rhetoric, combined with the fragmentary historic detail, evokes the greater historic narrative and resist closure. And, rather obviously, contra those earlier 11 ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS 187 critics, the poet signals the questioning of heraldry and its language in head-on terms. ‘Nesting-Ground’ establishes the theme of home-making that runs through Stations. The frst two stanzas ‘further’ the narrator’s fear of death, counterpointing death with the birth of the sandmartins. The language of threat and fear is balanced by protection, notably the military language of ‘sentry’, which colours the sequence. Rhetorical anaphora develops the poem in Fredman’s ‘generative’ way, with the structure ‘he could imagine his arm going in… but because… he only gazed’ from stanza one becoming, in stanza two, ‘he heard cheeping… but because… he only listened’. This repetition inches the narrative forward and antic- ipates the fnal stanza: ‘he thought of putting his ear to the ground’, which the fragment leaves unanswered—what did he expect to hear there? In ‘England’s Diffculty’ we encounter Heaney as a northern Irish boy living in southern Ireland, evacuated during the war—a ‘visitant’, just as the migrating sandmartins are visitants in ‘Nesting Ground’.20 Such metonymic fragmentation ties Stations together. The narrator moves ‘like a double agent among the big concepts’, echoing the repeated language of war, with fragmented historical details about the German bomb- ing of Belfast and the Haw-Haw broadcasts,21 transposing these onto the Irish troubles. The diction is exact, with a little heightened lexis (‘opaque security’, ‘fretted baize’, ‘domed valves’) although the common images of ‘mowing machine’ and the boy being ‘conveyed through the starlit yard to see the sky glowing over Anahorish’, balance this heightened lexis. Again, the full details are withheld, involving the reader in the de-coding (a suitably ‘double agent’-like activity) of the historical moment, to let the sentences inch towards their absent context through parallelism and allusion. ‘Trial Runs’ (18) also develops the war imagery—a Protestant neighbour returns from the war, with a gift for Heaney’s Catholic father. The ‘WELCOME HOME’ message is painted on the wall above ‘REMEMBER 1690’, another reminder of the Battle of the Boyne. As

20 A trope that “Visitant” tackles head on. 21 Lord Haw-Haw was the soubriquet given to the Second World War broadcaster William Joyce. His propaganda broadcasts for the Germans opened with “Germany calling, Germany calling”, in an upper-class English accent, in an attempt to demoralise the Allied forces and home population. 188 A. BROWN in ‘England’s Diffculty’, the conficts are paralleled. The returning man is another ‘visitant’, bringing a chain of ‘big clicking rosary beads’ for his neighbour. ‘I stole them for you, Paddy, off the pope’s dresser when his back was turned’, the man jokes. The imagery makes a ‘leap’ in the rhetoric at the end, when the laughter becomes birds: ‘their laughter sailed above my head, a hoarse clamour, two big nervous birds dipping and lifting, making trial runs over a territory’. As Helen Vendler comments: ‘The two men will not be able to go farther into amiability than their awkward joking; but the son hails it none the less as the marking out of an intermediate territory’ (81). The fragmentary ‘spot of time’ not only reminds us of the sectarian dimension, but leaps into a metaphor of hope for the boy’s (and the poet’s) own territory. We encounter a similar leap in ‘Branded’, in which the boy takes straw to feed a horse in ‘the haggard’. The leap comes unannounced, mid- narrative: ‘As he lifts the straws towards the muzzle his small head hits the ground like a pod splitting open to the faraway acreage of the sky. // Now he is curled on the sofa, sucking, weeping’ (5). The action and effect are shown, but the cause is withheld, resisting closure and creating a space for the reader to fll. The fnal image of ‘the infamed crescent on his breast’ also creates space for the reader—the horse has kicked the boy, in his inexperience, and ‘branded’ him with a crescent hoofmark. Similarly, ‘Waterbabies’ (9) also dramatises a magical leap, beginning with two boys ‘busy in the fetid corner we christened Botany Bay. You pumped. I dammed’ (9). The wider context to this fragment is then evoked through sound—‘a bomber warbled far beyond us, sometimes a train ran through the felds’—with the leap provided in the image of a kaleidoscope that the narrator dropped ‘in the puddle. Its bright prisms that offered incomprehensible satisfactions were messed and silted: instead of a marvellous lightship, I salvaged a dirty hulk.’ This ‘fouled gift’ stands in symbolically for the childhood dreams that run throughout the sequence, now tainted by sectarianism and violence. A couple of examples of ‘regression’ (advance through negation) achieve the opposite effect of all these ‘leaps’, yet remain engaged with sectarianism. ‘Hedge-school’ presents the existential image ‘He stared himself into an absence’ (6), whose negation creates presence-in-absence. Here, the phrase ‘they retraced their steps’ provides regressive circular- ity, but also furthers to the last line ‘he walked behind them, homesick, going home’ (6). This literal regression ‘home’ and the previous use of negation/absence, fnd echoes in ‘The Sabbath-breakers’. Here, a set of 11 ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS 189 loudspeakers hangs ‘wired and pouting from the hedge like iron hon- eysuckles’ (13). The speakers are set for a sports tournament: a group of boys set out a feld on a Saturday evening, for the following day’s tournament. The narrative proceeds in a logical way until we reach the climax—a moment of regression and negation: ‘The next morning the goalposts had been felled by what roundhead elders, what maypole hackers, what choristers of law and liberty. Undaunted we threw in the ball’ (13). Despite these efforts to negate the game, the boys remain ‘undaunted’, a positive feeling evoked through a negative (‘un’) word. It is in such a ‘territory’ of hope that we fnd Heaney breaking away from rigid, territorialised ways of thinking about poetry as lineated verse alone. Formally, he steps outside the frame. In discussing prose poetic traditions through the work of Samuel Beckett, Nikki Santilli notes that ‘The frame is foregrounded because it is the area common to both sides of the dialectic’ (186).22 Santilli shows how images of rooms, cloisters, caves, pens, pounds and enclosed camps abound in Beckett, delineating a dialectical territory. Stations similarly abounds in such images: frames, skins, rooms, cloisters, cave nests, pounds and enclosed camps, as in: ‘a caul of shadows stretched and netted round his head again’ (‘Cauled’, p. 4); ‘Pain still futters against the trap of his ribs’ (‘Branded’, p. 5) and ‘behind the particular judgements of captor and harbourer’ (‘Visitant’, p. 17), amongst many others. The poem ‘Cloistered’ itself, with all its talk of the ‘chapel’, ‘sanctuary’, ‘walled hill’, ‘gated town’, cold ‘study hall’ and the ‘dormer after lights out’, shows remarkable equivalence with Santilli’s discussion of the ‘frame’ in relation to Beckett and the Romantic fragment. It ends with the image of the narrator breaking ‘the ice on an enamelled water-jug’. The confning skin is broken, with ‘exhilarated self regard’. Far from being unformed, these prose poems are cognisant of—and conversant with—the sophisticated formal and rhetorical traditions of prose poetry, and it is in relation to these traditions that they should rightly be read. It is pertinent, then, to ask what impact Stations might have had upon the trajectory of the British prose poem? While a detailed study of this is beyond the scope of this short chapter, I contend that Stations not only challenges commonplace prejudices against the form as discussed above, but that it also lays the ground for a subsequent generation of

22 The dialectic in question is Beckett’s inquiry into the “essence of the object and the nature of the mind that represents it” (180). 190 A. BROWN writers. It is unthinkable that a book such as Maurice Riordan’s The Holy Land (2007)—which similarly portrays coming-of-age narratives in rural Ireland—could have been published by such a well-known poet (and, again, by Faber & Faber) without Heaney’s infuence. One might go so far as to argue that, through its lyric lineage and relationship to the Romantic fragment, Stations has also infuenced other high-profle and popular contemporary lyric poets: Simon Armitage’s Seeing Stars (2010) with their surreal anecdotal ‘spots of time’ (what else is a star, if not a spot of time?); John Burnside’s ‘Suburbs’, with their parallel explorations of ‘cloistered’ lives; Robin Robertson’s subtle inclusion of the form in each of his books, and Alice Oswald’s notable use of prose poetry in her book-length work Dart. Each of these notable poets has, in their own use of the form, to some extent echoed Heaney’s ‘excitement of coming for the frst time to a place I have always known completely’ (3).

Works Cited Andrews, Elmer, ed. Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays. London: Macmillan, 1993. Brown, Andy. “The Emergent Prose Poem.” In A Companion to Poetic Genre, edited by Erik Martiny, 318–29. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Corcoran, Neil. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study. London: Faber & Faber, 1998. Crotty, Patrick. “All I Believe That Happened There Was Revision: Selected Poems 1965–1975 and New Selected Poems 1966–1987.” In The Art of Seamus Heaney, edited by Tony Curtis, 192–204. Bridgend: Seren Books, 1982. Foster, Thomas C. Seamus Heaney. Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 1989. Fredman, Stephen. Poets’ Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Godbert, Geoffrey. Freedom to Breathe: Modern Prose Poetry from Baudelaire to Pinter. Exeter: Stride Publications, 2002. Hart, Henry. “Crossing Divisions and Differences: Seamus Heaney’s Prose Poems.” The Southern Review 25 (1989): 803–21. ———. Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Heaney, Seamus. Stations. Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1975a. ———. North. London: Faber & Faber, 1975b. ———. New and Selected Poems 1966–1987. London: Faber & Faber, 1987. ———. District and Circle. London: Faber & Faber, 2006. 11 ‘I WENT DISGUISED IN IT’: RE-EVALUATING SEAMUS HEANEY’S STATIONS 191

Kennard, Luke. The Expanse: Self-Consciousness and the Transatlantic Prose Poem. PhD thesis, Exeter University, 2009. https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/ handle/10036/49653. Morrison, Blake. Seamus Heaney (Contemporary Writers Series). London: Routledge, 1982; 1993. O’Donoghue, Bernard, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Parker, Michael. Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet. London: Macmillan, 1993. Preminger, Alex, et al. The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, rev. ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Santilli, N. Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Stevenson, Anne. “Stations: Seamus Heaney and the Sacred Sense of the Sensitive Self.” In The Art of Seamus Heane, edited by Tony Curtis, 47–51. Bridgend: Seren Books, 1982. Vendler, Helen. Seamus Heaney. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. CHAPTER 12

The Letter-Poem and Its Literary Affect: Mark Ford’s ‘The Death of Hart Crane’

Anthony Caleshu

Within his fve collections of poems, Mark Ford has published a single prose poem and two others which are part prose/part lineated verse. This slim investment in the genre might preclude him from being the subject of an essay to be included in a book on British Prose Poetry, but for the fact that ‘The Death of Hart Crane’—Ford’s prose poem assuming the stance of a letter-to-the-editor—is of real interest for its epistolary/prose poem crossover and its perpetuation of literary affect. While the history of the epistolary poem has been well-documented from its classical origins to present times—encompassing open letters to a readership at large, projections of autobiographical address to lov- ers and friends, fctitious letters to fctional audiences, and hidden material efforts (literally poems in letters)—little has been written about the relationship between the letter poem and the prose poem. In Julia De Pree’s study of the ‘Epistolary Lyric in the Siècle des Lumières’, however, she ‘identif[ies] the fctitious letter as a primary … infuence on the prose poem’, and moreover refers to the ‘tendency … toward narrative

A. Caleshu (*) University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 193 J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_12 194 A. CALESHU and anecdote’ of nineteenth-century French writers such as Baudelaire.1 Ford’s literary infuences are wide and varied; in terms of English national identity, he comes after Auden and Larkin, but he is also clearly extending the traditions of American infuences such as Ashbery and O’ Hara and the nineteenth-century French writers he ‘came across’ when he was just beginning to publish in the 1980s: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Pierre Reverdy, not to mention Raymond Roussel, of whom Ford has written the defnitive biography.2 Though de Pree’s concern is the writers of the French Enlightenment, her understanding of the letter/prose poem as something ‘romantic’ is relevant to Ford, whose poem assumes a fctitious persona’s anecdotal report within the realm of a lyric piece of prose which re-imagines the ‘self.’ As De Pree writes:

The blending of prose and verse may be said to represent an ‘obsessive ideal’ to quote Baudelaire … the ideal is romantic in its very nature, seeking transcendence over difference and striving to unite the dissociated

1 Julia de Pree, The Ravishment of Persephone: Epistolary Lyric in the Siècle des Lumières (Chapel Hill, NC: Department of Romance Languages, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998), 74, 77. 2 Mark Ford, unpublished interview with Anthony Caleshu, 9 July 2017: “AC: What about the prose poem interests you, if anything? MF: The only two prose poems I’ve written have both been in the form of letters: the frst, called ‘From Shenandoah to Cherry Stone’, was very early (circa 1985) and was published in Oxford Poetry, but I never reprinted it, I think partly because it was too close to W.H. Auden’s ‘Letter to a Wound’ in tone. The prose passages in Auden’s The Orators and also The Sea and the Mirror’s pseudo-Jamesian ‘Caliban to the Audience’ were the prose poems that most excited me about the possibilities of the genre. It is rather odd that Auden should have written such great prose poems, since the form comes really from the French, and he was very anti-French. After Auden I came across Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Pierre Reverdy etc., and of course John Ashbery’s Three Poems. The prose poem became incred- ibly popular in the 80s and 90s, with Lyn Hejinian and almost every Language poet you can think of, and that probably put me off it somewhat—it felt like poetry was drowning in prose poems. But I should mention that I have a couple of poems which combine prose and verse, ‘The Confdence Man’ in Six Children and ‘Fide et Literis’, which has just been published in Poetry London, and will be in my next collection, Enter, Fleeing (2018). The prose passages in both these poems allude to Hölderlin, which makes me wonder if, for me, there is something overtly literary about prose poems (as I recall, ‘From Shenandoah to Cherry Stone’ makes reference to Emily Dickinson); and, further, that this inherent literariness may be the reason that I have been reluctant to do more than dabble in the genre. But there’s no doubt there are lots of great prose poems getting written these days—my favourite British prose poet is the witty and wonderful Ian Seed.” 12 THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ... 195

verbal realms of abstraction and narration. Romantic too in that every attempt is inspired by the impossibility of the desire: letters err too much on the side of sentiment and the prose poem privileges telling over showing.3

Roussel achieved this obsessive ideal to some extent, claims De Pree; and, as I shall argue here, so, too, does Ford. Ford’s interest in exporting the romantic into the twenty-frst century becomes even more interesting if we consider the philosophical bridge between letters and poems, as written about by Daniel Katz in his essay on the ‘Epistolary Poetry’ of American poet James Schuyler (which references Jack Spicer’s letter poems as well):

traditionally, letters and poems are considered to be very different sorts of objects … whereas poems, subject to the aesthetic, are ft objects of contemplation, a letter would be seen to have above all an utilitarian function. To blur the distinction letter/poem is precisely to unsettle the category of the aesthetic as that of disinterested contemplation.4

In its presentation as a letter-to-the-editor, Ford’s poem poses as having an utilitarian function since, in form and voice, the matter-of-fact prose (at least at frst) looks and sounds like the very sort of letter which might be published in the London Review of Books (where, in fact, the poem was frst published)—a letter which convincingly assumes the guise of responding to a previous reader’s letter-to-the-editor about the death of Hart Crane. Ford’s letter-poem, however, increasingly trumps its mere utility as it becomes a letter full of desire, to use the word of De Pree, which Katz also utilises when he defnes ‘disinterested

3 De Pree, Epistolary Lyric, 78–79. De Pree prefaces this with: “The blending of prose and verse may be said to represent an ‘‘obsessive ideal,’’ to quote Baudelaire: Voltaire warned against this romantic attempt, Diderot stopped heeding the warning, and Roussel achieved the ideal to some extent. The ideal is romantic in its very nature, seeking transcendence over difference [between prose and verse] and striving to unite the dissociated verbal realms of abstraction and narration” (78). 4 Daniel Katz, “James Schulyer’s Epistolary Poetry: Things, Postcards, Ekphrasis,” Journal of Modern Literature 34.1 (Fall 2010), 143–161: 150. 196 A. CALESHU contemplation’ as deriving from the ‘ultimate utility … to fulfll desire’.5 Desire in Ford’s poem is expressed in its signifcant leaps of parodic and imaginative verve and takes two major fronts: the letter-writer’s desire to correct the previous letter-writer’s account of the death of Hart Crane (‘murdered and thrown overboard by sailors after a night of … rough sex’, we are told in the early moments of the poem)6; and the letter- writer’s desire to re-render (even transcend) his very ‘self’. The self is both the cause of and also what’s at stake in the romantic lyric, and Ford’s poem is entirely invested in this, intervening in the tradition and likewise provoking a mock literary historical debate. In collapsing the binaries between prose and poem, and letter and poem, Ford forces the poem into a sphere whereby even the unsettled category of ‘disinterested contemplation’ is unsettled. Though the aesthetic of the letter-poem may assume the posture of disinterested contemplation, beneath this is the conditioned affect of a letter-writer who perpetuates a subversive, counter-world order, offering a fabulist, alternative history to the death of twentieth-century queer Modernist author Hart Crane, and, likewise, an alternative vision of himself. An affective turn—expressive of emotional entanglement—becomes not just Ford’s persona, but the reader of Ford’s poem. In assuming the prose-block form of a letter—as opposed, for example, to taking the form of a traditionally lineated ‘poem’, or even a traditional literary essay on Hart Crane—the letter-poem deliberately bucks any privileged inclusion in the literati. Instead, it is welcoming to readers, enormously so considering the abstract obliqueness which contemporary poetry is usually accused of (i.e. being hard slog) and the coded obtuseness of so much scholarly writing (i.e. even harder slog).7 Most interestingly, the prose-letter form playfully and tantalisingly encodes the poem’s cognitive refection: a disembodied speaker exists behind

5 Katz, “James Schulyer’s Epistolary Poetry,” 148. 6 Mark Ford, “The Death of Hart Crane,” in Six Children (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), 18–19. All references to this poem refer to these pages. 7 Note: This description of scholarly work does not apply to Ford, whose literary essays in LRB and NYRB etc. are as reader-friendly as scholarship comes. Indeed, as the commendation which appeared with his winning the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from Poetry magazine cites John Lancaster: “If more literary criticism were like this … more people would read it.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/press/71805/poetry-foundation-announces-winner-of-the-2015-pegasus-award-for-poetry-criticism, accessed 20 July 2017. 12 THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ... 197 what we’ll fnd an investigation of corporality—bodies which are made material, resurrected, only to be thrown back into the sea, ‘devoured by sharks’, as Ford concludes his poem.8 Far from being a simply ‘literary’ poem, then—merely of the mind—a connection to the body is sought (the body of the letter-writer and the body of Hart Crane). This inten- sifes the ‘affective encounter’, to use the terms of Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. In their seminal text The Affect Reader, Gregg and Seigworth write:

Affect is in many ways synonymous with force or forces of encounter. The term ‘force’, however, can be a bit of a misnomer since affect need not be especially forceful … In fact, it is quite likely that affect often transpires within and across the subtlest of shuttling intensities: all the miniscule or molecular events of the unnoticed.9

In assuming the posture of a prose letter, Ford’s affect is one which perpetuates an encounter at a distance, an anonymous letter-to-the-editor which corrects ‘a letter from a reader in your last issue’.10 That distance is nar- rowed when we consider that the letter is a claim of corporal encounter, via an implied rhetoric of exchanged body fuids, semen and blood (as I will soon explain). Gregg and Seigworth go on to ‘tentatively lay out’ various ‘orientations’ of ‘affect’s theorization’, including the idea that it ‘is found in the regularly hidden-in-plain-sight politically engaged work—perhaps most often undertaken by feminists, queer theorists, disability activists, and subaltern peoples living under the thumb of a normativizing power—.’ While I would not, necessarily, consider Ford’s poem ‘politically engaged’ on the front of queer activism, it is inviting to imagine it as such since its investment in an alternative world order chimes so well with queer theory advocate Jordan Alexander Stein, who writes:

modernity’s alignment of sex and time generates a queer counterdiscourse that continues to hold sex and time together, even as it challengingly reimagines their interarticulation (interarticulation as a rhetorical concept

8 Ford, “The Death of Hart Crane.” 9 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Reader (Duke University Press, 2010), 2. 10 Ford, “The Death of Hart Crane.” 198 A. CALESHU

that can help us account for both the shifting meanings in unevenness of rhetorics as they travel in the same direction). It is to this counterdiscourse—its contents as well as its strategies and improvisations—that I mean to point when I suggest that literary histori- ans expand their notions of history beyond the normative temporal orderings of chronology. More specifcally, I am arguing that queer theory is exceptionally well-poised to offer such a counterdiscourse because queer- ness is so often positioned outside of (temporal as well as sexual) normativity, from which vantage it has iterated powerful and persuasive objections to normativity’s claims on universality.11

Ford’s ‘counterdiscourse’ comes in its formal strategies (prose), as well as its reimagining of Hart Crane in terms of sex and time, dramatically making a new literary history. In one of his own literary essays on Crane, Ford writes of how ‘Crane’s voyaging [in the poem ‘Voyages’] … entails a rapturous suspension of meaning, a delighted, sensual dwelling in the possibilities of response and counter-response.’12 Correspondingly, we fnd here that Ford’s poem is fashioned explicitly out of the ‘possibilities of response and counter-response’ over a collapsed sense of time. (Crane is pronounced dead in 1932, resurrected in the early 70s, and in our 21st century is prompted to live again via this counter-responding letter-to-the-editor.) In some respects, Ford’s prose-poem seems to pick up where his prose essay leaves off, whereby he writes—referring to the respective negative reviews of Crane’s The Bridge by his ‘erstwhile allies and friends, [Alan] Tate and Yvor Winters’:

You don’t have to be a Queer Theorist to decode the implication of such terms; underlying both Winters’ and Tate’s judgements was a dislike of Crane’s homosexuality, and a conviction that no homosexual could write a convincing American epic.13

11 Jordan Alexander Stein, “American Literary History and Queer Temporalities,” American Literary History 25.4 (Winter 2013): 866–67, https://muse-jhu-edu.plymouth.idm.oclc.org/journals/american_literary_history/v025/25.4.stein.html, accessed 31 August 2016. 12 Mark Ford, “Not Ready for Repentance: Hart Crane,” in Mr. and Mrs. Stevens and Other Essays (London: Peter Lang, 2011), 83. 13 Ford, “Not Ready for Repentance,” 86–87. 12 THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ... 199

Though one needn’t be a queer theorist to read Ford’s poem as one of literary affect, in offering a correction to Winters and Tate—and mounting a defence of Crane’s homosexuality by enabling him to transcend time—Alexander Stein’s suggestion to employ queer theory seems apt nonetheless.

I cite Mark Ford’s ‘The Death of Hart Crane’ in full:

Sir/Madam, I was intrigued by the letter from a reader in your last issue that recounted his meeting, in a bar in Greenwich Village in the mid-sixties, a woman who claimed to have been a passenger on the Orizaba on the voyage the boat made from Vera Cruz to New York in April of 1932, a voyage that the poet Hart Crane never completed. According to her, Crane was murdered and thrown overboard by sailors after a night of such rough sex that they became afraid (surely wrongly) that he might have them arrested when the boat docked in Manhattan. This reminded me of a night in the early seventies on which I too happened to be drinking in a bar in Greenwich Village. I got talking to an elderly man called Harold occupying an adjacent booth, and when the conversation touched on poetry he explained, somewhat shyly, that he had himself published two collections a long time ago, one called White Buildings in 1926, and the other, The Bridge, in 1930. I asked if he’d written much since. ‘Oh plenty,’ he replied, ‘and a lot of it much better than my early effusions.’ I expressed an interest in seeing this work, and he invited me back to his apartment on MacDougal Street. Here the evening turns somewhat hazy. I could hear the galloping strains of Ravel’s Boléro turned up loud as Harold fumbled for his keys. Clearly some sort of party was in progress. At that moment the door was opened from within by another man in his seventies, who exclaimed happily, ‘Hart! – and friend! Come in!’ The room was full of men in their seventies, all, or so it seemed, called either Hart or Harold. The apartment’s walls were covered with Aztec artefacts, and its foors with Mexican carpets. It dawned on me then that Hart Crane had not only somehow survived his supposed death by water, but that his vision of an America of the likeminded was being fulflled that very night, as it was perhaps every night, in this apartment on MacDougal Street. At the same instant I realized that it was I, an absurd doubting Thomas brought face to face with a miracle, who deserved to be devoured by sharks. Yours faithfully, Name and address withheld14

14 Ford, “The Death of Hart Crane.” 200 A. CALESHU

Gregg and Seigworth come to affect via seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, in which he writes: ‘No one has yet determined what the body can do.’ The ‘issue’ they tell us, is about ‘endeavoring to confgure a body and its affectedness, its ongoing affectual composition of a world, the this-ness of a world and a body.’15 The relationship of the body to affect, and particularly a gendered body, is of consequence from the start of the letter. The greeting, ‘Sir/Madam’, blurs the lines of gender, and yet the tone is academic in anecdote, an impartial letter from someone who himself is positioned as gender neutral, a dis-embodied speaker/narrator, maybe even asexual, a speaker bent on narrative introspection (and eventual self-retrospection) but, above all and throughout, a speaker of ‘reticence and tact’ (as Ford once wrote in an essay of his own about Schuyler).16 Another way of putting this is to say that Ford’s poem has no premonitions towards what Frank O’ Hara, in his mock-manifesto, ‘Personism’ called for poetry to perpet- uate: ‘one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself)’.17 In being directed to the dualistic ‘Sir/Madam’ (the fgurehead for a generalised readership), it is ultimately a letter to and for no one in particular, an open-letter, written into a nether space without bodies, a virtual place of just words. At this point, the poem is not ‘social’, but an articulation of a conscious thought about ‘viable interiority’—a letter-poem written for its own author—and so, in the words of another Ford poem, seeking a place where a speaker can go ‘drifting from inner suburb to inner suburb’ alone, since ‘Men, historically, for- swear their special friends.’18 The speaker affects us by being unaffected (in the absence of an identifable addressee—the speaker is literally, untouched). In time, however, the letter-writer goes on to recollect his reception as a ‘friend’—albeit whilst also ‘doubt[ing]’ it. The call to friendship is a coded call for sexual liberation, a homosexual tryst which Ford’s persona—after what may well be too many years of denial and

15 Gregg and Seigworth, “Inventory of Shimmers,” 3. 16 Mark Ford, “James Schuyler and Englishness,” in A Driftwood Altar: Essays and Reviews (London: Waywiser Press, 2005), 167. 17 Frank O’Hara, “Personism,” in Selected Poems, ed. Mark Ford (New York: Knopf, 2008), 248. 18 Mark Ford, “She Spears,” in Soft Sift (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), 32–33. 12 THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ... 201 repression (of not just sexuality, but of the Stevens-esque ‘miracle’ of the imagination19)—ultimately confesses to in order to defend Crane’s version of everlasting, immortal masculinity. As letter-writer, he rises up to challenge the provocations of the frst letter-writer, which, not inci dentally came out of a hetero-relationship: a man who met a woman in a bar. As the poem reads: ‘According to her [the woman the previous letter-writer met], Crane was murdered and thrown overboard by sailors after a night of such rough sex that they became afraid (surely wrongly) that he might have them arrested when the boat docked in Manhattan.’ That parenthetical phrase ‘surely wrongly’ is our frst clue that the poem’s letter writer is aware of Crane’s homosexuality, and that he is going to support Crane and challenge the hetero-libel that essentially tells us Crane died because he was gay. In this way, the poem thinks and feels its way toward correcting a hetero-normative wrong that was done to the body of Hart Crane.

Gregg and Seigworth tell us: Affect is born in in-between-ness and resides as accumulative beside-ness. Affect marks a body’s belonging to a world of encounters or; a world’s belonging to a body of encounters but also, in non- belonging, through all those far sadder (de) compositions of mutual in-compossibilities.20

Ford has been written about by Helen Vendler as a poet who writes in the tradition of Hart Crane for his ‘physically sensuous documenta- tion’: ‘it is the physical, with its irruptions of sensuous transcendence that appeals to Ford in Crane’.21 So much of Ford’s poetry is concerned with the body22 and, in this poem, Ford’s letter-writer gives us a poem which supplements biographical concern as he exposes bodily concern. The body is the place where he can make his greatest historical leap and offer a variant alternative to what’s ‘known’—a defence of the social

19 Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value,” in Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (Washington: Library of America, 1997), 738. 20 Gregg and Seigworth, “Inventory of Shimers,” 2. 21 Helen Vendler, 191. 22 Ford’s interest in the “body” would be the subject of another essay of course. But I direct the reader to such poems as ‘‘In the Adirondacks’’ from Landlocked, “She Spears” from Soft Sift, “A Natural History” from Six Children. 202 A. CALESHU vision of an ‘America of the likeminded’—which is to say, the democratic and the tolerant, a challenge to what America (against Constitutional declarations) has become: a place rife with self-righteousness, funda- mentalist versions of justice, and (per the previous letter-writer) salacious rumour-mongering, which all but deems homosexuality as being deviant to the point of deserving of death (a body’s being thrown overboard). Ford’s letter-writer offers a counter-pose by taking up Jordan Stein Alexander’s desire for the sort of ‘literary historian who will expand their notions of history beyond the normative temporal orderings of chronology’.23 The idea that Crane did not die, but is still writing poetry, living in the 1970s, in an apartment on MacDougal Street, where nightly gath- erings of all-male, 70-somethings named Harold (Hart Crane’s given frst name) gallop to the ‘strains of Ravel’s Bolero’ is not only literally fantastic, but delves deep into the territory of camp. ‘How does a body, marked in its duration by these various encounters with mixed forces, come to shift its affections (its being-affected) into action (capacity to affect)?’, asks Gregg and Seigworth.24 Ford’s poem answers this question by turning a by-chance conversation about poetry into a pick-up, but even this is not straightforward. At the point of the letter-writer’s accompanying Harold back to his apartment, Harold fumbles with his keys before the door, and we begin to wonder just who picked up whom? No longer is the letter-writer an amateur historian bent on pedantically correcting a transgression of death and dates; instead, we hear the letter-writer’s earlier encouragement of Harold’s advance as bold and anticipatory: ‘I expressed an interest in seeing this work, and he invited me back to his apartment …’ We are thinking about the poem taking place in the early 1970s, and the letter writer’s slightly wry declaration that ‘I too happened to be drinking in a bar in Greenwich Village’, that liberal bastion of Manhattan. We read again Harold’s modest boasting of his ‘effusions’, and this time the sexual euphemism (‘Come in!) is as loud as those ‘galloping strains of … Bolero’, which is as loud as the aforementioned ‘rough sex’. ‘Here’, the letter writer tells us, standing at Hart Crane’s apartment door, ‘the evening turns somewhat hazy’. And it is in this deliberately ambiguous ‘haze’ that the reader of the poem imagines the letter-writer and Harold take their night’s affair to the next physical stage, two bodies coming

23 Alexander, 867. 24 Gregg and Seigworth, “Inventory of Shimers,” 2. 12 THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ... 203 together … melding/multiplying (can I go so far as to say ‘reproducing’?) the modernist poet in this ‘room … full of men … all … called either Hart or Harold’. The poem now begins to present itself as an intricate and intimate encounter between not just the ‘likeminded’ but the same-sex loving relationship which, up until recently, was relegated to the sphere of ‘friendship’ (without recourse to legal marriage). It is in this sphere that it relates to the ‘body’s affectual doings and undoings’. And so we ask some of the very questions friendship philosophers from Aristotle to Montaigne to Emerson have asked over these past two millennia: What is the distinction between friendship and love? How does gender inform it? Hetero-normative accounts are, not unexpectedly, the norm, and Montaigne, in his essay ‘On Friendship’, expresses his belief that the distinction is absolute and gender biased:

The fre [of a man’s love for a woman] is … more active, more eager, and more sharp … more precipitant, fckle, moving, and inconstant; a fever subject to intermissions and paroxysms, that has seized but on one part of us. Whereas in friendship [of a man with a man], ’tis a general and universal fre, but temperate and equal, a constant established heat, all gentle and smooth, without poignancy or roughness [I like Ford’s and Montaigne’s shared use of that word].25

Montaigne punctuates the gender/emotional boundary in no uncertain terms; friendship is the stuff of men, whereas love is the stuff of men and women: ‘We are not here to bring the love we bear to women.’26 Alan Bray’s book of queer theory, The Friend, offers an alternative and fascinating history of male friendships from the eleventh century to the seventeenth century, one where male kinships were inevitably replaced with male–female family units. The sacrament of ‘marriage’ as conferred by the Church and State on men and women was (certainly in the 1970s, and even still in most places, though of course no longer in the UK) denied single-sex relationships. Loving gay relationships were thus expressed in terms of partnerships, or in the coded ‘friendship’ of the poem. The gay

25 Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton, ed. William Carew Hazlitt. Project Gutenberg Ebook. Volume 6, http://www.gutenberg.org/ cache/epub/3586/pg3586-images.html, accessed 1 September 2016. 26 de Montaigne, Essays. 204 A. CALESHU

(and, by ‘gay’, I mean happy) exclamation, ‘Hart! – and friend! Come in!’ spoken by the man who opens Harold’s door is one which opens the door to entertain both friendship and love between men, a ‘vision of an America of the likeminded … being fulflled that very night, as it was perhaps every night, in this apartment on MacDougal Street’. Bodies are invited to come into action and the encounter is made. As I approach the end of this poem, I want to bring into the context of my reading Natalie Pollard, who writes about ‘poems as letters’ in Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address. Pollard’s sense of the epistle (as written about by twentieth-century British authors as varied as Carol Ann Duffy, James Fenton, W.S. Graham, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin, Edwin Morgan, Don Paterson, C.H. Sisson and Anne Stevenson) is one whereby the poem as letter makes use of ‘dissenting poetic address [that] exemplifes in a fresh light, how late twentieth-century poetry makes considerable use of voices that reject, and explore the politics of being seen to reject, what Robert Crawford calls, in writing of Douglas Dunn, “the apparently unshakeable dominance of metropolitan Englishness”’ (my emphasis).27 Ford’s poem, interestingly and readily, exploits ‘Englishness’ in tone and subject. Despite rejecting the previous ‘reader’s’ claim, the persona makes positively affecting use of what Pollard calls ‘the smooth patter, false assurances, glib language of the polite literary occasion: the poetry reception, the academic conference, the tempered exchanges of men of letters’.28 She then poses the question: ‘to what extent can such literary addresses move effectively in opposition to conservative immobility, staid linguistic convention, and assumed authority’, before answering with a litany of writers, including Larkin, who ‘work[s] to parody the closed values of the establishment, the stuffy idiom of the old boys’ network’29 (my emphasis). In some respects, Ford, like Larkin ‘pokes savage fun at … the mannered politeness of middle-class sociability’ (is there anything more middle-class than a letter-to-the editor?). Ford’s parody is, then, twofold: frstly, via the grand distance of a letter-to-the-editor, his persona offers a new world view which challenges the frst letter- to-the-editor writer’s brash ignorance; and, secondly, in his adopted

