THOMAS LARSON

(TriQuarterly January 31, 2014)

I’ll admit it: I’ve never understood the prose poem, although it seems to be going strong in its third century. It’s the griffin of literature—an amalgam of the two literary arts that neither enhances their respective purposes nor makes the result stronger at the fused place. A definition is not much help; here’s the clearest definition I’ve found in a poetry handbook: “The point seems to be that [any] writing in prose . . . is a poem if the author says so.” It’s at odds with itself, which, I realize, may be the point. But when I reflect on the prose poem’s formlessness, I find it leaves me cold. A few descriptors may explain the chill: the prose poem is blocky, spatially inelegant, print-dependent, unmetered, and unsyllabic.

The prose poem is an inland sea, bordering continents; it is a poem become a paragraph, the apotheosis of free verse, the incantation of poetic diction flattened by sentences. Why does the poet need prose? What’s wrong with verse? (I note that only rarely does a writer of prose break into poetry. The author may add/quote poems, but not in midstream discourse.)

We know what a poem is and what to expect of its line allegiance. What happens when a poem’s vestigial calling is abandoned or disenjambed? Where does the idea of the poem go? In its page-wide box, the prose poem behaves differently than verse does. What is that behavior? Prose poetry rejects the line—which may say something about the poet and his or her psychology. In a volume of poems, some authors scatter a few prose poems and thereby unpattern the spatiality of verse—perhaps to upset our expectations. Is it any more than that? I think not.

And yet, because of the digital era, a few crafty poets are pushing this griffin toward its graphic possibilities, making the prose poem work—precisely as a nonelectronic, handheld, print form. When I say “graphic,” I’m thinking as much about the revolution in design as I am about a text whose layout embodies or enacts its theme. What intrigues me with two of the three books under review here is how they require the book—the book’s physicality—to achieve their purpose. This literal bookishness plants the prose poem where it may grow and prosper. Not only does the printed text possess a unique layout, but the layout manipulates the reader to interact with, or page, the book, thereby activating the reading, rather like swiping our digital screens.

Case in point: Continuous Frieze Bordering Red by Michelle Naka Pierce (Fordham University Press). The book is square, measuring 8.5 x 8.5 inches. The text covers the top quarter of 68 pages. Each page has 5 lines, justified. The text moves on line 1 of page 1, line 1 of page 2, and so on, through 68 pages; then, returning to the beginning of the book, we continue on line 2 of page 1, line 2 of page 2, and so on. (There’s also a poem, with its own irregularities of line and placement, that roams the bottom white space of pages 21–32.)

Two things happen as you read. One, your eyes drop from the first line to the line below it, as is customary. To resist this automatic response, I lap-balance the book so I can keep turning the pages. Which move quite fast. Two, you feel that, because the lines of print are at the top of the page, the text is buoyed above the blank space below. The lines feel propped up or floating in the air of the page, air that otherwise would have been distributed in and around traditional verse. The blank space feels solid and yet also lacks elegance.

I mention this because Pierce wants us to traverse the piece as though it were piled, the text like geologic strata visible in highway road cuts. As with any text, we cannot ignore what is above or below a given line. The optical companionship between lines of a poem or sentences in a paragraph is here completely changed from what we’re used to. One needs to adjust. The idea is intriguing, reminiscent of a narrative frieze  or story told horizontally across the entablature of a temple, requiring a reader to walk the tale.

To help us through her work, Pierce refers to an actual wall-mounted set of two-dimensional paintings. She has patterned her “continuous frieze” after Mark Rothko’s 1959 Seagram Murals. In her acknowledgments she writes that she recently toured a gallery of these large paintings at the Tate Modern. Having received the commission from the Seagram Company for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, Rothko finished the murals but did not deliver the collection due to a political dispute. He is reported to have felt that the merchant kings of capitalism, while eating their chichi meals, would scoff at his meditative work. The Seagram space was all wrong; he kept the work and returned the money. One of the murals, Black on Maroon—blocky shapes with rough borders—is reproduced on the book’s cover.

Midway, Pierce links her work to Rothko in the following sentences (the forward slashes indicate page breaks). “Squares inside rectangles inside squares and suddenly electrical / outlets and heating radiators materialize. Followed by soft edges, blurry. Like water damage.” Later: “If you cannot establish how the tessellating pieces interlock, how can you / record it?” On the experience of touring the gallery: “And so you must move closer then farther away in / order to understand what it means to border the borders.” Throughout, Pierce seeks to “de-territorialize” herself from “the symptom of color.”

