The Prose Poem in Great Britain

October 02, 2006 It is told that prose poetry flowered in the British isles, momentarily, in the Gallic pretentions of Oscar Wilde. But, at his Old Bailey trial the infamous letter Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas was denouced as a “prose poem”. This was, of course, a misnomer: it was no prose poem at all, simply a letter that the prosecution wished to depict as utterly scandalous. Calling it a prose poem was an effective way of associating it – and Wilde – in the minds of the bourgeoisie with all the appalling excesses they believed were part of “French decadence”. When Wilde was convicted, the prose poem fell with him, quashed by no less authority than Her Royal Highness’s judiciary and the tabloid press.

This was just one incident that prevented the prose poem from being accepted as a genre, but it is not the whole story. Since its development in the nineteenth century, the prose poem has not attracted serious attention from British writers. In general, it is felt this is due to the historically liberal nature of English literature which has never been tied to formal convention (consider the unconventional early novel, Tristram Shandy; the rich history of essays and meditations; the excellencies in style of the King James bible; prose translations of foreign and Old English poetry and so on). As a result, the prose poem was at best, ‘entertained’ on occasion by a handful of verse and prose writers and finally began to be used with some regularity and consideration in the 1970s, influenced by work in America. However, a school has not emerged and in Britain the form remains idiosyncratic, generally appearing, irregularly, in small presses.

So, where to begin to update the account and introduce contemporary British work? In an environment where there doesn’t seem to be an issue to debate or genre to defend, a ‘history’ is more a matter of tendencies and non-generic, sympathetic texts, punctuated by the occasional rebuttal or rallying cry. Pre-Romantic British prose oscillated between flowing Ciceronian and abrupt Senecan styles while being influenced at the same time by the re-appraised King James Bible. The Romantic period itself continued to debate issues that verged on prose poetry and even produced the first identifiably prose poetic texts in England, most notably by William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey. From there the genre appears in somewhat bloodless imitations of Gallic imagism, fake scripture or Ossianic gasps before Eliot finally scolds Richard Aldington in his “Borderlines of Verse” for attempting an impossible genre and since then the prose poem has proved more of a pathological itch for some experimental writers; an awkwardness that appears in collections but is politely ignored by readers, critics and even, to an extent, the authors themselves

Despite this rather bleak picture, British prose poetry still exists today, certainly, but it generally appears on an occasional basis (its unusual format emerging to suit the requirements of a particular piece), rather than as a text produced in accordance with, or in response to, a recognizable genre. Indeed, several writers whom I approached with a request to submit material for this feature were intrigued that there was already quite a school of thought on the form, let alone bemused that here was someone prowling around, recording instances of it.

There is something quite unique about a form that appears in print but is not formally recognized by its author or its audience, both simply accepting it for what it is. And, in a way, I feel somewhat rueful about assembling a sample collection; troubled by the conscience of the anthropologist who makes her subjects aware of the science of their behaviour. Any subsequent movement is bound to be a little self-conscious after that.

Considering the lack of exposure given to the form, I was interested in the question of influence and was surprised by responses from writers that indicated it was overwhelmingly French: Jacob, Mallarmé, Michaux and Char. The medium in which foreign texts are often received, that is, plain prose translation, was itself regarded as a contributing aesthetic. Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams were cited by Roy Fisher and Alan Halsey while Peter Reading found sympathy with Hemingway’s “short shorts”. In terms of compatriots, Samuel Beckett and David Miller were both identified for their prose poetry texts. Other forms mentioned were the aphoristic fragments of the pre-Socratics, mythological tales and the Japanese haibun.

I initially contended that a discernable typographical shape through brevity was a characteristic of the form; Alan Halsey, by contrast, confessed to being “gob-smacked” by the suggestion that it had a role to play in these matters. Nevertheless, he agreed with the need for some formal imposition (be it formal, or linguistic) in order to generate the desired tension within the text. In all, it seemed that Eliot’s maxim still held: “freedom is only freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation” (Reflections on Vers Libre). The nature of that limitation is contestable, defined for each poem by the poem itself.

At this point, I defer to the selection itself; inviting the reader to wander around uncovering directions, contrasts, surprises and similarities. The texts are immediately challenging in not conforming to the dimensions that have become recognizable in US journals in print and online. It may be deemed that some of them are not prose poems at all. In articulating why that is so, we may have another criterion that editors can wave and writers rail against. It is the latter, after all, who find freedoms in the smallest spaces and unfold their worlds there. This is an edited version of Santilli’s introduction to Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Issue 3, 2005. Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics 4, guest-edited by Peter Johnson, is out now. “Sentence spans the expanse of what is currently being done with the prose poem... and is surely as good a place as any to seek out the best of what is now in circulation.” - American Book Review