Saturday, January 16, 2010

my comma problem and yours

I do have a comma problem but this post is not about that, it is about prose poetry and the perversity of my instincts.

There's a physical law yet to be named but it goes like this. The fewer people that care about any given topic or medium of art or scholarship, the more vicious and unyielding are the differences within its community.

I am, as you may all attest, a peace loving man. So it is certainly not from a love of combat or word-bludgeoning my weaker opponents into inchoate babbling followed by cellar-light vows of vengeance that I am interested in prose poetry.

Which is a very contentious subject indeed. Many poets and readers of poetry claim it doesn't even exist. People who don't read poetry are even less likely to read prose poetry. There is currently just one journal that specializes in it, though others do accept submissions. Which means that, what, maybe three people out of ten thousand actively read poetry. Which puts readers of prose poetry at <1 out of ten thousand, by my quick and dirty math. The numbers are probably actually far worse.

Which is not really that important to me. What is important is that what I am actually writing, the form of engagement with poetry and prose in these pieces, are likely not even to be accepted as prose poems by the few people who care. There are many, many accepted formal definitions, but they almost all agree that a prose poem should *look* like prose but *be* something else.

(Shit! My in-laws are a half an hour away! Gotta clean the bathroom... and myself...)

To be continued...

1 comment:

chopova said...

Hahaha! I was all deep in thought reading this entry... and then the ending u-turned me to the cleaning of my own bathroom