Gerry LaFemina | April 2021

Gerry LaFemina

Imagine you’re going to a surprise birthday party: you’ve bought a few presents, and you need to wrap them. This is about boxes—not so much the boxes themselves, but about what goes inside each box. For the adventurous and creative recipient, lifting a gift box may lead to someplace mysterious, artistic, delightful in a way that opens to possibility. Inside may be colorful or open-ended, the gift of an adventure or the gift as adventure. For a business associate or mere acquaintance, the presents are much more prosaic, more mundane. You might have gotten for them something practical, something that says I know what you like. Here’s that New York Jets polo shirt, Brother. I know you’ll love it.

The paragraph is a gift box. There is an exchange going on. The writer gives the gift of the words in the paragraph. The reader gives the gift of attention. Sometimes the paragraphs are wildly adventurous, lyric excursions of language barely held within the confines of prose. Others are what we expect from a well-written paragraph: informational, perhaps narrative, sometimes discursive, but usually logical—sentences held together by voice, subject, sensibility.

These are the differences, of course, between prose poems and prose. The gift wrap doesn’t matter in the end. The box is just a container, one that’s chosen deliberatively, or ought to be. When we are talking about short-short prose, what we are talking about are paragraphs. Some pieces one paragraph long, others multiple paragraphs long—all of them without lineation and therefore all of them by definition prose.

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This is where we often get into trouble, isn’t it? When we get to the question of genre. Genre is a tricky thing. Frederic Jameson defines genres as being “essentially literary institutions or social contracts between a writer and a specific public.”¹ Publishing something as a genre provides a sensibility for a reader. Poetry is a separate genre of literature, and classically poetry was divided into three (sub)genres: the epic, the dramatic, and the lyric. More contemporaneously, we are less likely to talk about poetic genres. Instead, we are more likely to discuss modes: the lyric, the narrative, the meditation, LANGUAGE, etc., or else we discuss forms of poetry. Poetry, in and of itself, has become genre.

With prose, it’s a lot trickier, this discussion of genre. Nonfiction and fiction both get broken up into (sub)genres, so much so that to discuss them would be pointless. It’s possible, now, to get an MFA in popular (read genre) fiction. Suffice to say, though, we recognize the differences between types of fiction and nonfiction and dramas as genres.

What do we do with the notion of the prose poem, something by its name that lives in the netherworld between these major genres? It is inherently sui generis, an amphibian, a Frankenstein monster. They are what’s inside them. They are gift boxes. Surprise ensues.

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In the last thirty years or so, the genre we refer to as the prose poem has blurred into what some have called PP/FF: prose poem/flash fiction. In his American Book Review piece “What is PP/FF?” Peter Conners defines this literary form in this way:

Narrative prose poetry, short-short story, sudden fiction, poems in prose, or one of a dozen other terms privilege poetry or fiction and don’t fairly acknowledge writing that swings between the two forms without ever coming to a complete standstill. Peter Johnson ... wrote “Admittedly, you can call a short work of fiction whatever you want (prose poem, sudden fiction, halfstory, and so on), but it’s difficult to hold the apple if you’re chewing it on all sides. Eventually, as more and more short shorts are being written and published, some distinction between ‘prose’ and ‘prose poetry’ will have to be made.”²

The declaration, it seems, is that these short paragraphs, these sui generis forms, ought to be genericized. It should also be noted that no distinction is being made for writing that is distinctly nonfiction and super short, or as Brevity calls them “the extremely brief (750 words or less) essay form.”³

Of course, there are prose poems that function in essay-like ways. And the word “essay” is pretty open-ended in its roots, coming from the French word essais, which means trials, or attempts. Every prose poem I’ve written is an attempt, a lab experiment, a cross pollination. And considering the French roots of the prose poem, perhaps the micro-essay should be called an essais, if we’re looking to brand our paragraphs into genre.