27 Natalie Pollard, Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 28. 28 Pollard, Speaking to You, 28. 29 Ibid., 29. 12 THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ... 205 tone of mannerly ‘intrigue’, which transforms into reticence and, ultimately, self-recrimination. In this way, Ford manages to both sound and subsequently re-sound (with distortion) an ‘English’ voice. Even if, as I am surmising, the voice of the persona is an English one, I appreciate that this is in tension with the poem’s investment in America: Hart Crane is an American poet, of course, and both letter- writers refer to drinking in a Greenwich Village bar. The last statement as well complicates the trans-Atlanticness of the voice, complexly locating us somewhere between shores (and between Earthly and Heavenly worlds) in its religiousity: ‘At that same point, I realized that it was I, an absurd doubting Thomas brought face to face with a miracle, who deserved to be devoured by sharks.’ There is nothing more American than Christian idealism and, in disrupting the time-continuum and bringing the American poet back to life, Ford’s letter writer appropriates hetero-society’s Biblical terms of reference and rhetoric. Before he dooms himself to the ocean to be devoured by sharks, he is invited to the MacDougal Street apartment where he’s greeted as a ‘friend’, and where he realises he’s come ‘face to face with a miracle’; one perhaps akin to that which takes place in the Fourth Gospel (Chapter 11, verse 3), where Jesus is said to refer to ‘our friend Lazarus’ before bringing him back to life. But, instead of being happy about bringing Hart Crane back to life, the letter-writer refects back on himself as the body-conscious ‘doubting Thomas’ (insistent on seeing and probing Christ’s wounds with his own eyes and fngers), cementing Biblical intertextuality and not incidentally posturing severe self-loathing (unworthiness has a long and distinguished history within the Church). If we read this admission as sincere, we also read it as a performing an intricate act of exchange with the tale the woman told the previous letter-writer at a bar, which started this series of letters about the death of Hart Crane in the frst place, a homophobic tale of what happens to those who engage in ‘rough [male] sex’.30 The poem thus presents itself as an argument of faith, in which the narrator assumes his own bad faith: indicting himself at the poem’s end as being in the same position as the previous letter-writer. His ‘I’ thereby complicates the gender-dynamic further, a frst-person admonishment of the third person ‘she’ whose scandalous tale of Crane’s death at the hands of gay sailors seems something out of Leviticus:

30 This woman puts me in mind of Stevens’ “A High Toned Old Christian Woman.” 206 A. CALESHU

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.31

Where there are sharks there is blood. To explore the fear and criminal- isation of blood that came with the AIDS epidemic a decade after these early 70s would be interesting, but would also require another essay. Instead, I’ll complicate the social rejection of blood with the desire for it, by returning the reader just briefy to Ford’s own essay on Crane, and the account of Crane telling Katherine Anne Porter of his inclination ‘to images of erotic frenzy and satisfactions for which he could fnd no coun- terpart in reality … he now found himself imagining that if he could see blood, or cause it to shed, he might be satisfed.’32 To ‘see’ blood in the sea as a mode of satisfying a self-destructive impulse is exposed as both a physical goal and theoretical position (the desire and fatal consequences that come in the poem ‘after a night of such rough sex’). In the letter-writer’s proposed sacrifce of his own body (as well as the woman, and anyone else who might doubt Crane’s life as one of ongoing affrmation), Ford’s poem offers a counter discourse of sex and time and, in doing so, begins to break down the binaries affected by two “like minded” bodies coming together (my emphasis):

affect and cognition are never fully separable – if for no other reason than that thought is itself, a body, embodied. Cast forward by its open-ended in-between-ness, affect is integral to a body’s perpetual becoming (always becoming otherwise, however subtly, than what it already is), pulled beyond its seeming surface-boundedness by way of its relation to, indeed its composition through, the forces of encounter. With affect, a body is as much outside itself as in itself – webbed in its relations – until ultimately such frm distinctions cease to matter.33

To be ‘out’ or ‘outted’, and then to come ‘in’ to the room, is to expose a metaphorical ‘out of body’ experience with the long-thought dead— it brings metaphor into a literal space and, in so doing, disrupts the sex-time continuum. Whether my afore-argued and speculated sexual encounter takes place, ultimately, does not matter. More interestingly,

31 The King James Bible. Leviticus: Chapter 20: 13. 32 Ford, “Not Ready for Repentance,” 86. 33 Gregg and Seigworth, “Inventory of Shimmers,” 2–3. 12 THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ... 207 perhaps, is the route taken to bring together men in a room not having sex. Since a room full of Harolds NOT engaging in sex, necessarily, is— as Michel Foucault has it—hetero-society’s greatest fear:

what most bothers those who are not gay about gayness is the life-style, not sex acts themselves … the common fear that gays will develop relationships that are intense and satisfying even though they do not at all conform to the ideas of relationship held by others. It is the prospect that gays will create as yet unforeseen kinds of relationships that many people cannot tolerate.34

Even though the poem comes out-of the-closet of time to depict an affecting literary encounter, it ends in the shadows of anonymity, identi- fying that the redressing of the normative is not complete: ‘Yours faithfully, / Name and address withheld.’ The letter-writer’s epiphany does not claim enlightenment so much as reinforce self-doubt about society’s sexual squeamishness (the belief that gay sex will get a body thrown overboard). The withholding of name and address keeps the poem in tension with the queer goings-on in that apartment on MacDougal Street, where a room full of Harolds happily remain galloping, to the obliviousness of the normative hetero-world, to the ‘strains of Bolero’. In terms of literariness, this prose letter-poem earns its pathos all the more by presenting itself as an affecting counter-posture to the straight- laced and conventionally lineated. As an open letter, it offers an open opportunity for engagement, a lay-effort presenting a non-literary/ non-threatening stance for something which is, of course, exceedingly literary. A blurring of the literary and the non-literary, however, is further complicated when Ford himself in interview refers to two other poems of his which move between prose and verse:

[The prose passages] in both ‘The Confdence Man’ and ‘Fide et Literis’, which appears in a recent edition of Poetry London and will be in my next collection, Enter, Fleeing (2018) … allude to Hölderlin, which makes me wonder if, for me, there is something overtly literary about prose poems, and, further, that this inherent literariness may be the reason that I have been reluctant to do more than dabble in the genre.35

34 Michel Foucault, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: Foucault and Homosexuality,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 301. 35 Ford, unpublished interview with Anthony Caleshu, 9 July 2017. 208 A. CALESHU

Nonetheless, Ford’s playful literariness is one of his signature markers; it is what makes his work so innovative—rewriting and reinvigorating tradition and literary material by way of subject, language, aesthetics, form, and so on. Ford may be a British poet, but his American infuences and interests36 make Michel Delville’s sense of literariness as he writes about it in his ground-breaking study, The American Prose Poem, as relevant to Ford as any American:

Many writers have turned to the prose poem because of its ability to refect upon the methods, aspirations, and internal contradictions of poetry and thereby invite us to ask questions that address the problems of dominance and subversion, tradition and innovation … what is at stake here is the extent to which poetry … can have claims to larger concerns in the world outside the text.37

‘The Death of Hart Crane’ is very much concerned with the politics intrinsic to counter-discourse, presenting, as I’ve argued, a speculative literary history which subverts the dominant (hetero-normative) and promotes the subversive (homo-alternative). By blurring and collapsing binaries throughout (between verse and prose, letter and poem, fction and biography, body and mind, etc.), Ford conditions a mode of literary affect that imaginatively challenges the physical laws of life and death (sex and time), and thereby connects the readership to larger world concerns.

Works Cited de Montaigne, Michel. Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Edited by William Carew Hazlitt. Translated by Charles Cotton. Project Gutenberg Ebook. Volume 6. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3586/pg3586-images.html. Accessed 1 September 2016. de Pree, Julia. The Ravishment of Persephone: Epistolary Lyric in the Siècle des Lumières. Chapel Hill, NC: Department of Romance Languages, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998.

36 See “Coda: An Interview with Anthony Caleshu,” in Mark Ford, Mr. and Mrs. Stevens and Other Essays (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011): “when I started reading poetry during my student days all the cool poets of the post-war era were American … undoubtedly American poets, in particular Ashbery and O’Hara, got me going, and made poetry seem possible” (229–230). 37 Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), x. 12 THE LETTER-POEM AND ITS LITERARY AFFECT: MARK FORD’S ... 209

Delville, Michel. The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1998. Ford, Mark. “She Spears.” In Soft Sift, 32–33. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. ———. “James Schuyler and Englishness.” In A Driftwood Altar: Essays and Reviews, 167. London: Waywiser Press, 2005. ———. “Not Ready for Repentance: Hart Crane.” In Mr. and Mrs. Stevens and Other Essays, 83. London: Peter Lang, 2011. ———. “Coda: An Interview with Anthony Caleshu.” In Mr. and Mrs. Stevens and Other Essays, edited by Mark Ford. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011. ———. “The Death of Hart Crane.” In Six Children. London: Faber & Faber, 2011. ———. Unpublished Interview with Anthony Caleshu, 9 July 2017. Foucault, Michel. “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: Foucault and Homosexuality.” In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman, translated by Alan Sheridan et al. New York: Routledge, 1988. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Reader. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Katz, Daniel. “James Schulyer’s Epistolary Poetry: Things, Postcards, Ekphrasis.” Journal of Modern Literature 34.1 (Fall 2010): 143–161. O’ Hara, Frank. “Personism.” In Selected Poems, edited by Mark Ford. New York: Knopf, 2008. “Poetry Foundation Announces Winner of the 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/press/71805/ poetry-foundation-announces-winner-of-the-2015-pegasus-award-for-poetry-criticism. Accessed 20 July 2017. Pollard, Natalie. Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Stein, Jordan Alexander. “American Literary History and Queer Temporalities.” American Literary History 25.4 (Winter 2013). https://muse-jhu-edu.plymouth.idm.oclc.org/journals/american_literary_history/v025/25.4.stein.html. Accessed 31 August 2016. Stevens, Wallace. “Imagination as Value.” In Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Washington: Library of America, 1997. Vendler, Helen. “The Circulation of Small Largeness: John Ashbery and Mark Ford.” In Some Things We Have That They Don’t: British and American Poetic Relations, edited by Mark Ford and Steve Clark. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. CHAPTER 13

‘Immeasurable as One’: Vahni Capildeo’s Prose Poetics

Jeremy Noel-Tod

Vahni Capildeo’s oeuvre is fascinated by the double nature of prose poetry and the nameless third thing that it makes. The result is six books in which prose and verse are interwoven: No Traveller Returns (2003), Undraining Sea (2009), Dark & Unaccustomed Words (2012), Utter (2013), Measures of Expatriation (2016) and Venus as a Bear (2018). ‘In my own writing’, she has said, ‘I try to create changes of modality in one book, not make collections of “prose poems” and “poem poems”.’1 ‘Dog or Wolf’—a short lyric which responds to an Iron Age canine fgu- rine in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford—offers a poetic version of this position. The poem begins by citing the hesitation of the curatorial note in the display case (‘Dog or wolf’) and then proposing, in the next line, a literary equivalent: ‘Verse, or prose’. Its conclusion, partly written in lineated prose and partly in verse, queries the neat separation of these taxonomic pairs:

1 Vahni Capildeo, “Poetry into Prose: In One Binding,” Lighthouse 12 (Spring 2016): 72.

J. Noel-Tod (*) University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Mistress / I set up a gentle howling / tomb or toy / and now I am about / wyrd or ward / now I am wholly towards / play or prey / ave, vale / which is it to be, Huntress?

I hear with ears that point upwards. Eagerness valleys my backbone. Satisfaction curls over my tail. Good lupo; optimum dog.2

The domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris) still contains much of the wolf (Canis lupus). A pet dog may be ‘gentle’, a ‘toy’, a ‘ward’, a creature of ‘play’ and affectionate greeting (‘ave’, Latin: hail) to a ‘Mistress’. But if the homely mistress becomes the ‘moonrules Mistress’ invoked earlier in the poem—that is, Diana the ‘Huntress’, Roman goddess of the moon— then the creature who speaks the poem aligns with a darker, wilder set of words: ‘howling’, ‘tomb’, ‘wyrd’ (Old English: fate), ‘prey’, ‘vale’ (Latin: farewell). The macaronic fnal line translates the domesticated English phrase ‘good dog’ into the sonorous Latin of ‘optimum lupo’ (‘best wolf’). Verse and prose, by implication, are similarly entangled as formal denominations for the same restless creature known as ‘poetry’. Beginning with the dialogic framing of her major early sequence, ‘The Monster Scrapbook’ (2003), Capildeo has been interested in the poetics of prose as a way of formally dramatising a multiplicity of identity that overfows a limited lyricism of the personal. In her next major work, ‘Person Animal Figure’ (2005), the human-animal-monster/ prose-verse-poetry triad of ‘monsterhood’ was refgured with a new satirical emphasis on the politics of gender and race, refecting her own experience as a Trinidadian woman living in Britain. Over a decade later, the prose title sequence of Measures of Expatriation (2016), Capildeo’s most directly autobiographical book to date, makes explicit her recurring use of domestic space as an analogy for how prosimetric form both contains and liberates the hybridity of the poetic imagination. In the same year, Capildeo published ‘Poetry into Prose: In One Binding’, a short essay concerning prose and verse as ‘changes of modality’ which draws on her knowledge of Old Norse poetics and its use of the metaphor of binding. As in ‘Dog and Wolf’, the essay begins by complicating binary categories and foregrounding the question of translation:

2 Vahni Capildeo, “Dog or Wolf,” in Venus as a Bear (Manchester: Carcanet, 2018), 30. 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS 213

Old Norse distinguishes between language that conforms to no poetic shape and language in poetic form by using technical terms that are also a construction metaphor: bundið mál, bound language or speech, versus óbundið mál (but how roughly is unbound speech or language translatable as ‘prose’?).

Readers familiar with the poetic concept of ‘fxed form’ will grasp the idea that verse is ‘bound language’ readily enough. But ‘unfxed form’ would be a strange antonym to apply to prose or free verse. ‘Bound’ and ‘unbound’, like ‘dog’ and ‘wolf’, are terms that exist in a specifc cultural dichotomy that can’t be easily unpicked on other terms. As Capildeo goes on to show, in the alliterative tales of the Poetic Edda, the idea of binding-as-form becomes a metaphor for power relations within the narrative: ‘text and body, binding and unbinding, […] poetry and prose, partake intensely of each other’s being’. Thus, it is the fate of ‘the love- lorn, bearlike smith-fgure Völundr’ to be bound hand and foot and have his ankle sinews cut by his enemies: a brutality that is at once a binding and an unbinding and which, in its ‘interpretation of what he can and should be […] is as if he has been made prose’. ‘Prose’ here denotes the opposite of the poetic: Völundr’s heroic identity as a smith depends on his powers of poiesis (from the Ancient Greek, meaning ‘to make’), but now he is himself reduced to shapeless ‘matter’; in the hands of his enemies, he is a sinewless text, lacking the power to become poetic.3 That ‘text and body […] partake intensely of each other’s being’ is a recurring idea in Capildeo’s dialectical thinking about identity. Speaking on BBC radio, she observed:

When I was growing up I had the idea that the poet could be a channel for all languages, for any sort of linguistic phenomenon that any literary work encountered, and then when I came to England I found that marketing and identity politics were combining to crush, like in the Star Wars trash compactor, the body, the voice, the voice on the page, the biography, the history […] You had to choose, you had to be a sort of documentary witness wheeled around and exposing your wounds in the market place.4

3 Capildeo, “Poetry into Prose: In One Binding,” 69. 4 Vahni Capildeo, “Language and Reinvention,” Start the Week, BBC Radio 4, 1 February 2016. 214 J. NOEL-TOD

The ‘Star Wars trash compactor’ refers to a scene in George Lucas’s 1977 science-fction flm where the four heroes—Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo and Chewbacca—fnd themselves caught between the closing walls of a waste disposal system. The horror of the scene, which will be familiar to many children of Capildeo’s generation (she was born in 1973), is that it threatens to obliterate not just one person, but a whole group. As a critical analogy, therefore, the Star Wars trash compactor not only illustrates the idea that a young writer may feel ‘crushed’ by external forces, but asserts—with Roland Barthes—that ‘the voice, the voice on the page, the body, the history’ are not simply to be squeezed into one ball known as ‘the Author’.5 Coming to England from Trinidad in 1991, Capildeo began to publish poems while she was a student at Oxford University, signing herself ‘S.V.P. Capildeo’. One motivation for publishing under one’s initials might be to conceal gender, as well as to align oneself with the modernist tradition of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and others. The ‘marketing and identity politics’ that she seems to have found particularly inhibiting at this time, however, were those of race. The 1990s was a period that saw literary culture in Britain take an increasing interest in the publication of black writing, some of which was promoted by anthologies commemo- rating the fftieth anniversary of the frst wave of large-scale immigration from the West Indies with the arrival of the Windrush in 1948.6 Such projects, worthy in intent, inevitably risk simplifying the oeuvres they represent by confating historical interest with literary interest, identity with voice. The Caribbean writer, in Capildeo’s words, becomes ‘a sort of documentary witness’—an image which, with a violently ironic twist (‘exposing your wounds in the market place’), she elaborates to suggest that the marketing of ethnic minority writing in Britain remains haunted by the slave-trading history of empire, when wounds were disguised at auction.7

5 See Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977): “the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins” (142). 6 See Bruce King, The Internationalization of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 224–226. 7 Capildeo, “Language and Reinvention”. Derek Walcott makes a comparable argument in “The Muse of History” (1974) when he attacks the confation of history and identity into an easily consumable poetry of black protest as a modern form of ‘minstrel’ entertain- ment, What the Twilight Says (London: Faber & Faber, 1998, 54–55). 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS 215

Such efforts nothwithstanding, very few black poets were visible in Britain at the turn of the twenty-frst century, while a black prose poet was almost unheard of.8 Although well-established in America by the 1990s, the prose poem was a marginal practice in Britain in the early 2000s, mainly published by the more formally experimental magazines and presses.9 In this context, Capildeo’s decision to devote seventy-one pages of her frst collection, No Traveller Returns (2003), to ‘The Monster Scrapbook’, a sequence of poems in both prose and verse, was a bold assertion of her belief that ‘the poet could be a channel […] for any sort of linguistic phenomenon’. As she later commented in a ‘Synopsis’ of No Traveller Returns, written for the publisher’s website:

I realized that this shifting of modes, which initially seemed natural, was not universally obvious. This became a concern within the writing. Identity politics; the lyrical I; were inadequate to a sense of self evolving from others and their words, accessible or arcane.10

A prefatory section, written as pastiche epistolary fction, toys with the questions such a ‘shifting’ text would raise for readers. ‘H.’—whom we later learn is called Henry—presents a ‘bundle of writings’ by an anonymous relative to a male friend whom he addresses as ‘My dear J.’ (later identifed as Jeremy). His attitude towards the manuscript is both fascinated and apologetic. ‘Do you not share my instinct’, he asks, ‘that some among us are most closely akin to those hybrid and marvellous beasts which haunt legend, manuscript, and folk memory alike?’ Such people, he suggests, are ‘Monsters’, and the present hybrid manuscript is ‘a true image of the MONSTER STATE OF MIND’:

8 Honourable mention should be made, however, of Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon, whose long, lyrical prose text “Poem in London” was broadcast on the BBC’S Caribbean Voices programme in 1951. D.S. Marriott, whose oeuvre is contemporary with Capildeo’s, has also experimented with prose form: see, for example, Incognegro (Cambridge: Salt, 2006). 9 See Carrie Etter, “Poetry in the Prose: Getting to Know the Prose Poem,” Poetry Review 102.2 (Summer 2012): 69–71. 10 Vahni Capildeo, “No Traveller Returns: Synopsis,” Salt Publishing, https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/no-traveller-returns-9781876857882, accessed 25 September 2017. 216 J. NOEL-TOD

It consists of highly disparate parts, as do the minds of Monsters (if one may speak of Monsters’ minds). It is a feature of the Monster mind that the most abrupt transitions and the unlikeliest effusions are believed by the Monster to connect. Excessive acquaintance with Monsters or the Monster way will lead any reader, except the most robust, to believe in and pursue this Monstrosity of connections. This is why I would suggest the title OBSESSIVE TALK for the fnished collection which (excuse the impertinence!) you, my dear J., will have edited. In the meantime, I have left the original compiler’s title, THE MONSTER SCRAPBOOK, to stand. It is my belief that even the apparent stretches of prose are to be read as poetry. Monsters want logic, therefore everything they speak is a kind of poem. Your fne mind will assemble in its entirety the continuous poem which is the MONSTER SCRAPBOOK in its ideal state. It requires only your reading – the POEM will stand complete.11

The reader is left unsure, however, as to the precise relationship between the preface and what follows. Does the fact that ‘The Monster Scrapbook’ appears with its ‘original compiler’s title’ mean that we are reading the manuscript in Henry’s possession? His version, though, was also not the original: we are told that ‘some later hand has annotated these writings, and done a cut and paste job on them. It is diffcult to say how much has been discarded’. So, if we are not reading Jeremy’s edited version, or the redacted version that has come into Henry’s hands, is this the Monster Scrapbook ur-text? Or is it the expanded version of the text that Henry fears a female editor would produce: ‘for on the topic of Monsters females have little sense, and would doubtless have preserved the documents in their entirety, indeed adding notes of admiration to the bizarreries there contained’? (48). (To confuse matters further, the preceding sequence in No Traveller Returns is called ‘Obsessive Talk’— Henry’s proposed title for Jeremy’s revision—and comprises a single four-part poem titled ‘Twist’.) The effect is to open up a mise-en–abyme around the origin and authorship of the ‘Monster’ poems. At the same time, an argument is advanced about how to read such a text as ‘poetic’: it is a work that ‘want[s] logic’, but the ideal reader will be able to trace a path through its ‘Monstrosity of connections’ and, by sympathetic response, convert its scrappiness, which includes ‘stretches of prose’, into a ‘continuous

11 Vahni Capildeo, “The Monster Scrapbook,” in No Traveller Returns (Cambridge: Salt, 2003), 47–48. Further page references will be given in the text. 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS 217 poem’ (48). Both the dandyish tone and the paradoxical argument of the preface strongly suggest a burlesque of the most famous statement on prose poetry in the European tradition: Charles Baudelaire’s 1862 letter to his editor Arsène Houssaye, which was published as the posthumous preface to his seminal Petits Poèmes en Prose or Paris Spleen (1869). This begins:

My dear friend, I am sending you a modest work of mine, of which nobody can say without injustice that it has neither beginning nor end, as everything in it is both head and tail, one or the other or both at once, each way. […] Take out a vertebra and the two halves of my tortuous fantasy will join together again quite easily. Slice it into any number of chunks and you will fnd that each has its independent existence. In the hope that a few of these slices will have enough life in them to please and entertain you, I venture to dedicate the whole snake to you.

Like Capildeo’s Henry, Baudelaire presents his hybrid work with a dif- fdence that nevertheless asserts its strange power by characterising it as a kind of ‘marvellous beast’. The essential quality of the Monster mind is to make connections between ‘highly disparate parts’. Similarly, Baudelaire’s plotless collection of prose poems is a fantastical serpent that can be cut into ‘any number of chunks’ but will always recombine into a ‘whole snake’. Both prefaces offer their monsters deferentially to readers whose job is to appreciate them discerningly, and so complete the magical transformation of piecemeal prose into continuous poem (what Baudelaire calls ‘the miracle of a poetic prose’).12 Capildeo’s Henry takes Baudelaire’s conceit of the monstrous text further by presenting the unknown author of the text as a possible monster, too, and warning the less ‘robust’ reader against ‘excessive acquaintance’ with ‘the Monster way’. Only Jeremy, and his ‘fne mind’, can be trusted with the heroic task of drawing the poem out of the prose. The need to be sensitively appreciated is also the troublesome demand of the Monster species itself. They are, Henry writes, ‘people whose eyes hit you with large and sudden appeals—people whose capacity for feeling and action seems sometimes more, sometimes less, than the human […] They induce SPECIES FEAR, a kind of wincing of the soul’ (48). To read

12 Charles Baudelaire, The Poems in Prose and La Fanfarlo, trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil, 1989), 25. 218 J. NOEL-TOD

‘The Monster Scrapbook’ is to enter into a condition of uncertainty not only about literary form, but the category of the human itself—a category which, according to ‘the Monster’s system of reckoning’, it tran- scends: ‘Monster is the opposite of Animal, human being no more than a shared subset of both’ (130). In the sequence’s various descriptions of ‘Monster consciousness’, the Monster, like the prose poem, disturbs dualities by occupying a third position. ‘Monster Pastimes’, for example, tells us frst that Monsters ‘are great readers’ who respond to poems in ‘uncritical rhapsodies’ of ‘purple prose’; then, that Monsters ‘get lost in their own poems’; and fnally, that Monsters sometimes ‘insist on speaking in ellipses’ (69). Monsters, it seems, are both readers, writers and a third thing that ‘turn[s] away from adequate communication’. An analogy for this tripartite nature is offered by another prose poem in the sequence which does not explicitly concern Monsters, but is part of the bigger ‘scrapbook’—a compilation, that is, of things of personal interest to a Monster. ‘Seeing Without Looking’ describes a sheet of song music in three different ways: as ‘a set of printed stanzas’, ‘a page of printed music’, ‘a page of lyrics and music’. Each is then compared to a perception of the world that is ‘all […] in the mind’. Of the third image, which combines words, melody and music on ‘three staves’, we are told: ‘You would like to rationalize it as a grid. No, the effect is of parallelisms, of things that are separate yet that are, in so far as they become ultimate, irretrievably enmeshed’ (58). The rational grid of defnition cannot be applied to ‘The Monster Scrapbook’; its dualities can only be read imaginatively, mystically even, by ‘seeing without looking’—a riddle that returns in the fnal sentence of the sequence: ‘Monsters have their vision, but they have lost half their sight’ (138). Among the ‘things that are separate yet […] irretrievably enmeshed’ in this sequence are the meanings of the word ‘monster’ itself. The primary defnition in the Oxford English Dictionary is:

a mythical creature which is part animal and part human, or combines elements of two or more animal forms, and is frequently of great size and ferocious appearance. Later, more generally: any imaginary creature that is large, ugly, and frightening.

But the OED also records an antiphrastic usage—considered obsolete from the eighteenth century, but revived in modern American English— in which ‘monster’ signifes ‘an extraordinarily good or remarkably 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS 219 successful person or thing’. In a poetic context, moreover, it conjures up the hybrid Caliban, Shakespeare’s imaginary Caribbean islander in The Tempest (a play in which ‘monster’ occurs thirty-four times). Capildeo’s repositioning of ‘monster’ as the antithesis of ‘animal’, with ‘human’ relegated to the hybrid subset, suggests that one lens through which to read the human allegory of ‘The Monster Scrapbook’ is the postcolonial tradition of Caliban revisionism. In George Lamming’s ‘A Monster, a Child, a Slave’ (1960), for example, Caliban is presented as ‘the epitome of a pure and uncalculated naiveté’, enslaved by Prospero’s feeding him and teaching him language.13 Similarly, Capildeo tells us: ‘To gain the trust of a Monster, all you have to do is speak to it three times a month or so, in human language, with reference to biscuits’ (55). Further such parallels with Lamming’s Caliban might be elaborated.14 Capildeo’s employment of the lyrical privacy of the prose poem to explore ‘monster consciousness’, however, also carefully avoids committing itself to unam- biguous markers of race and gender. As she comments: ‘This poetry collection includes prose. Some pieces […] half-express, half-explain, a certain pressure of situation.’15 Highly conscious of the pressures that it holds off, ‘The Monster Scrapbook’ resists being reduced in the trash compactor of personal identity. Capildeo’s next major prose sequence, Person Animal Figure (2005) was dedicated to Nikki Santilli.16 Santilli’s 2002 study of the prose poem seeks to offer ‘concrete evidence for what is still so often considered to be one of the more exotic literary genres’. Her title (Such Rare Citings) is a punning riposte to ‘The Jubjub Bird or Some Remarks on the Prose Poem’, an essay from 1985 by the poet George Barker, who observes:

The idea of the prose poem exists, certainly; but does the prose poem? […] What is this monster really like? […] Like the Loch Ness monster the

13 George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Allison & Busby, 1984), 114. 14 Compare, for example, Capildeo’s concluding statement of the distinction between a Monster’s imaginative ‘vision’ and impaired ‘sight’ (138), with Lamming’s claim that Caliban ‘is never accorded the power to see’ but exists in a condition of ‘creative blindness’ (107, 115). 15 Capildeo, ‘Synopsis.’ 16 The dedication appears in the frst chapbook publication of the sequence by Landfll Press in 2005. 220 J. NOEL-TOD

prose poem is a creature of whose existence we only have very uncertain evidence.17

Barker’s mocking use of the cryptozoological metaphor refects a widespread scepticism about the prose poem as a ‘real’ form in twentieth- century English literature. It is, moreover, expressed in terms that invoke a cultural suspicion of the exotic: do we believe reported sight- ings of such monsters? Having answered this question formally in ‘The Monster Scrapbook’, in Person Animal Figure Capildeo answers it politically. Developing the triadic model of identity (human-animal-monster) sketched by the earlier text, she places a fctionalised version of herself as a British Trinidadian citizen in the ‘Person’ corner of the triangle, opposite the ‘Animal’, with the liminal ‘Figure’ emerging from the resulting dialectic. The sequence is built around anaphoric, third-person descriptions of ‘the animal’, a restless creature of unknown species, but with many human qualities, including the inhabitation of domestic space. Capildeo’s Animal is amorphously metaphorical, and its shape-shifting sees it merge readily with the material fabric of its genteel British life-world:

The animal who knocks and patters lives in the next room […] It has a fondness for chimney pots. It inquires about freplaces. When it mourns, it becomes the length of a Victorian fue.18

These third-person descriptions are, however, intercut with a frst-person monologue which develops in counterpoint to the Animal passages, and which is visually distinguished from them by the use of a bold font. Whereas the Animal is a mystery that only deepens with every statement made about it, the Person is a mind on immediate display, via a stream-of-consciousness prose that resembles the thoughts of Molly Bloom in the fnal ‘Penelope’ chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The Person’s monologue is a stylised performance of the anxiety of being between identities. The frst paragraph establishes both her familiarity with England and the fact that she is also a foreigner, conscious of

17 N. Santilli, Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2002), 17. 18 Vahni Capildeo, “Person Animal Figure,” in Undraining Sea (Norwich: Eggbox, 2009). Further page references will be given in the text. 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS 221 a life elsewhere: ‘I am the person who buys stamps with the Queen’s head on them because this is England […] why a letter because if your family lives far away they are in a different time zone’ (58– 59). Like Molly Bloom, Capildeo’s Person’s run-on style is characterised by the endless curiosity about causal connection of a mind enmeshed in the global quotidian (over the course of eight long, unpunctuated sentences, ‘Penelope’ employs ‘because’ forty-eight times, and roams imaginatively between Dublin and Gibraltar, where the half-Spanish, half-Irish Molly was born). In the next paragraph, we meet the Person in the supermarket, where she is ‘the person who stands up among special offers’ and considers sympathetically ‘the girl at the cash desk […] perhaps she hasn’t been here long in this country’. Later in the sequence, defying her own tendency to feel ‘guilty about everything’, she launches into a contrarian defence of the consumerist joys of the supermarket:

Let me say that the supermarket is something to celebrate […] think of all those hands harvesting in lovely warm countries there’s progress for you big spills of sunshine on bare feet and funny hats isn’t it wonderful it’s like the whole world ends up in here […] always Christmas and never winter that’s what it is. (62–63)

As Marc Augé has observed, the ‘non-places’ of late capitalism, such as the airport and supermarket, construct the individual consumer as ‘innocent’ through ‘the passive joys of identity-loss’.19 Here, the Person experiences that loss as a world of overabundance, in which the external reality of place is effaced by the suspension of time under artifcial lights (‘always Christmas and never winter’), and the reality of other people’s labour in other countries shrinks to a sprinkling of glib visual synechdoches (‘hands […] bare feet and funny hats’) among a mass of other products. Having atomised the speaker of these passages under supermarket lights, the sequence then moves towards a more profound confrontation of the question of identity and place by drawing the Person back towards private domestic existence. Previously, this is the domain that had been observed by the empirical, third-person prose associated with

19 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 102–103. 222 J. NOEL-TOD the Animal. Affrming the need ‘to confront my fears at home’, the Person acknowledges that she will ‘need a lot of punctuation to do that’. Freed from formal convention, the fow of stream-of-consciousness prose is—like the anxious mind—potentially boundless in its associations. In the passage that follows, an implicit analogy is developed between the punctuation of sentences and the securing of domestic and psychological space. Itemising aspects of the house that exclude—curtains, blinds, shutters, locks—she refects that ‘the brass letterfap is a point of weakness, but what can one do? It is a period detail.’ The lexical play here on ‘point’ and ‘period’ is made explicit in the next sentence, which reverts to the unpointed periods of previous passages as it slips out of the impersonal prose of an estate agent’s description (‘this desirable midterrace Edwardian property’) into an imaginative reverie about a former owner (‘Bill a broadshouldered factory worker’). Correcting the slip, she comments: ‘The punctuation went there. I have double-bolted, deadlocked, Yale locked, chained, wired, and alarmed the door’ (64). The sequence’s oscillation between the observation of an abstract otherness (the Animal) and the narration of a concrete individuality (the Person) converges here in the private house, with the suggestion that the Person and the Animal may, in fact, be inhabiting the same domestic, as well as textual, space, and are therefore be understood as the observation of the same individual from different perspectives. The splitting of self is everywhere in the Person’s monologue, whose ‘fears’ are precisely to do with the experience of feeling out-of-place. Her fear that ‘I do not have good taste’, for example, is exacerbated by her experience of the racism encoded in the class structure of British society: ‘the people behind the counters in banks and dress shops talk to me as if I were poor but the poor eye me like loose change […] is it wrong to like ribbons well perhaps in London naturally’. The Person’s stammering anxiety is a dramatisation of her sense of verbal and cultural in-between-ness that reaches a climax with the recollection of a temporary loss of language itself (‘I could no longer say the green book was green’, 65–67). And it is at this point that another voice enters the sequence, bringing to its alterna- tion of Animal/Person a third poetic being: the abstract ‘Figure’ of art. Capildeo’s Figure is an entity characterised by the in-between-ness of metaphor—where images are always in transit—as well as the in- between-ness of prose poetry itself. The description of the Figure, which is typographically distinguished by the use of an italic font and a 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS 223 right-justifed margin, reads as a text commenting on its emergence as the dialectical shadow of the Animal and the Person:

This dark fgure moves from peripheral vision when the nest of the body has sprung apart. It jets up from the ground. Turned to face each bodily action, it leads as it beckons, beckons as it mirrors, contracting, decontracting, by a plumage spray of lines.

