The prose poem is what it sounds like: prose, but a poem. How can that be? As the editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Peter Johnson once said, “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.”
Prose poems are one of my favorite forms; one I keep coming back to time and again. The poet Charles Simic won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry with his collection of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems.
A good example is Simic’s poem “He had mixed up the characters…”
"He had mixed up the characters..." by Charles Simic
He had mixed up the characters in the long novel he was writing. He forgot who they were and what they did. A dead woman reappeared when it was time for dinner. A door-to-door salesman emerged out of a backwoods trailer wearing Chinese robes. The day the murderer was supposed to be electrocuted, he was buying flowers for a certain Rita, who turned out to be a ten-year-old girl with thick glasses and braids. . . . And so it went.
He never did anything for me, though. I kept growing older and grumpier, as I was supposed to, in a ratty little town which he always described as “dead” and “near nothing.”
This video of Charles Simic reading shows how the line between poetry and prose can be blurred. Where are the linebreaks? Are these stories? Poems? Or are they all of the above?