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All of this reminds me of a time from grad school in the early ’90s when my classmate Peter Markus was publishing a number of short paragraphs, a style in which he continues to write: paragraphs filled with anaphora, imagery, temporal stillness/lyricism. We were talking about publishing, and he said that he didn’t define genre when he sent these pieces out: if an editor published them as prose poems, they were prose poems; if as short stories, then they were fiction. As an example of his work from this time, here’s “Light”:

When he wasn’t working, on his days off, his father liked to spend his day outside, in the shingle-bricked, single-car garage, tinkering with his ‘52 Chevy Bel Air: a stoop-roofed, two-tone junker he bought off a drunk buddy of his, a fellow hot metal man by the name of Lester Litwaski, for a fifth of whiskey and a scrunched-up dollar bill. There were days when his father wouldn’t take five minutes to come into the house to eat a hot lunch. Days like these his mother’d send him outside into the garage with a cold corned beef sandwich and an apple, and his father’d stop working only long enough to wolf down this food, his hands gloved with grease and dust, before ducking back under the Chevy’s jacked-up back axle. Sometimes his father would fiddle around past midnight, his bent-over body halfswallowed by the open mouth of the hood, his stubby, blood-crusted fingers guided by the halogen glow of a single bare light-bulb hanging down like a cartoon thought above his hunch-backed silhouette. Sometimes he would stay up late and watch his father’s shadow stretch like a yawn across the walls of the garage. And in the darkness of his room he would sit, silently, on the edge of the bed, by the window, and wait for that moment when his father raised up his hand, as if he were waving, as if he were saying good-bye, and turned off the light.⁴

Who decides genre? Writer? Editor? Reader? “Light” was published originally in The Prose Poem: An International Journal. Here Markus must have sent it to the editor, thus considering it a prose poem. Peter Johnson, the editor there, must have considered it a prose poem. Yet, there’s story here, a narrative, something more than just vignette.

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I didn’t choose “Light” willy-nilly. I’m interested in this talk about the object, interested in those things we put in the box. There’s a long tradition of the object prose poem. And of course, objects have long been the subject of stories and essays. Let’s consider how we write about the subject of objects. More importantly, how we work with them in short prose forms.

The prose poem comes out of the symbolist movement. Ursula Franklin notes that the “traditional Symbolist poem… develops only one term of its principle metaphor throughout, without any explicit identification of the object or idea to which the first term stands in an analogical relationship, so that the thing symbolized has to be inferred from the symbol itself and other signs in the poem.”⁵ In his introduction to A Poverty of Objects, The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre, Jonathan Monroe writes, “In accordance with the object-like density and compactness of its form, the prose poem has evidenced over the course of its very brief history an extraordinary preoccupation with the prosaic world of everyday material objects.”⁶ Is it any wonder that the first wave of prose poetry in the US appears around the time of the Imagists (consider Stein’s Tender Buttons in which both objects and language are manipulated, handled), and it experiences a resurgence during the Deep Image era? The object—as symbol, as metaphor, as thing unto itself, as totem and fetish, as that thing which there are no ideas without—both personal (subjective) and in the world (objective) is in the DNA of the prose poem itself.

Monroe tracks the prose poem’s development as genre and notes, “the genre’s increasingly characteristic but largely transhistorical focus on ordinary, everyday objects of the physical world.”⁷ Each writer discussed, though, works with these objects in uniquely different and distinct ways. For instance, about the object prose poems of Francis Ponge, Monroe says the poet “demands ‘infallibility,’ ‘indubitability,’ and ‘brevity’ on the one hand, and concreteness and ‘a respect for the sensory aspect of things’ on the other.”⁸ If this is the case, objects are a source of possibility for all writers of short paragraphs, whatever our predilections of genre.

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Adorno notes that “[p]otentially, though not actually, objectivity can be conceived without a subject; but not likewise object without subjectivity.”⁹ A thing, in the end, is defined in part by what we do with it, despite whatever cultural symbolism may be attached. If my sweetheart doesn’t like roses, my sending her a bouquet of long-stemmed reds isn’t romantic, but stupid, despite cultural norms. Consider an egg. It can be an embryonic chicken or an Easter decoration or breakfast or a projectile or an ingredient in a cake recipe or a symbol of spring or an item to gather and sell. Its use is, in part, defined by its user.

Ditto if we were to write a paragraph titled “Egg,” we might write a prose poem, or a short short story about someone searching for an Easter egg (or throwing an egg at someone), or a memoir about an egg drop science fair project, or a recipe. What we do with our object, in part, determines “genre.” The paragraph then, like the egg of the example, is versatile. It becomes what we make of it.

Thus, a paragraph can embody/embrace a subject and function as metaphor for an object. In The Hobbit, Bilbo gives this riddle: “A box without hinges, key, or lid,/ yet golden treasure inside is hid.”¹⁰ The answer is egg. I might argue, the answer could also be a paragraph. Though sometimes the treasure is a chicken. Or a duck. Or a snake. Or a sulfury stench.

