Monday, April 30, 2018

Prose-Poem-Personal-Essays: A Bite-Sized Dose of Journey, Exploration, and Meaning

As a poet and a essayist, and someone who reads widely in both genres, I see a very thin line between poetry and essay: specifically, when a poem is first-person, mostly linear, reads as prose, and contains elements of the personal essay. These prose-poem-personal-essays pay close attention to language and other poetic conventions, but also employ persona and personal experience to make meaning in a way characteristic of the personal essay. While the lyric essay has long been in conversation (and conflated) with the prose poem, I’m more interested with how the I-character is used in the personal essay and the prose poem to tell a meaningful story about the author. Both the prose poem and the personal essay are difficult genres to pin down because of their myriad variations, but each have formal conventions informed by their genre’s history.

A daily newspaper in Paris, La presse, published a few of Charles Baudelaire’s prose poems on August 26, 1862—debuting the possibility of prose as poetry. Baudelaire collected 50 of his short prose poems into a book, Petitis poemes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (1869) (Hass 385). In the book’s introduction, he explains his ideal for the form as “a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the gibes of conscience” (386). Baudelaire wanted to create a new, more flexible type of poetic prose better suited to capture the whimsey of human thought.

Baudelaire’s American prose poet counterpart was Gertrude Stein, who debuted prose poems in English with Tender Buttons (1914) (Delville 262). The 1997 version of Tender Buttons, published by Dover Inc., includes an unauthored Note specially prepared for the edition to contextualize the seemingly gibberish poems. This Note discusses how Stein attempted to write portraits of people “solely rooted in the present moment,” but then realized acknowledging people’s “movements and expression… forced [her] into recognizing resemblances, and so forced remembering and in forcing remembering caused confusion of present with past and future time” (v). Tender Buttons was born when Stein wrote still lives comprised of objects, rooms, and food—scenes with no humans, and thus no movements or changing expressions (vi).

To avoid any resemblances or remembering, Stein defamiliarized a long-recycled vocabulary and syntax whose patterns recalled its past and future use. Stein stripped words from their denotative contexts: “repeated words, recast them, rhymed them, and strung them together in unusual combinations. She emphasized their musical qualities, favoriting sound over sense” (vi). Her focus on sonics is decidedly poetic, but the form of her poems follow the conventions of prose: sentences begin with a capitalization and end in a period, commas offset separate clauses, and indentations begin each paragraph. For me, these prose familiars make the unfamiliar language construction in the poems easier to read and digest. Stein’s poems in Tender Buttons are unified into paragraphs, and each paragraph or series of paragraphs represents an object, a food, or room; it’s the language and grammar within those paragraphs, however, that subverts their unity.

The expectation of the paragraph is unity, as Robert Hass discusses in his chapter on the prose poem in A Little Book on Form (387). Outside of a poem using paragraphing, Hass declares the prose poem “impossible to define” (386). I feel like this claim is an easy way for Hass to discount the prose poem’s legitimacy, which is silly considering he writes prose poems, including the well-known “A Story About the Body.” He seems to take prose poetry as an affront to what he believes are the only four kinds of prose: “narration, description, exposition, and argument” (387). What a narrow definition of prose! What of exploration? reflection? retrospection? What of the poetic prose he claims “was sired by ambivalence and envy” (387)? From its inception, Hass says, prose poetry “was torn between undermining its medium and appropriating it… The ‘prose poet’ is either worshipping at or pissing on the altar of narration, description, exposition, and argument. Or both” (387).

Must prose poets either worship prose, piss on prose, or hold prose in esteem while still desecrating it? Can’t the prose poem combine elements from both its namesakes, thereby expanding the definition of each? Unlike Hass, I do believe the prose poem can be defined—as any writing that utilizes paragraphing and is categorized as a poem by author, reader, or publisher. Genre is murky, and genres bleed into each other, especially in the case of short prose. I’ll delve into this later in the essay.

