The Prose Poem in England Today: A Poet’s View

The prose poem in England today is still treated as a risk, or at best, a question and cause for hesitation. I recently attended a writing conference in the UK, and discussed the prose poem with a variety of editors, publishers and writers. One publisher announced that he’d never received a prose poem in his career, and wouldn’t know how to read one. Others simply acknowledged it was rare, and disclosed that the prose poetry they had received, was predominantly bad writing. England’s resistance to the form, is seen as a mystery to some, while for others, it is clearly a formist reaction, and disinterest in engaging openly with a new approach to its traditional notions of prose and poetry. The question remains then: will the UK ever begin to realise that perhaps this ‘subversive’ genre, is far from radical or detrimental to the safe divisions between poetry and prose? Where Coleridge and Wordsworth recognised the absence of an “essential difference” between prose and verse, the current literary climate is still uncomfortable with the prose poem and what it appears to represent: the abolition of the most familiar of all divisions between prose and poetry: the line break. While in the plastic arts, cows are being halved and petrified, in literature the term ‘chopped-up prose’ is an offence; a derogatory term for the “textual assault” that is the prose poem. The possibility that the prose poem has its own terms and is a genre in its own right - that among its ambitions “textual assault” is not a priority - has not yet been considered by enough individuals in Britain, in the right place, at the right time.

The current status of the prose poem in the UK is still very much at the stage of Nikki Santilli’s title of the first full-length book study of the British prose poem, published in 2002: Such Rare Citings: the Prose Poem in English Literature.

But, it is important to acknowledge the corners of this floating world that are taking on the prose poem, or rather taking on more than one at a time. Recently published was the first full-length collection of prose poems in the UK, at least of a relatively mainstream publication: How to be a Dragonfly by Patricia Debney, and it’s exciting, significant even, that a British publisher has made the leap. The winner of the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition 2004, ‘Patricia is one of the few people in this country to write prose poetry, and this was the first time this prize has been awarded to a prose poet. She said 'It's a form that developed in France around 150 years ago and it is still going in Europe. It also developed in North America, possibly through Gertrude Stein. But it's really funny - it's just not published here.' (1)

As there are only a handful of magazine editors in the UK who have actually published prose poems, and a slightly larger handful of authors who have included prose poems as part of their poetry collections, it is interesting to observe this progression. Add to this the rumours that more and more writing courses are sounding out the name, and that some academic institutions are becoming more open to honouring the genre its own module, and I am willing to believe that far from seeing its day that never really dawned in the UK, the prose poem is just beginning its ascent towards the fickle skies of England.

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(1) Extract: Newsletter Vol 26, No 5. June 2005, University of Kent.

Bio:

Jane Monson is a Creative and Critical Writing Ph.D researcher based in London, writing on the prose poetry of Francis Ponge. Publications include The Liberal magazine, Ore, Cadenza and three poetry anthologies, Magpie, Reactions, and White Noise. She was short-listed for the Eric Gregory Award, received a commendation prize from Poetry London, and has taught Creative Writing online and in schools.