The Note

T h e  N o t e

I have a friend who is very intelligent but doesn’t know anything about poetry.(On some days, to me, this seems a blessing, but that’s for another The Note.) I can tell he is baffled by my activity in the poetry world. He still doesn’t get the fact that most published poems don’t rhyme. So, I can only imagine his reaction to the idea of prose poetry. Not only no rhyme, but no verse.

Howie Good and I have been publishing digital chapbooks of prose poetry over at White Knuckle (www.whiteknucklepress.com). We’ve got 10 up and 4 more in the pipeline. When we were setting up that endeavor, we exchanged these thoughts on prose poetry.

Howie (from something he posted on the Third Face Blog): Prose poetry doesn't have the long, hoary history that poetry has, a history that imposes formal requirements, rigid expectations, etc. I like writing it because it looks like prose but behaves like poetry. By which I mean because the nature of prose poetry is indeterminate, or at least mixed, it can be whatever the writer can make it. It invites invention, risk-taking, surprise.

Dale: I don't think of prose poetry as a harmonious marriage of prose and poetry. I think the beauty of a good prose poem is in the bitter blood feud between its poetic language and its visual format.  When we read prose, we're conditioned to expect, more or less, certain things--clarity, narrative, explanation, even. The word prose comes from the Latin, prosa, which is translated "straight-forward," (and I totally just learned that on Wikipedia.) So when we encounter the oblique language of poetry when our reading brain is in "prose mode," we get a really disorienting reading experience. Neuroscientists call the brain's reaction to this kind of sensory conflict...okay, I have no idea what they call it but maybe I can find something about it on Wikipedia.

Anyway, I’ve really increasingly enjoyed reading and writing prose poetry in recent years and I have a print chapbook of my own coming out soon of mostly prose poetry. More about that later.

Once again, our friend and frequent contributor Howie Good stepped forward, and guest-edited this issue.  Thanks to Howie and, as always, to fiction editor F. John Sharp and associate editor F. J. Bergmann.

Enjoy!

Dale

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We're pleased to announce the upcoming publication

of a new collection of poems by our frequent

contributor Allan Peterson.  Fragile Acts

is published by McSweeney's.  Click on the cover

below for more information.