The teacher in me wants to suggest everyone write a short-short titled “Eggs.” Consider this one:

My mother each spring hard-boils a dozen eggs, colors them in teacups filled with vinegar, water, and dye. No matter that she has no kids to hide them for. She puts them all in a basket, takes photos of them, and she sends, like postcards, wish you were here. xoxo. All the next week she eats egg salad on toast. I never liked egg salad. I used to dream I’d been adopted, the way all kids might wish their parents were someone else. I said this because I hated egg salad and threw those sandwiches into the plastic garbage can at the end of the school cafeteria. Sometimes the brown bag with my name on it might sit on top of the pile, nestled there among half pint milk cartons and banana peels. A friend in fifth grade told a story of a woman cracking open an egg and a baby snake slithered out into the skillet. We knew it was a lie even as we gasped. Male penguins care for the egg all winter, huddled together, but my dad was long gone. Later we learned how the mockingbird that lays its egg in the nests of others, so the mother doesn’t have to put the effort in to raise its young.

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There is a difference between an omelet, eggs benedict, and a hard-boiled egg. This emphasizes the role of the cook, the role of the medium, and the role of the diner. Ditto, one might argue (though I am less sure), there is a difference between a prose poem, a flash fiction, and a micro-essay. The prose poem’s intensity comes from its lyric roots, its desire to stop time, to sustain a moment. The flash fiction’s intent is more narrative, its ambition is to move through time. What then of the micro-essay? Does its essence in fact distinguish it between a prose poem and flash fiction? Then we must consider how many prose poems begin with fact. And how might we know?

And this distinction between narrative drive and lyricism is problematic, too. The history of the prose poem acknowledges its roots in fable as much as in poetry. Narrative, after all, often provides context for lyricism. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics notes that “among [the prose poem’s] antecedents are the poeticized prose translations of the Bible, of classical and folk lyrics, and of other foreign verse; the poeticized prose of such Romantics as Chateaubriand and the prose passages of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads; and the intermixtures of verse and prose”¹¹ in other European Romantic literatures. In other words, there is no way to distinguish beyond declaration of “genre,” what self-contained paragraphs might be. The need for such distinction, it seems to me, is rooted in academia, the need to be a specialist, to have publications in that specialization.

Let’s consider two short pieces by Aloysius Bertrand who is considered to have been the grandfather of the prose poem.

The Mason

The Master Mason: “Come look at these bastions, these buttresses;
they seem to have been built for all eternity.” &mdashSchiller, William Tell

The Mason Abraham Knupfer is singing, trowel in hand, scaffolded up so high that, as he examines the gothic inscription on the great cathedral bell, even the soles of his feet stand high above the flying buttresses of this church—all thirty of them, in this town of thirty churches.

He sees gargoyles spewing water from the roof-slates down into the entangled abyss of stone galleries and stained-glass windows, pendants, pinnacles, and spires, rootfops, turrets and timberwork, which the falcon’s hovering wing punctuates with its one still point.

He sees the star-shaped outlines of the fortification-walls...

The imperial guard is quartered at the edge of town. Look!—In the distance, a soldier’s drumming! Abraham Knupfer can see his tri-cornered hat, his epaulets stitched with bright red yarn, his cockade crimped with a rosette, and his pigtail tied with a bow.

The next thing he sees are some other soldiers....

And towards evening, when the echoing nave of the cathedral falls asleep, stretched out with its arms flung out in the shape of a cross, he sees from his lofty ladder an entire village set afire by troops, flaming like a comet in the deep-blue sky.¹²

“The Mason’ functions as a short short narrative (it has a character, it travels through time—the course of a day—there’s tension) with some lyricism thrown in at the end to create a sense of epiphany. We can note significant differences between how the prose functions in this piece and how it functions in “Moonlight,” below.

Moonlight

Awaken, all you sleepy-heads
And pray now for the dead.
—Call of the Night-Crier

Oh, how delightful it is, as nightly hours ring out from the steeple, to see the moon—with its nose so like a golden coin!

 

*

Two lepers were wailing beneath my window, a dog howled at the crossroads, and the cricket on my hearth chirped out its tiny, ominous prophesies.

But soon, only utmost silence filled my listening ear. The lepers had retreated to their huts, to the customary sounds of Jacquemart beating up his wife again.

The dog had skulked off down an alleyway, past the halberds of the night-watch, all rusted by the rains and chilled by the keen, north winds.

And the cricket had fallen asleep at the moment when the last coal flickered out, there in the ashes of my fireplace.