Visually resembling both prose and poetry in its ‘plumage spray of lines’, the Figure stands for both Person and Animal as they become writing itself, in the living moment of being read:

This dark fgure, in sending itself out, draws after. Constant on all sides, its places itself ahead, proceeding containing the person, that which is drawn at its back. The prickle of nerves betokens the instances of its moves.

Although Capildeo’s ‘dark fgure’, like her ‘Monster’, passes through the racialised ambit of Caliban-language (‘this thing of darkness’, as Prospero calls him), it resists being confned to a personal interpretation—that is, one dominated by the Person. Instead, the Figure asserts the indivisibility of the text and its depersonalised art: ‘Detachment is this dark fgure’, the section concludes. ‘That is immeasurable as one’ (67). ‘Person Animal Figure’ does not end at this mystic point of unity, however, but tracks back to narrate the further adventures of the Animal, who is now presented in a state of deepening domestic abjection (‘This animal, faithful and grateful, accepts punishment as its due […] It is a lashed and pitted animal’) until a fnal paragraph of sudden release:

This animal bursts the house open one day and fnds another. It cannot do without houses now, but it will fnd a house that is more wild. […] This animal bounds and rises. […] It is an animal that knows no terms. […] This animal remains beyond those animals forever. (69)

This animal, to borrow the terms of Capildeo’s later poem of wildness and domestication, is more wolf than dog—and, it is tempting to say, more prose than verse. But that would be to set terms on an animal that ‘knows no terms’: no labels, no compromises, no termini. It ‘bounds’ beyond bounds, to other ‘houses’ that are ‘more wild’. The metaphorical equation of reimagined domestic space with prose as a poetic form is one that Capildeo has continued to develop 224 J. NOEL-TOD in her later, more explicitly autobiographical writing. ‘Letter Not from Trinidad’, for example, a short essay from 2015, describes her childhood experience of Deepavali, when the family garage and part of the house would be transformed into a ‘ritual space’, with lamps lit and Sanskrit chanted, leading to ‘other mixings: of space, and of language’. ‘Now that habit of mind has aestheticised itself’, she writes:

I see no problem, I take delight, within the space of the page, in crossing from mundane to heightened, elaborated, even opaque codes, registers, allusions. […] To this experience I can trace my instinctive revolt against such terms as ‘line break,’ ‘white space’ or ‘margins of silence.’ Without meaning to, I developed a poetics of reverberation and minor noise [and became] a practitioner of a mixity of the alinguistic, the musical, the structured. I write this for an unruly language which is not ‘fractured’ as with the avant-garde or ‘resistant’ as with the old-style postcolonial, but may indeed have a politics, as well as a poetics, belonging to a modernity rooted in ways of life still not considered safe, polite or relevant to admit to the canon.20

As with Capildeo’s essay ‘Poetry into Prose: In One Binding’, this assertion of poetics by practice carefully avoids anything as simplistic as a binding distinction between verse and prose. But it may be set beside a key passage from the essayistic title sequence of Measures of Expatriation (2016), in which ‘language’ is investigated as a term that both sets bounds to expression and goes beyond them. In ‘Going Somewhere, Getting Nowhere’, the third part of ‘Five Measures of Expatriation’, the poet refects on what the words ‘home’ and ‘Trinidad’ came to mean when living in England, concluding ‘Language is my home’ but with the caveat that ‘thought is not bounded by language’. This proposition is illustrated by a brief memory of having ‘lost’ the words ‘wall and foor’, so that ‘the interiority of the room was in continuous fow’, without formal divisions. This ‘languageless’ experience of being in domestic space then leads to the fnal declaration, which comes freighted with implication for the politics of rigidly demarcating certain kinds of imaginative language use ‘prose’ and others ‘poetry’: ‘Language is my home, I say; not one particular language.’21

20 Vahni Capildeo, “Letter Not from Trinidad,” PN Review 221 (January–February 2015): 6. 21 Vahni Capildeo, Measures of Expatriation (Manchester: Carcanet, 2016), 100–1. 13 ‘IMMEASURABLE AS ONE’: VAHNI CAPILDEO’S PROSE POETICS 225

Works Cited Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image Music Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Baudelaire, Charles. The Poems in Prose and La Fanfarlo. Translated by Francis Scarfe. London: Anvil, 1989. Capildeo, Vahni. “The Monster Scrapbook.” In No Traveller Returns, 45–138. Cambridge: Salt, 2003. ———. “Person Animal Figure.” In Undraining Sea. Norwich: Eggbox, 2009. ———. “Dog or Wolf.” In Venus as a Bear, 30. Manchester: Carcanet, 2018. ———. “Letter Not from Trinidad.” PN Review 221 (January–February 2015): 6. ———. “Language and Reinvention.” Start the Week. BBC Radio 4, February 1, 2016a. ———. Measures of Expatriation. Manchester: Carcanet, 2016b. ———. “Poetry into Prose: In One Binding.” Lighthouse 12 (Spring 2016c): 69–72. ———. “No Traveller Returns: Synopsis.” https://www.saltpublishing.com/ products/no-traveller-returns-9781876857882. Accessed 25 September 2017. Etter, Carrie. “Poetry in the Prose: Getting to Know the Prose Poem.” Poetry Review 102.2 (Summer 2012): 69–71. Joyce, James. Ulysses (1922), edited by Jeri Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. King, Bruce. The Internationalization of English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Lamming, George. “A Monster, a Child, a Slave.” In The Pleasures of Exile, 95–117. London: Allison & Busby, 1984. Santilli, N. Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2002. Walcott, Derek. “The Muse of History.” In What the Twilight Says: Essays, 36–64. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. CHAPTER 14

The Successful Prose Poem Leaves Behind Its Name

Owen Bullock

Some commentators have asserted that discussions of prose poems privilege poetry to the detriment of an examination of prose.1 While this may be true, I would like to suggest that the term itself privileges poetry in an appropriate way. In the name ‘prose poem’, the word ‘prose’ can be read as a modifer, subordinate to the main noun ‘poem’, and in that sense is not an oxymoron at all, as has also been claimed.2 A simple defnition might be offered, such as a poem with some attributes of prose, but, as with any defnition, there are problems applying it to all cases, and ultimately the genre, if it is a genre, may well be indefnable. The problem of defnition makes acceptance of the form diffcult. The success of Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End—Prose Poems (1989) in winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 would seem to have helped establish

1 For example, Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 116. 2 Michael Riffaterre, “On the Prose Poem’s Formal Features,” in The Prose Poem in France: Theory and Practice, ed. Mary Ann Caws and Hermine Riffaterre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 117.

O. Bullock (*) University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia

© The Author(s) 2018 227 J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_14 228 O. BULLOCK the genre and to increase its acceptance, at least in the USA,3 but that acceptance seems to have taken longer in the UK. Simic’s book is notable for the fact that it acknowledges prose poems in the subtitle, which many volumes do not. Does this differ from the practice of poets publishing prose poetry in the UK? More recently, UK interviewers, editors, critics and judges have embraced the concept of the prose poem. Those in such roles are all readers, and readers and poets might talk about prose poems in quite different ways. Prose poems make broader use of narrative than most lineated poems, including critical engagement; their language is perhaps freer and closer to speech, both qualities which may make them more accessible. But it is important to remember that the writing itself does not need the title ‘prose poetry’ in order to achieve these effects. The affordances the movement towards prose gives the poet beg investigation. These questions will be discussed in relation to recent works by Claudia Rankine, Simon Armitage and Peter Riley. Stephen Fredman suggests that prose poetry is inherently explorative, even investigative; a very open form of writing that accommodates the world of facts and ideas, and even of criticism.4 It appropriates the techniques of prose, and this appropriation ‘may be seen as central to our time’5 as hybrid forms proliferate. In so doing, prose poetry recognises that all discourse is a kind of art.6 Since critics tend to agree on lineation as the defning feature of the free verse poem,7 the absence of the line is a crucial marker for the prose poem. Instead, the sentence takes centre

3 That is, despite the struggles of earlier collections, such as Mark Strand’s The Monument (1978), which was initially nominated for a major award and then withdrawn. Admittedly, it is a work that confounds one’s understanding of poetry in a more confrontational way. 4 Fredman used the term ‘poet’s prose’ and, though this never gained traction, his ideas about prose poetry are signifcant and durable. See Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), viii, 10. 5 Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 10. 6 Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 139. 7 Robert Frank and Henry Sayre, eds., The Line in Postmodern Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 1988), ix–x; Marjorie Perloff, Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 116–117; and Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 11. 14 THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME 229 stage.8 The sentence could be more accessible to the general reader; its ordinariness breaks down barriers, and the prose poem does not scream poetry! to the uninitiated.9 The ‘subversive potential’ of the prose poem has been emphasised by critics,10 since any new form or hybridising of genres can be understood as a revolution against accepted norms. Yet, Wordsworth was already questioning the boundaries of prose and poetry in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, arguing that there is no essential difference in their composition.11 Ginsberg talks about writing which ‘passes from prose to poetry & back, like the mind’,12 a statement which suggests that poetry is something like ordinary speech, at the same time as acknowledging that the individual idiolect includes poetry. Philip Gross describes lyric and narrative as ‘two poles that create a process’, that the prose poem can hold a certain ambiguity which is useful for both.13 Rankine’s 2014 collection Citizen is subtitled An American Lyric. Nowhere does the poet or publisher use the term ‘prose poetry’. The volume has been nominated for and won many awards, including a double nomination for poetry and criticism in the National Book Critics Circle Awards (winning for poetry). Newspapers such as The Telegraph announce her work as prose poetry.14 One review is unclear whether it

8 See Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 10 and Anthony Howell, ed., “The Prose Poem—What the Hell Is It?” The Fortnightly Review (2016), http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2016/04/ prose-poetry/. 9 This might include the writer new to poetry, as well as the reader new to poetry, as Robert Alexander narrates, in “Prose Poetry,” The Marie Alexander Poetry Series (2016), http://mariealexanderseries.com/prosepoem.shtml. 10 Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre, (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 10 and Margueritte Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). 11 Murphy, Tradition of Subversion, 9. 12 Allen Ginsberg, “Notes for Howl and Other Poems,” in American Poetic Theory, ed. George Perkins (Open Library: Holt, Rinehart & Winston of Canada Ltd., 1972), 345. 13 Philip Gross, “Voices in the Forest: Three Ways of Conceiving of a Work in Progress with Selected Pieces from Evi and the Devil,” Axon: Creative Explorations #6 (2014), http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-6/voices-forest. 14 Kate Kellaway, “Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine Review—The Ugly Truth of Racism,” The Guardian, 30 August 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2015/aug/30/claudia-rankine-citizen-american-lyric-review, accessed 22 September 2016. 230 O. BULLOCK is, in fact, poetry, but asserts that the question becomes unimportant as one reads.15 Adam Fitzgerald reports that, on being asked by an audience member at a poetry reading if her work was prose poetry, Rankine responded that is was a hybrid, but also that she wanted to provoke such questions.16 The author’s acknowledgements on the back page of Citizen note, ‘poems and essays’ from the collection previously published. One certainly has the sense that it is the essay form in pieces such as the discussion of Serena Williams’ career.17 There is a great deal to be said for the argument that a work is sit- uated in whatever genre the author claims for it. Of course, the reader has their own expectations (characterised by Bakhtin as ‘genre memory’), as well as responding to the way publishing and marketing describe and categorise a book, as a facet of the culturally specifc and ‘historically determined’ understandings of genre.18 Citizen has been published in an English edition, which won the Forward Prize and was nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize. This seems like a coup for prose poetry. And yet only indirectly so, since the signposting suggests some other form: a kind of lyric. While the form of the prose poem would seem to be gaining acceptance with critics, the writer’s seeming resistance to the term ‘prose poetry’ could hinder that progress. If there is some precedent to the popularity of Rankine’s work, it might be found in the accessibility of Margaret Atwood’s Murder in the Cathedral: Short Fictions and Prose Poems (London: Virago, 1997). The subtitle is a broad shot; the reader is left to fgure out which pieces are short fctions and which are prose poems. Lyn Hejinian’s much admired My Life has something in common with Rankine in its use of motif and repetition. Hejinian’s work is described on the back cover as ‘poetic

15 Tristram Fane Saunders, “Claudia Rankine Wins £10,000 Forward Prize with Book of Prose Poems,” The Telegraph, 30 September 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to- read/claudia-rankine-wins-forward-prize-with-book-of-prose-poems/, accessed 11 August 2016. 16 Adam Fitzgerald, “‘That’s Not Poetry; It’s Sociology!’—In Defence of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen,” The Guardian, 23 October 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/oct/23/claudia-rankine-citizen-poetry-defence, accessed 11 August 2016. 17 Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014), 23–36; references to this text will be given in parenthesis hereafter. 18 Marjorie Perloff, Postmodern Genres (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 7. 14 THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME 231 autobiography’; it won awards in poetry categories but nowhere does the term ‘prose poetry’ appear in the edition I have in front of me.19 Rankine has used the subtitle ‘lyric’ before—in her previous collection, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004), a collection also composed mainly of what I would call prose poems.20 There are two claims at work in the subtitle: that the text concerned is inherently American, vying for status in a still white-dominated country, and asserting the lyric quality of a work as being key to what constitutes poetry.21 Yet, Rankine’s work is comparatively bare in its use of poetic tropes22; motif and repetition are probably the most obvious ones in Citizen. There are narrative fragments and essay-like ruminations of a variety close to the original understanding of the essay as a forum for trying out one’s thoughts, of a kind that Emerson would surely have applauded. Indeed, Emerson has been cited as one of the innovators in the development of a specifcally American prose poem, in contradistinction with the French-infuenced, largely surrealist prose poem.23 Rankine’s language is direct and unfussy; its mystery comes in the shadowiness of response from those who display racist attitudes, in the accompanying thoughts and feelings of the person slighted and the uncertainties between people—in other words, through content. The book begins and invites the reader into its world with the admission of being too exhausted to engage with and turn on any gadgets or mobile technology. This small detail alone suggests that this is a book with contemporary preoccupations, of and for our times. More seriously, recent shootings of African-American citizens by US police, and subsequent reprisal killings of police offcers, show its concerns to be sicken- ingly current. The use of language is important for any issue construed as political. The form of address is often the second person; the text tries to get us involved—What if this were you? How would you feel treated this way?—but also establishes a sense of ambiguity in regard to identity and to the critical theme of invisibleness experienced by African-Americans in

19 Lyn Hejinian, My Life (Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 2002). 20 And Rankine’s 2001 collection Plot is composed largely of prose poetry. 21 Commonality with the lyric essay is observable, but a full consideration of this form is beyond the scope of consideration of this chapter. 22 Also observed by Howell, in “The Prose Poem….” 23 Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 5. 232 O. BULLOCK

American culture. But the use of the second person is not always ambivalent or universal, and complicated slightly by the use of the frst person in tandem with it. Initially, this is confusing, until one sees the complexity it lends the topic of identity.24 It communicates the possibility that the ‘I’ might be owned internally but not with the same ease socially, because of the pressures of prejudice, and the erasure of self that is systematic in the face of racism. Rankine moves away from the more direct encounter with racism in earlier texts—particularly, for example, in the sequence ‘In Transit’ and ‘New Windows’, from Nothing in Nature is Private (1994). Though this earlier, lineated work from Nothing in Nature is subtle and compelling, the strategies of Citizen are even more psychologically complex. The ambiguity of the prose poem and the particular use of the second person in Citizen serve to support this complexity and open up unique ways on both literal and emotional levels to overcome all kinds of barriers, not just those around race. By the time Citizen comments explicitly on the use of the second person, the ambiguity around form of address has helped forge an active connection between text and reader. Slights delivered through ignorance or uncertainty nevertheless highlight overt racism and make one consider the spectrum. The refrain that you are not that guy highlights the problem of identity for the victim of racial prejudice. Selfhood is embodied and the abuse of the body is another ploy in the devaluing and dehumanising strategies of racism, which is seen taking formal hold of the body, much like imprisonment. The text’s explorative power and sense of interconnectedness helps achieve these aims, and the voice of the text wonders if the issue is too ‘foreign’ to assimilate. The emphasis on you is disembodied by a sense that a weird and undefned experiment is going on around her, for example, in being told that a university is hiring people of colour in spite of the fact that there are so many other great writers and having to face a two-hour meeting with men who she has overheard making racist comments. Some of the later texts in Citizen, notably those written for video collaboration, showcase the postmodern fragment, an important element of the hybrid text. Some prose poems as monologues employ fractured statements and place greater emphasis on language for its own sake, sometimes condensing a number of complex ideas by disdaining

24 The strategy of the writing recalls Atwood’s ambiguous second person in “A Parable” (Atwood 1997, 101–102). 14 THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME 233 punctuation (101). ‘World Cup’ is an assemblage of quotations about race, which includes racist slurs made against soccer player Zinedine Zidane in 2006, noted by lip readers. If this assemblage is a postmodern trope, it is certainly familiar—and continues to refect the age in which we live. The speech-like tone of the writing gets across the ordinariness or eve- rydayness of the ongoing tragedy described. A friend advises the author that she needs to absorb the world, meaning to take the abuse and not mind too much. Notably, the friend who actively refuses to take on or hold what is not hers suggests the limitations of empathy. There is pressure from the justice system not to speak out about racism, to let go, or move on; this is what it means to be a citizen. Language close to speech ensures an all the more direct account of the situation in its unforgiving reality. The false sense of moving on is contrasted with impressions of transcendence. For example, universality is suggested in the author’s sense of her own presence at the beginning of a day, and the concerns of the self are in some mysterious way shared with everyone. The fact remains that an injury to selfhood has been sustained, and the seemingly universal quality of blobbing out watching tennis matches—described so candidly as a neat way of displacing any form of trial, aim or being let down—has another meaning for the person of colour, associated here with the racist attitudes that Serena Williams has encountered. The book’s fnal metaphor is a weighty one in the full knowledge that the defeat of prejudice is slow. The image of the patient stethoscope implies a monitoring of the situation, like the poet’s ability to comment on societal values, and, through the medium of ordinary speech, is upheld in prose poetry. * When a successful poet such as Simon Armitage uses the prose poem, as Seamus Heaney did during and after the 1970s, does it make a difference to the acceptance of the form? Is it no longer subversive? The cover blurb of Seeing Stars accentuates the storytelling aspect of the book, ‘a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales’. This is a specifc and interesting list, but, again, omits the term or even the possibility of ‘prose poetry’. While some reviewers have no hesitation labelling the work as 234 O. BULLOCK prose poetry, others are undecided as to what name to assign it.25 The poems are, indeed, a series of dramatic monologues. These are not the imagined worlds of real characters or real situations. They are supremely imaginative and tending towards a kind of intellectual surrealism. Since neither Heaney nor Armitage have used the term ‘prose poetry’, at least in these collections, however,26 their adoption of prose poetry may not have helped the acceptance of the term. But they have helped acceptance of the practice of writing prose poetry, and that is a distinction which needs making. It has to be said that Armitage’s lineated poems are themselves quite prose-like. The structure of ‘Snow Joke’, for example—the frst poem in his debut collection Zoom (1989)—could ft very well in Seeing Stars without lineation. Yet, Armitage is clear that prose and poetry represent ‘two different mindsets’; if too much poetry spills over into the prose it becomes clogged, he confesses.27 That has not happened here. Visually, the setting of Seeing Stars troubles any discussion of prose poetry. The ends of lines have been left ragged and stop rather a long way short of the right-hand margin, as if to tease the reader, or open up related discussions of the long line.28 The effect is that one is uncertain how the poems are meant to be read. Yet, familiarity with poetry suggests that these are not line-endings in the normal sense: they seem completely arbitrary. Armitage shed light on the situation by explaining that the typesetting choice was his, agreeing that the line breaks are casual, and saying simply that he had a conception of a certain size for the poems.29 Furthermore, Armitage has asserted that they are not prose poems and gleefully describes one reviewer’s opinion of them as ‘not poems’.30 His assertions about form spill over into doubts as to

25 For example, Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Telegraph, 24 June 2010 and Paul Batchelor, The Guardian, 5 June 2010, respectively. 26 Heaney merely called his 21 prose poems in Stations “pieces”. See, Stations (Belfast: Ulsterman Press, 1975), 3. Much later, Heaney revisited the form in the sequence “Found Prose,” in District & Circle (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 36–41. 27 Simon Armitage, “Interview,” The Poetry Archive, 2010, http://www.poetryarchive. org/interview/simon-armitage-interview, accessed 11 August 2016. 28 See Howell, “The Prose Poem…”. 29 Simon Armitage in conversation with the author, University of Canberra, 16 September 2016. 30 Armitage’s comments during poetry reading, Poetry on the Move Festival, University of Canberra, 13 September 2016. 14 THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME 235 whether Rankine’s Citizen is poetry, which he challenges on the basis of its generalisations and regarding which he makes reference to the varying typography of the differing editions of her work.31 One reviewer of Armitage’s inaugural Oxford lecture sensed a residua of white privilege in these remarks,32 while acknowledging some progressive ideas. Another reviewer was more freely complimentary in the new professor’s ability to herald change.33 If anything, Armitage’s pragmatic ambiguities assist his work overall, even as they do for Rankine.34 The trait of ambiguity is ongoing in Armitage’s text. One is never quite sure what is intended. For example, is the son who wants to be an executioner merely an example of cheap sensationalism, or does it raise real questions about parenting and ambition? Some poems in this respect are closer to enigmas, rather than parables. Armitage’s surrealism (intrinsic to these enigmas and ambiguities) is of a different kind to, say, Baudelaire’s or Simic’s; it takes as its model James Tate’s Return to the City of White Donkeys (2004).35 In a few cases it can seem strained, with too big a suspension of disbelief (e.g. ‘Aviators’), but the variety of ‘what if’ scenarios is entrancing. The main difference from previous work seems to lie in the extent of freedom given to imagination; we have moved from strange scenarios to fantastical ones.

31 Armitage, “The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet”, Inaugural lecture, Oxford University, 2015, http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-events/news/201511/listen-professor-simon-armitages-inaugural-lecture-professor-poetry.html, accessed 22 September 2016. 32 Dan Holloway, “The Place of Poetry in the World—Simon Armitage’s Inaugural Lecture,” Sabotage Reviews, 2015, http://sabotagereviews.com/2015/11/26/the-place- of-poetry-in-the-world-simon-armitages-inaugural-lecture/, accessed 22 September 2016. NB: It was noticeable that, in a symposium keynote address, of the nine works Armitage referred in detail only one was by a female poet, so that male privilege might also be an issue. The poets were: Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Robert Graves, Edward Thomas, Jorie Graham, Douglas Dunn, and Thom Gunn (Armitage 2016b). 33 Michael Delgado, “Review: Simon Armitage Inaugural Lecture,” The Oxford Culture Review (2015), https://theoxfordculturereview.com/2015/11/26/review-simon-armitage-inaugural-lecture/, accessed 22 September 2016. 34 See Howell, “The Prose Poem…”. 35 Armitage, in conversation, 2016b. 236 O. BULLOCK

One reviewer complained at the lack of originality of Armitage’s situations.36 Though the precedent for ‘An Accommodation’ is, indeed, obvious from a certain episode of Steptoe and Son, where the two pro- tagonists divide their living space in half, the reviewer in question ignores the appraisal of marriage that ends the poem—and far from fippantly. The premise for ‘Knowing What We Know Now’ also has an obvious antecedent in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but the unexpectedly romantic affrmation at the conclusion of the poem still manages to break new ground. In any case, language itself comes to the rescue, in sentences such as, ‘Could he really go swanning around with a young man’s intentions and a fashionable T-shirt while she slipped away towards undignifed infrmity and toothless old age?’37 Sentences and phrases ring with life; who could resist, ‘the true scold of Antarctica’s breath’.38 There is comic drama and fairy tale, with deft use of dialogue and extreme confrontational interactions—for example, in ‘The Accident’ and ‘Seeing Stars’—which perhaps appeal to the novelist/ dramatist in the author. These are all extensions of Armitage’s poetic mode, made possible by incorporating prose more freely. Another pragmatic aspect of the prose poem worth considering is in the differences between text and performance. In a panel discussion on prose poetry at the University of Canberra in 2015, an audience member made the astute observation that when prose poems were performed they became lineated poems, since the poet had to choose to pause somewhere. Of course, this idea needs to be nuanced by the fact that performance is a variable phenomenon. Many poets, for example, who make use of enjambment in a skilful way in the published versions of their poems, then fail to pause or linger in the appropriate places when reading them aloud; this tendency ensures that many readers of poetry sound as if they are reading prose throughout. But with the above audience member’s observation in mind, I would like to consider Armitage’s poem ‘An Accommodation’ as performed in the video recording hosted by The Guardian. If one were to lineate the poem in response to where the poet actually pauses in performance, it would come out something like this:

36 Paul Sutton, review of Seeing Stars, “Unoriginality & Simon Armitage,” Stride, 2010, http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag2010/May%202010/Armitage%20 review.htm, accessed 1 August 2016. 37 Simon Armitage, Seeing Stars (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), 32. 38 Armitage, Seeing Stars, 17. 14 THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME 237

An Accommodation

___ and I both agreed that something had to change, but I was still stunned and not a little hurt when I staggered home one evening to fnd she’d draped a net curtain slap bang down the middle of our home. She said, ‘I’m over here and you’re over there, and from now on that’s how it’s going to be.’ It was a small house, not much more than a single room, which made for one or two practical problems. Like the fridge was on my side and the oven was on hers. And she had the bed while I slept fully clothed in the infatable chair. Also there was a Husker Dü CD on her half of the border which I wouldn’t have minded hearing again for old times’ sake, and her winter coat stayed hanging on the door in my domain. But the net was the net, and we didn’t so much as pass a single word through its sacred veil, let alone send a hand crawling beneath it, or, God forbid, yank it aside and go marching across the line. Some nights she’d bring men back, deadbeats, incompatible, not ft to kiss the heel of her shoe. But it couldn’t have been easy for her either, watching me mooch about like a ghost, seeing me crashing around in the empty bottles and cans. And there were good times too, sitting side by side on the old settee, the curtain between us, the TV in her sector but angled towards me, taking me into account. Over the years the moths moved in, got a taste for the net, so it came to resemble a giant web, like a thing made of actual holes strung together by fne, nervous threads. But there it remained, and remains to this day, this tattered shroud, this ravaged lace suspended between our lives, keeping us inseparable and betrothed.

There is a no-nonsense quality to these line breaks, since full stops and commas already do most of the work of organising the way it will be 238 O. BULLOCK read. Where the pauses are slight, I have inserted extra spaces to give a more complex view of how the poem sounded. Making further line breaks after ‘Also’, ‘let alone’ and even ‘or’ and ‘over the years’ could be productive, emotionally, on the page, as it was in performance. By implication, the prose poem resists the idea of the breath as a defning characteristic of poetry.39 But, in performance, lineation does indeed seem to return because of the performer’s need to pause. One could say that a prose poem is an unperformed poem: unperformed lineation. In comparing the written and spoken word, it can seem as though there is uncertainty in the poet’s mind, but perhaps this is simply a refection of the uniqueness of performance. The most dramatic difference in Armitage’s reading from the written text is the large break after the opening ‘__ and I’ (the reading also includes the motion of a fnger drawn across silenced lips to denote the missing name). The full stops are defnite pauses: line-breaks; the commas less clear, as one might expect. Each use of the word ‘But’ creates a very clear break, stronger than after any other full stop—should this denote a stanza break? The only obvious opportunity for the use of enjambment is with ‘keeping us’ suspended before the reveal of the last line, though in the reading Armitage barely pauses at this point. At any rate, there is a tension between the spoken and written word, which further complicates the understanding that ‘poetry is rhythmically organised speech while prose is ordinary speech’.40 Appended to this summary, performance must equal lineation. * Another British poet, Peter Riley, makes frequent use of prose in his collection The Glacial Stairway (2011). The cover blurb discusses the interplay between poetry and prose, rather than using the term ‘prose poetry’. Sometimes this interplay is achieved by a judicious insertion of a prose stanza into an otherwise lineated poem. For example, in part I of the long title poem (a sequence over seven pages) just one stanza is prose. Its content is noticeably less organised, and it creates a lovely contrast with preceding stanzas, focusing on information and observations

39 The idea of the line being a breath unit was made popular by Charles Olson in his famous essay “Projective Verse”. 40 Yury Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, ed. and trans. D. Barton Johnson (Michigan: Ardis/Ann Arbor, 1976), 27. 14 THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME 239 on the track through the Pyrenees to Andorra, without refection.41 The prose section is clearly signalled by being justifed on both sides, and represents a change of tone. The cover blurb notes the ‘layering and counterpoint’ of the poems, and this shift between poetry and prose is a signifcant contributor to the effect of counterpoint. Riley himself claims that there is no defnition of poetry. He also notes a movement away from pragmatic prose; he is ‘interested in prose as a support to poetry’.42 The sequence ‘Best at night alone’ makes more frequent use of prose, but with a shift of emphasis. Here, the prose sections are stream-of- consciousness—for example, ‘And where does all this get us where do we go from here where are my glasses what are the practicalities of collective hope’ (36)—some responding to social situations in quiet refection, such as, ‘Sing the slow long song and watch the forces part. Street, street, baleful street, paved with wishes’ (37), after a night of singing and as one reveller continues in the distance. The changes of tone achieved are reminiscent of the ‘link and shift’ strategy of haibun, where a concise prose is counterbalanced by haiku. Riley notes a similar dimension in Scandinavian poetry as ‘a song interlude in a narrative’.43 Whatever mood and tone the lineated sections establish, the prose sections create departures from them. When moving from one prose section to another, the shift in the link tends to be even more profound, taking us to a new but related topic or preoccupation.44 The journey narrated in the prose poem ‘King’s Cross to SOAS’ is full of sharp observations and found quotations. Postmodern fragment and cacophony pervade the poem: ‘World with your gliomas and your bibles’; its contemporary orientation: ‘I don’t think I have the password for this’, anchors the poem in our times (68). In this ‘diagonal journey across a N-S grid’, we fnd that ‘the labyrinth has no centre but the true voice which is not so hard to fnd’ (the postmodern world and the post- structuralist text are not as decentred as Derrida would have us believe).

41 Peter Riley, The Glacial Stairway (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), 8; references to this text will be given in parenthesis hereafter. 42 Peter Riley, “In Conversation with Keith Tuma,” Jacket #11, 2000, http://jacketmagazine.com/11/riley-iv-by-tuma.html, accessed 1 August 2016. 43 Peter Riley, “In conversation…”. 44 An earlier version of this work was published as a chapbook by Oystercatcher Press. There is a sustained interest in the possibilities of the prose poem in Riley’s work (e.g. in the chapbook, The Ascent of Kinder Scout, 2014). 240 O. BULLOCK

The sense of displacement leads the voice of the text to muse, ‘At every corner I become a different creature’, yet, there’s a clear sense of an individual consciousness choreographing movements. The voice imagines walking into each shop and buying the body parts necessary to reassem- ble ‘a people out of their debts’ (70). Just as ‘debts’ takes in the semi- otic potential of ‘depths’, the fgure is sensitive to the plight of consumer humanity. It is a heroic route, lined with the concerns of the everyday and the extremes of urban life. The prose poem sequence ‘Western States’ (1) is ‘a journal of travels’—a fact which makes the reader ponder the varieties of short form that can be encapsulated by the prose poem, including diaries, letters, philosophical refections (à la Wittgenstein, Neitzsche and so on):

Unsustainable light, discontinuous song, unpayable debt. A display of surplus energy not yet accounted for: a burning cauldron, a mass of bright lights surrounded by blackness as the plane descends towards Los Angeles. (72)

The sentence fragments of the opening take us straight into the point of view of the voice, with its environmental and economic concerns, shown by ‘unsustainable’ and ‘unpayable’, and the lack of accounting. We also encounter the free associative, or connotative, reference to a cauldron. The protagonist soon gets out of the city:

The desert each side of the road pitch black, the desert of fun pitch bright disappearing behind to a ficker and we are alone. Such lights will always leave you alone, looking for somewhere to lay your head. (72)

The unnatural, unsustainable light is left behind; it disappears in a way prophetic of economic meltdown, such lights unable to help humanity. The chatty, ruminative style and the poetic use of free association soften the philosophical tones of the work. There is much opinion here without substantiation, one takes it or leaves it—again, evoking the original understanding of the essay form. Recollecting Ed Dorn’s probing of life in Nevada and Idaho (presumably in Gunslinger), which he characterises as ‘a lustful quest for exhaus- tion’, Riley sees ‘faceted mirrors in people’s speech and eyes that stir up our hope’ (81). People make the best of life; the national situation seems irrelevant, and the fear of Islam manufactured. The writing is full of memorable statements of the best and worst of humanity: ‘Nevada, 14 THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME 241 dumping grounds for Indian tribes surplus to requirements and nuclear waste’ (83), where the ungrammatical import of the causal addition, ‘and nuclear waste’, would not be achievable outside a sentence structure. The simple and quotidian is respected: ‘An elderly woman comes out of her door to examine the post box, fnds nothing and goes back in, surrounded by sky and earth’ (83). Once more, the grammar is doubtful; it is the whole action that is surrounded by sky and earth, not the closing one. There is much more that could be said about this evocative portrait, but the closing self-conscious statement is apt: ‘Under the circumstances it seems best to end with a paragraph struggling to be born’ (86). Is this a metaphor for the USA? For form? For sustainability? Again, the text’s form and its frequent ambiguity assist content, and recall Gross’ comments, above, about ambiguity being useful for both lyric and narrative. Riley’s strategies extend to writing supporting prose texts which accompany poems (Riley 2000, n.p.). This practice is paralleled in David Bromige’s prose, which forms biographical commentaries on earlier poems and has been described as bespeaking ‘an immense anxiety about the future of one’s writing’45—and, though it is questionable that anxiety is the right word, it does show a seriousness of intent and exploration that is a good model for writing. Perloff’s quoting of William Spanos that ‘poets want to make prose out of their poetry’ is also apt for the above,46 and nicely counterbalances the thesis ‘that poetry can be extracted from prose’,47 or Riley’s ‘song interlude in a narrative’. With regard to the advantages prose gives the poets discussed in this chapter, one might say, with Fredman, that their strategies are ‘a sign of engagement with the largest range of language in order to both understand and come into the world’.48 Correspondingly, each poet offers actual and possible versions of that world in ways that extend the range of their poetry. It has been claimed that the prose poem can include an illumination of the self by the discourses that surround it and from which it cannot be independent.49 Such engagement would seem particularly

45 Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 144. 46 Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 291. 47 N. Santilli, Such Rare Citings (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2002), 32. 48 Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 147. 49 Santilli, Such Rare Citings, 36. 242 O. BULLOCK true of Rankine and Riley; perhaps less so of Armitage, where the self is hidden by the monologue. In Rankine, the critical capacity of prose poetry is strongly to the fore. In Armitage, the prose launches fantastical narratives. Riley’s work centres on technique as much as subject matter, highlighting stylistic choices and the inherent contrasts between prose and poetry. Rankine, in particular, seems to transcend genres. If poetry and prose are ‘two independent but correlated artistic systems’,50 then she blends that independence and, in doing so, her work recalls the much-enjoyed notion that prose poetry is subversive. Delville notes the way prose poetry ‘straddles’ genres, and uses this word interchangeably with subverts.51 In contrast, a recent essay introducing a selection of prose poetry in the Australian Poetry Journal claimed that the prose poem is so self-evident an option for the (Australian) poet that it is no longer subversive at all and may even be considered a form, rather than a genre.52 On balance, one could say, that the pragmatic sense in which the prose poem ‘defes categorization’53 in itself means that the prose poem can always be seen as subversive. Finally, I would like to refer back to Gross and the ideas or thoughts he had during his recent return to prose poetry. Excerpts from ‘Evi and the devil’ are owned as ‘a prose poetry sequence’. According to the author, the work, tried frst in lineated form, resisted poetry. It was attempted in other hybrid genres, including a ‘poem-documentary’, but all were unsatisfactory. He describes a movement towards narrative and away from the lyrical. His conclusion—important for himself and useful for us—is that ‘lyric and narrative are principles, not demarcations’.54 This belief accords with Alexander’s assertion that many poets are storytellers and many storytellers are poets.55 Both these ideas refect on the work of the poets discussed here, in terms of their shifting use of registers and functions.