As I mentioned earlier, the type of prose poem I’m most interested in includes elements of the personal essay. In “Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing,” essayist and nonfiction writer Ned Stuckey-French attempts to define the illusive genre of the essay. He first turns to the two fathers of the essay—Francis Bacon and Michael de Montaigne. Bacon’s essays were “aphoristic, tidy and impersonal” searches for “truth” (4). On the other hand, Montaigne’s essays were “a means of self-exploration, an exercise in self-portraiture, and a way for him to explore… his own thoughts and feelings” (3). Montaigne’s essays are quite reminiscent of Baudelaire’s aims for his prose poems to capture “the undulations of reverie, the gibes of conscience” (Hass 386). These modes of Bacon’s truth-seeking and Montaigne’s self-portraiture combine into the modern personal essay as a form for the mind to think on the page.

Stuckey-French constructs a continuum with the dry, fact-based nonfiction article on one end, the personal essay in the middle, and the imaginative, fictitious short story on the other (7). The personal essay combines fact and elements of storytelling like narration, scene setting, characterization, and dialogue to tell a true, subjective story. The goal of telling a story in an essay is not just to entertain, but to create some type of significance.

This significance is accrued through the three distinct voices Stuckey-French associates with the personal essay. The voice of you as storyteller (recounting what happened), the voice of reflection (your inner voice from when the events of the essay occurred), the voice of retrospection (your inner voice now) (10). Stuckey-French explains how these three voices combine: “An essay recaptures the voice of a former self and in so doing enables one’s current self to talk about that former self, and then one or both of them... talks to the reader about the lives lived by both selves” (11). The voice of retrospection builds meaning at the end of an essay by looking back on those past selves and providing commentary that reveals some nugget of truth, or illuminates a new idea.

The I-character is a construction of a self on the page. Persona is elastic. But it can’t be stretched so far that the experiences of your I-character become fictitious, because the contract you have with a reader if something is published as “essay” is that it’s true. This is not the case in poetry. Poetry is unconcerned with distinctions of what is and isn’t true. When it comes to a prose poem that reads like an essay, outside research is necessary to understand the conflation of the author’s I-character with the poet’s own life.

In the case of the prose poems “Obey” by Danez Smith and “How I Look In Clothing” by Arielle Greenberg, both authors expressly said their work is about themselves. In a 2015 interview with Candice Iloh in Lambda Literary about their collection of poetry [insert] boy (2014) where “Obey” appears, Smith says: “Publishing these poems...has been like ripping pages out of my diary and posting them on everyone’s locker. So I feel like I have practice in being comfortable [with the fact that] people will read and judge my work and, by extension, my life” (Iloh).

As for Greenberg, the piece in question first appeared in BOAAT PRESS, an online journal dedicated to poetry. The book where the piece was next published, Locally Made Panties (2016), is introduced in the very first sentence of the press release as “A transgenre (prose poem? flash nonfiction?) exploration…” both complicating and reinforcing the publisher’s distinction of the book as nonfiction (“Arielle”). In an interview on The Rumpus with Nicole Guappone in 2016, Greenberg said, “I definitely do not think of the work in Locally Made Panties as prose poems. I think of them as micro-essays… When I write prose poems I’m really emphasizing language… [they’re] image-driven, not particularly narrative work and that’s not how I think of this book.” She goes on to say that her prose poems “are stand-alone,” but the work in Locally Made Panties needs to be read together for readers “to get the point” (Guappone).

I want to push back and say I read “How I Look In Clothing” as a poem, firstly because I encountered it in an online poetry journal, secondly because I believe it does stand alone, and thirdly because prose poems can also be narrative and driven by thought rather than image. This is all to say, I can also read “How I Look In Clothing” as an essay. The pieces in Locally Made Panties are labeled differently based on the needs of the publisher, designations of the writer, and perceptions of the reader, which only reinforces the flexibility of genre.