And as for me, it seemed to me (for such are the confusions of fever!) that the moon had screwed up its face and was sticking out its tongue at me—like a hanged man!¹³

Here each paragraph is an examination, a reinterpretation of a moment. The function of the prose is purely descriptive, symbolic, imagisitc, in other words, lyric. Time stands still.

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How the paragraph works, then, is all about time, about how we process moments, not as in the time it takes to read (or write!) a particular piece, but how it engages the temporal. Does time move forward or does time stand still? Perhaps these short shorts, these paragraphs, are a place to work on a theory of special relativity in quantum literary mechanics. That said, there are a number of commonalities—a sense of egginess—in the eggs benedict, omelet, and hard-boiled egg dishes mentioned earlier. Similarly, there are a lot of shared qualities in these short prose pieces: a reliance on conciseness, a need for control of rhythm in the sentence, and on the need for lyricism. The importance of image and surprise can’t be forgotten.

Perhaps, a better metaphor for the prose poem is not the box that is egg, but the box that is cuckoo clock, the old fashioned kind that my great aunt Gladys had in her dining room, the one that had to be set or else it would stop running, the kind that every hour the cuckoo bursts forth from its doors and cuckoos. I loved it when I was a kid, and as I waited for the hour to happen, time seemed to last forever (that could be as much to do with the company of adults talking Polish all around me as my anticipation for the clock).

Remember, William Carlos Williams called the poem a machine made of words. Each word is a gear or a cog in our paragraphs; they spin and turn toward the end of the piece. The paragraph is the box. Sentences are the way we manage time. At the end the bird bursts forth

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It is crucial to remember that the prose in the term prose poem is not genre specific. The desire to call it pp/ff seems to want to distinguish the fictional narrative aspects of a particular type of prose from the prose poem, to create something for fiction writers in the academy to say, “See. I’m publishing pieces,” nonfiction writers be damned. The fact is, the very name prose poem props up a particularly big tent without the need for distinction.

Monroe declares “Both prose and poetry, but neither prose nor poetry exclusively, the prose poem is… the place of confrontation between inside and outside, where the distinction between these threatens to collapse.”¹⁴ If we think about our relationship to objects and how we might identify ourselves with things (think of the importance of the possessive pronoun my) or in opposition to things, we begin to understand perhaps the allure of the object prose poem.

That said, there’s so much we don’t know about the things of the world, even the things that we love, even the things that we own. Speculation, research, history: all these strategies can develop the paragraphs we write. Therefore, imagine a paragraph titled, “Something You Love But Don't Own.” Or else a paragraph titled “Something You Loathe But Own.” Either way, it’s the relationship between object and emotion that creates tension.

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It can be argued that Aristotle was the first to define literary genres, but right now I’m thinking about Plato, and his criticism of the poets (and other artists) for making copies of copies of an ideal. As we write our objects, the space between the subjective self engaging the object and the world outside the self breaks down. We redefine the thing in the context of our story/prose poem/micro-essay. It loses more of its idealness. That’s the ideal of the paragraph, to force the reader to rethink the experience of the thing itself, to rethink our experiences of things in the world.

Oh, to be Adam in the garden with the ability to name the flowers and the animals and the trees. Or to be Marianne Moore and charged with naming a new Ford (the car that later became the Edsel—a name she did not suggest). Fiction writers often get the joy of naming things. Consider Italo Calvino’s prose poems (or are they micro-essays of perfect communities, travelogues of places that might exist? Or are they microfictions, pieces of literary fiction without a narrative?)

Octavia

If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed.

This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support...

Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.¹⁵

Compare this to Dino Campana’s prose poem “Florence,” the second paragraph of which reads as follows:

Here the Arno has fresh rippling’s still: later it takes on the silences of deeper places: in the channels between low monotonous hills nudging the little Etruscan cities, level now all the way to its mouth, leaving behind the white trophies of Pisa, the precious duomo traversed with its colossal beams holding in the nakedness of such vast breath from the sea. At Signa in the continuous assonant musical humming I remember that deep silence: silence of a buried epoch, silence of a buried civilization: and as a young Etrsucan girl is able to sadden the landscape...¹⁶

There’s no doubt that the latter is a much more fact-based description, with the prose elegantly enacting the Arno—that long first sentence rippling itself along the river bed of the paragraph. It’s poetic prose, surely, in its use of metaphor and image and repetition. Compana was a poet; is that what makes his pieces prose poetry and not short travel essays?