50 Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, 25. 51 Delville, American Prose Poem, 10. 52 Ali Jane Smith, “The Mongrel: Australian Prose Poetry,” Australian Poetry Journal 4.1 (2014): 6–14. 53 Steven Monte, Invisible Fences—Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 236. 54 Philip Gross, “Voices in the forest…”. 55 Alexander, “Prose Poetry”, Marie Alexander Poetry Series. 14 THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME 243

We are challenged as readers and writers to look at concepts such as ‘prose poetry’ to see, ultimately, whether they are helping or hinder- ing us. Perhaps the designation ‘prose poetry’ is more useful to readers and critics than to writers. I have suggested above that there is a difference between acceptance of the term and the practice of writing prose poetry. A look at journal contents and recent collections suggests that the practice is now far more widespread in the UK than previously. It is the writer who is more able to work in the liminal space that does not need a name, and innovative writing, which is of its times, is often nameless or in defance of these categories. This essay has imposed the term ‘prose poem’ on works which are not thus assigned, but which might all be considered versions of prose poetry; this represents one reader’s choice. The works differ from one another signifcantly; the fact that they are so different indicates the rich potential of hybrids, but does not make it easier to defne them. The discussion has sought to highlight the advantages that aspects of prose gives to poets and how they work with these additional resources to produce compelling literature. Where form is unclear, a deeper discussion about content and style becomes possible, and readers may be more open to these issues than an over-emphasis on genre can allow for. The success of hybrid works is not necessarily impeded by our inability to categorise them. At the same time, the history of the discourse of the prose poem has thrown up signifcant and useful debate about prosody and reading, both through its name and what it comprises.

Works Cited Alexander, Robert. “Prose Poetry.” The Marie Alexander Poetry Series, 2016. http://mariealexanderseries.com/prosepoem.shtml. Accessed 18 August 2016. Armitage, Simon. Zoom. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1989. ———. Seeing Stars. London: Faber and Faber, 2010a. ———. “Interview.” The Poetry Archive, 2010b. http://www.poetryarchive. org/interview/simon-armitage-interview. Accessed 11 August 2016. ———. “The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet.” Inaugural Lecture, Oxford University, 2015. http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-events/news/201511/ listen-professor-simon-armitages-inaugural-lecture-professor-poetry.html. Accessed 22 September 2016. ———. Comments during poetry reading, Poetry on the Move Festival, University of Canberra, 13 September 2016. 244 O. BULLOCK

———. Conversation with the author, University of Canberra, 16 September 2016. Atwood, Margaret. Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems. London: Virago, 1997. Delgado, Michael. “Review: Simon Armitage Inaugural Lecture.” The Oxford Culture Review, 2015. https://theoxfordculturereview.com/2015/11/26/ review-simon-armitage-inaugural-lecture/. Accessed 22 September 2016. Delville, Michel. The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998. Fitzgerald, Adam. “‘That’s Not Poetry; It’s Sociology!’—In Defence of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.” The Guardian, October 23, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/oct/23/claudia-rankine-citizen-poetry-defence. Accessed 11 August 2016. Frank, Robert, and Henry Sayre. The Line in Postmodern Poetry. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Ginsberg, Allen. “Notes for Howl and Other Poems.” In American Poetic Theory, edited by George Perkins, 343–346. Open Library: Holt, Rinehart & Winston of Canada Ltd., 1972. Gross, Philip. “Voices in the Forest: Three Ways of Conceiving of a Work in Progress with Selected Pieces from Evi and the Devil.” Axon: Creative Explorations #6, 2014. http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-6/voices-forest. Accessed 13 July 2016. Hartman, Charles O. Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Heaney, Seamus. Stations. Belfast: Ulsterman Press, 1975. ———. “Found Prose.” In District & Circle. London: Faber & Faber, 2006, 36–41. Hejinian, Lyn. My Life. Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 2002. Holloway, Dan. Review of “The Place of Poetry in the World—Simon Armitage’s Inaugural Lecture, 2015.” Sabotage Reviews. http://sabotagereviews.com/2015/11/26/the-place-of-poetry-in-the-world-simon-armitages- inaugural-lecture/. Accessed 22 September 2016. Howell, Anthony, ed. “The Prose Poem—What the Hell Is It?” The Fortnightly Review, 2016. http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2016/04/prose-poetry/. Accessed 11 August 2016. Kellaway, Kate. Review of “Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine— The Ugly Truth of Racism.” The Guardian, August 30, 2015. https://www. theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/30/claudia-rankine-citizen-american-lyric-review. Accessed 22 September 2016. 14 THE SUCCESSFUL PROSE POEM LEAVES BEHIND ITS NAME 245

Lotman, Yury. Analysis of the Poetic Text. Edited and translated by Dan Barton Johnson. Michigan: Ardis/Ann Arbor, 1976. Monte, Stephen. Invisible Fences—Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Murphy, Margueritte. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Noel-Tod, Jeremy. “Review of Seeing Stars by Simon Armitage”. The Telegraph, June 24, 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/ bookreviews/7851863/Seeing-Stars-by-Simon-Armitage-review.html. Accessed 11 August 2016. Perloff, Marjorie. Postmodern Genres. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. ———. Poetry On & Off the Page—Essays for Emergent Occasions. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998. ———. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Rankine, Claudia. Nothing in Nature Is Private. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Centre, Cleveland State Poetry Series, 1994. ———. Plot. New York: Grove Press, 2001. ———. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2004. ———. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. ———. “On the Prose Poem’s Formal Features.” In The Prose Poem in France: Theory and Practice, edited by Mary Ann Caws and Hermine Riffaterre, 117– 132. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Riley, Peter. Best at Night Alone. Old Hunstanton: Oystercatcher Press, 2008. ———. “In Conversation with Keith Tuma.” Jacket #11, 2008. http://jacketmagazine.com/11/riley-iv-by-tuma.html. Accessed 1 August 2016. ———. The Glacial Stairway. Manchester: Carcanet, 2011. ———. The Ascent of Kinder Scout. Sheffeld: Longbarrow Press, 2014. Santilli, N. Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2002. Saunders, Tristram Fane. “Claudia Rankine Wins £10,000 Forward Prize with Book of Prose Poems.” The Telegraph, September 30, 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/claudia-rankine-wins-forward-prize-with- book-of-prose-poems/. Accessed 11 August 2016. Simic, Charles. The World Doesn’t End—Prose Poems. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. Smith, Ali Jane. “The Mongrel: Australian Prose Poetry.” Australian Poetry Journal 4.1 (2014): 6–14. 246 O. BULLOCK

Strand, Mark. The Monument. New York: Ecco Press, 1978. Sutton, Paul. Review of Seeing Stars by Simon Armitage. “Unoriginality & Simon Armitage.” Stride. http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20 mag2010/May%202010/Armitage%20review.html. Accessed 1 August 2016. Tate, James. Return to the City of White Donkeys. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. PART IV

Other Voices, Other Forms CHAPTER 15

‘Man and Nature In and Out of Order’: The Surrealist Prose Poetry of David Gascoyne

Luke Kennard

In her authoritative study of the form, Santilli puts forward a number of useful analogies for the prose poem, four of which are especially pertinent to an assessment of David Gascoyne’s surrealist works: the container , the fugue, the refrain and the footnote. In the container analogy, the prose poem becomes ‘a kind of transparent container that, while it possesses certain constant attributes (prose sentences, brevity, and collective presentation, let’s say), acquire[s] its immediate effects from current literary moods that it absorbs or subverts’ (20). As we shall see, Gascoyne’s ‘containers’ at once absorb and subvert the mood of Surrealism: its techniques of automatism, its profoundly rebellious stance against reason and traditional structures of authority, specifcally religion. It is in the case of the latter that Gascoyne’s poetry rather subverts the subversion of the movement. In the fugue analogy, Santilli draws on compositional theory to demonstrate the way in which an ‘abandoned theme’ within a prose poem may be used ‘to initiate new sections’. This will be best examined through close textual analysis of the prose

L. Kennard (*) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 249 J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_15 250 L. KENNARD poems in question, in particular ‘Automatic Album Leaves’, which makes consistent use of furtherance or, as Santilli defnes it, ‘extension generated through repetition’. As in a complex musical work, ‘the point of origin masks its own privilege by setting itself in a context that coun- teracts causality and even association because it is a refection’ (108). Gascoyne’s prose poems tend to have two main points of attention: disturbed mental states and rituals. In the disturbed mental state the point of origin is masked for different reasons, but the effects are the same: the attempt, via ritual, to generate meaning, to explain the unexplainable and to explore metaphysical, noumenal spaces for which no proof exists is, by defnition, a refection. This leads us to the refrain, which Santilli defnes later in her study: ‘Repetition suggests a return or ceremonial circling. In the context of (suppressed) narrative(s), the refrain-encased text lifts a moment out of the general fux of passing moments, nullifying the time scale because the prose poem now exists outside sequentiality, freezing continuity into a tableau’ (187). We shall see this reifcation of distorted time, ceremony and narrative in ‘The Great Day’, as well as ‘Automatic’ and a number of the shorter prose poems. It is the suppressed narratives, in this case Gascoyne’s questioning of his own position on the Surrealist’s stance, which will be of interest to us here. Finally, Santilli also defnes the prose poem as akin to the footnote: a textual space which is itself supplementary/ subservient to the main body. In the past, I have looked at the various ways poets have used their prose poetry to comment on, interrogate and destabilise the techniques they use (apparently without self-consciousness or complication) in their verse poems. This is no less the case when considering Gascoyne’s Surrealist prose poems in the context of his Surrealist verse. In aesthetic terms, the prose poem can be defned by its combination of the conversational and the Surreal. It is democratic in that it appropriates and absorbs non-literary language and form, turning it to literary ends; and didactic in that we are to agree on the superiority of the latter. It is collaborative insofar as we, as readers, are expected to participate in that construction of meaning; and authoritative insofar as there is, as in a satirical one-liner, a plateau on which we are expected to converge. Like Breton, it asks us to concur with the great inner work of the imagination, its signifcance and, even, primacy. David Gascoyne’s Surrealist poems were composed and published between 1933 and 1936. He was the only British poet to be accepted by the movement and is therefore of interest 15 ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST … 251 to any British critic looking to defne (or apply) its tenets. Nonetheless, it is impossible to overlook the fact that Gascoyne’s Surrealist period was fairly brief and summarily rejected by him over the decades which followed. We can look to various sources to confrm this. The dual language (English/French) anthology Man’s Life is This Meat was published by Black Herald Press in 2016. According to Will Stone’s introduction, Gascoyne ‘divorced from Surrealism’ in 1938 with Holderlin’s Madness. (‘Refected Vehemence’ is the only prose poem in this concise selected—a poem I cannot make head nor tail of.) I like Stone’s use of ‘divorce’ here, and one needn’t read Holderlin’s Madness for very long to conclude, with him, that the collection constitutes a formal separation. These poems are no less complicated than Gascoyne’s Surrealist works, but they are unabashedly spiritual lyric poems of great seriousness, almost monastic in their focus. ‘He has no need of candles who can see / A longer, more celestial day than ours.’ A seriousness refected in its pentameter and confrmed by his later devotional poems on the Stations of the Cross. Roger Scott’s editor’s preface to the New Collected Poems (2014) adds further insight. ‘Gascoyne’s involvement with Surrealism was a necessary but brief journey of liberation. That phase, as he told me, tended to hang like an albatross around his neck in the public consciousness until the remarkable scope of his lifetime’s work became apparent in the 1990s. My focus became Gascoyne’s development from precocious avant-garde theoretician and practitioner of Surrealism into a religious poet of major signifcance’ (xx). We can agree with this conclusion, and yet still see the worth in exploring what was necessary in this ‘journey of liberation’, albatross notwithstanding. Such a journey (or volte-face) is explored in depth by Kathleen Raine in her 1967 article ‘David Gascoyne and the Prophetic Role’, which did much to cement Gascoyne’s reputation as the poet of major signifcance Scott describes. The escape, as Raine describes it, is from ‘suburban values and modes of thought’; and in Robert Fraser’s biography, Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of David Gascoyne, we learn that Gascoyne was educated, before the comprehensive system, at a polytechnic school with a complete focus on business and the civil service (also football, but not a whisper of music, poetry, or philosophy). While Surrealism, and its exponents’ enthusiastic acceptance of the young Gascoyne, may have provided passage from this dreary fate, we may yet share Raine’s suspicions of the movement in the late 1960s 252 L. KENNARD today, specifcally its Dadaist embrace of nihilism,1 but perhaps also its methods and results. Raine writes:

Surrealist imagery is not archetypal; often striking, sometimes prophetic, most of what surprised at frst by its novelty seems in retrospect the lumber of another age. […] every line is a new beginning; and the juxtaposition of image after image, whose shock at frst strikes the attention, in the end wearies it for want of an organizing principle – or rather, because subjected to the wrong organizing principle, murders it on a procrustean bed of manifestos and formulations.2

This amounts to a concise and comprehensive inventory of all that can fail in a piece of Surrealist writing; it is not just that it is off-putting for the reader, or disturbs the relationship between the writer and reader; rather it is that it fails even to accomplish that frustration in any engaging or interesting way. We could argue over what exactly ‘the wrong organizing principle’ is (and therefore what the ‘right’ one might be), but Raine’s conclusions are both unignorable and valuable in considering Surrealism’s current usage or obsolescence. Gascoyne’s frst published Surrealist poem, ‘And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis’, contains all the above. It opens: ‘white curtains of infnite fatigue / dominating the starborn heritage of the colonies of St Francis / white curtains of tortured destinies / inheriting the calami- ties of the plagues of the desert / encourage the waistlines of women to expand…’ (25) and continues for several pages. But, aside from his verse, Gascoyne wrote seven Surrealist prose poems which, at their best, transcend the more common trappings of the technique (via the expansive nature of the form itself) and contain, I will argue, the seeds for his divorce from the movement: the refection turned against itself, the subversion used against the totalising orthodoxies of subversion per se. Little Medusas. Allow me to absorb one of the more beautiful contentions of the Surrealists and to speak to you as if you are a poet (as every human being

1 “Such evil jokes appear less amusing since Belsen and Buchenwald put nihilism into practice on a mass scale, and the instruments of mechanized warfare made the prophetic nightmares of Ernst seem as old-fashioned as Jules Verne. Had such art been, after all, cathartic, or had it played its part in the loosing of the devils into a possessed world?” (201). 2 Kathleen Raine, “David Gascoyne and the Prophetic Role,” The Sewanee Review 75.2 (Spring 1967): 203. 15 ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST … 253 is, whether they have suppressed this facet of their humanity or not). What do we aim for when we write a Surrealist prose poem? I like to think of the frst-wave Surrealists in direct competition with one another, or, that is to say, the salons where they shared their work were for the joint purposes of admiration and the camaraderie of jealousy (when they weren’t disavowals or aesthetic show-trials). But it is not enough simply to ‘out-strange’ the last poem and there is little more tedious than listening to a stranger’s dream. Unless it is about you. Especially with these long-form prose poems, the reader/listener must be interested enough to go on reading/listening past the opening lines, to discover something, even if that something is only our instinctive need to make sense of that which resists our efforts. In that tension alone, there are rewards and consolations. So, when we write a Surrealist prose poem we are aiming for something ‘heady’, something the reader might get lost in but nonetheless enjoy the experience of being lost and fnd, in their disorientation, a new state, a metaphysical space of faith, doubt and seemingly illogical juxtaposition negotiable by certain points of illumination. A breadcrumb trail. My contention here is that such effects are more convincingly achieved in prose poetry than verse. Prose poetry is more spacious; it tends to contain complete sentences; it allows for more incongruity and complex yet visible patterns; already at odds with the supposed purpose of prose (to convey information clearly) it is, in fact, the ideal Surrealist form. ‘I know what I am saying…’ insists Gascoyne’s narrator of the hysterically nonsensical prose poem ‘The Great Day’. Indeed, the narrator insists that he is of sound mind and reason, in spite of sentence by sentence evidence that he is not. The four-page long prose poem begins with the narrator waking up, but waking into an even less logical space: a dream narrative with time out of joint and interjections of violence and lustful images. The poem feels fairly raw and unprocessed, and was likely composed automatically (pace the movement). The narrator wakes up refreshed, the stairs swimming towards him, everything shining and beautiful. He watches from his window, enervated, as a succession of ambulances or an Easter parade passes; he is not sure which, and hence neither are we. He refers to ‘Pascal lambs’ which, it should be noted, are sacrifcial, and therefore could stand for the victims in the ambulances. The world is part threatening and part whimsically benign: a bygone era (or a single, era-long day) where things start to happen ‘precisely at the hour of the one-o’clock séances and balloon-course meetings’, a 254 L. KENNARD confation and expansion of time fairly typical of Surrealist dream logic. The basin is not flled with water, but with ‘cream and ashes’ and this brings on ‘one of my fainting fts’. Cream and ashes could simply be shaving foam and stubble, the narrator so dissociated from his actions that he has forgotten, mid-shave, what he is doing. At this point ‘she’ appears: the object of the narrator’s affection/obsession. He rushes straight up to her: ‘her mouth was like a beautiful garden full of fowers and full of bronze fowers and beautiful fowers like medals’. The hyper repetition of ‘fowers’ is deliberately clumsy; it gives the impression of a speaker overwhelmed by the moment, or obsessively pedantic, or stu- pid, or both. Such guileless repetition also undercuts poetry itself (the best words in the best order). It is a device which persists in contemporary application of Surrealist technique3 because it works so well in under- mining the authority of the narrator/author, perhaps to comic effect (which always masks something else), or perhaps towards a subtler dissonance (which comedy always points towards anyway). Within the same sentences of ‘The Great Day’ we are given the fap- ping of sheets and the bottling of new wine (as metaphors for his kisses in the air), and this is where he insists that he ‘knows what he is saying’: at the moment of supplying us with the wildest succession of analogies. Maybe his account of the day is distorted beyond recognition as report- age, but it is precisely this distortion which makes him able to describe a kiss. We can say that we kissed someone and that it was exciting, but this does nothing to capture the experience or to recreate, for the reader, our state of mind (or body or soul) during the experience we purport to describe. It is the difference, we might say, between watching a football match and looking at a score line in a newspaper the next day; between the event which inspired a Rothko canvas, and the feeling the event inspired in the artist and, thereafter, anyone who experiences the painting. Andre Breton saw such psychic automatism as the raw material for insight: ‘If the depths of our mind harbour strange forces capable of increasing those on the surface, or of successfully contending with them, then it is all in our interest to canalise them, to canalise them frst in order to submit them later, if necessary, to the control of reason’

3 There are too many examples to list here, but we could think of Heather Philipson’s “mashed potato” in “Heliocentric Cosmology”; “fucking” in John Cooper Clarke’s “Chicken Town”; the register of casual communication in Sam Riviere’s frst two Faber collections, or, indeed, what I was aiming for in using the word “murder” (or murderer/ murdered/murdering) 57 times in “The Murderer”. 15 ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST … 255

(60). These strange forces Georges Hugnet defnes as being manifested in ‘madness, dream, the absurd, the incoherent, the hyperbolic and everything that is opposed to the summary appearance of the real’ (60– 61). In an era of scientifc rationalism, we may add religion to this list of strange forces and observe that, in the aforementioned realm of ‘commonsense’, faith is regarded with much the same suspicion as poetry. The principal ontological difference between a position of atheism and a position of faith is the importance we place in thought. For the ration- alist, such thoughts as itemised above can only be a waste product: saliva looping from the spit valve of a woodwind instrument before it continues its sane and coherent melody. But for the Surrealist and the person of faith alike, such thoughts are as real as the location in which they are thought. In response to Henry Miller’s ‘Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere’, Gascoyne wrote Miller a ‘Letter to An Adopted Godfather’,4 since published in chapbook form by Etruscan Press in 2012. Gascoyne’s letter is heartfelt, lyrical and eccentric, describing his inner struggles with a rare and alarming clarity. ‘I have always had […] a sense which seems almost like a mysterious recollection of the state preceding birth, and that is what I really want, and I can never hope to be satisfed with anything else. And so: drama, strain and anguish without end. An ever-latent Claustrophobia caused by the walls of the world-womb […phrase missing] – in order to persevere I must have faith, ex nihilo, in spite of everything. This ounce of faith is one of the rare concessions to the instinctive human demand for comfort that I can at all willingly allow myself to make.’ At this point, Gascoyne still views his ‘ounce of faith’ as a concession to bourgeois comfort, but it is nonetheless present, and clearly explored in his prose poetry. He was never, to put it bluntly, quite comfortable with the nihilism of Surrealism. Surrealism’s central adversarial relationship to Christianity may strike us now as slightly dated. We can look at the oft reprinted photograph from the journal The Surrealist Revolution: ‘Our contributor, Benjamin Peret insulting a priest’, which Gascoyne identifes as indicative of Peret’s poetry and its ‘brutal, bitter, crazy humour’ (77). We can also look at Paul Eluard’s ‘Critique de la Poesie’ [1929] as a key example insofar as it implicates not only the establishment, but all of us who fail to loath

4 Traditionally, the role of the Godfather or sponsor is to give their godchildren advice and spiritual guidance, to answer their questions and worries about the Church and spiritual life in general. 256 L. KENNARD it as much as he does: ‘Of course I hate the reign of the bourgeois / The reign of cops and priests / But I hate still more the man who does not hate it / As I do / With all his strength. / I spit in the face5 of that despicable man / Who of all my poems does not prefer this Critique de la Poesie’ (110). This poem is interesting for its confation of clerical and civic law, its completely straightforward language (in the sense of a gloves-off revelation of the poet’s subtext all along), and its meta-textual commentary upon itself as the only Eluard poem we should celebrate (on pain of being spat on). In a liberal, Western democracy such as the UK in the twenty-frst century, the Christian religion does not occupy the same elevated position (ideologically, politically, morally) as it did in the early to mid-twentieth century and may even seem like something of a soft target; the well- thrashed dead horse of the New Atheism. Certainly, we are surrounded by other forms of epistemological violence, whether marketing, PR and advertising, political rhetoric (including right- or left-wing extremism, yes, and including liberalism), corporate philosophy, hack-work posing as journalism, the means of representation and public language owned by the most privileged 4% of our society. One might feel that Thought for The Day ought to be the least of our worries. I’m writing this essay partly in order to argue that Surrealism and Absurdism persist as vibrant and vital tools for interrogating authority, specifcally by pointing out its arbitrary nature, and that their burning scorn might be turned against the new orthodoxies.6 In that sense, its program has barely begun.7

5 Worth noting that Peret’s aforementioned “insult” is in the form of literally spitting at a passing cleric. 6 Gascoyne writing to Henry Miller: “You attribute man’s misery to the fact that he allows himself to be the prey of unreal abstractions, do you not? The inexorable abstractions bred by moralists, ethicists, philosophers, critics, lawyers, politicians, etc. We are sucked dry and sterile by ideas as though by vampires. Therefore we must rid ourselves of our exaggerated awe of them, cease to attribute more than a secondary and quite relative importance to their authority, refuse to admit the validity of their unremitting claim to determine human behaviour (without succeeding in doing so, except quite superfcially). Then we shall be able to live in and enjoy the only true reality, which is that of most immediate present experience.” 7 Not least in that gestures of rebellion tend to be appropriated and marketed back to us as an opportunity to express our individuality—and if that individuality by its nature attacks the very system which is making it available to us, all the better—through what we buy; e.g. Che Guevara t-shirts, punk band t-shirts in high-street chain stores. 15 ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST … 257

I have mentioned Santilli’s comments on the ‘ceremonial’ repetitions and refrains to be found within prose poetry. In Surrealism such cer- emonialism takes a decidedly satiric turn towards the mockery of ritual. Gascoyne’s most substantial prose poem (a sequence of nine parts), ‘Automatic Album Leaves’, is a work in vigorous dialogue with Surrealists on the topic of faith. In A Short Survey of Surrealism, Gascoyne locates the roots of the movement in Dadaism, characterised by its ‘violent, vit- riolic attacks on modern society’ and its motifs of ‘destruction and sac- rilege’, often manifesting in a subversion of presentation/distribution (gallery openings and poetry recitals violently distorted into eccentric, offensive ‘happenings’ which often insulted their own audience) and resulting in riots and police involvement. ‘They wanted to break everything down in order to liberate – what? They did not know as yet.’ Gascoyne concludes that ‘complete anarchy, such as Dada represented, ultimately amounts to the most restricting kind of tyranny’. In this sense, Surrealism survives because ‘it is fundamentally a revolution of ideas and not of the forms expressing them’ (32–35). Nevertheless, the Surrealists preserved this violence on the level of the text and we might look at Peret’s8 poem ‘And So On’, translated by Gascoyne in the same study, as a point of comparison:

A kick in the pants once more and the empty sardine-tin thinks itself holy A kick with the heel on the jaw and it is a divinity which swims in pure honey not caring about protozoons (155)

I want to focus on the opening lines here: the language of science and religion, ritualistic gesture reduced to a single, repeated and simple act of violence: ‘a kick’; the empty sardine-tin here representing the tools used in the sacrament of the Eucharist. An empty sardine can is an inanimate object; a piece of litter. It is ridiculous that it might be capable of thought, or self-image. Everything is ridiculous. Religion is especially ridiculous, but mainly insofar as it is a part of the bourgeois establishment.

8 Peret was a prominent late Dadaist before being embraced by the Surrealist movement under Breton. 258 L. KENNARD

Gascoyne’s ‘Automatic Album Leaves’ is as typical of the movement as ‘The Great Day’, a tribute as much as a contribution,9 but one which vacillates as it accuses; as anti-Surrealist as it is anti-Christian. In fact, a poem which telegraphs Gascoyne’s abandonment of Surrealist tenets in favour of the lyric tradition and a reckoning with his own faith. Part I is a mise en scene describing what appears to be a manner of small chapel or church. It could also be a workshop or private study. Some of the para- phernalia is familiar but exaggerated: ‘hundreds of crosses hanging, made of rotten, worm-eaten wood, and to each is nailed a small fat fgure cut from rose coloured tin’; but even here the décor is wilfully disconcerting. The abject description of the wood and the carving of the crucifed Christ, if that is indeed what it is, reduced to an anonymous ‘small fat fgure’ is itself a distancing effect, as if the narrator had never seen such iconography before. The altar holds ‘bundles of hair, paper-knives, photographs of angels kissing’, miniature Greek statues in cork. The narrator describes a shadow ascending to the ceiling and bursting, whereupon many books open at once on ‘coloured plates showing embryonic development’ which then futter to the foor in slow motion, ‘faintly phos- phorescent and smelling of sweat’. Here, and throughout the sequence of nine prose poems, Gascoyne, like Peret in ‘And So On’, juxtaposes religious and scientifc symbolism and language, as if the one might undo or pollute the other. In the New Collected Poems published by Enitharmon in 2014, only this frst part of ‘Automatic’ is included, and the sequence is catego- rised within the ‘Other Early Poems’ section as opposed to its grouping with ‘Surrealist Poems’ in the original Oxford Poets Collected Poems 1988. This is a shame, I think; although doubtless the full sequence of ‘Automatic’ is fawed and perhaps negligible in the context of Gascoyne’s major work, to excise it altogether is to miss its subtext. Robert Fraser gives us the details of its initial publication in his biography: ‘Just as

9 Gascoyne himself comments on “The Great Day” and “Automatic Album Leaves”: “the result of my frst attempt to produce a sequence of lines of poetry according to the orthodox Surrealist formula: ‘Pure psychic automatism by which is intended to express … in writing … the real process of thought … in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all moral or aesthetic preoccupations’, in the words of Andre Breton. […] In November 1933, A.R. Orage published in his New English Weekly […] the series of short Surrealist texts that in the present volume I have re-titled ‘Automatic Album Leaves’. […] All these poems are united by the basic aim of achieving the greatest possible sponta- neity, but this aim can produce results of considerable variety” (xxvii–xxix). 15 ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST … 259 soon as he was back in London again, Gascoyne appeared in Orage’s paper once more as the author of ‘Ten Surrealist Cameos’ [since retitled ‘Automatic Album Leaves’] featuring a similar [as in similar to ‘And the seventh dream is the dream of Isis’] stream of unlikely and macabre connections, with an occasional disturbed ecclesiastic undertow’ (69). These connections still connect, and the undertow is to become the ostensible direction Gascoyne’s work eventually fows in. Part II makes reference to ‘the mental seasons, the spectacular Roman Catholic seasons’ and goes on to describe some form of initiation ceremony: ‘And did they ever show you the heavenly respiration-box with its nine coagulated wounds and its ink-stained mouth into which they used to pour gall-stones?’ It reads almost like instructions for a piece of instal- lation art, but this sacred/profane object used in an obscure ceremony is a distorted version of a reliquary: a decorative cabinet where fragments of bone, scabs and teeth of Saints were stored for veneration. Initiates are then required to recite numbers and phrases, and the tone remains quite formal and serious, especially when that which is described becomes hysterical and preposterous. ‘They would never have shown you the seasons’ combs, they have to be kept apart during the day, as they are apt to turn black and to sprout poisonous feathers.’ But perhaps no more preposterous than faith in itself, couched in terms of truths we all hold to be self-evident with weary pomposity, captured by the narrator’s tone here: ‘I refer of course to the mental seasons.’ Of course. The pleasures of ‘Automatic Album Leaves’ are ftful, but Part III opens with the fnest sentence in any of Gascoyne’s prose poems: ‘Several years ago I fell violently in love with a pear tree, and sat for a long time in one of its branches.’ This is gorgeous, contemplative, silly, and opens up limitless potential (it would be a great opening line for a novel). What follows, however, is somewhat disappointing. The narrator coughs up a surprising amount of blood, which settles in a pool around the tree, and thousands of tiny creatures with alarm clocks for bodies and daffodils for faces emerge from the pool and start ascending towards his perch. In the fnal sentence: ‘they climbed without pausing to the very topmost bough, where they astonished birds by committing hara-kiri en masse’. It is instructive—for anyone who wishes to use them now—to look at why this fails as a piece of writing and as an implementation of Surrealist technique. For one thing, it is hard to visualise the creatures committing seppuku. Do alarm clocks even have stomachs? Where did they get the ceremonial blades? How did they climb the tree if they were holding 260 L. KENNARD swords? The reader can only conclude that the scene is not an ‘authentic’ dream: the appropriations too arbitrary, an imagination too insistent on its own eccentricity. We can think here of Hopkins admonishing a young Yeats for the lack of logical cohesion in The Island of Statues wherein the poem’s characters live abandoned on a remote rock: ‘(how did they get there? what did they eat? and so on: people think such criticisms very prosaic; but commonsense is never out of place anywhere.)’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, by Paul Marlani, pp. 370–371). Of course, Surrealism sets out to be the enemy of ‘commonsense’ and other dominant rhetorics, and the ‘out of place’ is arguably its metier and prime location, but it may do to dwell on Hopkins nonetheless: in order for the effects of the out of place to work on us, the place itself must be established, evoked, agreed upon by the writer and reader. Thus, ‘Automatic’ is more successful when the reader can frmly grasp its deviations via the norms from which it deviates. To appropriate non-literary writing to literary ends is a legacy of the prose poem, and Part IV is written in the second person as a set of instructions. ‘Halfway down the alley you will meet a naked woman who will take you by the hand and drag you out to the esplanade. There you will receive the secret message about which I have already told you.’ In this context, second-person directions inevitably bring to mind the late passages of the Gospels where Christ instructs his disciples before the entry into Jerusalem: ‘Saying unto them, Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall fnd an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them unto me’ (KJV, Matthew 21:2). ‘And if any man say unto you, Why do ye this? say ye that the Lord hath need of him; and straightway he will send him hither’ (KJV, Mark 11:3). Sourcing a loft apartment in which to eat the Passover with his disciples is couched in similar, delightfully arbitrary terms. In Gascoyne’s poem, the narrator has not told us anything about the ‘secret message’ at all—again, setting the authority of the speaker against his own illogic while simultaneously dei- fying him with the gift of foresight. Part V opens with an exultation: ‘How historic and full of resonance are these crumbs!’ Gascoyne’s narrator then describes these possessed crumbs as if they were creatures (with a now familiar whimsy). There is no consistency of time and place, and the mundane is put beside the sanctifed space. ‘Observe the way they glide out of the churches, lifting their skirts with lobster-like delicacy, watch how carefully they transform 15 ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST … 261 themselves into Japanese plants and begin to scrub the foor of the travel bureau!’ The crumbs themselves, via a process left out of the poem, are somehow ensouled and can behave in contravention of basic physical rules. ‘They will never risk thinking in the ordinary, mediocre and sensible way that people like ourselves do.’ Here, Gascoyne dramatises the rational mind faced with the impossible, which we might even see as an allegory for faith; that these creatures/phenomena are bread crumbs alludes to the material of communion. Within Catholic or Orthodox Christianity the sacramental is beyond the symbolic: the congregation are required to fast completely before receiving communion and the sub- stance itself, the bread and the wine, is sacred. It is not a symbol, it is the body and blood of Christ and becomes this during the Liturgy. In fact, this is the very purpose of the Liturgy. There is nothing remotely ‘sensible’ about this and, here, Gascoyne locates another unlikely intersection between Surrealism and Christianity. If we are supposed, in Surrealism, to eschew the sensible, might that not be a similar suspension of rational- ity required to accept the transubstantiation? Part VI takes on an apocalyptic air as it describes ‘Suffering’, who becomes a character: another impossible, surreal embodied force, a ffth Horseman, if you like, in a poem already heavily laden with impossible creatures in nightmarishly exaggerated and inconsistent forms. ‘They shake their rattling wrists and Suffering fies up the chimney and opens its green chemical head like a workbox. The trout that swim continuously through her hair…’ and so on. The world is in chaos as Suffering makes its rounds: diseased trees break through everything, nurses perform unnecessary operations and our bodies are themselves horrifcally augmented: ‘Priests pull pieces of string through holes bored in their jaws.’ Out of this maelstrom and ‘stench of burning rubber’, Suffering triumphantly emerges, ‘dressed in white, wearing a bishop’s mitre stained with ink, wine, blood and sperm’. We might take this as an ironic statement on the supposedly enobling nature of suffering, noting the Dali-esque collage of the sacred and the profane, the oozing stuff of life (blood, sperm) presented as if it were itself somehow an ugly negation of the spiritual, a call-back to earlier juxtapositions and an attempt, perhaps, to reckon with the narrator’s disgust at the physical, its mess and fuidity. We might also see it as a necessary element of Gascoyne’s thought experiment, wherein he must consider every impossible angle in all its dream- like violence if he is to accept his own faith. 262 L. KENNARD