Why not throw out genre labels entirely? If we could settle comfortably into post-structuralism, there would be no debate. But genres matter because they create contracts with the reader—labeling something as “nonfiction” or “essay” cues the reader into the fact the piece is true, labeling something as “fiction” tells the reader the piece is made up. As I’ve said, poetry is unconcerned with distinctions between the two. So if I’m curious how a poet’s life conflates with their work, I have to turn to research to prove the poem as true. Now that I’ve proved “Obey” and “How I Look in Clothing” as nonfiction based on statements from the authors, and as poems based on their publications and my reading experiences, I can discuss them as both poems and essays.

OBEY

at the orgy I deem all the whiskey & all the weed & all the coke mine mine mine & I dare a motherfucker to tell me different. but who would? they line up next to the free hummus for a shot at the young, black rampage who has come to conquer the house full of men who would be mall Santas or Senators, except for the brown one who speaks no English except yes & no & harder. the latter is his favorite, he makes it my pet name. tonight, I am no one’s pet, maybe an animal, wounded & hungry for revenge or sympathy, but what’s the difference? Some white guy says fuck him, dawg. & I hear fuck him, dog. I obey. when the brown one says no harder where I am sure he means stop, I no harder. he kisses his beast on the cheek, walks away bleeding, smiling, & the blood makes everyone want me more. one by one they bend, one by one I wreck them. everything must leave here limping & bruised. everyone must know what I know. (Smith 65)
The first sentence of the poem establishes a lavish orgy: whiskey, weed, and cocaine (which doesn’t come cheap). Orgy also carries both connotations and denotations of sexual multitudes and excess. The repetition characterizes the speaker, Danez Smith, by situating them in this setting and showing their perceived entitlement to those party drugs: “mine mine mine.” The next part of the sentence and following rhetorical question, “& I dare a motherfucker to tell me different. but who would?” demonstrates the confidence of the narrator. The short length of the question is more of an aside, a way to demonstrate Smith’s essayistic thinking on the page.

Storyteller Smith delivers this first sentence and continues describing the orgy with “men who could be mall Santas or Senators”—a genius way to describe white men—who “line up next to the free hummus for a shot at the young, black rampage who has come to conquer the house full of men.” Here, Smith describes themselves in the third person, which disrupts notions of the conventional personal essay where the narrator stays in the I-character. But this poetic move doesn’t disrupt the story they’re telling. Instead, it gives us a greater characterization of Smith’s I-character and the way the white men see Smith as a Black person, a Black rampage, who will take sexual control at the orgy by conquering, or topping, and thus dominating. Smith’s identity as a Black top is very important for the way power is distributed in the poem, because it encompasses racial power as well as the power of controlling the sexual encounters. Typically, because of systematic racism in the United States, a Black person would not be in control in a house full of mostly white people. But Smith reverses these roles and reclaims power by literally being on top of these white men. Conquer and rampage seem to foreshadow the violence of this topping later in the poem.

This violence is first played out with the only other person of color at the orgy. A man “who speaks no English except yes & no & harder.” Storyteller Smith tells us this man makes “harder” Smith’s “pet name,” which is a example of figurative language lauded in both poetry and prose. Then, Smith puns on the word pet and says: “I am no one’s pet, maybe an animal, wounded & hungry for revenge or sympathy, but what’s the difference?” I read this as the introduction of a second voice: Reflective Smith, not just telling us what happened at the orgy, but describing how they thought of themselves in that moment. They don’t belong to anyone like a pet, but they might be an animal—a word that in this context speaks to the primal urges of sex and violence. Smith again employs a rhetorical question which creates the conversational and essayistic nature of their thoughts for the page.