Rothko’s blocks of color with tattered edges are echoed in the prose poem’s squarish form. The soft borders he exploits recall those Pierce negotiates: biracial, bicultural, binational. Pierce, who has a Japanese mother and a white Canadian father, confronts her otherness in this book. Her sensitivity is hardened and softened by her looks, history, and parents; her experience of trans-Pacific air travel; her familiarity with being tagged (sometimes by the TSA) and scapegoated in race-obsessed America. Calling herself “you,” she is hyperaware of the “borders” “your” mother crossed; she is “as white as a non-white girl can get”; she is or never has been “white girl pretty”; she suffers from “internalized oppression”; and she is an outcast: “You locate . . . the idea of beauty in a culture that does not value your currency.”

Is her self-talk querulous? At times. But adding in Rothko gives a larger, choral way of engaging self-oppression. After all, Pierce is using the second person to make herself the other: “Your struggle is to see (and be seen) from both perspectives at once.” Such lines arrive quickly as each line-per-page turns: “Can you / begin with this shift: see yourself as different, not as illegitimate, to reverse the vibrations and their effects.” By the end, having recast her victim status, she has moved meaning through the text and finally dislodged her brooding tone. “You are finally breaking down any [mis]perceived symmetry. / Destroying nations of [self] [other] [inside] [out]. You used to know your range through someone else’s.”

Here’s the line/sentence that solidifies the work for me: “You are this continuous sequence with adjacent elements not perceptibly different.” Yes. That’s it. The key discovery in the poem lies in Pierce’s ameliorating her adjacencies, disenthralling her marginalization, which, unchecked, might result in even more suffering.

On to the monolithic pillar, Obedience, by Chris Vitiello (Ahsahta Press). Again, the layout matters. I’m reminded that these books, like installations at a museum of modern art, call for me to operate the book manually to unlock its essence. Almost square in size, Obedience has two front covers and two frontmatter sections. We choose one direction and, at the end, turn the book over and continue in the other direction. I found I often put the book down and picked it up turned over. But I didn’t lose the thread. Because the book is a seamless whole, starting here as much as there and continuing anywhere, I can restart it where I like. Interactive, indeed.

Though the book is omni-enterable and barely holds a narrative, its style and argument—style as argument—do gain traction. Vitiello emphasizes the text’s  syntactic play. Commands and statements constitute his rhetoric, the expository graying the whole with more “is” verbs and verbals than any book ought to  have. Vitiello is playing with the code of “profluence”—the notion that a book needs to get somewhere. And that’s his point: the self-reflexive nature of language is enough of a plot. At least for him.

We know we’re in the school of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry because of the book’s dedication: “For the word, ‘this.’” And, sure enough, that wily pronoun gets the most attention: this, and these, which Obedience enacts. Someone I read recently remarked that and is the most useful word in the English language. This comes a close second. This has the definiteness of the thing at hand: Is this your purse? I’m holding up this alligator-print handbag, and  yet this may not be the one, assuming a sea of purses. Which of these is yours?

But listen to a few of Vitiello’s madcap variations on this pronoun: “This begins and ends with this.” “This line is the moment of its being read.” “The this that this is is immaterial.” “This does not have to end as much as it has to stop.” (It may be our third most useful word.) Such sentences remind us of President Bill Clinton’s 1998 deposition, when, testifying in the Paula Jones lawsuit, he stated memorably: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Vitiello exploits each line’s aloneness, its isolation, often with a deconstructionist’s wit: “The dictionary definition for the word ‘the’ itself contains the word ‘the.’” The book’s arrangement of these pithy nuggets is just the opposite of Pierce’s. Vitiello likes the scattershot as much as he rambles on against or circles around or sniggers at poetry’s touchstone, namely, that a given line has more weight and meaning, based on its context and placement, than another line. 

Like the ambiguity-savoring Gertrude Stein, Vitiello seeds his field with as many flowers as weeds. Some of his best shoots are barbed, the wordplay cloyingly pertinent. A few checked favorites, which I get to by spinning the pages, maybe turning the book over, maybe not:Every line or sentence in Vitiello is given equal space—one line, one vote.

A poem is not an idea but is often said to have ideas in it

Some of the numbers will never be used

Water has no color but always appears to have a color

Stairs contain stairs

One’s usage of words depletes no resource or supply

The substance of Obedience is watery: putting your foot in is to touch its placelessness, its anti-narrative, its nowhere (utopia) of unnumbered, often lookalike pages, which I flip-flop my way across, more awake than I am with many books of contemporary poetry. Vitiello’s is a wonderment. And, like the graphic treadmill of Pierce’s book, unique. Vitiello aestheticizes language insecurity, riddles his grand non sequitur with monadic avowals, maxim-like, yet congealing—as I say, more liquidy than earthy. Perhaps a liquid sense of earth.

Less noteworthy as prose or poetry is Jessica Baran’s Equivalents (Lost Roads). Because her writing is undeveloped and heavily atomized, her several prose poem failures loom larger than her few successes. My main criterion as a reader is that something grab me. Nothing here much does. This, from the laconic and recondite numbered sequence called “On Dailiness.” Number 14.