But let’s throw a monkey wrench into the discussion here (just consider the word monkey wrench and all it conjures for a split second). Michael Martone’s Blue Guide to Indiana takes on all the trappings of a travelogue of Indiana—even in form and design it appears to be an actual Blue Guide guidebook to Indiana (so much so that in its second printing the book had to have a disclaimer added to the cover announcing it was not an actual Blue Guide to Indiana. In these pieces, the state is real, the attractions are not. There is no “Hoosier Infidelity Resort Area,” no “National Monument for Those Killed by Tornadoes in Trailer Parks and Mobile Home Courts,” and surely no commemoration of the “License Plate Insurrection of 1979.”

Here’s one of the book’s “Ten Little Italies of Indiana.”

7. The Only Active Volcano in the State—Mt. Etna

Settled by Sicilians accustomed to living in the shadow of an active volcano, Mount Etna nestled at the foot of the 429-foot hill shelters several dozen families still engaged in the traditional peasant occupations of their forbears. There, on the fertile slopes of Mount Etna, the entire national crop of anise is cultivated each fall. Also in production are gourmet table grapes and raisins hybridized for use in chocolate-covered confections. The region’s groves produce the specialty salad olive, a variety, due to the tendency of its fruit to break apart or split upon ripening, ideal as an ingredient in green lettuce salad. Mount Etna, currently erupting particulate ash and steam, has attracted a colony of landscape painters who come to the area to employ what has been called the “Hoosier Light” in oils and watercolors to accent their renderings of the summit’s brooding romantic nature.¹⁷

Place can be an object made of other objects, like the box that contains multiple other gift-wrapped boxes inside.

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Show don’t tell. No ideas but in things. Michel Beaujour in his essay “Two Contextual Approaches,” says about the image that it functions “as a signal indicating a belief in correspondences beyond the reach of ordinary language.... One face of the image is this-worldly and linguistic, while its hidden face is magic, supralogical, prelogical, metasemiotic, and real.”¹⁸ In writing that privileges image, which Beaujour declares is inherently poetic writing, we are exploring the metaphoric, the possibility of interconnectivity found in the world of things.

When we open the box of the paragraph, of the short short prose form, we are sticking our hands into the other world, picking up an object that exists within our subjective understanding of the object and the metaphoric/symbolic potential explored in the writing. Richard Stamelman in talking about the object prose poems of Frances Ponge says “the beginning is more than just the start of a text. It marks the birth of an object as well.”¹⁹ This duality is seamlessly understood in the dialectic implied in the name prose poem, something no other generic descriptor provides. Monroe suggests “the prose poem characteristically gestures both toward unity and sameness and toward fragmentation and difference. If it aspires, on the one hand, to a hybridization or ‘fusion’ of generic difference in order to resolve false contradictions and oppositions (as of poetry and prose, literary and ordinary language), it aspires also to the breakdown of generic, textual, and class barriers...”²⁰

All we have to do is exmine the history of the prose poem to recognize its all-encompassing nature in terms of generic possibility. Looking particularly at a series of prose poems that engage objects, we see how seamlessly the term remains genre-bending. The writer’s tendencies allow for the paragraph to be the perfect gift box for whatever we put in it. In my case, I’ll put a monkey wrench in it.

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Monkey Wrench

Not the lemur wrench or the gorilla wrench, no, nothing as new-fangled, as open to possibility as those, but an old-fashioned monkey wrench, thick-handled, thick-headed, clumsy but still all-purpose.

My mother was a firm believer in the crescent wrench, which she referred to as a monkey wrench, with which it shares an important characteristic: an adjustable head.

If I could, I’d present a graphic. Suffice to say it has a handle, an adjustor, and adjustable jaws with a pair of grips.

Despite the rumors there was no Mister Moncky, for whom the wrench is named. We’d call him a mensch for creating such a utilitarian tool. Nor is it known for being so versatile that even a monkey could use it. There’s a monkey mystery, a monkey wrench thrown into etymology.

All day, I’ve been building the machine with spare scraps from the work b≠ench: different nuts, different bolts. So many cogs and sprockets set. So many head sizes: metrics and ASE. So many hours of labor. Tightening, loosening: my monkey wrench the only tool for the job.

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Gerry LaFemina s a multi-genre writer whose latest book of prose poetry is Baby Steps for Doomsday Prepping (Madville, 2020). A professor of English at Frostburg State University, he serves as a mentor in the Carlow University MFA program.

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Notes