They think of themselves as someone who is “wounded” and seeking “revenge” or “sympathy” for their hurt. Animals have no sense of mercy. We need this context as a lens to help us accrue meaning in the poem—Smith is no longer the wounded, but the wounder: “Some white guy says fuck him, dawg. & I hear fuck him, dog. I obey. when the brown one says no harder where I am sure he means stop, I no harder. he kisses his beast on the cheek, walks away bleeding, smiling, & the blood makes everyone want me more.” Smith returns to their Storyteller voice; they are no longer victim, but the one inflicting (consensual) hurt on these men. Smith is powerful, their violence is desirable to the men at the orgy.

This passage also continues the punning started on the word pet, and mirrors that in the version of dawg as an informal nickname, and dog as the animal. The animal wordplay is continued when Smith turns again to the third person; the brown man they fucked “kisses his beast on the cheek,” which invokes their past uses of pet, animal, and dog. It’s also necessary to note that a Black person referring to themselves as pet and animal and beast recalls the brutal past of slavery. Smith reclaims these words to describe themselves and their agency at this orgy, and to own, without shame, the uninhibited animalistic sex and violence they exemplify.

“I no harder” recalls Stein’s language in Tender Buttons. Here, Smith creates their own language to capture a single moment, a still life at the orgy if you will. The uniqueness of the language successfully freezes that moment, although still references the past with the brown man saying harder and eventually no harder, but Smith takes the phrase out of the man’s mouth and puts it into their own as a creative way to show they stopped the fucking. This storyteller voice appears for the last time in the next sentences: “one by one they bend, one by one I wreck them.” The pinnacle of Smith’s power is a serial-fucking of all the white men.

The last two sentences are where the most meaning in the poem accrues, because they deliver Retrospective Smith: “everything must leave here limping & bruised. everyone must know what I know.” Everything, instead of everyone, illustrates how Smith thinks of the men as less than human, as if they are limping, bruised animals as Smith once was. Then, everyone returns the humanity to these men, and thus also to Smith themselves. Retrospective Smith combines the experiences of the confident Smith who tells the story of the orgy, as well as the Smith who reflected on their emotional position as a wounded animal to show how they add up together to build meaning about the emotional truth at the orgy—Smith’s desired revenge seeks to transform the white men into animals and fuck them until they are limping and bruised, but then restore the men’s humanity so they can feel the physical and emotional repercussions of that objectification and hurt like Smith once did. We need all three of Smith’s essayistic voices to find this meaning in the poem.

In “Obey,” the poetic and essayistic elements combine into a single unified paragraph that tells a linear story of the orgy. The paragraph isn’t indented, which is typical of many prose poems today. A single, justified block of text looks more poetic because it employs prose conventions, while also subverting them without the formal indentation. The very look of the paragraph is also unified, with the first letter in each sentence uncapitalized, as well as Smith’s consistent use of ampersands throughout. This poem reads as a paragraph of prose; each sentence leads logically to the next to create a unified whole. “How I Look In Clothing” also utilizes the paragraph as a unit of cohesion, but instead of one, it has five:


HOW I LOOK IN CLOTHING

I am (always) currently trying to lose weight.
At one point I was trying to lose the weight I gained by getting pregnant with a baby who did not live, but who left me with the pounds I’d gained to house him in my body. I eventually got to the point where I had lost almost thirteen pounds, I still needed to lose ten more pounds to be at my normal adult weight and have a lot of my clothes fit me again, which would make me happy, since I love my clothes.

Right now, if I lose thirty-three pounds altogether I can almost guarantee I will feel really good about how I look in clothing. I will be able to wear even my smallest clothing, the clothing packed away in plastic storage tubs and duffel bags marked “small size clothing” and kept way up on the top shelves of closets. If I go to purchase new clothes and try them on in dressing rooms I will do a little dance of pleasure and have a hard time resisting making the purchase because I will like how most things look on my body.
If I lose forty pounds altogether it will be a fucking miracle and that would be my Goal Weight, my weight of all weights, and I would think that everything I put on looked fabulous on me.
A Goal Weight is really a completely ridiculous construct.
The first paragraph introduces Reflective Greenberg and the theme of the poem: “I am (always) trying to lose weight.” These seven words gives us all the context we need to understand the lens Greenberg is looking at herself through. If we didn’t have the “(always),” we might assume the obsession with her weight only began after her stillbirth, but since we know she’s always trying to lose weight, we can better follow the logic of Greenberg’s thoughts. With that context, we move into the next paragraph which is told to us by Storyteller Greenberg about her stillbirth.