Part VII concerns ‘the little pilgrims that make their nests in stones’: they are afraid of ‘the wings of swallows. They are afraid of street corners.’ This information is reincorporated in the fnal sentence of the stanza where the little pilgrims are found in street corners, the very place they fear most, ‘shouting at the tops of their voices’. The collocation is most successful here; elsewhere in the sequence the elements feel inter- changeable (Why Japan? Why not Hong Kong, Maharashtra, Sweden?) and appear as of nowhere. This is the case here, too, I suppose, but it is that much more satisfying through comic timing. ‘I tell you again and again: “There is a crystallized hair in the last workman’s bouquet and fsh are cleaning their nails with the rose-coloured pencils of despair.”’ This is a simple trick of dissonance: a commonplace (How many times do I have to tell you?) followed by a sentence of glorious nonsense, but the restraint of the former is suffcient in allowing us to smile at the latter. The italicised lines could be a sentence from any other point in the poem, recasting the entire sequence as a plaintive need to be understood (a grumpy authoritarian demand, in fact) while explaining in terms that evade interpretation. Part VIII is especially pertinent to the idea of the anti-ritual with its clergyman who ‘is said to have made advances to the statuette of the Madonna that he keeps in his study’. This clashing of the erotic and the religious is embedded earlier in the poem when the narrator confesses: ‘It makes very happy to be able to read the word ROME on the top of your stocking.’ This sentence acts simultaneously as the prelude to a sexual encounter10 and an intimation that said encounter is in some way legitimised or granted special dispensation by the seal of Rome. ‘Please do not stare at my lips’, the narrator breaks off to say, ‘I know they are swollen, it is because of the wooden doll that I use for brush- ing my teeth.’ Once again, the explanation is as beside the point as it is true or, to put it another way, in answering one, it raises a more press- ing question: why? As elsewhere in ‘Automatic’, the assault on the sacred is literal: ‘let us amuse ourselves by tearing apart this shirt front with consecrated buttons’, a garment which recalls a priestly cassock, which, in Catholicism, has thirty-three buttons to symbolise the thirty-three earthly years of Christ and, in Anglicanism, thirty-nine buttons to

10 In a letter to Henry Miller, Gascoyne relates an anecdote about engaging two sex workers, taking them back to his hotel and telling them that he wants only to talk to them about their lives. “I don’t really care very much for fucking.” 15 ‘MAN AND NATURE IN AND OUT OF ORDER’: THE SURREALIST … 263 symbolise the thirty-nine Articles (post-Reformation, clergy would allegedly leave unbuttoned the articles they disagreed with). The violence is not even committed out of any revolutionary impulse or zeal but, rather, for amusement, as arbitrary as the narrator feels the ritual of consecration itself to be. In Part IX, the whole sequence concludes with a manner of appeal to a public assembly: ‘Does anyone know how to play conkers, a recipe for bats in the belfry, the way to lick stamps, the way to London; how to open collection boxes?’ The fnal question being well-placed as a link between the Church and fnance, specifcally the money taken from the congregation, in funding the ‘pearl of great price’, or in the propagation of a monstrous lie, depending on one’s perspective. It is, I hope, still the case that I am able to allude to scriptural references such as the pearl with the expectation of being understood but it is, in fact, the function of this very order of reference which ‘Automatic’ worries, if not overturns. If we cannot assume the reader’s foundational knowledge of scripture, such arcana might as well be possessed alarm clocks, dolls for toothbrushes, trout swimming through our hair. It is a question, then, of what we depart from, atheist and theist alike, ultimately to embrace or dismiss it. A few days after writing Holderlin’s Madness, Gascoyne wrote the following in his journal: ‘24.IX.37. Anything of the kind I may write from now on will be entirely different: no more themeless improvisation, no more autonomous lyricism, no more “pure” effect. I want depth, sol- idarity, experience. Poetry that will say something defnite. Emotion, a raised voice, but clear and coherent speech.’ He would live out this resolve in his future works (and in a manner which is only beginning to be appreciated after his death), but we may also note that depth and coherent speech were existing facets of his prose poetry. Indeed, the prose poem is unique in allowing the poet a depth of equivocation: there is no space in Gascoyne’s Surrealist verse for the clerical dimension, or for exploring anything so radical as faith and doubt in the Surrealist context or aesthetic. Aesthetically speaking, the verse is very much after Peret, if not written specifcally to please him, and such content would have been anathema. His prose poems, on the other hand, provide the space, both physical and philosophical, to do just that. Gascoyne would return to the form in later aphorisms and for passages of his long radiophonic poem Night Thoughts (1956), alongside the techniques of collage, multiple dissonant voices and equivocacy he developed in the Surrealist mode. 264 L. KENNARD

Works Cited Caws, Mary Ann, ed. The Yale Anthology of Twentieth Century French Poetry. Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2004. Fraser, Robert. Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Gascoyne, David. A Short Survey of Surrealism. London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1935. ———. The Sun At Midnight. London: Enitharmon Press, 1970. ———. Extracts from A Kind of Declaration. Warwick: Greville Press, 1988. ———. Collected Journals 1936–42. London: Skoob Books, 1991. ———. Night Thoughts: A Radiophonic Poem. Paris: Alyscamps Press, 1995. ———. Selected Prose 1934–1996. London: Enitharmon Press, 1998a. ———. Interview. Stand Magazine, Volume 33, 25 (1991). Reprinted in the introduction to David Gascoyne, Selected Prose 1934–1996. London: Enitharmon Press, 1998b. ———. Letter to an Adopted Godfather. Devon: Etruscan Press, 2012. ———. New Collected Poems 1929–1995. London: Enitharmon Press, 2014. ———. Man’s Life Is This Meat. Paris: Black Herald Press, 2016. Miller, Henry. An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere. New York: New Directions, 1939. Raine, Kathleen. “David Gascoyne and the Prophetic Role.” The Sewanee Review 75.2 (Spring 1967): 193–229. Santilli, N. Such Rare Citings. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2002. CHAPTER 16

Nonsense and Wonder: An Exploration of the Prose Poems of Jeremy Over

Ian Seed

‘Must a name mean something?’ Alice asked doubtfully.

The prose poem is an ideal vehicle for making the world we think we know, and indeed language itself, strange to us.1 It can work, as Michel Delville puts it, as ‘a self-consciously deviant form […] calling into question the naturalness of accepted boundaries between prose and poetry, the lyric and the narrative, or the literal and the fgurative’.2 Or, as that master of the prose poem Max Jacob declared, a prose poem will open the reader’s eyes ‘to the absurdity of our rituals and the things we hold dear’.3

1 A much shorter, earlier version of this article frst appeared in Tears in the Fence, 63. Permission granted by the author, also the editor of Tears in the Fence. 2 Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 11–18. 3 Max Jacob, The Selected Poems of Max Jacob, trans., ed., and intro. William Kulik (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 1999), 15.

I. Seed (*) University of Chester, Chester, UK

In the hands of Jeremy Over,4 the prose poem has much in common with nonsense literature in its ability to combine the seemingly irreconcilable: to be at the same time comic and philosophical, lyrical and satirical, absurd and beautiful. His work lays out before us the dazzling possibilities of language. Lurking not far beneath there is also a sense of melancholy, even when he is at his silliest. However, we have to be careful here when coming to an aesthetic judgement. As W.H. Auden warned Frank O’Hara: ‘I think you must watch for what is always a great danger with any surrealistic style, namely of confusing authentic, non-logical relations which arouse wonder, with accidental ones, which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.’5 This essay will argue that Over does, indeed, succeed in ‘arousing wonder’. Over’s work has a clear lineage back to Edward Lear. Like the later Lear who mixes prose and poetry, Over has a seductively sprawling and anarchic style. Indeed, many of his prose poems are in fact ‘hybrid’ poems, in which he combines pieces of prose and chopped lines within the same poem. On a brief examination of Over’s biography, one might be surprised to fnd such an anarchist lurking within the life of a former civil servant. He was born in Leeds in 1961, studied Law at Leeds University and, for many years, worked as a policy adviser for the Department for Work and Pensions, from which he has recently retired. Over has published two collections with Carcanet: A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (2001) and Deceiving Wild Creatures (2009), a third to be published in 2019. The ‘hybrid’ poem is hinted at in the frst stanza of ‘The Poet Writes to His Family from New York,’ and is the opening poem of his frst book. In the initial stanza, the lines are those of poetry but, since they come almost to the edge of the page and, in the third line, go over the edge (to be aligned on the right on the fourth line), might pass at frst glance for prose with a ragged right margin. The last line of the frst stanza, which is much shorter, could be the end of a paragraph rather than the end of a stanza:

4 This article is an exploration of Over’s prose poems. I should point out, however, that much of his work takes the form of lineated poems, which I plan to explore in a future article. 5 This quotation is given by Kenneth Koch in an interview with Mark Hillringhouse (Joe Soap’s Canoe 12, 1989). 16 NONSENSE AND WONDER: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PROSE POEMS OF … 267

Well here I am, alleluia, alleluia — a hot pineapple on a sharp parasol! The sea voyage was marvellous — six days of roses and cool hands. On arriving in New York one feels a faint trace of the ink’s desperation but what a sky I look for and am!6

Of course, it is visually, if not aurally apparent, that this is poetry rather than ragged prose as many of the lines on the page turn out to be short, and because of its bouncy, exuberant rhythms in lines such as: ‘but what a sky / I look for / and am’. What is equally apparent is Over’s characteristic use of nonsense in play with language and timing of unusual imagery. What does Over mean when he says that he is a ‘hot pineapple on a sharp parasol’, that he ‘feels a faint trace of the ink’s desperation’, and that he both looks for and is ‘a sky’? What is the connection between such a bewildering array of images? Why should we concern ourselves with them? We shall briefy return to the question of why we should bother at the end of this essay. In the meantime, it is worth pointing out that there is an important theme running throughout Over’s work: that of the difference between the literary or poetic reality we desire and the awkwardness and messiness of ‘real’ reality. The reference to ‘New York’ in the title of this frst poem points the reader towards Over’s poetic lineage. In the way he relishes and makes use of all kinds of bits of language that most of us would pay little attention to, he clearly owes something to the so-called New York School of Poets—above all John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Ron Padgett who, in turn, took much from the Dadaists and Surrealists who, in their turn, owe more than a little to Edward Lear and the wider tradition of nonsense verse. What of Jeremy Over’s relationship to British prose poetry? Here, it is best if we let him speak for himself:

I’m not sure I’m very well qualifed to talk about what’s happening at the moment with contemporary British poetry of any kind. My fnger has never been on the pulse of things exactly. I’m aware of excellent prose poems being written by younger writers here like Luke Kennard and Carrie Etter but the ‘context’ in which I’d set my work, i.e. the people I’ve tried to learn and steal from, is quite an odd one and probably a bit out of date.

6 Jeremy Over, A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), 9. 268 I. SEED

Early in the eighties I went on a happy day trip to Asa Benveniste’s bookshop in Hebden Bridge and came away with a copy of the Trigram Press anthology 5 x 5, which he edited, containing selections from Glen Baxter, Ian Breakwell, Ivor Cutler, Anthony Earnshaw and Jeff Nuttall. It was all boundary crossing work including prose poems and it’s been on and off my shelves many times over the years. I also bought a copy of Eugene Ionesco’s Fragments of a Journal which sort of compounded an absurdist view of the world. A lyrical and occasionally ecstatic absurdity. His journals (more than his plays really) have been important to me ever since. Other journal writers too like the natural historian Gilbert White. There’s perhaps a link between the everyday and apparently commonplace and prose poetry. I’ve enjoyed Lee Harwood’s work for a long time – Gilbert White appears a few times in Harwood’s work – and I like the mix of storytelling and the curiosity cabinet quality of some of his prose poetry. What he said about John Ashbery’s poetry and Joseph Cornell’s boxed assemblages too, both sharing a sense of being open to the reader/ viewer and inviting them into the work to animate it. I’ve also liked Peter Redgrove’s weird brand of magical realism and the thick texture and synaesthesia of Roy Fisher’s The Ship’s Orchestra. There’s a feeling of crammedness in both of these poets’ prose poetry that appeals to me. I’ve always taken my bearings from American poets more than British ones though. I’m not sure why but in the pre-internet days of the nineteen eighties and nineties, when I started writing, books from the US seemed very remote and attractive to me. And American poets seemed to be having a lot more fun than British ones. Prose poetry there was just one of the ways in which the stays were being loosened. Martin Stannard’s excellent Joe Soap’s Canoe introduced me to many of the New York poets including Ron Padgett who I think is a master of the prose poem. Several different kinds of prose poem in fact.7

British prose poets, then, and tellingly the work of the dreamy humour- ist Ivor Cutler, have their place in Over’s work. Yet, he clearly draws his inspiration from an extensive range of sources, including non-literary

7 Email interview between author and Jeremy Over, 4–11 June 2016. 16 NONSENSE AND WONDER: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PROSE POEMS OF … 269 ones such as the boxed assemblages of artist Joseph Cornell.8 It is important to note, however, that Over comes back in this quotation to the New York poets. John Ashbery, especially, is known for abrupt changes of tone within the same poem. Many of Jeremy Over’s comic effects depend on similarly startling changes, though in Over’s case the shifts can also be more gradual and subtle, and built into the narrative of the poem—for Over uses just enough of a ‘narrative’ thread to make us think that we are reading some kind of story which we intuitively understand. His nonsense is never mere nonsense. The hybrid poem ‘Love Poem 5 a.m.’ (‘hybrid’ being, as stated earlier, a mixture of prose and lineated poetry) begins with a quiet, meditative, intimate voice (although the element of send-up is already present), addressing us in short, lyrical lines:

8 “Visual art has been important for some time as a creative prompt; something to write about and something to learn from in terms of how to write. I’m interested in an English strain of visionary artists like Samuel Palmer and Stanley Spencer and have written some collaged poems about their work using words they’ve written in letters and journals. Collage plays a big part in my writing process and the work of Joseph Cornell (his journals as well as his collages and boxed assemblages), Kurt Schwitters (again his writing as well as his visual work and merz environments) and Peter Blake (especially his collecting and the art he’s made as a fan) have been inspirations. I’m writing a long poem at the moment based on my experiences in the light artist James Turrell’s skyspace environment at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Turrell talks about his art being a ‘non-vicarious’ one focused more on the seeing of the viewer than that of the artist and I’m interested in the verbal equivalent of this. There’s a link here back to what Harwood said about Cornell’s work inviting the viewer in. Both Turrell and Cornell are dealing with box-like environments. With Turrell’s skyspaces you literally enter into them in order to gaze out at the sky; with Cornell’s you are held at a distance by the glass but peer inside to share his reverie. There are often skies (night and day) in Cornell’s boxes too ironically. People often talk about prose poems being kinds of boxes of course but sonnets and haiku are also little containers. Perhaps prose poems are actually quite un-box-like in fact in their uncontained lack of line endings? I’ve been a practising Buddhist (practising in the zen sense of life being ‘one continuous mistake’) for some years and this also feeds into my writing in some ways I think. There is a lot of ‘I,’ ‘me’ and ‘my’ in the above and viewed from the Buddhist perspective of anatta (not self) this is deluded and likely to lead to a lot of suffering. So ‘I’ am interested in ways of writing (including collage and the use of chance or its OuLiPian alternatives) that play around with, and loosen, the sense of any permanent, stable ‘self’. I’m not sure where prose poetry fts in here. Luke Kennard sees its defning attribute as self-consciousness but perhaps it’s a self-consciousness that is busy sawing away at the branch of the self on which it is sitting. Or something.” (From an email interview I conducted with Jeremy Over, 4–11 June, 2016.) 270 I. SEED

The last grains of the night sift through the branches above our heads as we step, on bare feet through the young larches.9

The narrator and his companion are ‘too much in love to sleep’. But the poem then moves to:

weary swallows resting on the ground in small hollows – pockmarks on the grass body of a golf course by the sea10

It is the word ‘pockmarks’ here which, with its grotesquely comic connotations, changes everything in the poem’s tone. However, with little time to contemplate this new register, we are immediately swept into what seems to be something from a golfng manual:

This is sometimes tricky on seaside links, of course, where the often sandy ground can drain quickly and become very frm, causing the ball to travel a long way after the frst bounce. In these sorts of conditions, I always opt for the low chip and run approach myself: close the face of a seven iron slightly and just sweep the ball off the turf like you were clipping it off the dining room table. Better control and no divot.11

These unexpected twists and turns are a key part of Over’s somewhat seductive strategy and he constantly has the reader wondering where they are going next. Often, as in the above, Over seems to move from cut-ups of other text to larger pieces of found text. By taking an existing text out of its context and not only putting it alongside, but also connecting it to, another seemingly unrelated text, he highlights the sheer oddity of different kinds of language and demonstrates the fragility of meaning. The result,

9 Over, A Little Bit of Bread, 13. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 16 NONSENSE AND WONDER: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PROSE POEMS OF … 271 not unlike a Zen koan, provokes a realisation that not everything which we take so seriously is important in the way we think it is. The two-page prose poem, ‘Pendolino’, the last poem in his second collection Deceiving Wild Creatures, performs a similar strategy to that of ‘Love Poem 5 a.m.’, moving from one narrative to a completely different one through a series of associations which Over somehow makes appear seamless to the reader. ‘Pendolino’ begins in banal enough fashion with the narrator sitting on a train with a ‘low evening sun shining through the window’. We then learn that ‘there is also rain […] so the window is covered with raindrops that are running diagonally down the glass because of the speed of the train’. It reads like someone who is practising being a writer by observing what is around him, but who hasn’t quite got the hang of it yet and has little idea of what to put in and what to leave out:

I am looking at the back of the seat in front of me. I don’t know what it is made of – some sort of grey slightly refective material – a kind of metal or hard plastic perhaps. The sun is shining through the window and onto the back of the seat so that the raindrops on the window are projected onto it – the shadows of the drops that is.12

There is a feeling here of the writer trying to impose a poetic and meaningful narrative onto an awkward and untidy reality which will never ft into a story he is trying to fnd. He keeps us wondering where he can go next with his attempt to overcome the irreconcilability of life and literature. Although we are continually taken by surprise, the twists and turns of the narrator’s thoughts trick us into believing that they are somehow inevitable. The narrator goes on to imagine that he is watching a ‘semi-abstract’ flm directed by Stan Brakhage, even though, as we learn, he has never actually seen one. As he studies the raindrops, he realises that they remind him of:

sperm – sperm in a hurry for something. An egg, I suppose would be normal. Only they don’t look like they are searching for an egg to me. They just look like they want to escape – to fee the scene.13

12 Jeremy Over, Deceiving Wild Creatures (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009), 73. 13 Over, Deceiving Wild Creatures, 73. 272 I. SEED

The back of the seat in front starts to look like a gravestone and the raindrops like words being scribbled across it. The writer begins to feel that he is getting somewhere, but then notices that ‘the gravestone has a handhold on the aisle side, shaped a bit like a Mickey Mouse ear’. He concludes that a ‘gravestone with a cartoon ear is no good to me’, and instead looks out of the train window to look for inspiration there, only to be confronted by a small copse which reminds him of a woman’s genitals. Feeling ashamed by this thought leads to a whole new series of questions on what might be the sources of this shame; for example, ‘imagining a woman’s genitals in a landscape owned by the National Trust’ or ‘imagining the wrong woman’s genitals perhaps?’ This train of thought takes us into unexpected territories. He wonders, in fact, if he is really ashamed of ‘not being on a train at all now but here at my desk […] while pretending to be sitting on a train’. In conclusion (here, we have to miss a few steps in the poem along the way), he asks: ‘What is there to be ashamed of, after all, in trying to follow Reverdy’s directions by learning “to love reality better after a long detour by way of dreams”?’ He turns the question, seemingly, to the reader: ‘I ask you. I ask you in particular’, but we then learn that this ‘you’ is ‘R.H. Stacy, Associate Professor of Russian Literature at Syracuse University, poised there on the back fap, perusing your own half-read book and thought- fully smoking an unlit pipe. You look like you might know a thing or two about this.’ Somehow, in the space of two pages, we have started with one story and ended in a completely different one, and yet it all seems quite natural, quite ‘real’ as we are reading it. At the same time, we are thrown into the gap between narrative on the one hand, and reality on the other. As with much nonsense literature, there is something enticingly terrifying about all this, as well as comical and ridiculous. Over achieves a more intensely nonsense effect in his poem ‘Daubed Loops’ through a rather different technique, that of repeating one seemingly simple phrase in a series of variations. The sentence is taken from an autobiographical note by the German artist Gerhard Richter:

[…] as a child, after I had eaten all my food and while my supper plate was slightly greasy, I daubed loops with my fnger, curves that constantly cut across each other and produced fantastic spatial structures that changed according to the light, that could be reshaped endlessly, according to the light, while the endlessly intertwining forms constantly cut across 16 NONSENSE AND WONDER: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PROSE POEMS OF … 273

each other, and spatial structures that had eaten all my food to illustrate my plate, daubed loops in order that I as a child […] could be supper, had eaten all my fnger, slightly cut, while I daubed loops, I had eaten all my fnger, and while my eaten fnger could be changed, could be slightly reshaped as a fnger, I daubed loops with my other fnger, I changed fnger and daubed loops endlessly, constantly, I daubed loops, could be curves, could be loops […]14

This is like something which starts off as practical prank and gets out of control. The effect, if the poem is read out loud, is not dissimilar to being spun at increasing speed and, although the initial whirls are tantalising and escape-inducing, the poem’s content, style and process combine even more effectively to form an alternative perception of the world. In other words, once we have stopped reeling and had the chance to regain our senses, we see the world we thought we knew in a freshly adjusted and ultimately welcome light. In his fve-section prose poem ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’, Over takes some sentences from an essay by Wallace Stevens and repeats them in a way that evokes a dog chasing its own tail. The effect of this poem is to highlight the way in which our thought is often circular without us realising it. We believe we have moved forward and made progress when, in fact, all we have done is stay trapped in self–defeating, obsessive ways of thinking. The result, as always with Over, is funny without diminishing the inevitable sense of underlying sadness and isolation:

To begin with, I don’t know. I don’t know if I am competent to discuss this. I am afraid not. I don’t know. Perhaps no one knows and if no one knows, perhaps it doesn’t matter. It may be that someone else does know. I don’t know. Does it matter? This is not the same thing as saying it does or that I do. On the one hand it does and on the other hand it doesn’t. I don’t know. But it really has, along with everything else, and for the most part no doubt always shall, in time, be something of that sort, for very little is ever not. I suppose I had very little in mind anyway. A kind of jotting. I should like to consider this by autumn.15

This kind of repetition clearly owes something to the prose poems of Gertrude Stein. However, the effect of Stein’s work is less comical, more

14 Over, A Little Bit of Bread, 41. 15 Ibid., 44. 274 I. SEED an investigation into the endless possibilities of what we might call ‘surface reality’. Stein’s poetry shows how much there is in everyday objects which is marvellous and strange, which can never really be captured fnally in language. It does not have the same strong element of parody and, unlike Over, does not make use of found text. In his poem ‘Wunderkammern’, for example, Over appears to take sections of found prose and cut off their margins (the excerpts are cen- tralised and tightly framed by a black rectangle so that there is no space between the words and the frame) in order to show how easily meaning can be disrupted with just a little tinkering. The effect, once more, is beautiful and comical. Figure 16.1 presents the frst two sections of a six-section poem.16 Over has, in fact, edited the found text to intensify the experience he is seeking to create for the reader, namely to ‘get the effect of a peephole with the language sort of half-hidden behind and extending beyond the frames. I wanted that crowded curiosity cabinet feeling.’17 As with the world through the looking glass, nothing is ever quite what it seems. Here, we return to the question put at the beginning of this article: why should we bother with any of this? Chesterton offers a convincing defence. After differentiating between satire and nonsense, Chesterton states that nonsense literature offers an ‘escape into a world in which things are not fxed horribly in an eternal appropriateness’.18 That much, perhaps, is obvious, though it is a point we are continually in danger of forgetting. However, Chesterton goes on to say that the ‘cosmos’ is ‘nonsensical also […]. And here we fancy that nonsense will, in a very real and unexpected way, come to the aid of the spiritual view of things. Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the “wonder” of creation, but they have forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible.’19 Existentially, nonsense can be seen as a way to authenticity and freedom in its resistance to common sense, or to any dominant view of what reality ultimately is (Lecercle, 108).20 It keeps judgement in suspense.

16 Ibid., 53. 17 In an email from Jeremy Over (29 June 2015). 18 G.K. Chesterton, Stories, Essays and Poems (London: J. M. Dent, 1935), 124. 19 Chesterton, Stories, Essays, Poems, 124. 20 See Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (New York: Routledge, 1994), 108. 16 NONSENSE AND WONDER: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PROSE POEMS OF … 275

Fig. 16.1 From ‘Wunderkammern’ 276 I. SEED

It also, crucially, makes us laugh. Whereas the gap between subject and object, between what one desires and what really is (which in any case is ultimately unknowable) is rendered in some sense tragic by philosophers (such as Nietzsche and Camus), this same gap becomes comic in nonsense literature. It is this gap which the poet Jeremy Over exploits so well. For Over, not even surrealism can lay any claim to ultimate reality. His prose poem ‘…and they lived happily until they died’ parodies not only the fairy tale but also the surrealists, as if he wished to say to them, ‘Don’t think for a moment that you have any access to a superior world!’ Surrealism may subvert our everyday sense of reality, but it can be sub- verted in turn, as this excerpt shows:

She knew him at once and fell weeping upon his neck. Two of her tears fell upon his eyes, which immediately grew quite clear so he could see as well as ever. Everything that he had forgotten came back […]. On that spot a fne tree sprang up on which the bird rested, then it took them both home where they found their child grown tall and beautiful and the blockhead rode up the glass mountain and ordered more spinning wheels.21

However, in showing reality in different possible lights, Jeremy Over’s work can also take on a more sombre tone; for example, that of an autis- tic child in the poignant ‘Tree / Bush’. Here, as acknowledged in a note at the bottom of the page, the poem relies on excerpts from Hans Asperger’s paper on autism in childhood. The poem is worth quoting in its entirety:

TREE / BUSH It can happen that three or four cross over each other so that one has a knot in one’s hand. Then there is a wound there then they grow together.

STAIRS / LADDER It is much more comfortable on the stairs than on the ladder.

STOVE / OVEN The stove is what one has in the room.

21 Over, Deceiving Wild Creatures, 11. 16 NONSENSE AND WONDER: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PROSE POEMS OF … 277

LAKE / RIVER Well the lake it can never be as long and never have that many branches not in the least little bit.

GLASS / WOOD Glass is a moss. You would have to make a hole in it unless it’s a dry twig. With glass you need to hit only twice.

FLY / BUTTERFLY The fy has wings like glass.22

The effect is to show us that the world can be seen in different ways, and that there is not necessarily any ‘best’ or ‘most real’ reality. Although the result of how he dexterously evokes sadness and happiness simultaneously is astonishing, the reader cannot help but ask: why sadness? The answer is that these texts show us that our own way of perceiving reality may work much better in terms of our survival in the world, but that this perception is also in some way impoverished. Through images and language rich with association, Jeremy Over empowers voices that we do not normally pay any attention to, giving us glimpses into strangely beautiful truths, and re-awakening our buried sense of wonder. Of course, in the UK the prose poem itself has always been regarded as marginal and can therefore be seen as a ftting form for such voices, making use of the form to throw ‘authority fgures off the scent—pretending to fsh for the moon so that they can be left alone to pull up the nets and see if they have snared any real fsh’.23 Jeremy Over, alongside other new British prose poets such as Emily Berry, Luke Kennard and Hilda Sheehan,24 works from the rich traditions of nonsense verse, surrealism and Dadaism, to sweep us through doors we did not think were there into a new reality in which sadness and delight, lyricism and parody, the banal and the beautiful are reconciled. With the new British prose poem, we fnally get to celebrate real fsh on the real moon.

22 Ibid., 33. 23 See Over, “Fishing for the Moon: Some Recent Prose Poetry in the UK,” Hard Times: Contemporary British Poetry Issue 80 (2006): 39–44. 24 These poets employ the prose poem alongside many different poetic forms. See, for example, Emily Berry, Dear Boy (London: Faber & Faber, 2013); Luke Kennard, The Harbour Beyond the Movie (Cromer, Norfolk: Salt, 2010); and Hilda Sheehan, The Night My Sister Went to Hollywood (Sittingbourne, Kent: Cultured Llama, 2013). 278 I. SEED

Works Cited Auden, W. H. Quoted by Kenneth Koch, in Joe Soap’s Canoe 12 (1989). http:// martinstannard.com/jsc/jsc12compressed.pdf. Accessed 10 June 2017. Chesterton, G. K. Stories, Essays and Poems. London: J. M. Dent, 1935. Delville, Michel. The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Jacob, Max. The Selected Poems of Max Jacob. Translated and edited by William Kulik. Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1999. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature. New York: Routledge, 1994. Over, Jeremy. A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese. Manchester: Carcanet, 2001. ———. “Fishing for the Moon: Some Recent Prose Poetry in the UK.” Hard Times: Contemporary British Poetry Issue 80 (2006): 39–44. ———. Deceiving Wild Creatures. Manchester: Carcanet, 2009. CHAPTER 17

Prose Poetry and the Spirit of Jazz

N. Santilli

New Orleans, in the early years of the twentieth century, was a bus- tling and noisy place. Numerous cultures—domestic and foreign—vis- ited, passed through or settled, and all of them practised their traditions loudly against the backdrop of places made infamous in the jazz numbers they inspired: Basin Street, Funky Butt Hall, Mahogany Hall. Public parades, including funerals, were frequent events in the city. Around the offcial parade line, hangers-on would ‘be having their own damn parade, taking what was going on in the street and doing something with it, tearing it up kind of, having their fun. They’d be the second line of the parade’ (Sidney Bechet).1 Not an anti-parade, not even a heckling one, but people catching the spirit and continuing its momentum with their own expressions. With its brass bands leading the way and the colourfully sinuous Second Liners behind them, this vehicle of early jazz parallels the classic symbol of prose poetry, the Thyrsus. Jazz music itself might usefully be equated with this Second Line: around traditional Western, composed music, the arabesque can be seen as the soloist’s interpretation—anything from a modestly syncopated rag to a hot jazz solo.

1 Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002), 62.

N. Santilli (*) Independent Scholar, London, UK

Ever since Baudelaire’s ‘Le Thyrse’ appeared in his iconic collection of prose poems, the straight rod surrounded by its arabesque of green tendrils has provided an ideal image of prose poetry itself which, like jazz, embellishes the classical tradition around which it plays. The rod equates with prose fction, biblical narrative, archaeological report and so on, which the prose poem presents then dances around in its inimitable and always individual way. It is this shared sense of play around a standard, a classical, or otherwise canonical form that I would describe as the ‘spirit of jazz’. Under this phrase I would also suggest the relocation of the lyric and, most recently, in British practice, it has enacted a syncopation upon its very poles of rod and thyrsus to shed its skin, emerging capable of dealing with humanity at its current state, with its contemporary concerns and struggles with expression. It is this fnal act with which the prose poem passes into a new era, not—as was always the risk—as a twentieth-century form but, like jazz itself, a succession of styles but always questioning and moving its boundaries, incessantly avant-garde. Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton claimed to have invented jazz in 1902. His claim may be unlikely, his dating of it even more dubious, but his description of jazz, as the syncopated marches of ragtime combined with the lyrical fow of the blues, is generally accepted as a fairly accurate one.2 Forty years before Morton’s extravagant claim, Charles Baudelaire was trying to write into existence a form of writing that would suit modern Parisian life. He found something of what he sought in the miniatures of Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit and applied it to his own experiment, Les Petits Poèmes en Prose. An artistic alchemy, which Jelly Roll used years later, was at the heart of his new form.3 Baudelaire’s famous defence invokes the spirit of jazz, avant la lettre, explicitly associating it with the birth of the prose poem as a dynamic form. On one hand, ‘musical but without rhythm…’ refers to the strict French poetics of the time. On the other, Baudelaire suggests that the innovation he seeks will be found inside music itself; a new prose that

2 A generally-accepted date for the introduction of jazz is 1917, with the recordings by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. 3 “Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movement of our rever- ies and the convulsive movements of our consciences?” From Charles Baudelaire, The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo, trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 30. 17 PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ 281 fows and convulses with the new rhythms and disruptions of modern life. Such connection with the spontaneous expression of an individual will later be found in jazz music.4 Syncopation and swing in general, and the jazz solo in particular, would come to ft Baudelaire’s searching description.5 Baudelaire continues: ‘This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.’6 Scarred and noisy, Paris was undergoing major development at the time of his writing. New boulevards and public spaces were drawing people outside. Characters from all levels of society emerged to watch each other and to be seen, accompanied by the sounds of demolition and construction. Baudelaire draws on Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas De Quincey when he explicitly aspires to a style that integrates the human fow of the city with the unfamiliar sounds of its mechanical interruptions. At this point, the new locus for the lyric is not outside society, but at its core; the poetic voice now just one sound: competing, soaring, threading through the mechanistic and human melee of the city.7 It is no wonder

4 In one of his record reviews for The Daily Telegraph, Philip Larkin misquotes Baudelaire to update him (with characteristic dourness): ‘Back from a holiday where the only music came from waiters’ beach radios, my scoured palate revels in the accumulation of recent records. While an exciting multilayered sandwich works slowly down the spindle of my record-player, I realize afresh the truth of Baudelaire’s words: “Man can live a week without bread, but not a day without the righteous jazz.” Philip Larkin, “Make Me a Palate,” 9 September 1961, reprinted in All What Jazz (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), 45. 5 The writer Carl Van Vechten was still trying to sweep away older forms in 1917, “it is not my intention to start someone writing a tone-poem called New York… But, if any composer, bearing these tendencies (jazz) in mind, will allow his inspiration to run riot, it will not be necessary to quote or to pour his thought into the mould of the symphony, the string quartet, or any other defunct form, to stir a modern audience”, Carl Van Vechten “the Great American Composer”, Vanity Fair, April 1917, qutd. in Roger Pryor Dodge, Hot Jazz & Jazz Dance: Roger Pryor Dodge Collected Writings 1929–1964, Selected and edited by Pryor Dodge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 45. 6 Baudelaire, The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo, 30. 7 Cf. Winthrop Sargeant, “like jazz, skyscraper architecture lacks the restraint of the older forms. The skyscraper has a beginning, and perhaps a middle. But its end is an indefnite upward thrust. A jazz performance ends, not because of the demands of musical logic, but because the performers or the listeners are tired… A skyscraper ends its upward thrust in precisely the same way. It might be stopped at almost any point in its towering series of foors.” Jazz: Hot and Hybrid, qtd. in Roger Pryor Dodge, Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 71. 282 N. SANTILLI that both prose poetry and jazz will become identifed with the city, and particularly with Paris. Oscar Wilde also pre-dates Jelly Roll Morton’s new form, but he was familiar with Baudelaire’s work in this genre. His own, very mannered, biblical-styled prose poems were among the frst to be written and titled ‘poems in prose’ by a British writer.