She has an entire book about the stillbirth of her son, but tells us the story in the context of the poem—in relation to her weight: “At one point I was trying to lose the weight I gained by getting pregnant with a baby who did not live, but who left me with the pounds I’d gained to house him in my body.” She created a metaphor; if she can lose all the weight she gained in the pregnancy, she can also slough off the grief of losing her child. This connection intensifies the obsession with her weight, which was already present before her stillbirth, as introduced in the first paragraph.

Her obsession with weight is reflected in the repetition of phrases about losing weight and how much weight she lost or needs to lose. Over the course of the 240-word poem, there are 17 mentions of losing, weight, and pounds. The repetition of these phrases is compounded by the commas stringing them together: “I eventually got to the point where I had lost almost thirteen pounds, I still needed to lose ten more pounds to be at my normal adult weight and have a lot of my clothes fit me again, which would make me happy, since I love my clothes.” Greenberg could’ve broken up this sentence with a semicolon, periods, or coordinating conjunctions—but she didn’t. The clauses of this long sentence follow the logic flow of Greenberg’s thoughts: an essayistic mode of thinking captured in the subversion of grammar.

In this sentence, Greenberg also develops her I-character as someone who can be made happy if all her clothes that fit before the pregnancy would fit her again. I, too, love my clothes. And like Greenberg, my weight constantly fluctuates. Fitting into my clothes makes me happy, but it’s something I don’t talk about for fear of not being taken seriously. I laud Greenberg for her honesty about the simple joy of feeling good in the clothes she owns.

The third paragraph continues in Greenberg’s Storyteller voice, but carries us into stories about how she will act if she’s able to lose even more weight: “Right now, if I lose thirty-three pounds altogether I can almost guarantee I will feel really good about how I look in clothing. I will be able to wear even my smallest clothing, the clothing packed away in plastic storage tubs and duffel bags marked ‘small size clothing’ and kept way up on the top shelves of closets.” By projecting into the future, Greenberg brings us even closer to her consciousness by sharing her hopes and dreams. Her honesty is even more apparent when she tells us she keeps the clothes that no longer fit her in the hopes they will fit her again, which will mean she “will feel really good about how [she] looks in clothing.” The title of the poem also draws this connection.

The final sentence in this paragraph has no punctuation until the very end: “If I go to purchase new clothes and try them on in dressing rooms I will do a little dance of pleasure and have a hard time resisting making the purchase because I will like how most things look on my body.” Grammar conventions dictate at least one comma before the “I will” to separate the two clauses from each other. By making another poetic move to subvert grammar, Greenberg demonstrates the fast-paced nature of her thoughts surrounding the adrenaline and happiness she would feel if she were thin, dancing in the dressing room.

The penultimate paragraph carries a tonal shift: “If I lose forty pounds altogether it will be a fucking miracle and that would be my Goal Weight, my weight of all weights.” Before, all Greenberg’s musings about her weight were tempered with longing. This sentence is about self-depreciation. The phrase “fucking miracle” is hyperbole; Greenberg never believes she will actually reach her Goal Weight, but she’s confessing it to us anyway. If she reaches her Goal Weight, Greenberg tells us: “I would think everything I put on looked fabulous on me.” This is the third mention of how she looks in clothing, after the title and the third paragraph, reinforcing that she doesn’t think she looks good in clothing at her present weight.