When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort. And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said, ‘We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.’ ‘But was Narcissus beautiful?’ said the pool. ‘Who should know that better than you?’ answered the Oreads. ‘Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.’ And the pool answered, ‘But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.’ ‘The Disciple’, Fortnightly Review 56 (July 1894), 23–24. Wilde narrated his pseudo-biblical tales over lunches hosted by Frank Harris, who published six of them in his Fortnightly Review (1894), including revised versions of ‘The Disciple’ and ‘The House of Judgment’ which had appeared in The Spirit Lamp in 1893. Some of Wilde’s ‘poems in prose’ therefore have existed in at least three versions: live performance (we might say) and two, different, published versions. A.J.A. Symons instinctively refers to the spoken versions as ‘witty improvisations’ Yet, however modern they sounded, Wilde’s appropriations and inversions were in line with pre-1920s jazz which was still mostly composed ensemble playing with prepared and controlled improvisations. Nevertheless, it would be out of these early forays from canonical classical form that both the prose poem and jazz would blos- som as lyrical improvisations in the 1920s. 17 PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ 283

Ragtime8 struck the frst freedom for jazz, which followed it, breaking (or ‘ragging’) the even pace of the popular march-time with lively, lightly syncopated embellishments. In any comparison between music and literature, it cannot be over-emphasised that jazz players were com- mercially more restricted by their market—live audiences and, when recording became possible, the recording companies.9 However, it is because Wilde was essentially a performer and improviser at heart that he bears comparison—perhaps seen most fully in the transcript of his trials, where he thrives on turning real-time question and answer into another form of call and response. In some respects, his embellishments in this context are more thrilling than the composed witticisms of his plays and aphorisms. Wilde remained quite conservative in many ways, artistically, so we cannot make guesses as to what he would have made of even the earliest jazz. He does not report on any new music during his trip to America in 1882, although he does engage with the country on an auditory level: ‘America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale but by the steam whistle… such continual turmoil must ultimately be destructive of the musical faculty.’10 His tour is a learning journey for him and he comes to re-evaluate the new sounds: ‘It was not until I had seen the waterworks at Chicago that I realized the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautifully rhythmic thing I have seen.’11 If he had survived a few more years, Wilde would have encountered the tango, the fox trot, the grizzly bear, and the new syncopations of Ragtime, which would have resolved his struggle between the rural harmony and urban rhythms that he identifed in America. His death in

8 “Ragtime—A genre of musical composition for the piano, generally in duple meter and containing a highly syncopated treble lead over a rhythmically steady bass. A ragtime composition is usually composed three or four contrasting sections or strains, each one being 16 or 32 measures in length”. Library of congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200035811/. 9 Referring to pre-1920s, “The city of New Orleans sported two kinds of jazz: the rougher, blues-colored music of Uptown and the more polite Creole music of Downtown”, Schuller, 70. 10 “Impressions of America” by Oscar Wilde, edited with an introduction by Stuart Mason (Sunderland: Keystone Press, 1906), 22–23. 11 Wilde, “Impressions,” 24. 284 N. SANTILLI

1900 holds him forever poised on the cusp of Modernism. The broken rhythms of syncopation and the beauty of industrialised sounds (boogie woogie, for example, favours the train) were still ahead. * Jumping forward in time to an era when jazz was openly appreciated by British poets, we can see prose poetry moving beyond ragging to a ‘jazzing up’. In contrast to Wilde’s embellished biblical-style prose poems, Roy Fisher’s The Ship’s Orchestra is biblical style, ‘jazzed’. Fisher wanders further from familiar biblical format and inserts it as a detail into a larger work. Nevertheless, it is a recognizably biblical register that is used for this surrealist scenario, in which ‘he’ (the narrator or not-the-narrator) is seduced by a fower:

And forthwith the fower made great to do to unloose the fastenings of his garments, even to the buttons of his braces. And right hard the work proved, whereas the fower had not fngers but the points of its leaves only. So in this wise passed a longer while than that of all that went before.12

There is no specifc biblical tale on which this piece hangs: Fisher has created the sense of a passage from the Old Testament by his register and phrasing, while simultaneously playing with it in characteristic, gentle humour. We recognise in the fower, the familiar biblical use of a natural object as the instrument of God’s will (such as the burning bush, or the whale). Yet, in this prose unit, the fower is an active agent, mischievous in its ‘defowering’. The subtle accuracy of imitation in the vocabulary, ‘unloose the fastenings of his garment’ (my emphasis) is precisely what provides the ‘physical’ humour further on—namely, that without fngers the unfastening takes a right long time. For a time-frame that has lasted only two sentences, the fnal sentence skews it all beautifully with a moment stretched so far that is almost painfully shambolic. Finally, the introduction of the West Midlands dialect, ‘and right hard the work proved’ (my emphasis) suggests a vernacular translation, but with everything getting somewhat lost in that translation. The dream- like de-fowering by the fower turns the whole composition into a ‘head

12 Roy Fisher, The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005 (Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2005), 113. 17 PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ 285 arrangement’ where, once stated, the next sentence must push on with the logic of the previous one.13 Today, the phrase ‘jazzed up’ is a quaint expression, suggestive of something once made modern but viewed from the perspective of having already passed into the ‘old-fashioned’. Yet, ‘made modern’ really is quite accurately what early twentieth-century popular music represented. ‘It has been said that there is no such thing as jazz music and that what is commonly called jazz is only a manner of playing music. This is partly true’, writes early jazz dancer and music critic, Roger Pryor Dodge, in 1929.14 Early jazz was an active approach to musical expression. Not so much a fully conceived form or simple subversion, but a fight of fancy. From the early ventures of ragtime and the similarly closed set of biblical (re-)arrangements by Wilde, we can begin to see how this mischievous transgression operates within prose poetry. The shift is a subtle one. With Wilde and Fisher still in mind, let’s take another modern work, ‘Proust from the Bottom up’, in which Tom Raworth uses Proust’s text as his source (by this very act, asserting it to be on a par with the Bible or Shakespeare, perhaps as a known text). Using the Enright/Kilmartin translation of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (913–914), Raworth rewrites the key passage which begins: ‘As for the inner book of unknown symbols’. Raworth instead starts mid-sentence ‘exploring the ocean bed’ stopping at ‘The book whose hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us’ and re-transcribes the whole passage back to front. One sentence (which marks a repetition, albeit in translation) jumps to a previous sentence to continue, ‘cheekily and literally, from bottom to top, while at the same time redistributing its elements in willful disregard of normal syntax and sense’.15

13 A musical term used by bands in which the version is not written down but arranged and remembered collectively. 14 Roger Pryor Dodge, “Negro Jazz,” in Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance: Roger Pryor Dodge Collected Writings 1929–1964, selected and edited by Pryor Dodge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3. 15 Christopher Prendergast, Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 158. 286 N. SANTILLI

PROUST FROM THE BOTTOM UP not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us. not that the truth, they are arbitrarily chosen. the books whose hieroglyphs are patterns formed by the pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible upon us, it remains behind as the token of its necessary truth. the ideas printed in us by reality itself, when an idea – an idea of any kind – is let in dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the ‘impression’ has been laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been the most austere school of life, the true last judgement. this book, more listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all in art and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it. but excuses have no place genius, that is, to say ‘instinct’. for instinct dictates our duty and the these are mere excuses, the truth being that he has not or no longer has the moral unity of the nation, he has no time to think of literature. but this book: he wants to ensure the triumph of justice, he wants to restore war, furnishes the writer with a fresh excuse for not attempting to decipher to evade this task! every public event, be it the dreyfus affair, be it the aside from writing! what tasks do men not take upon themselves in order our work for us or even collaborate with us. how many for this reason turn any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no-one can do exploring the ocean bed), if I tried to read them no-one could help me with.16

Raworth enacts an astonishing novelty act on the Proustian text in this prose poem (I use the term ‘novelty’ in the same way that it was used to describe jazz when jass was still a zeitgeist rather than an event). ‘Proust from the Bottom Up’ is not a simple cut-up or ironic subversion of an iconic text—that would be ragtime behaviour. Rather, Raworth’s text involves time and movement, and is alive with engagement in its own play. Concepts and words are substituted at what feels like key points. For example, where Proust writes ‘ideas formed by the pure intelligence’, the skewed transcription turns out ‘patterns formed by the pure intelligence’ and later substitutes ‘impression’ for Proust’s ‘ideas’. Christopher Prendergast suggests that the whole thing ‘totters’ like the Duc de Guermantes as he appears at this point, near the end of the novel. I propose instead that the piece stands, like the description of the

16 Tom Raworth, “Proust from the Bottom Up,” in Tottering State: Selected and New Poems (New Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1984), 186. 17 PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ 287 duke’s head, whipped by a ‘tragic gale’ of time. As Raworth’s recorded reading of the piece reveals, without using a single word of his own, he has created a new language from Proust. Even the double-article, ‘and the these are mere excuses’ is not a rock on which two halves of the text crash, but a break which ripples them. It is seamless while composed entirely of seams: Frankenstein’s monster, alive and tottering. Raworth’s technique creates certain rhythms and/or conceptual gro- tesques out of Proust’s text through its substitutions. Alternatively, it may be that he is simply ‘cavorting around’, which is how Roy Fisher describes Louis Armstrong’s early trumpet solos. The fact that Proust himself manages to manipulate time as if the narrative were made of rubber would make Raworth’s avatar even more complex, if it were not for the poet’s absolute economy. Raworth does not add, he only interferes. As a mischievous curator, he challenges our beliefs in the truths that Proust postulates. Is the ‘pure intelligence’ changed by being formed of ‘patterns’ rather than ‘ideas’? Or does the notion survive intact, considering that both words are part of the proustian palette? Are all Proust’s words related to each other as notes in the same key, harbouring mel- ancholic or vibrant tones, reverberating regret or scintillating prospects? Raworth skips the metaphor and the question to tickle those keys on his re-fashioned paragraph. If we have not read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (and the Enright/Kilmartin translation, in particular), we are confused. If we have read it, we are not much more enlightened—just unsure whether the line of logic has been saved, ragged, or completely ‘jazzed up’. * In 1928, Louis Armstrong laid down a trumpet solo to ‘West End Blues’, which made the world take note of a new sound and marked the shift from ragtime to jazz and novelty to art.17 Innovations had occurred gradually, including the return of the old gospel-tinged improvisational lyric of blues, which was stretched across the formal and still relatively stiff ragtime, delivering a softer fow and an onward propulsion. This was

17 I do not have space here to discuss the issue, but can only insist that this essay be read in the light of an awareness of the social and political discrimination of the era which skewed the opportunities for progress and/or perceived achievements of many African American musicians in particular. 288 N. SANTILLI one of the most important innovations: the notion or quality of ‘swing’ which came to be identifed with the jazz of the 1930s and 1940s.18 Like syncopation, swing is, in part, a physical stretching and collapsing of passing time; such as coming in late on the beat (swing musicians will firt in different ways with the time that each beat takes to sound) but it is not a quantifable quality. The question ‘does it swing?’ remains a legitimate one for assessing any piece of early jazz. Much like prose poetry, without much history to lean on, we still often wonder of a piece if it is ‘authentic’: Is this a prose poem? Does this swing? Composer and critic Gunther Schuller describes swing as ‘a force in music that maintains the perfect equilibrium between the horizontal and vertical relationships of musical sounds; that is, it is a condition that pertains when both the verticality and horizontality of a given musical moment are represented in perfect equivalence and oneness’. He breaks down the swing function into two parts: a ‘“type of accentuation” and a “continuity”—the forward-propelling directionality—with which individual notes are linked together’.19 We have no great leap to fnd a parallel with Roman Jakobson’s vertical and horizontal qualities in language. For Schuller, verticality in music refers to the regular march of the pianist’s left hand while the horizontal invokes the lyrical, the embellishment and, at times, the improvised line of thought which the right hand expresses through melody. For Jakobson, verticality in language refers to the poetic or metaphoric, where layering rather than (marching) progress takes place. It is the horizontal, in Formalism, which describes the onward nature of expression. In prose poetry, as I have argued elsewhere, the horizontal axis is the slightly dominant because the medium is prose and the movement must be onwards, however slightly. Gertrude Stein enacts the strongest case for the tension between the two axes in her prose poetry, apparently circling her still life objects, entranced by them so as to suggest a purely metaphoric layering until we become aware that her circling is what we are following and that, by isolating the

18 This “big band” period is often considered the golden era of jazz, but the context is populist, rather than artistic. 19 Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 7. 17 PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ 289 object with so much repetition and not quite repetition, she is reweaving the very fabric of the contextual atmosphere in which that object sits.20 Returning to our comparison with early jazz, it is interesting that, within the interplay of these similarly bi-directional qualities, both arts should be characterised by that moment of perfect balance between them; as if getting it right puts the wind in the sails of both the jazz piece and the prose poem… Perhaps partly due to his long-term experiences with serious medical conditions, Raworth raises time over character, onwardness over elaboration. Like Beckett, the primal need to go on, regardless of the current condition, is the only goal. Amelioration is not the issue (‘fail again, fail better’), executing the next step is all that counts. To go on is to live and if that step swings… there is the joy of life. However, to set the wheels turning, to allow onwardness, gives rise to plot and subplot, to character and narrative logic, to chapters and endings. Raworth manages to avoid this by the sheer adrenalin rush of his poems which cascade down each book, spilling across each page in such a hurry that we read to catch the falling words, to make sense as they rush past. There is little time to sit back and contemplate the whole. Live readings in Raworth’s breathless style support this rush to a stop. Raworth has described his method of composition and it is not of breakneck speed, but highly wrought and considered.21 * For Roy Fisher, there is as little subversive behaviour in the emergence of prose poetry as there was in the emergence of jazz. ‘A thing has inherent qualities (musical or verbal) which give it form and hold it together

20 See Michel Delville’s discussion of Gertrude Stein and the relationship of her work to formalist plotting. In particular, Delville defends Stein’s work against David Lodge’s insistence that her “vignettes” are more surrealist than cubist due to their predominantly metaphoric nature (Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 70–71). 21 Marjorie Perloff suggests that Raworth’s broken rhythms may be linked to a constant awareness of his own heart condition [Raworth underwent open heart surgery in 1956]. “Cardiac arrhythmia, moreover, plays a role, not only thematically but formally. The dis- location of rhythm is hardly unique to Tom Raworth—indeed it is a staple of experimental poetries today—but in comparison to the rhythmic units of, say, Bruce Andrews or Steve McCaffery, Raworth’s starts and stops connote a curious breathlessness”. Marjorie Perloff, “Filling the Space with Trace,” in The Gig, 13–14 (May 2003), 130–144. 290 N. SANTILLI without bells and whistles and anapaests and so forth. Why that should be subversive sounds curious to me. It’s just something done well.’22 Fisher refers to Anabase, by St.-John Perse as ‘rhapsodic noise’. ‘It went on and on’, he says, ‘he [St.-John Perse] had his elasticity. I had mine, which was much more tight-arsed.’ To be done well, Fisher, ever the entertainer, is sensitive to his time on stage. Start off, say something and get out, he explains, ‘You’ve got Coltrane or a three-minute record’ and he plumps for the three-minute record every time. Fisher’s long prose poem, The Ship’s Orchestra (composed 1962– 1963) is a modernist work, made up of eighty-three prose units. The narrative revolves around a small band who are employed on board ship but who are never invited to play. The narrator is one of these musicians and the prose poem takes place in his consciousness, which moves from direct observations of his immediate surroundings to musings, to tran- scriptions of dreams. As a narrator, his identity loses defnition until it becomes as watery as the ocean on which he sails. ‘He’s an indeterminate sort of character… You don’t know much about him except the way he sees things. He may or may not be sober, he may or may not be telling the truth. He may or may not know whether he’s telling the truth or not. He may or may not be who he says he is. He may or may not know all these things.’23 Each prose unit represents a new idea, shifting slightly in tone or register even if the identity of the speaker does not necessarily change. Each unit might be a new three-minute record on which the narrator is the soloist, adapting to the number and the ensemble. Meanwhile, everyone and everything in The Ship’s Orchestra seems to be waiting and yet, at the same time, everything is happening: musicians are playing, women are being seductive, men are being uncommunicative, passengers pass by and make provocative statements, someone is hallucinating, the narrator gets drunk and vomits. One of Fisher’s favourite works from his oeuvre, The Ship’s Orchestra was inspired by Picasso’s cubist painting, ‘The Three Musicians’. Comedic nightmares and image fragmentation are characteristic of Kafka, Beckett and Woolf. It is not diffcult to read their traces:

22 Telephone conversation with me, April 2015. 23 John Tranter interview with Roy Fisher, 1989. Published in Jacket (October 1997) (accessed 8 April 2015), http://jacketmagazine.com/01/fsher-iv.html, accessed 23 July 2017. 17 PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ 291

I am something that has been pushed out of Amy’s body, though I cannot remember it. I have no legs, though I have the idea of legs, and I have no arms or hands, though I can conceive of them; but I can move my head this way and that, where I lie. She knows I have come out but she doesn’t know where I am. It would upset her very much to learn that I can move my head in this way, and I shall take care that she never fnds out. My eyebrows are beautifully thick and curved, incidentally. A thin brass ring goes bouncing down the steps noisily. And still the orchestra is about to agree. Bandaged, I am something that has been pushed out of Merrett’s body in his sleep. Although I can run and jump I have no head at all. I think I am yellow. (The Ship’s Orchestra, 122) Half way through composing the prose poem, Fisher was scrapping units because he knew they could continue, they could run on and on, they could develop. Like Gertrude Stein, he keeps moving although the object of his text is not allowed to develop. Like Raworth—and unusually for prose poetry writers, who often make much of the ceremonies of exit—Fisher does not regard endings with much concern. While this seems to contradict his preference for ‘the three-minute record’, surely the very epitome of closure, the prose poem was not to evolve into a novel or long prose narrative.24 To retain its cubist aesthetic, the short unit must be maintained throughout. Nothing must be allowed to grow roots, become rhapsodic, or extend beyond its discrete prose unit. ‘They were becoming loose’, explains Fisher, ‘That’s not my music.’ So what is his music? Fifty years on, Fisher remains absolutely clear about how he composed the piece and what he was trying to achieve:

I had a rigorous law of composition, which is that everything that was written must somehow come from what was already written, but that must be regarded as complete. The work at any moment was fnished. I couldn’t lay trails as a novelist can for something that was coming in advance. And I was not to know – I must not know – what was coming next. So I wrote in these short units that were almost like verses, and each one was fnished,

24 The three-minute record became the industry standard around 1910, when the 10-inch, 78 rpm shellac disc rose to become the most popular, causing artists to write to that format. 292 N. SANTILLI

and for me that was a compositional law, and it gave me a standard. A compositional law sharpens up your texture.25

Fisher’s comments on how it feels to be improvising in music are worth laying alongside his compositional method: ‘if you’re improvising jazz’, he says, ‘you fnd you are in a common language of re-phrasing tunes, core sequences and so forth… ways of laying things out’. Returning to The Ship’s Orchestra, in another cluster of semi-related units, a woman (possibly the female musician, Amy) gives birth (possibly to the narrator) in a disused vehicle part, the sound of which, as it rolls, accompanies the build-up to the possibility that the band are about to agree, with a coming-together in perfect harmony, a climax, which is an airplane tyre, which is the same object in which the musician Amy gave birth… and so on… By his own admission, it is legitimate, although not straightforward, to consider Fisher’s prose poetry from a jazz perspective: ‘you can legiti- mately say what you’re saying’, he reassured me, when I frst approached him about whether prose poetry might be usefully discussed along with early jazz. ‘People will dig what’s going on.’26 He understood my approach was never a syntactical exercise in comparing rhythms, and Fisher does not mix his music and his writing. In fact, he aligns his prose with that of Samuel Beckett, closer to silence: the writing emerges.27 His remarks on both writing and playing are drawn to the feel of ebb and fow, at least from a compositional point of view. Fisher really loves the swing. Speaking of the early recordings of Louis Armstrong with Fletcher Henderson of around 1924, Fisher describes Armstrong’s solos as ‘simply cavorting around’ and, as if astonishingly to him, it’s an antic which catches on. ‘Trumpeter after trumpeter learned to lark about and it became a language.’ Fisher is interested in this idea of a common language that he can create both as a musician and a writer because it establishes a new ground from which he can take fight. He participates in the

25 Telephone conversation with me, 2015. 26 Ibid. 27 “There’s a basic artisan level in playing a tune in time and in the right key without failing, without scaling the impossible. But at the same time you’re always pitching yourself against something—you’ve got to invent. So I like that combination” [John Tranter interview with Roy Fisher, 1989. Published in Jacket 1 (October 1997), http://jacketmagazine. com/01/fsher-iv.html, accessed 8 April 2015]. 17 PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ 293 source of his own whimsy, whether that is a swing solo or a prose unit such as this one from The Ship’s Orchestra, ‘A journey. Between Amy’s breasts by caterpillar tractor. And back again.’ Fisher enjoys surprising our line of thought. It is not the caterpillar tractor that makes us smile so much as the ‘And back again.’ Although many of the images are details—from a painting, or the ship, or a body part—the effect is not one of fragmentation because each idea, each unit, is complete in itself. So much for the verticality of swing. For the fow, the onwardness, the horizontality that is the prose gene, Fisher directs me to Lester Young, the introvert saxophonist who didn’t listen to Louis Armstrong and who came up with his own style. It’s easy to see the attraction. Like Fisher, Lester Young was neither part of the academic set, nor a trained musician. He was essentially a blues player, a ‘musicianer’, re-telling the tales of ordinary people.28 His soulful, blues- drenched solos are also known for expressing so much depth in a narrow range of notes and an absolute economy in the number of notes he used. By this time, it’s worth noting, in the 1940s and 1950s, the jazz solo has moved quite far from a simple embellishment of the main theme: the musical lyric can weave its own separate line of thought before returning its listener to the common melody played by the ensemble. Young’s solo saxophone notes rise, almost regretfully, from the ensemble playing, like a sleeper rousing, moaning softly and turning away from us. We want to follow, to know the dream he is reluctant to leave. Before too long, the plaintive notes reveal their thought and drop away. It is no wonder Lester Young was the ideal accompanist to Billie Holiday.29 If Fisher’s aesthetic is that his words emerge from silence, in a common language that will playfully caper about before returning to the silence, then it is unsurprising that his other mode of expression is jazz music of the swing era. From the late ragtime/early hot jazz break, where the ensemble would pause for the soloist to fourish, to the pro- pulsive nature of combining a steady march with a fowing lyricism, Fisher’s work combines the shared language of the common tongue with the capering about of a truly talented soloist whose confdence never overtakes his mischief.

28 Sydney Bechet used the word “musicianer” for his type of musician. See, Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002). 29 Listen, for example, to Lester Young’s solo on Billie Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow”. 294 N. SANTILLI

Structurally, the prose units of The Ship’s Orchestra are interruptions to the waiting; a disruption and embellishment to sleep. Returning to Baudelaire’s dream of a new form of expression, Fisher believes that the prose poem itself is now a common language which, despite being characterised by relative brevity, is a fowering form, just like a solo: ‘closure-gestures would be a lurking presence, available and hinted at but not sought after’.30 * Among commentaries of early twentieth-century hot jazz, a key line of appreciation is the soloist’s logic. Random fancy is not rewarded; neither is hogging the limelight with nothing to say. The solo seems to lift the melody away from the ground of the ensemble. We follow its trajectory, its turns and tumbles, its soaring and its dives, until it returns at just the right moment to rejoin the band. For all its inspired individualism, the jazz solo is a virtuoso display of contiguity: the prosaic ‘and then’ of the piece. The prose poem offers precisely that: a prose lyric for modern city life; a unifed vision in piecemeal; a sound that reaches us as a collection of voices in a space that defes every defnition in order to harbour any form of life. English literature was slow to recognise prose poetry as a genre for the likely reason that it had no need of it. Medieval interlinear translations, seventeenth-century penchant for marginal notes, experimental novels as early as the form itself and much more besides, meant that prose poetry never commanded the attention that it enjoyed in other less liberal countries where prose and poetry were kept separate and distinct. Why then, would it come into view in the twenty-frst century? One possibility is that the fundamental aesthetic has shifted. The prose poem, from its very naming, has been predicated on the dialectic relationship between prose and poetry or similar categories (metaphoric/metonymic and so on). In the twenty-frst century, these traditional categories are being overturned in favour of fuidity, a sliding between poles which themselves melt into their own spectrum. The political left and right have moved to occupy a narrower middle ground. More recently, gender itself has been redefned from a duality to a scale. Heterosexuality, re-named ‘cisgender’ becomes one state among many. We can equate this with the African-based jazz manner of promoting the off-beat, from which can arise the characteristic sound of syncopation.

30 Email to me, 2015. 17 PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ 295

The prose poem as genderless genre becomes the site where the term passing slips into British usage to refer to gender fuidity. ‘Passing’ in the jazz era referred mainly to light-skinned African-Americans passing as Caucasian in order to live as part of white society. Related issues of passing referring to movement across countries—issues of immigration— might also be drawn to the prose poem form. Roy Fisher’s narrator in The Ship’s Orchestra cannot be identifed with any certainty as male or female, simply as a pure consciousness fowing around the sculptural set. Fisher’s infuences were modernist in general, and Picasso’s painting ‘Three Musicians’ in particular. British poet, Patience Agbabi, who has referred to herself as ‘bi-cultural and bi- sexual’, is more explicit in her playing with gender. If Fisher’s vagueness is aesthetic, Agbabi’s is clearly political. In the prose poem ‘Double Entendre’, an after-work scenario takes place between two friends in a gay bar in Soho. Agbabi appears to have closed the book while the ink was still wet. When we open it, the facing page carries a prose poem of equal length, set in a coffee shop in Amsterdam, paralleling the Soho scene but ‘translated’ to a slightly different cultural scene. This technique, a textual inkblot butterfy in rain- bow colours, evokes the call-and-response of African music and biblical text.

“Andy!” she replies, wide-eyed and pierced eared, “How are you?” “Solo. The shit hit the fan. She was sex on legs in long johns but wore pritt- stick for lipstick,” he replies. “And how are uhu?” “Dionne!” replies Café au Lait, sucking hard on her home grown, “How are you?” “Solo. The shit hit the fanny. He was sex on legs in PVC but wore wheels of steel in his conga eel,” she replies. “And how are you, go-go girl? Still selling your cunny for money?”31

‘He’ and ‘she’ are used but are not direct indicators of the characters’ genders. The scene is twinned rather than doubled or repeated. Words are echoed. Instances of copy or imitation occur internally, either on the

31 Patience Agbabi, Transformatrix (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2000), 72, 73. 296 N. SANTILLI surface level of rhyme (Agbabi’s prose crackles with these) or deeper, in the list of other patrons, for example, which reads like a stage play of stock characters ‘Bizzy Lizzy the speed freak, a hippy chick talking pop- pycock, a fat cat, a fag hag’ and so on. Like ‘Proust From The Bottom Up’, we read the two texts initially as an original text and a variation, but subsequently come to see them both as variations on a timeline that goes backwards and forwards, democratis- ing the whole idea of variation, embellishment and transgression. Agbabi plays this game in extended form in another work of prose poetry, Problem Pages. The conceit here is that fourteen famous sonneteers from Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547) to June Jordan (1936–2002) write to ‘Patience’ with their problem in one paragraph, to which she responds as a helpful, modern agony aunt in the next. The poets are represented in humorously modest and slightly self-conscious sentences—which increases the irony when ‘Patience’ not only embodies her name, but delivers her advice to these legendary writers in a rather arched tone. The prose poem is the perfect vehicle for this neatly exe- cuted ironic textual performance in which ‘Patience’ is mostly telling geniuses to pull themselves together, dishing out practical advice that would not look out of place in current-day creative writing magazines. The consistent rhythm across the piece, of two fairly equally-weighted paragraphs, creates a familiar ‘call-and-response’ dynamic, which places the sonneteers on a production line, while the consistently repeated address to ‘Dear Patience’ soon draws a smile.

TWO LOVES I HAVE Dear Patience, I am a poet who writes for the stage and thus typecast a performance poet. Yet my plays are on the GCSE syl- labus so my verse will stand the test of time [….]

I empathise. When will people stop categorizing and embrace the page-stage, black-white, heterosexual-homosexual continuum? […]32 Agbabi and Raworth clearly favour the spoken over the written word. There are numerous recordings of Raworth reciting his poetry and prose poetry. He reads everything at breakneck speed, as if taking Roger

32 Patience Agbabi, “Problem Pages”, in Bloodshot Monochrome (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2008), 34. 17 PROSE POETRY AND THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ 297

Pryor Dodge’s note about improvisational artists to heart: those ‘performers are constantly, joyously, doing their art at white heat’ (Dodge, 31). Agbabi employs the rap-rhythms that are based on rhymes, which are activated in silent reading as well as performance. Indeed, it may have been the generation growing up with rap in the 1970s that has helped establish the once-uneasy relationship between (prose) poetry and music.33 In her verse, such as her Prologue to Transformatrix, the rhymes are all placed at the end of the line, as in early-style hip hop:

If you rub two words together you get friction cut them in half, you get a fraction. If you join two words you get multiplication.

In her prose poems, Agbabi works more with internal rhymes, which, like the sonnet form, emphasises the contrast between the form’s hard shell and the internal fow of its content. It is worth noting that Agbabi also engages with northern soul, a British phenomenon from the late 1960s based on rare American soul music.34 With this fresh perspective, the prose poem suddenly seems an ideal form for modern times, just as jazz was the ideal musical expression for the new century. Suddenly, the prose poem becomes a vital contributing factor in this new landscape where the very pillars of organised society have been recast. Contemporary prose poetry must discard the Thyrsus itself, founded as it is on dualism, just as jazz moved away from synco- pating composed classical music to follow its own evolution. Rooted in classical music, jazz developed along its own lines and split into hot, cool and sweet, swing, bebop and so on. Just like its twin soul of jazz, the prose poem is shedding its skin—it does so easily—to sustain its defning, quixotic nature and continue to host its unique space for literary protest and play.

33 In pre-1970s jazz poetry, the emphasis is on rhythm, but rap introduced the idea that rhythm is based on rhyme, which took the lyric centre-stage and felt much more natural than rhythmic jazz poetry, such as the blues poems of Langston Hughes. 34 Agbabi’s personal history helps her to access both black and white cultures, as well as hetero and homosexual social scenes. She “passes” in the most positive sense of the word. (Black-British by birth, Agbabi was raised by a white family and acknowledges her twin attachment to white, middle-class literary forms alongside African ones). Her most well- known work to date is perhaps Telling Tales, an updating of Chaucer’s characters in the Canterbury Tales. 298 N. SANTILLI

Works Cited Agbabi, Patience. Transformatrix. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2000. ———. Bloodshot Monochrome. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2008. Baudelaire, Charles. The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo. Translated by Rosemary Lloyd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Bechet, Sidney. Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography. Cambridge MA: Da Capo Press, 2002. Delville, Michel. The American Prose Poem. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998. Dodge, Roger Pryor. Hot Jazz & Jazz Dance: Roger Pryor Dodge Collected Writings 1929–1964. Selected and Edited by Pryor Dodge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Fisher, Roy. The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2005. Larkin, Philip. All What Jazz. London: Faber & Faber, 1985a. ———. “Make Me a Palate” (9 Sept 1961). Reprinted in All What Jazz. London: Faber & Faber, 1985b. Perloff, Marjorie. The Gig 13–14 (May 2003). Prendergast, Christopher. Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013. Raworth, Tom. “Proust from the Bottom Up.” In Tottering State: Selected and New Poems. New Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1984a. ———. Tottering State: Selected and New Poems. New Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1984b. Sargeant, Winthrop. “Jazz: Hot and Hybrid.” In Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance, edited by Roger Pryor Dodge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Schuller, Gunther. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Tranter, John. Interview with Roy Fisher, 1989. Jacket 1 (Oct 1997). http:// jacketmagazine.com/01/fsher-iv.html. Accessed 23 July 2017. Vechten, Carl Van. “The Great American Composer,” Vanity Fair (April 1917), quoted in Roger Pryor Dodge, Hot Jazz & Jazz Dance: Roger Pryor Dodge Collected Writings 1929–1964. Selected & Edited by Pryor Dodge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Wilde, Oscar. Impressions of America. Edited with introduction by Stuart Mason. Sunderland: Keystone Press, 1906. CHAPTER 18

Roy Fisher’s Musicians

Peter Robinson

Roy Fisher’s book-length prose poem The Ship’s Orchestra appeared in a hardback-only edition from Fulcrum Press, London, in 1966. It is a small, square object bound in green boards with lighter green end papers and a cream dust jacket printed in black with a strikingly irrelevant, and unacknowledged, David Jones woodcut of an ark being constructed, and an acknowledged black-and-white portrait of its author wearing a tie and period art-school-style horn-rimmed glasses.1 It has a jacket blurb of two paragraphs that carefully indicates its aesthetic allegiances, what a reader may expect to fnd inside, and an assertion of the author’s emergent standing: ‘A poet of international reputation has broken through the barrier between poetry and prose with this disturbing and original volume. Using the same motifs over and over he paints us a picture. Simultaneously as in a cubist canvas several sides of the subject emerge at once.’ This comparison with cubist paintings, gesturing towards one of the work’s starting points in a painting by Picasso, locates it as

1 For a description of the woodcut and its non-relation to the book for which it provides a jacket, see Ian Pople, “Roy Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra,” PN Review 229, 42.5 (May–June 2016): 60.