This final paragraph-sentence is the Retospective Greenberg, who can look back at all her reflective and storyteller selves who were obsessed with trying to lose weight and undercut their grip on her life by saying what she was reaching toward—her Goal Weight—was “a completely ridiculous construct.” Greenberg’s use of construct, instead of a word like concept, shows she’s pointing to the artificial nature of a Goal Weight; construct as something that can be torn down, as opposed to concept, which is intellectual and intangible. It’s like she topples the dominos of all her former selves who were obsessed with reaching her Goal Weight.

Up to this point, each paragraph pushes us further into the future of her hypothetical weight loss until we reach this breaking point. It’s as if Greenberg is shaking her head at herself, but that doesn’t mean her fixation on weight loss won’t continue. This final sentence-paragraph is a pithy way to hold the tension and have the author laugh at herself. A Goal Weight, especially with the capitalization as if it holds the weight of a proper noun, is a ridiculous construct, but based on the history we know about the author, that won’t change her thought patterns.

Greenberg’s choice to employ retrospection in the last moment, just like Smith’s, shows the progression of her thoughts from the beginning of the poem. In the personal essay, this retrospection also comes at the end once the storyteller and reflective voices have done the work to develop the I-character. In the case of “How I Look in Clothing,” Greenberg introduces the poem with her reflective voice so we have the necessary context to see the evolution of her line of thought before she delivers the final retrospection.

Both Smith and Greenberg are very confessional in their poems. Smith’s reveals their penchant for drugs, and rough, casual sex, as well as their painful past; Greenberg’s her stillbirth, and wish to lose weight to look better in her clothes. Although the poems have very different tones, each contains a progression of thoughts the reader can follow to unearth a new Truth about the experiences of the author. The choice of these authors to write in prose is apt considering that the linear nature and evolution of their thinking is easily captured in the progression of sentences. It’s difficult enough to accrue this type of meaning in a 15-page personal essay, but to build this type of meaning in less than a page shows tremendous control of their craft by Smith and Greenberg. The prose poem-personal-essay is genre-blurring at its very best—a bite-sized dose of journey, exploration, and meaning.

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Raina K. Puels is the Nonfiction Editor and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Redivider. She leaves a trail of glitter, cat hair, and small purple objects everywhere she goes. You can read her in​​ The American Literary Review, Queen Mob's, Maudlin House, Occulum, bad pony, and many other places. See her full list of pubs: rainakpuels.com​​ Tweet her: @rainakpuels.

Works Cited

“Arielle Greenberg: Locally Made Panties.” Dorns Life: University of Southern California, University of Southern California, 2016, dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/371/docs/Greenberg_LMP.pdf.

Delville, Michel. “Strange Tales and Bitter Emergencies: A Few Notes on the Prose Poem.” An
Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art
, edited by Annie
Finch and Kathrine Varnes, University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. 262–271.

Greenberg, Arielle. “How I Look in Clothing.” BOAAT PRESS, 2014.
www.boaatpress.com/arielle-greenberg-boaat/#how-i-look-in-clothing.

Guappone, Nicole. “The Rumpus Interview with Arielle Greenberg.” The Rumpus, 15 Aug. 2016,
therumpus.net/2016/08/the-rumpus-interview-with-arielle-greenberg/. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Hass, Robert. “Prose Poem.” A Little Book on Form: an Exploration into the Formal Imagination of
Poetry
, HarperCollins, 2017, pp. 385–391.

Iloh, Candice. “Danez Smith: On His New Poetry Collection, Writing About Gay Sex, and the Power of Blackness.” Lambda Literary, 26 Jan. 2015, www.lambdaliterary.org/features/01/26/danez-smith-on-his-new-poetry-collection-writing-about-gay-sex-and-the-power-of-blackness/ . Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Smith, Danez. “Obey.” [Insert]Boy, Yes Yes Books, 2014, p. 65.

Stein, Gertrude. “Note.” Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms, Dover Publications, Inc., 1997, pp.
v-vii.

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