P. Robinson (*) University of Reading, Reading, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 299 J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_18 300 P. ROBINSON part of the 1960s modernist and experimental revival. However, rather than the revived aesthetic simultaneity of that moment, the overlapping or intersecting of planes is probably more relevant to it, and the mention of ‘motifs’ tilts this towards the composition as an equivalent for a piece of music. When Philip Larkin asked Fisher whether he had gone through the bebop barrier, the poet and jazz pianist replied: ‘There is no bebop barrier.’2 It is as unlikely he will have thought there was a barrier to break through between poetry and prose. Nevertheless, The Ship’s Orchestra is amongst his most uninhibited of works, and its being written in prose contributes directly to its fexibility of development and lack of constraint.3 In the second blurb paragraph, the work’s allegiances are shifted from that nineteen-teens art movement to another from the inter-war years:

Roy Fisher leads us on a journey through a tunnel where in the prolonged darkness the whole world begins to feel with its ears and fngertips eyes and dilated nostrils. The music from the ship’s orchestra cannot be heard but the echoes work their way intermittently along the words. The musicians are lost somewhere in the depth of the ship. The blackness breaks into hallucinatory retinal images, not as completely mad as a nightmare more in the frst stages of sleep when reality merges with fantasy and slips into the world of the surreal. It is here that his acutely perceptive painter’s eye and ear for the words makes the images so real and his surreal journey so disturbing.4

The work is located in intermediate states which draw beneft from both sides of the transits, between sleeping and waking, the real and the

2 This remark was reported in conversation with the present author. 3 The Ship’s Orchestra is Fisher’s frst published long work composed exclusively in a prose that has poetic purpose and texture. With one exception, the prose sections of the earlier City, mainly written in 1959, were written as part of an abandoned fctional work entitled The Citizen. Excerpted from the manuscript, they were collaged with independently composed poems to produce the hybrid work frst published in June 1961. The exception is “Starting to Make a Tree,” which was written on 28 August 1960. Two early surrealist prose poems, “Pharaoh’s Dream” (1954) and “The Doctor Died” (1954), were included in Three Early Pieces (London: Transgravity Advertiser, 1971). The latter of these is included in Slakki: New and Neglected Poems, ed. Peter Robinson (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2016), 64–65. 4 Front and back jacket faps to Roy Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra (London: Fulcrum Press, 1966) 18 ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS 301 surreal, with synesthetic switching as well, so that the visual and auditory, the tactile and olfactory, will conjure each other. The fnal ‘disturbing’ note suggests that this ‘journey’ will not be conducted only for the purposes of aesthetic experiment, but with something else in mind, something hinted at in ‘not as completely mad as a nightmare’. What is that other aim or purpose? The aim or purpose of this chapter is to comment on what happens and to whom in The Ship’s Orchestra, and to offer an explanation of what it may access, and why, through this reviving of modernist poetics, Cubist aesthetics, Surrealist liminal states, and opportunities suggested by the French-infuenced prose poem. It had been composed during 1962–1963, and was frst read in typescript by Gael Turnbull and others in the writer’s immediate circle.5 The Ship’s Orchestra came to be published by Stuart Montgomery at Fulcrum Press after a private samizdat edition, made in an edition of ten copies by Fred Hunter, started to circulate in London literary circles.6 This came to Montgomery’s attention and suggested the possibility of an offcially sanctioned publication, which then needed to be marketed as the frst edition, so the samizdat’s existence was quietly forgotten. The Ship’s Orchestra was thus the frst of Fisher’s books published in hardback, and by this press. It was the start of a relationship that ran to three further publications and launched the poet onto a national stage, a being at sea that would precipitate his writing block of about four years brought on by becoming conscious of having attentive readers. The 1966 publication was, despite the oddity of the association with David Jones’ art, The Ship’s Orchestra’s only fully sympathetic publication—for the size of the bold, modernistic typeface and that of the small square pages meant that the often short, individual prose paragraphs achieved a textual presence appropriately equivalent to their metaphorical and aesthetic weight. Fisher has stated that it closely reproduced the appearance of his own typescript, which, if it has survived, is not pub- lically available. Both of the work’s later republications—whether as an appendix to the two editions of the poet’s works, Poems 1955–1980 and Poems 1955–1987, issued by Oxford University Press (1980 and 1988),

5 For Turnbull’s response, see “An Unpublished Commentary from 1966,” News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher, ed. Peter Robinson and Robert Sheppard (Exeter: Stride Publications, 2000), 47–49. 6 This and other observations about the publication derive from conversation with its author. 302 P. ROBINSON or in The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005 (2005) also produced by Bloodaxe Books in an enlarged edition in 2010—print the prose poetry paragraphs in smaller typefaces and with much wider text areas, making the paragraphs both shorter and thinner, dispersing their visual and poetic impact as they associate the work with a more worka- day expository or narrative prose. The importance of typeface and layout to the aesthetic yield of prose poetry (Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns would be a prime example) suggests the need to mitigate the loss of expressivity in the lack of enjambed or stopped line endings; for prose poetry is, as its name indicates, defned in relation to the losses and gains of a relation to an absence. The Ship’s Orchestra is reported by Fisher to have been prompted by musings on a reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921), a synthetic Cubist group portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, author of many prose poems, and Picasso himself: that’s to say, of two poets and a painter.7 The fgures in the painting are also formed of overlapping planes, the fgures intersecting as they do, too, in Fisher’s prose work, where there are ‘about fve of us, then’: two called Green, two black, three men and two women:

About fve of us, then, and something of an assortment. The coloration problem touches Merrett and me more lightly, in that we are, fairly decidedly, Caucasian, although I can tell already that there’s a need for one of us to feel Jewish at times, and we pass this rôle back and forth tacitly. I am sallow and feshy, with something of a nose, while he is more ruddy, with black hair and a pout. Both of us come from nondescript families; both of us are called Green. He is a Londoner. Both of us are circumcised, too; but so, as it happens, is Dougal. The other oddity is Joyce, from Nottingham, who looks very young. She must be about seventeen, but doesn’t look it: little face, rather pasty (has been sick, though); long blonde hair she can’t quite manage; longish nose and big (relatively) dark eyes. Round- shouldered; sometimes a bit damp-looking under the arms. (108)8

These sentences tentatively introduce characters that the narrator has been thrown together with for the purpose of playing on a ship; they

7 See Roy Fisher, Interviews Through Time, ed. Tony Frazer (Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2013), 29–30. 8 Page references in parenthesis are to Roy Fisher, The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2010 (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2012). 18 ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS 303 point towards possible narrative developments, the descriptions suggesting aspects of their personalities that will interact and evolve a story. Yet, the work does not satisfy this lightly trailed expectation. The number of musicians eventually settles on six: ‘Now there’s this trumpet-player, Henrik, come out of the sickbay at last.’ He is the subject of some empathetic and then cruel observations: ‘Suffering and love in Henrik’s eyes. A thinking love. Temptation to make him happy, then outwit him’ (123). But the temptation is not acted upon. Narrated in the frst person by the pianist, one of the Greens, the work thus has a setting, a set of characters and intermittent snatches of dialogue.9 Beyond these, its similarities to a novella or short story are neither established nor sustained. So, when Fisher says in interview that he is ‘not interested in making a structure which has got a climax, a thing which has got an authoritarian centre, a rule or mandate somewhere in its middle which the work will unfold and will reach’, he gives only half the strategy, for he is certainly suffciently interested in such things to establish possibilities that will then be disappointed. He keeps them so as to evade expectations sketchily evoked.10 Just as no sounds issue from Picasso’s painting, where the ‘coloration problem’ helps to differentiate the fgures, haplessly emphasising the silencing of Apollinaire by death and Jacob by his retreat to a monastery (it has been suggested), so, too, Fisher’s musicians are not asked to play:

Dougal has spoken to each of us in turn, to say ‘Four days at sea, and they haven’t asked us to play.’ I believe he has also written these same words in a diary, the only entry so far. Dougal concerns himself a great deal with this question of our status, and Amy at least is beginning to be suspicious about his musicianship. This may be because, however obscurely, Amy is American, and is plainly a negress: being black, stringy and big-mouthed, although she wears her hair straight, while Dougal is equally plainly a late British Empire seaport (Liverpool) Spade; tall and medium brown, with quiet eyes and cropped ginger hair and a neat moustache of the same colour. There isn’t a leader in fact; we’re just a Foster Harris orchestra and if

9 The narrator is not “unnamed,” as Pople has it in “Roy Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra,” (60), illustrating the diffculty of keeping its ‘realist’ lineaments in mind. 10 Fisher, Interviews, 6. Fisher expresses similar views, relating them to romantic and sexual themes, in flmed conversation intercut as part of Tom Pickard’s documentary Birmingham’s What I Think With (1991). 304 P. ROBINSON

the ship people get any trouble they just wire the offce behind your back. But Dougal has to bother. (107)

There is no such thing as a Foster Harris orchestra: the writer has invented this name with its faintly American favour, a taste sustained by the threat that they will ‘wire’ the offce to complain of the musicians’ playing or behaviour. There were and are, though, agencies that put together bands for voyages and cruises, while the experience of forming ad hoc groups for specifc gigs is humorously reported in Fisher’s memoir, ‘License my Roving Hands’.11 That this orchestra is not asked to play—the question of their status—occasions the work’s strange trajectory. Their need for expressive release, which the narrating pianist accompanies and improvises upon, is squeezed out as a series of synesthetic themes and variations, wildly sensory perceptions of themselves and others, sexual fantasies, identity confusions, and speculations about their predicament. August Kleinzahler remarks that The Ship’s Orchestra ‘feels almost as though’ its author ‘had fallen asleep during a break between sets with a copy of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch spread across his face’, adding that ‘Fisher had not yet read’ that work, and ‘there can’t have been much of this sort of thing going down in Handsworth in 1961’.12 Doubtless true on the face of it; but just as Fisher’s ‘Handsworth Liberties’ fnds freedom of movement in the association of patches of landscape with particular records, so the idea of music in The Ship’s Orchestra conjures by driven compensation a vast range of experience, released from entailments to empiricism through analogy and association.13 The

11 ‘Geraldo’s Navy’, for example, was the nickname for Gerald Walcan Bright’s agency for placing jazz musicians on transatlantic liners. For the original of Merrett appearing in the Birmingham jazz scene, see “License my Roving Hands,” Roy Fisher, in An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963–2013, ed. Peter Robinson (Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014), 90–91. John Lucas relates the mishaps of the practicing jazz musician to The Ship’s Orchestra in “The Works of a Left-Handed Man,” The Thing about Roy Fisher: Critical Essays, ed. John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 91. 12 August Kleinzahler, Foreword, Roy Fisher, Selected Poems (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2011), xxiii. 13 For the musical sources of “Handsworth Liberties,” see ‘Handsworth Compulsions’ in An Easily Bewildered Child, 106–108; and, for Fisher on ‘entailment […] in ordinary reality’, see Interviews, 37. 18 ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS 305 poet’s characteristic landscapes put in an occasional appearance, through the repeated ‘on the land’ motif: ‘On the land the oil-refneries strain to escape from themselves along the river banks but cannot move, and the sky on its conveyor comes round and round again’, or ‘On the land the men swarm over the new concrete obstacles and fll the spade’s ravines with their ebullient bodies. Let us build again!’ (119), which is last recalled in: ‘This is what it is like on the land: the town-gods, with coloured rings painted around their eyes, drive their cars down to the water’s edge and stand in them watching the ships go by’ (127).14 One of the work’s possible other aims or purposes, then, is to explore what the meanings of improvised jazz music might be, what sorts of obscured or repressed materials it can articulate and release. Having the musicians fail to play, silencing the music (which would express them without referential content), occasions the work’s obligation to articulate such content in the prose. As often with jazz, and other popular forms of music, the matter being expressed, often comically, is the socialisation of sexual urges and instincts: ‘Monitors, those curious warships there used to be. Little vessels that each carried one enormous gun. Restless home lives of their captains’ (112). In ‘The Thing about Joe Sullivan’ (1965), Fisher characterises the white Chicagoan’s style as not ‘the snake charming business, /the ‘masturbator’s rhythm’, but generated by ‘his mood: / a feeling violent and ordinary’,15 which produces:

the rapid and perverse tracks that ordinary feelings make when they get driven hard enough against time. (164–165)

Both Joe Sullivan and Fisher tended to play accompaniments for, or improvisations on, ‘standards’, popular songs, often with simple and sentimental lyrics, where the apparent content of the work as expressed in

14 For later prose poems in which Fisher uses their freedom of form to evoke his more characteristically “in-between places” across land- and cityscapes, see, for example, ‘At Once’ (The Long and the Short of It, 139) and the ffth section of ‘The Dow Low Drop’, 24–25. 15 The phrase in quotation marks is derived from Stravinsky’s comment that the ‘beat’ of jazz “is a kind of masturbation that never arrives anywhere,” in Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), 116. 306 P. ROBINSON the words, for instance, is at odds with what is signalled by the orchestration, the piano intros and flls—fguring a relation between ‘ordinary feelings’ and those ‘rapid and perverse/tracks’ generated by the urge to improvise expressively across standard structures and changes. A further analogy is then implied between music and poetic rhythm, whereby the silencing of the music in The Ship’s Orchestra (nobody wants it played), like the stopping of poetry (as if no one wanted that either), occasions prose poetry.16 The prose is then fooded with contents that could have been articulated in musical terms without having to be directly spoken. In the absence of music, and given the narrative need of the pianist, they grow articulate through analogy and metaphor. The following passage appears immediately after the two Greens and Joyce are introduced:

This has attracted comment from The Ship’s Orchestra’s few critics.17 Having established its ‘given’, the passage works it in two ways: frst, by exploring what happens if you try to capture such tastes, and improvising a little on ‘meaninglessness’; then, by turning the idea upon itself, wondering what the narrator’s ‘taste’ would be and who or what could identify it. The passage in which Fisher touches on the impossibility of knowing your own taste suggests one of the further sources for this work—since the idea of shaking hands with yourself compares closely with the impossibility, as Wittgenstein has it, of your left hand giving your right hand money.18

16 A foreshadowing of formal ideas behind The Ship’s Orchestra can be found in the 1957 poem “Why They Stopped Singing,” The Long and the Short of It, 383. 17 See, for example, Robert Sheppard, “‘Making Forms with Remarks’: The Prose”, in The Thing about Roy Fisher, 137. Ian Pople relates its “body sensations” (see Interviews, 35) to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (61). For a review of The Ship’s Orchestra’s reception by critics supportive of Fisher’s project, see Pople, 62–63. 18 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 268, 80, 80e. For the infuence of Wittgenstein’s aphoristic style on Fisher’s poetry and prose, see Interviews, 20, 63. 18 ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS 307

When discussing this piece, Fisher has kept away from the work’s aims and purposes, by concentrating on what he won’t do (‘I’m not going to give you biography or I’m not going to give you pornography or any kind of rallying cry’),19 or by elucidating its formal properties and how they derived from the writing procedure. Describing its compositional method on a number of occasions, he does so most fully when talking to Eric Mottram:

But the ideal procedure for me is to have an intensely realised starter and then I work something on the starter, and then I work the next thing on the thing I’ve got so far. So the work is completely subsumed into the last moment of writing, and then I write further. The Ship’s Orchestra is a model of this […] I cheated insofar as I had certain revolving themes which I would feed in when the thing started to slow down so that I had a number of little themes which kept coming round; but basically I would perfect every step and cut it and phrase it so that it would stand, and then I would write the next piece on the support of that, which meant that I could no longer alter what had gone before. So that I adopt, in fact, complete linearity of composition. The one thing I can’t do is to sketch and then to tidy up afterwards. I don’t have a sense of a large overall form.20

The Ship’s Orchestra was written in separate prose paragraphs, varying in length from a brief sentence to a larger block, preserved in the work’s layout. When each was completed the writer could use what had been produced to generate the next paragraph, without retrospective editing or revising. The method might be compared with lines from Yeats’ ‘Byzantium’ in which ‘Those images’ will ‘yet/Fresh images beget’—and in ‘that gong-tormented sea’ a ship’s orchestra might be remotely imagining music.21 The direction of Fisher’s work would be determined thus by the improvisational skill of the writer in a strictly forward direction. No coherence through added foreshadowing would be possible, and the work’s direction would emerge as it went along. It is most likely, then, that the arrival of Henrik the trumpet-player was not exactly planned, but prompted perhaps by noticing the ‘about fve’ expression when returning to go further. Thus, characters, themes

19 Fisher, Interviews, 45. 20 Ibid., 21. 21 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems, 2nd ed., ed. Richard J. Finneran (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 249. 308 P. ROBINSON and imagery could be picked up and run with for a space, and as quickly dropped. This happens with ‘The Ivory Corner’, the work’s starting point, which is returned to intermittently on other occasions. In small jazz bands, the pianist’s location might be thought of as a corner with ivories, but no piano is described as being there:

Ivory corner for Joyce; on the white paintwork a big lipstick mouth to kiss her. Ivory Corner for Amy: padded hooks, to hold her up by the shoul- der-straps. (121)

This is an entire paragraph, some three-quarters of the way through the work, followed by another:

Ivory Corner for Merrett; with a heavy iron disc to press down on the crown of his head when he stiffens upward. Ivory Corner for Dougal: Joyce, standing stark naked and freezing cold, with her eyes shut, at two in the morning. (121)

Thus, ‘Ivory Corner’ comes to fgure as a cross between a necessary support and place of exposure and torture: as the stage can for performers. The compulsion to improvise and produce variations, in jazz, using emotion as the driving force and sexuality as the tacit theme, exfoliates into images of the musicians constrained by Ivory Corner, a fgure for the unused bandstand. Among the consciously articulated reasons for The Ship’s Orchestra’s writing procedure is its relieving the author of a need to produce a structure of an Aristotelian kind with beginning, middle and end. It similarly relieved him of having to create sustained personages whose sexual concerns might be generated by their psychologies and characters. Thus, the writing strategy detaches the fantasies and speculations about others from entailments either to the characters themselves, including the narrator, the pianist Green, or to the then living author, Roy Fisher, during that early 1960s period of composition. This liberty of movement is one of the benefts The Ship’s Orchestra, then, offers its readers—one intimately related to the narrative device enabling it to be staged—that the musicians are troubled by the fact that they have not been asked to play. So, when Amy is heard sounding ‘Long notes, staccato series. Methodical, clear, accurate; says nothing’, Green observes that she ‘must 18 ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS 309 be feeling low, to have to play’ (111). Gael Turnbull observed: ‘To have to. The necessity, the ignominy of it.’22 Yet, as the Fulcrum blurb indicates, however surreal and disturbing, The Ship’s Orchestra is not ‘as completely mad as a nightmare’, and offers reasons for its predicament and indirection:

Reasons. The ship is a unity. Enclosed within its skin of white paint it foats upon, and chugs across, the unifed ocean. Some would think of it as having the shape of a cleavage, a narrow leaf: to me it is a fat canister bearing another canister and a similarly cylindrical funnel, the basic canister shape being eccentrically elongated. This is because the vessel’s speed is not great and, whereas there are those who would see the superstructure as a vague and mutable spectre above the hull, it is that hull that appears ghostly to me, while the funnel never altogether leaves my thoughts. At any rate the ship is a unity and does one thing: it proceeds on its cruise. Not only does it have a structural and purposive unity; it makes music which proceeds with it, sounds within it and makes signals of the good life. In among the musicians is the tough glass bubble of the music. (112)

This paragraph continues for almost as long again, in a process of self-undoing:

Reasoning, now. The musicians don’t play. No bubble. The ship is not a unity. It is not white. It is grey, indigo, brown. Thin girderworks of green, and orange even, and coils of pale yellow piping. It is not a series of can- isters; it is a random assembly of buildings which, though important-looking, have no proper streets between them. It does not foat; its parts are arrested in their various risings and fallings to and from infnite heights and depths by my need for them to be so. The funnel cannot be said to crown the frm structure; rather it juts rakishly over inconsequential forms and looks when the sky is dirty like the chimney of a crematorium suspended above the waves. The ship does not proceed on its cruise, but opens and closes itself while remaining in one spot. The ocean is not a unity but a great series of shops turned over on their backs so that their windows point at the sky. (112)

22 Gael Turnbull, “An Unpublished Commentary from 1966,” in News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher, ed., Peter Robinson and Robert Sheppard (Exeter: Stride Publications, 2000), 49. 310 P. ROBINSON

Comparing the above paragraph with Fisher’s comments on the compositional procedure of The Ship’s Orchestra raises a number of questions. Is the strict linearity of the compositional method purposive like the ship’s cruise? Or are the individual paragraphs like those ‘inconsequential forms’, or the shops’ windows that ‘point at the sky’? The method has unidirectional forward movement as its mode of development, but the preference not to sketch and revise means that a fully directed structure cannot be elaborated. This paragraph of ‘Reasons’ and ‘Reasoning, now’ combines both aspects of The Ship’s Orchestra’s compositional structure, in that it is a set of discrete items, like shop windows which can be looked into for objects of desire and revulsion, and that these do not add up to a unity, while at the same time, and as if willy-nilly, they constitute the forward movement that it has and manifest its improvised music. This entire paragraph is also an experiment in thinking by means of embedded metaphors fgured around a copula; and, because these can contradict each other, they then fgure as not so much descriptive of the world as expressive of the describer’s needs—though, again, this is another transit point across which the work oscillates, as here in what is another complete paragraph: ‘Joyce is taller than I thought she was’ (126). In such statements fact and impression rapidly change places, for the frst fact in the light of the second false thought suddenly becomes a correct impression with implications, while the false impression becomes a report of subjective fact. The work is thus also conceptualised upon the idea of expressive need, and it homes in on both explicit and implicit sexual content, as even here, minimally, in the question of Joyce’s height. The work’s sexual content is, like the relationship of improvisation on standards to their often simple lyrics, a shadowy obverse to ‘the good life’ as expressed in popular music—a content multiplied and proliferated out of a search for substitutes to the music, there being no music other than that generated by the words of its poetic prose paragraphs. Further differences between music and writing are suggested throughout The Ship’s Orchestra, for music without words ‘says nothing’. It does not need to articulate the exact nature of the material that it expresses, though Amy ‘must be feeling low’ (111). Musical expression can be made of built and released tensions, repeated phases of ‘approach, development, climax, discard’ (164)—as Fisher describes it in Joe Sullivan’s 18 ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS 311 playing.23 However, it cannot do this by articulating the nature of that material; while writing is more usually compelled to articulate and explore what, by that means, it expresses:

Somewhere there’s going to be some music. I haven’t the courage myself to clamber over what keeps me from the piano, to plunge my fngers into its clashes of sound. And what I play isn’t what I mean by music. Breath music. Slow opaque music. The ship has come close, drawn itself up my body and continues to rise. Yet it is, though ftted to me, nevertheless very big and stretches far away from me above and below and on all sides. And all the compartments of which it is made are full of milky sounds ready to knock against the bulkheads and echo all through the vessel. (117)

It is as if the title, The Ship’s Orchestra, had shifted implications, for now it is the ship that appears on the point of playing and becoming the music. Two things stand in the way of accepting Fisher’s word that the achieved freedom of movement and development that The Ship’s Orchestra delivers is not entailed to aim or purpose beyond not doing some things, or doing them in a certain way, and these things, too, derive from the work’s formal characteristics, its unusual style and materials. The frst is the match between the pianist Green’s situation and that of his creator, for both are jazz-pianists, both appear as writers, and both combine striking degrees of mental travelling towards the natures and conditions of consciousness, sensibility and relations between individuals with a similarly striking detachment. The second is that the style of the work is acknowledged by the author as his, both by means of the publication and in his many comments in interview. The point of these two observations is both to note the degree of involvement that Fisher has with the work (which derives from his experience and thought), simultaneous with a characteristic detachment from it (he won’t give you biography). Further, the observations point towards reader interest in it as well; for both observations invite the thought that the work’s formal and aesthetic characteristics have performed tasks regarding the writer’s sensibility—not least because they can be experienced as performing tasks

23 For Fisher’s evocations of playing jazz piano himself, see “The Home Pianist’s Companion” (240–41), and the playing of others, see “Death by Adjectives,” in An Easily Bewildered Child, 139–42. 312 P. ROBINSON in relation to our own, tasks of specifcation, exploration, and relief in expression such as distinguish the work, as a literary performance, from listening to or playing music. Consider, in this light, how The Ship’s Orchestra speculates about the other musicians in the silent orchestra. It operates, we might think, in a realm not far from, though not the same as, the ordinary curiosity that people can have about the relationships and sexual lives of those around them. Yet, what keeps it from being exactly the same as such gossip is its dependence on metaphor and image, rather than narrative. Green wonders what his own playing will sound like:

Perhaps the little white piano has useless dampers, and however good the others are my playing will be a continuity of shining brass water, shaking idiotically. Have the others wondered whether I can play? Pianists who go about alone usually can. For my part I have seen Dougal stowing his bass behind the door; have heard him scat odd bars; I have heard Merrett blow a few sodden fourishes on his alto when he took it out to show it to me as soon as we were drunk; I have not seen Joyce anywhere near her drums, but I have heard her humming to herself. I have heard Amy’s short notes, and her long notes; and what appeared to be a series of arpeggios of the chord of the ffteenth, with the ffth, seventh, ninth and thirteenth degrees fattened in various combinations as the afternoon proceeded. Some of them showed her up a little, but it would have been an achievement for a woman who was sober. Amy has stayed drunk in order to break Joyce in, it appears. (119–120)

His professional speculation about them, which runs from their playing to their characters and behaviour, quickly turns to their sexuality, and to sexuality as such. Sometimes the shorter paragraphs have the feel of call-and-response improvisations: ‘If Merrett, Dougal and I dress as women, become women, will Amy and Joyce have to become men?’ To which the next paragraph replies with loaded ambiguity: ‘There’ll be no need’ (121). What interests Green, it would appear, and his creator, is the texture, often phobic and fetishistic, of his speculations about others’ lives and fantasies. It is a sense of the world that extends beyond the bodies of the other musicians to the ship that surrounds them and, beyond that, to the sea within which the ship moves. Thus, the entire world of the musicians is, through Green’s sensibility, attributed with the textures and characteristics of sex-infected desires and fears. 18 ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS 313

Yet, what does the work’s not having a structural or narrative ‘climax, a thing which has got an authoritarian centre, a rule or mandate’ do for its meaning? After all, it is not as if nothing happens in the work:

The ship’s orchestra is at sea. Crammed into a high and narrow compartment in a heated train on a penal railway, we loom out of the shadows at one another in our full dignity at last, between the brownish light of the windows on either side, light that fails to reach right into the domed ceiling of the compartment. The light paints over Merrett’s glasses and covers his eyes. Amy’s cheekbones are luminous in the tobacco shadows; our heads reach up close to one another, preternaturally large from narrow shoulders and stretched bodies. We are about to agree. (119)

Agreeing might even mean playing music together. Not quite ‘all at sea’, but close to it, the musicians grow increasingly uneasy about their position. They suffer the kind of ‘existential’ or ‘identity’ crises that were, and would continue to be, fashionable in European art around the time that the work was composed. Some of them engage in sexual activities, as does the narrator, and these are refected upon: ‘She seems to enjoy me as if she were enjoying something I should not myself like: a shiny, sticky iced cake, for example’ (123). There are outbreaks of excessive drinking and the inevitable consequences of such overindulgence:

There’s a binary phase to this kind of vomiting, especially marked if your balance is fairly good. A strong consciousness of two ears, two shoulders, two knees, feet, elbows, sets of fngers gripping the edges of the basin; these two sets of characteristics existing each on its side of the room. Between them is a void, a gully; and that is the vomiting. (111)

So, the work has what might be called a repertoire of happenings upon which improvisations can be staged, but, unlike the incidents in a pica- resque novel (for which the ship’s voyage provides a remote analogy), these happenings do not have teleology. They don’t point towards any conclusions about the characters of the musicians (so there is no bil- dungsroman trajectory) and there is, as one would expect with this author, too, no—overt at least—moralising or being ‘tempted by ethics’ (221), though that resistance is itself, of course, ethical. The behaviour of the musicians, whatever it happens to be in acts or fantasy, is not judged, a characteristic that collaborates with the work’s 314 P. ROBINSON speculative freedom. This combination of a non-moralising or judging approach to the fgures and materials encountered, alongside an associ- atively cumulative, strictly linear approach to composition, suggests that its unstated, but perhaps evident, purpose is therapeutic—frst, for its author and, then, a reader. Comparing this work with ‘The Cut Pages’, Kleinzahler describes it as a ‘signifcant and immeasurably more successful detour’.24 Being a detour, it may have done its work for the author. Unusually accepting of the human predicaments of its characters, The Ship’s Orchestra does not have to act upon its temptations, such as the urge to outwit Henrik, or build up to a resolving denouement, or be constrained to the shaping formalities of poetry. It thus fgures a safely prose poetic area of release, release for both the writer and his readers, in which oppressive thoughts and impulses, aggressions and anxieties, such ordinary feelings as Joe Sullivan used to drive his style, can be pressed as equally hard against time—not the signature-time of music, but of words in rhythmic shapes unimpeded by enjambment or by end-stopping lines.

Works Cited Fisher, Roy. The Ship’s Orchestra. London: Fulcrum Press, 1966. ———. The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2010. Hexham: Blookaxe Books, 2012. ———. Interviews Through Time. Edited by Tony Frazer. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2013. ———. An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963–2013. Edited by Peter Robinson. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014. ———. Slakki: New and Neglected Poems. Edited by Peter Robinson. Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2016. Kleinzahler, August. “Foreword.” In Roy Fisher, Selected Poems. Chicago: Flood Editions, 2011. Lucas, John. “The Works of a Left-Handed Man.” In The Thing about Roy Fisher: Critical Essays, edited by John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Pickard, Tom. Director. Birmingham’s What I Think with. Documentary on Roy Fisher, 1991. Pople, Ian. “Roy Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra.” PN Review 229, 42.5 (May–June 2016).

24 Kleinzahler, Foreword to Selected Poems, xxiii. 18 ROY FISHER’S MUSICIANS 315

Sheppard, Robert. “‘Making Forms with Remarks’: The Prose.” In The Thing about Roy Fisher: Critical Essays, edited by John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. Conversations with Igor Stravinsky. London: Faber & Faber, 1959. Turnbull, Gael. “An Unpublished Commentary from 1966.” In News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher, edited by Peter Robinson and Robert Sheppard. Exeter: Stride Publications, 2000. Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems, 2nd ed. Edited by Richard J. Finneran. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. PART V

Thinking Back, Writing Forward CHAPTER 19

Wrestling with Angels: The Pedagogy of the Prose Poem

Patricia Debney

The challenges of teaching prose poetry are akin to the challenges of teaching any conceptual art form: the resulting pieces must be technically sound and exhibit ‘form’ in one way or another, yet be transformative, surprising and inventive. For apprentice writers, harnessing and fnesse- ing these ‘chops’, while remaining open to fights of the subconscious and so on, can feel a Sisyphean endeavour at best. As, in a way, it should, if a writer’s work is set to develop throughout their lives. When it comes to the prose poem, however, everything, all aspects of its teaching and learning, can—as is typical for this form—get slippery. As David Young writes in his sparky introduction to Models of the Universe: An Anthology of Prose Poetry,1 ‘If you mean to write a poem and choose to do that in prose, you wrestle with an angel who knows more holds than you have dreamed of.’

1 David Young, “Introduction,” in Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem, ed. Stuart Friebert and David Young (Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1995), 18.

P. Debney (*) University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Naïveté I frst started teaching the prose poem as part of a general creative writing class in an adult education institution in 1992. I had studied for my undergraduate degree at Oberlin College in the USA, where writing prose poetry was a recognised and accepted undertaking. It therefore did not occur to me that the prose poem was a form that no one—not one— in my two classes of adult students in the UK would ever have seen or even thought about making themselves. I was young—twenty-seven—and had only published a couple of stories at this point. I had stumbled into teaching for adult education via my MA in Creative Writing (in prose) from the University of East Anglia, and my teaching experience gained at undergraduate level in the USA in my fnal year. I had been in the UK for three years, and had not yet read much UK contemporary poetry. When the faces of the keen adult writers—some of whom were very experienced and published writers themselves, I later found out—gazed at me, asking ‘What is this? What is a prose poem?’ I was completely unprepared. I had not imagined that the form needed explaining or justifying. I had not begun to interrogate it or look at it critically—and therefore could not really teach it. And yet—if pedigree is anything to go by, I should have been better at describing and communicating the nature of the prose poem. As an undergraduate at Oberlin College, I was part of a vibrant, international community of poets and writers, supported and cherished by committed writers, teachers and translators such as Stuart Friebert, David Young, David Walker and Diane Vreuls. Oberlin College Press published the FIELD translation series—with which, in some way, we all became involved—and, consequently, I read great prose poem writers such as Francis Ponge, Günter Eich and Miroslav Holub as a matter of course. I practised translating some of their work, and David Young and David Walker both wrote prose poems as part of their practice. While at Oberlin, I wrote both poetry and prose—in fact, still do—and the prose poem became a place that held, for me, poetic moments of stories that were not stories: poems that felt like stories; stories that felt like poems. Soon after my graduation, Stuart Friebert secured a Dana Grant and asked me to begin collating prose poems for a new anthology. I worked on it for a year, reading hundreds of collections from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from all over the world; from them I extracted examples, transferring the information to index cards. Several years later, this initial work contributed to Models of the Universe. 19 WRESTLING WITH ANGELS: THE PEDAGOGY OF THE PROSE POEM 321

The questions which must be asked—of myself, in retrospect, as a compiler of prose poems dating from around the mid-1800s—are: How did I know a prose poem when I saw it? What did I ‘count’? What did I dis- count? And why? And how do I communicate these views to students? How will they, in turn, know when they write or read a prose poem? Raising these questions does get us a closer to the pedagogy of the prose poem, and also closer to the nature of the prose poem itself— and, thereby, how to teach it, and how its infuence may affect writers’ developments and lives. Because it turns out that a prose poem is a prose poem as much as by what it is not than by what it is.

Talking About What It Is Not My early research for Models of the Universe had enormous impact on how I think about prose poems now, and also how I talk about them with students. I continued to teach in various institutions—prisons, further education and higher education—and, by 2003, I was writing a lot of prose poems myself. I had two young children, could not write the sustained prose of my postgraduate training and, anyway, ideas seemed to come to me in contained moments, much like a germinating image for a poem might, yet connected to a voice which seemed closer to storytelling. It felt entirely natural to explore these ideas in prose poem form. Writing them so regularly—alongside teaching—then led me to start to formulate how and what I was making, and to articulate the bases of my choices for the anthology years before. I began to do small workshops on ‘the prose poem’—again, for adult learners. This is where I started:

(1) A prose poem is NOT part of a larger piece of prose. (2) A prose poem is NOT poetic prose (which can by turns be either purple or sustained, as in Marguerite Duras’ Moderato Cantabile). (3) A prose poem is NOT a poem written as prose.

The reaction of the adult learners, ten years after my frst attempt, was nearly as sceptical as before. Many of these students were published writers—and yet, none could see what the prose poem might offer either the reader or the writer. This time, perhaps because of my accumulating practice, I was less panicked and more considered. It became obvious to me that this reaction was less resistance than straightforward ignorance. Most students at 322 P. DEBNEY the time had only ever read the odd single prose poem within a collection, and such a piece’s ‘reason for being’ did not need exploring; it was simply an ‘unusual form’. So, I returned to the anthology—and my own work, which was now becoming book-sized—and fooded the students with examples. We started again—from the work itself this time, rather than defnitions. We returned my own New Criticism roots, analysing the work for sound, image, language, sense, rhythm—the traditional stuff of poetry—and then segued to voice, narrative, character, syntax—the traditional stuff of prose. We interrogated two dozen pieces, beginning with Baudelaire, then Stein, then Holub, Eich, Edson, Ashbery and so on. And at no point did we make a declaration: this is the defnition of prose poetry. Because what became obvious very quickly was that prose poetry could not be defned any more easily than poetry could, or prose. And once this hurdle was leapt, the world of writing opened up. The students began to see prose poetry from the inside, from the process, rather than from a distance. At the same time, I realise now, I stopped ‘justifying’ the existence of prose poetry. It seemed that, although it might take time, we were all re-focusing our eyes, as we might when scouting for cicadas huddled in trees: they are so well-disguised, yet their sounds defne the landscape. That there is no precise defnition of prose poetry was fnally established. Students still, however, needed ways into writing it.

Openness In 2004, I joined the School of English at the University of Kent. One of my frst ‘jobs’ was helping to develop the MA in Creative Writing (with Susan Wicks, Patience Agbabi and Scarlett Thomas). The obvious research expertise for me to pursue was the prose poem—so I wrote a module that explored prose poetry, with poetic prose as an alternative, and a foil. Through this teaching situation, I was forced to theorise prose poetry in ways I’d never attempted before. At the same time, I became more involved in the British prose poem scene, and discovered Santilli’s Such Rare Citings. This book confrmed some of my ‘instinctive’ critical approaches to the prose poem, and helped me arrive at the next stages. Faced with the challenge of guiding these talented MA students into writing prose poems, I decided now to offer guidance by cultivating ideas of paradox, tension and lack of resolution: 19 WRESTLING WITH ANGELS: THE PEDAGOGY OF THE PROSE POEM 323

(1) Prose poetry uses the sentence as its unit, like prose, not the line, like poetry. (2) Prose poetry is essentially paradoxical in nature. (3) The negotiation of paradoxes creates tension, and tension (which can take many forms) is the engine of prose poetry. (4) The sources of these tensions and paradoxes are numerous, and most feel familiar to writers of sophisticated work. They include:

Intimacy vs distance The part vs the whole Surreality vs reality Revelation vs secrecy Said vs unsaid Conventions of prose vs conventions of poetry Horizontal vs vertical The self vs character Accessibility vs inaccessibility Informal vs formal register Convention vs subversion

Of course, many of these complexities are explored in any advanced writing—but as I myself became more comfortable with lack of resolution, with the surprise or transformation that is so typical of prose poetry, with the sense of the surreal that often emerges in prose poetry—indeed, in my own prose poems—I became convinced that prose poetry is almost entirely driven by these tensions, that paradoxes and liminal spaces are not only exposed, but celebrated in prose poetry—rather than resolved. And that it is this lack of solution, this open-endedness, this shocked laugh or falling sensation which so often unsettles readers. And, in turn, makes writers think: Have I done it? Have I written a prose poem? Does it stand up? Or does it fall over? By the second year of teaching the postgraduate module, it became apparent to me that, in effect, dismantling what students may feel they already know about writing—poetry or prose—was a good place from which to begin writing prose poetry. Through this cultivated openness, students began to enter their work as a process of discovery, rather than a process of capture, and the confusion, the questioning, the de-stabilisation of what they thought they were doing almost always led 324 P. DEBNEY to work which surprised them, which took more risks than they’d taken before, and which seemed to articulate interests and passions and obses- sions with more freedom than any of them had experienced. By this point, my students were fashioning pieces which took risks, which stretched tensions and defnitions, with few pre-conceptions and lots of inventiveness—but it still wasn’t clear to me how I might be able to help move writing the prose poem past the ‘happy accident’ and into an educational direction of its own, one with fnesse, mass and weight. I realise now that I was learning—intensively—alongside my students: by 2003, my own frst collection of prose poems, How to Be a Dragonfy, was in preparation. The frst half of the book was full of ‘happy acci- dents’, in that I had no plan and had not set about either writing it or revising it with any deliberation or considered insight. Acting on a suggestion from a friend, I submitted the twenty pieces I had completed to The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition, and awaited the results. What happened next was instructive, to say the least. The work was shortlisted, and I was given a month to produce a book-length manuscript. I managed to write and complete twenty-two prose poems in one month, and won the competition. For the frst time in my life I had deliberately set out to write only prose poems; I structured sections of the book around ideas for series—plants, childhood events, astronomy. I wrote several a day for the frst few days, letting them rush out, sketching them without revision, and then, one by one, revised them, using all of my ‘writing muscle’ gained from years of writing both poetry and prose. From this experience, I knew it was possible to set out to write prose poems (and nothing else). I also knew that revising them had required skills I’d never used in combination before.

Talking About What It Is In 2007, I had the opportunity to offer prose poetry as a specialist module on the undergraduate programme. This move marked a real shift in how I approached the pedagogy of the prose poem. I dropped the exploration of poetic prose as foil for prose poetry, and re-designed the module so that the frst half of the module looked at exemplar prose poetry texts, and the second half concentrated solely on students’ own production of prose poems. This clear division of time and energy also allowed me to contextualise the history and development of the prose poem 19 WRESTLING WITH ANGELS: THE PEDAGOGY OF THE PROSE POEM 325 more usefully. Students saw early on how different strains—the European and Eastern European threads, and the North American thread—had led to pieces which differently emphasise speech patterns, language, notions of reality or surreality, sound and so on. While this exploration opened out possibilities even further, in time this contextualising knowledge allowed students to understand with what tradition their work may be more aligned—and, from there, gain insight into its development and editing. Also, and as importantly, each year more and more whole collections of prose poems have emerged. Today, the reading list not only includes the single poems from my earlier classes, but entire collections within a wide range of voices: Luke Kennard’s The Solex Brothers, Carrie Etter’s Imagined Sons, Lynne Rees’ and Sarah Salway’s Messages, Michael Rosen’s Carrying the Elephant, Donna Stonecipher’s Model City, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. More anthologies have emerged as well—A Curious Architecture: A Selection of Contemporary Prose Poems (edited by Rupert Loydell and David Miller), and This Line Is Not for Turning: An Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry (edited by Jane Monson). In each, there is a wide range of styles—from rambling, chatty glimpses into other worlds, to crystalline, distilled moments. There are pieces which follow the ‘traditional’ prose poem shape—written entirely as prose, with no variation, no line-break, ftting to one page—and pieces which are a more experimental prose poem, employing line-breaks in places, fragmentation, running over several pages and so on. We begin each term analysing and discussing a substantial range of work, ask: How is this working? What draws you? What doesn’t draw you? Why? At the same time, I ask students to locate an idea that has ‘legs’. I ask them to fnd something they have expertise in, or something they are interested in or obsessed by. Something particular to each one of them. I ask them NOT to write a prose poem, not yet; as in the very earliest classes I taught, I continue frmly to believe that entering the prose poem from a state of openness and near-trepidation means that risks are taken. The most substantial shift in my teaching for this undergraduate module is my insistence upon the development of a ‘series’ of prose poems. And this is because today—in this time, this era—series of prose poems are where the greatest strengths of the form lie in my view. The proliferation of prose poetry in the UK is founded upon series. Upon each taking 326 P. DEBNEY up space of its own, rather than as part of versed collections. The faint idea of series I had developed in my frst book became a conviction that series is right for the prose poem—indeed, that it benefts from series, it excels in series. This idea was partly—as ever—gleaned from my own practice which, by 2010, was solely focused on a series of prose poems centred around the sea and the coast. At the time, I located a glossary of coastal terminology which fuelled piece after piece in the book; I braced my more lyrical register against the technical register of the glossary and, from that tension, a sustained series emerged. This series eventually became my second collection, Littoral.

And What It Can Be Producing innovative work—once it starts—becomes, as ever, the ‘easy’ part of the process. What follows is that, of course, students also need to edit their work. Are there aspects of this process as well which are particular to prose poetry? As with the initial drafting, the initial editing involves stepping back into a place where anything is possible, but some things seem already under way. I ask students to examine what matters in their pieces: Is it the workings of the language? Is it the voice? Is it the syntax? Is it what is said? What is not said? I ask them to interrogate the pieces’ connectivity: do they half-tell a story; or do they tell ffteen facets of the same story? Only after making what might be prose poems, can students re-instate their critical eyes, their technical chops and their expertise, in order to arrive at fully realised pieces. By taking this approach, students have been able to produce a huge range of work, each ultimately and knowingly staking out its own particular territory. For instance, Georgia Hingston’s portfolio uses fairy tale tropes as scaffolding, yet deliberately redirects the narrative, as seen here in ‘Cinderella’:

You mop the foor wearing your lab coat, the hem of your dress snagging on glass slippered heels. Your blonde hair is falling out of its fancy doo, dying leaves, a fash of orange amongst the tumbling curls. Test tubes rattle in your pocket, fragile glass quivering. The foor unravels a gleaming wake from soggy twists, moisture soaking into the dragging dress trim. You pause to push your glasses up the bridge of your nose, but a shrill, hysterical cry rises from the next room. Enough. Down goes the mop with 19 WRESTLING WITH ANGELS: THE PEDAGOGY OF THE PROSE POEM 327

an angry clatter. You pull off your glass shoes, throw them at the marble foor, where they shatter. They’ve rubbed your feet raw.2

By contrast, Katrine Solvaag’s work disrupts a known narrative through pure collage, in this case of Moby Dick, chapter by chapter:

The Carpet-Bag [chapter 2]

Don’t you hear? So goes the story within blocks of blackness where the frst American whale was found stranded upon imported cobblestones. We only catch glimpse of gods within smoky light, these eyes of mine teeth-gnashing ashes from that destroyed city as fying particles sent by Euroclydon’s turbulent winds almost choke me. Walking along red silken streets packed with congealed frost laying ten inches thick of which Death is the only glazier we neglect the connexion between our hearts. We never asked Lazarus what he thinks. So they sally out in canoes to give chase to the leviathan only to fnd the universe is fnished.3

Both methods exploit narrative expectations as ways into the work, but subvert these expectations differently; the essential tensions of the pieces lie in the relationship between what we think we know, what feels familiar through the use of narrative signals (storytelling words like ‘so’ and active, sequencing verbs, physical movement through landscapes, known archetypes)—and the ‘poetic’ resonances of the pieces (as opposed to a conclusive storytelling ending): Hingston’s by revealing feminist concerns, and Solvaag’s by (re)creating a story we never grasp, so our attention continually turns to the linguistic experiments of the work. Other work more typically has its roots in poetry. For instance, Sam Julier’s ekphrastic pieces highlight image more than narrative, as in ‘A Response’:

The ocean uncurls in subtle blue brushstrokes tipped with a crystalline bristle of foam, suspended in its arc, holding for a moment.

2 Georgia Hingston, “Cinderella,” unpublished (April 2014). 3 Katrine Lynn Solvaag, “The Carpet Bag,” in Moby Dick, unpublished (April 2017). 328 P. DEBNEY

A gentle wind manipulates the pebbles, shapes irregular dunes, forming round the feet. An expensive bottle spills and dampens the sediment, and the crab we constructed from its scattered anatomy. We’ll bounce a couple stones across the water in August, or March, still waiting for oysters; where Whitstable’s still beautiful as a painted ocean, the sun along the surface, water coloured.4

Charlie Lay’s portfolio, on the other hand, relies on fragmented and sparse prose, structured as a book, as in its frst two pieces:

[foreword] with the rain tapping at the world outside and the streetlamps blink- ing in the wind, you could almost be a ghost sitting there on the edge of my bed. you feel solid enough when you bush my hair back from my face and kiss my cheek. i ask you to shut the window, and all the lights in the world go out when you leave. [1]

at frst it hung by a thread of fesh and you were afraid it would be left behind. the pain was measured carefully in cups by the nurses hands and when you had run out she showed you the pictures. all that hurt poured into boxes you could sign for later when the fesh was reattached. amazing, you thought. when your mother sat by your bed you smiled at her like the fowers. it took you a while to notice the clean cup she held in her hands.5

Both Julier’s and Lay’s work privilege space and movement on the page, a typically poetic concern. Both portfolios also foreground sound and rhythm as structuring principles. The tensions in these works spring from

4 Sam Julier, “A Response,” unpublished (April 2015). 5 Charlie Lay, unpublished (December 2015). 19 WRESTLING WITH ANGELS: THE PEDAGOGY OF THE PROSE POEM 329 a broader place of questioning boundaries: how do we read the line- ended parts of Julier’s work? What are we to make of no capitalisation, no titles, and so much unsaid in Lay’s? Once again, as readers we arrive in unexpected places: both Julier and Lay ultimately tell complex stories (Julier’s through seasons, and Lay’s through a parental relationship) across their portfolios, despite their essentially poetic drivers. Over time, I have learned to ask students to edit for something, and toward the particular strengths of their pieces. And to avoid, for as long as possible, the urge to ‘make sense’, to ‘smooth out’, to ‘fnesse’; doing this too early tends to fatten prose poems, and removes their tensions. Exploiting tension in prose poems, wherever it is located, and whether piece by piece or over a whole series, really does allow the work to function differently from both poetry and prose, it seems. Locating and foregrounding tension of whatever sort discourages one of the main pitfalls of writing the prose poem: the slide into anecdote. Indeed, time and again students rise to the occasion: there would seem to be something about writing the prose poem which presses them into the best work they are capable of. And presses them into individuality. Of course, similar approaches are common (in different ways) when revising both poetry and prose. The difference with prose poetry, however, is that the writer edits for anything which the work itself deter- mines, with tension really being the only necessary ingredient. There is no regard for convention; there is only the usage or subversion of the full range of technique and craft available in both poetry and prose. There are only decisions made from the full palette. Given all this and more, I am convinced that the formalised teaching of prose poetry—the learning and experiment of doing it—has enabled the production of this work in ways no other form of writing could have done.

Experience Over the last twenty-fve years, the teaching and learning of prose poetry has grown from entirely unknown in the UK to something recognizable and accepted, and undertaken—to some degree—in a number of institutions. This has been matched and fed by the proliferation of prose poem collections published in the UK, particularly since the early 2000s. The prose poem has become part of the fabric of young writers’ lives in the UK. For most, it is no longer ‘foreign’ or encountered singly, 330 P. DEBNEY buried in collections. The experiences of writing it and studying it in university mean that the days of greeting a prose poem with ‘But why?’ are—thank goodness—gradually drifting into the past. For my own students—whose experiences and writings I have followed and whose openness has, in turn, fred my own experiments, expanding my own prose poetries—for them, their enthusiasm for prose poetry continues. When I contacted several about being represented in this essay, to a person they said they planned to write more. Several students have published some of the prose poems written as undergraduates and postgraduates, several students have published collections of prose poems, and at least two students have completed PhDs in the study and writing of prose poetry. Year after year, I have learned about the value of always starting from ‘not knowing’ when teaching prose poetry. From the students’ mystif- cation, discomfort and curiosity—and from my own. Each year I remind myself to withhold, not to say what I think I know, not to pre-empt, or even offer much comfort. It is important that we stay for several weeks in a place without known boundaries, and in a place of transition. For their sakes—and for mine.

Works Cited Debney, Patricia. How to Be a Dragonfy. Huddersfeld: Smith/Doorstop Books, 2005. ———. Littoral. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2013. Etter, Carrie. Imagined Sons. Bridgend: Seren Books, 2014. Friebert, Stuart, and David Young, eds. Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem. Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1995. Kennard, Luke. The Solex Brothers (Redux). London: Salt, 2010. Loydell, Rupert, and David Miller, eds. A Curious Architecture: A Selection of Contemporary Prose Poems. Stride Publications, 1996. Monson, Jane, ed. This Line Is Not for Turning: An Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry. Gwynedd: Cinnamon Press, 2011. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. Rees, Lynne, and Sarah Salway. Messages. Bristol: bluechrome Publishing, 2006. Rosen, Michael. Carrying the Elephant: A Memoir of Love and Loss. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Santilli, N. Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature. Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Stonecipher, Donna. Model City. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2015. CHAPTER 20

Life, Death and the Prose Poem

Michael Rosen

In 1999, my eighteen-year-old son died. It was overwhelming. The frst way I dealt with it was to pretend it hadn’t happened. I would lie in bed in the mornings and come up with stories of where he was. As I started to realise that he was dead, I found myself making a conscious decision to not write about him, not write about how I felt. I had written about him often before and, earlier on the very day he died, I had told some children how small he was when he was a baby but now how huge he was, so huge that he could lift me up and whirl me round on his shoulders. I loved the fact they thought that this was funny, especially when I acted it out shouting, “Put me down! Put me down!” But now, with him dead, I decided I couldn’t and wouldn’t write about him. Several months went by and I stuck to my plan. But then I read ‘Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In’ by Raymond Carver.1 I read it over and over again, sometimes performing it to myself in a faux,’ specially dry, Robert Frost-like voice. It is in part about death, the

1 Raymond Carver, in All of Us: Collected Poems (London: Harvill, 1997), 73–74.

M. Rosen (*) Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 331 J. Monson (ed.), British Prose Poetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_20 332 M. ROSEN persona’s death. He can see his death because he’s not in his house. As it happens, I had once done a radio interview with his last partner, Tess Gallagher, and she had talked about Carver’s last days. In a way, I was on the other side of the poem. He had written about what had now happened. He wasn’t in his house. I loved the way Carver had said these things without being obviously metaphorical or emotional until the end of the poem when he talked of a ‘wave of grief’ and being ‘violently ashamed’. It felt as if the topographi- cal detail of standing outside the house earned the right to have this out- burst later on. I started to write about what had happened. I started to describe things like my son’s body bag slipping down the stairs, or the way in which it looked as if hair grew out of his forehead several days after he died. I recorded the things that people said. Carver laid his poem out according to the conventions of free verse: a line-break representing a speech-pause. I had written hundreds of poems like that. For some reason, and quite spontaneously, I decided that I didn’t want to put that patterning over the words I was writing. I wanted them to be even less rhetorical than that. I wanted what I was writing to be more prosaic, more factual than the free verse format implied. I was hanging on to the idea that I wasn’t writing poetry. I was writing paragraphs. The moment that I had that word ‘paragraphs’ in my head, I knew what to do. I could write short, medium or long ones, but not too long. No longer than Carver’s poem. What came out were anecdotes, rever- ies, meditations, considerations about what had happened. I saw them as fragments of a whole, just as the segments of a stained glass window, or the pieces of a mosaic make up a whole. But, I wasn’t pretending or claiming them as poems, I kept saying. If other people wanted to call them that, that was fne. I was writing paragraphs, segments and mosaic pieces. They weren’t the whole truth. They weren’t even the essence or the ‘inscape’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins. They were moments. There was even the satisfaction of seeing how they looked on the page. I engineered tiny cliff-hangers at the end of lines, so that they were the opposite of the free verse pause. The ends of lines were anticipations demanding that the eye and meaning were suspended in the hope that it would make the reader go on. I liked the chunkiness of the paragraphs, too. I started to have an ideal length in mind, somewhere around eighteen lines. 20 LIFE, DEATH AND THE PROSE POEM 333

The more I wrote about my son, the more a uniting principle started to appear. This loss, this hole in my life had connections with other losses. But, in writing, I discovered that it wasn’t only a matter of loss. There was something incongruous and bizarre about what had happened. Something so big and all-encompassing had taken place in the ordinariness of home. He went to bed. I went in the morning to tell him I was going off to work. He was dead. It was all so simple. This strangeness, I felt, was in its own way like surrealism: the unlike in amongst the like; the unfamiliar stuck in the middle of the familiar. Thinking along these lines produced more paragraphs, some excavated from my past, others spun out of the present. I came back again and again to a postcard I had bought in Paris. It was an eighteenth-century engraving by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, illustrating one of La Fontaine’s fables: ‘Les Deux Aventuriers et le Talisman, Fable XIII, Book X’. In the picture, a man in knee-breeches and shirt is carrying an elephant up a mountain. I have it on my window-sill in front of me as I write even now. I decided I was the man in knee-breeches. I am carrying the elephant, I thought. And he became another paragraph, an eighteen-line one that became the core of the collection which came out under that name, Carrying the Elephant (Penguin, 2002). I went on to write two more in that vein, This Is Not My Nose (Penguin, 2004) and In the Colonie (Penguin, 2005), and I digested all three into Selected Poems (Penguin, 2007). The prose poem form enabled me to tell stories that seemed, at the moment of writing, important. Because I took from that form its apparent prosiness, I felt I could inhabit the kind of detachment that a narrator of a novel has at the moment that narrator appears to be telling the story. I like the way the author hides behind the narrator, just as Michael Rosen could hide behind ‘I’. Michael Rosen could invent some qualities of ‘I’ that didn’t belong to Michael Rosen. Of course, the prose poem doesn’t dictate any of this sort of thing. A prose poem can be as metaphorical, rhythmic, non-syntactic, ornate and poetic as it wants to be. I think that I’m saying that the apparent prose format of a paragraph suggested to me a non-fction quality—not inevitably or essentially attached to that form—just the one that I took from it. So, I used it to write three autobiographical mosaics. At the core of This Is Not My Nose is the experience of having consumed my own thyroid gland. I didn’t do this voluntarily. My immune system identifed my thyroid as a foreign being and digested it. The 334 M. ROSEN result was a change of body and identity. When I started to take replace- ment medicine, I became someone else. The format that had served me so well in describing the extremes of death seemed to be just right for describing many different ways in which I wasn’t who I appeared to be. Again, the detachment worked for me. Finally, in In the Colonie there was a core experience which I was, and still am, haunted by: a six-week stay at the age of sixteen, as the only English person in a French colonie de vacances (kids’ summer camp) on the dry plateau of the upper Ardéche. In my head was a set of scenes. I had tried on several occasions to knit it into a narrative until I realised one day that there wasn’t one. There wasn’t a slowly developing sense of jeopardy, or an unresolved confict that swelled to a climax, no hubris that took six weeks to work its way through to a denouement. It was a series of scenes, vignettes, cameos which sat in my mind, untold but affecting, scenes that I had returned to over and over again over the ffty years since their happening. A mosaic for paragraphs, I felt, would serve me well. The idea of being away, estranged, on my own, but being ini- tiated, politicised and forced to acknowledge my own culture, released other analogous stories before the spell in the colonie and after. In digesting them down, I think now, in retrospect, I lost something of the three uniting principles. Indeed, the uniting principles (or is it symbols?) behind each of the books had had the effect of holding these detached paragraphs together in a way that I hoped would result in the books being more than the sum of their parts. There was an invisible string running between the prose poems in the three books that was much less evident in the selection from the three books. Defensively, I can feel myself acknowledging here that sometimes these prose poems—I’m most certainly not speaking for any others— need each other. Where the secret string is absent, the detachment that I am so fond of can sometimes tend towards the ordinary. That tone that I picked up from Raymond Carver needs support. That’s how it feels to me. There was a pause between the Selected and a rush of writing that I did in 2012, 2013 and 2014. This time, instead of it being a poet, as it was with Carver, it was new technology. I’ve found that two digital spaces feel just right—snug, if you like—for writing prose poems or paragraphs: Facebook and my blog. I found that I could respond in direct, surreal, absurd, satirical ways to events as they happened, rather as if I was just saying them to someone sitting next to me. I could dash off a 20 LIFE, DEATH AND THE PROSE POEM 335 para—a comment on what George Osborne had said; a reply to someone on Question Time; a story of something that could have happened on the bus today, that is if a whale had got on the bus. One moment these paras could be in the voice of, say, Adrian Mitchell, another more like Eddie Izzard or Ross Noble, another more like Bertolt Brecht. I don’t say these names because I fancy myself as being them; more that I’m saying I was talking as if I was their echo. This time the paragraph quality told me that I was writing short monologues. When you open the old ‘Reciters’, much loved in the Victorian and Edwardian period, you notice that they are full of non-rhyming monologues that people would perform in ‘parlours’, or by way of home entertainments. In fact, looking back to my university days, I remembered that I had written and performed some monologues which we called ‘sketches’ or ‘cabarets’. All a bit self-satisfed perhaps, but an interesting form all the same. In fact, all sorts of performers from Joyce Grenfell to Michael Crawford, Harry Enfeld, Rik Mayall have done something very similar. As I’m not on the road or knocking on the door of TV to let me in, I found that I could do my monologues on Facebook and my blog. I could even video them and put them up on Youtube. On the page, they are prose poems, they are paragraphs. As I started to collect them, I found myself looking at everyday events and turning them into everyday encounters with the surreal. A man tries to sell me a washing machine that de-shrinks clothes, I lose a cucumber and try to get it back from the Lost Property Offce, Bear Grylls gives a course in poetry and so on. Surrealism is not only a means to investigate whether we have an unconscious or not. It can also be a means to investigate the meaning of our random encounters. If I can meet a man who I’ve never met before and within a second he tells me he hasn’t been to the toi- let for a week (true), why shouldn’t Michael Bublé be in the next door loo compartment on Euston Station. And if the Guardian says that the Israeli government put out a directive that no one should mention the names of children killed in the latest round of wars going on, why shouldn’t I extend that directive in absurd and totalising ways? Again, I was pleased to see that the paragraphs found their secret strings again. Events that are to all intents and purposes ‘real’, sit alongside the whale on the bus and an invisible tattoo. The act of deconstruction, in a critical sense, is to reveal the power relationships behind the texts and utterances we come across (not, as some say, to separate a statement, or work into its constituent parts). Poetry of any kind has a 336 M. ROSEN tradition of revealing powers and reasons that lie behind what is said or shown. That old ‘defamiliarising’ process can do a lot of that. Paragraphs seemed, as I wrote this time, to be very useful, too. One moment, they could be mini-essays, as if I was some kind of modern-day Montaigne, and the next a stand-up peering into an audience trying to fool them that this odd thing happened on my way to the theatre. This collection appeared as Don’t Mention the Children (Smokestack, 2015). So, this form has served me well. I am grateful to it.

Works Cited Carver, Raymond. All of Us: Collected Poems. London: Harvill, 1997. Rosen, Michael. Carrying the Elephant. London: Penguin, 2002. ———. This Is Not My Nose: A Memoir of Illness and Recovery. London: Penguin, 2004. ———. In the Colonie: A Memoir of Separation and Belonging. London: Penguin, 2005. ———. Selected Poems. London: Penguin, 2007. Index

A Bletsoe, Elisabeth, 25–27 Academia, 66 Borges, Jorge Luis, 52, 55, 56 Agbabi, Patience, 13, 295–297, 322 Breton, André, 250, 254, 257, 258 Aldington, Richard, 4, 20, 34–36 Brown, Andy, 13, 185 Armitage, Simon, 11, 13, 15, 190, Burnside, John, 185, 190 228, 233–238, 242 Ash, John, 21 Ashbery, John, 2, 56, 57, 186, 194, C 267–269 Capildeo, Vahni, 13, 25–27, 211–213, Atwood, Margaret, 230, 232 215, 216, 220, 224 Autism, 276 Carver, Raymond, 331, 332, 334 Autobiography, 182, 231 Chaloner, David, 64–66 Christianity, 255, 261 Cities, 37, 281 B Clements, Brian, 11, 26, 150, 153 Babbitt, Irving, 30, 138, 139 Crotty, Patrick, 179 Barker, George, 219, 220 Barthes, Roland, 83, 122, 214 Baudelaire, Charles, 12, 14, 19, 21, D 30, 31, 37, 42, 43, 79–85, 99, Davis, Lydia, 51, 55 100, 118, 131, 138, 172–174, Decadence, 2, 4, 20, 182 181, 194, 217, 280, 294 Delville, Michel, 4, 5, 13, 117, 208, Beckett, Samuel, 3, 21, 53–55, 242, 265, 289 149–151, 157, 159, 162, 185, Dickens, Charles, 6, 103, 168 189, 289, 292 Dismorr, Jessie, 38–42 Bertrand, Aloysius, vii, 19, 31, 280 Dobrée, Bonamy, 106, 141, 142, 145

Dowson, Ernest, 2, 4, 20, 138 Hemingway, Ernest, 169, 170 Dreams, 14, 27, 43, 60, 84, 119, 188, Henri, Adrian, 51, 58, 62–64 272, 290 Hill, Geoffrey, 6, 13, 171–173, 178, Dunham, Jamey, 26, 150, 153, 183 204, 235, 302 Mercian Hymns, 171–175, 178– 180, 302 E Hulme, T.E., 32, 36, 41 Edson, Russell, 2, 7, 322 Huysmans, J.-K., 128 Eliot, T.S., viii, 2–5, 9, 13, 15, 19–22, Huyssen, Andreas, 36–38, 42, 43 30, 34, 35, 53, 94, 100, 106, 133, 134, 136, 146, 170, 214, 230 I Ellmann, Richard, 117, 119, 123, Imagism, 32, 37, 125 124, 126, 170 Internet, 51, 268 Eluard, Paul, 149, 255, 256

J F Jakobson, Roman, 288 Fisher, Roy, 13, 21, 22, 47, 51, 58, 60, Jameson, Fredric, 43, 44 61, 268, 284, 287, 289, 290, 292, Jazz, 13, 279–289, 292–295, 297, 295, 299–304, 306, 308, 309 300, 304, 305, 308, 311 Flint, F.S., 29, 33 Jennings, Humphrey, 9–11 Ford, Mark, 13, 56, 57, 193, 194, Jones, David, 20, 53, 169, 172, 178, 196, 198–200, 208 299, 301 Fredman, Stephen, 5, 177, 185–187, Joyce, James, 3, 117–119, 122, 124, 228, 241 125, 149, 170, 171, 183, 220 French poetry, 19, 137, 149

K G Kennard, Luke, 13, 25, 67, 178, 249, Gascoyne, David, 13, 21, 249–253, 267, 269, 277, 325 257–261, 263 Gender, 200, 203, 205, 214, 294 Ginsberg, Allen, 2, 57, 62, 66, 229 L Gross, Philip, 229, 241, 242 Lehman, David, 49 Lowell, Amy, 33–36, 125 Loy, Mina, 47, 48, 52 H Haiku, 12, 122, 126, 239, 269 Hart, Crane, 195, 196, 199, 201, 202, M 205 Mac Low, Jackson, 97, 102 Harwood, Lee, 21, 47, 56, 57, 268 Madge, Charles, 9–11 Heaney, Seamus, 13, 177, 204, 233, 235 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 98–100 Index 339

Mass-Observation, 9, 10 62, 67, 75, 85, 87, 94–96, 98, McMillan, Ian, 8, 9 153, 155, 171, 178–180, 182, Merrill, Stuart, 2, 31 184, 185, 189, 190, 193, 211, Merseybeat, 62 217, 222, 228–231, 233, 234, Miller, Henry, 255, 256, 262 236, 238, 242, 243, 250, 253, Minimalism, 8, 9, 12 255, 257, 263, 267–269, 277, Modernism, 12, 13, 21, 31, 34, 36, 279, 280, 282, 284, 285, 288, 44, 149, 284 289, 291, 292, 294, 296, 297, Monte, Steven, 6, 51, 242 302, 306, 319, 322–326, 329, Morrison, Blake, 178, 179 330 Morton, Ferdinand, “Jelly Roll”, 280, anthologies of, 24, 268, 325 282 attacked as unmasculine, 30 Mottram, Eric, 57, 58, 62, 307 and the avant-garde, 47 Murphy, Margueritte, 12, 74, 229 as British rather than English, 1, 2, Murry, John Middleton, 32, 33, 38 10–12, 14, 15, 30, 67, 75, 180, 193, 194, 267, 284 compared to drama, 12, 234, 236 N defnitions of, 5, 6, 95, 322 Nonsense, 13, 237, 262, 266, 267, as disparagement of prose, 171 269, 272, 274, 276, 277 essays, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12–14, 48, 94, 95, 242, 243, 256, 330 fash fction, 12, 15 O found text, 270, 274 Olson, Charles, 20, 48, 58–60, 63, French origins of, 193 64, 238 gender, 2, 13, 15, 106, 136, 139, Oswald, Alice, 190 212, 219, 294, 295 Over, Jeremy, 13, 266–269, 271, 274, indeterminacy of, 22 276, 277 magazines, 31, 95 in the nineteenth century, 1, 12 in novels, 10, 75, 95, 294 P paragraphing in, 302 Peret, Benjamin, 255, 257 poetic prose, 1, 14, 15, 322, 324 Perloff, Marjorie, 49, 60, 228, 230, prizes, 14, 15, 227, 230 241, 289 public transport, 175 Perse, St.-John, 30, 47, 290 punctuation, 75, 153, 170 Pound, Ezra, 33, 52, 125, 126, 130, short stories, 75, 170 135, 171, 172, 178 small presses, 67 Prizes, 11 in the United States, 31 Prose poetry, 1, 3–6, 8–15, 19, 22, Publishing, 5, 14, 58, 59, 68, 87, 124, 24, 26, 31, 42, 48–51, 53, 57, 178, 214, 215, 228, 230 340 Index

Q Surrealism, 234, 235, 249, 251, 252, Queer theory, 197–199, 203 255–257, 260, 261, 276, 277, 333, 335 Symbolism, 20, 21, 85, 258 R Race, 212, 214, 219, 232, 233 Racism, 222, 229, 232, 233 T Raine, Kathleen, 251, 252 Translation, 2, 47, 80, 82, 85, 99, Rankine, Claudia, 13, 14, 67, 228– 128, 138, 144, 212, 284, 285, 230, 325 287, 320 Raworth, Tom, 51, 58, 60, 285, 286, Turnbull, Gael, 47, 51, 58, 59, 61, 289 301, 309 Revision, 216, 324 Riley, Peter, 7, 13, 25, 64, 65, 228, 238, 239 V Rimbaud, Arthur, 30, 31, 99, 149 Versioning, 81, 82 Robertson, Robin, 190 Rodker, John, 42, 43 Romanticism, 41, 178 W Walcott, Derek, 214 Wanner, Adrian, 8, 9 S War, 8, 20, 39, 41, 43, 50, 53, 58, Santilli, Nikki, 13, 21, 177, 189, 219, 103, 137, 140, 142, 144, 170, 220, 241, 249, 279 172, 187, 208, 286, 300 Schuller, Gunther, 288 Wilde, Oscar, 2, 20, 30, 182, 282, 283 Schuyler, James, 56, 57, 195, 200 Williams, Rhian, 95 Scofeld, Martin, 136, 137, 144 Williams, William Carlos, 12, 47, 51, Seed, Ian, 8, 9, 13, 67, 194, 265 64, 85, 87, 121, 178 Selerie, Gavin, 25, 26, 64, 66, 67 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 12, 13, 22, 74, 76, Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 20, 74, 76, 78, 77, 79, 91, 92, 97–101, 105 87 The Waves, 22, 74–78, 94, 96, 97, Simic, Charles, 2, 227, 235 105 Smart, Elizabeth, 20 Spinoza, Baruch, 200 Star Wars, 213, 214 Y Stein, Gertrude, 3, 19, 47–50, 94, Yeats, W.B., 98, 102, 117, 119, 120, 184, 273, 288, 289, 291 173, 260, 307 Stevenson, Anne, 179, 182, 204 Young, Lester, 293