Prose Poems

[LucienMidnight]

i was skimming these did anyone mention the beat generation? jack kerouac and some Allen gineburg in my opinion kerouac is more prose but allen is alot better idk if that helps but pick up mexico city blues

[Il Penseroso]

John Ashbery has some of the best prose poems I've read. "The Network" is 20-30 pages long I believe. Here's a good one:

The Young Son

The screen of supreme good fortune curved his absolute smile into a celestial scream. These things (the most arbitrary that could exist) wakened denials, thoughts of putrid reversals as he traced the green paths to and fro. Here and there a bird sang, a rose silenced her expression of him, and all the gaga flowers wondered. But they puzzled the wanderer with their vague wearinesses. Is the conclusion, he asked, the road forced by concubines from exact meters of strategy? Surely the trees are hinged to no definite purpose or surface. Yet now a wonder would shoot up, all one hue, and virtues would jostle each other to get a view of nothing -- the crowded house, two faces glued fast to the mirror, corners and the bustling forest ever preparing, ever menacing its own shape with a shadow of the evil defenses gotten up and in fact already exhausted in some void of darkness, some kingdom he knew the earth could not even bother to avoid if the minutes arranged and divine lettermen with smiling cries were to come in the evening of administration and night which no cure, no bird ever more compulsory, no subject apparently intent on its heart's own demon would forestall even if the truths she told of were now being seriously lit, one by one, in the hushed and fast darkening room.


-John Ashbery


There's also Poe's "Eureka: A Prose-Poem", which I've read a bit of, although it strikes me as more an Essay. Then there's Bob Kaufman's (a lesser known Beat) "Does the Secret Mind Whisper"

Hope that helps, belatedly.

[Riesa]

fabulous.

Here and there a bird sang, a rose silenced her expression of him, and all the gaga flowers wondered.

That is incredibly beautiful.

[blp]

Yes, that's pretty much everyone. I think Jules Laforgue too.

Creeley was mentioned in one of the Bly poems. He's also occasionally interspersed small, almost unclassifiable prose pieces among his poems, e.g.

When and/or if, as, ––however, you do "speak" to people, i.e., as condition of the circumstance (as Latin: "what's around") a/n "im(in)pression." "I'll" crush you to "death" –– "flying home".

•

Allen last night––context of how include the output of human function in an experience thereof makes the fact of it become possibility of pleasure––not fear, not pain. Everybody spends it (the "life" they inhabit) all––hence, no problem of that kind, except (large fact) in imagination.

[Riesa]

Patti Smith anyone?

The Blue Doll

This morning I dreamed you returned and left a blue doll face down on my mother's quilt. I reached to turn it over, as a black liquid seeped from a crack in the wall and bled into a pool, rising beneath our bed. The doll had blue hair and a blue face. I gripped it by the ankles and shook it like a medicine rattle, I shook it with such force, the head spun and I felt remorse.

I rose and fastened my hair. My robe trailed the rim of the black water. My nose began to bleed, slowly at first, then tear sized drops that slid down my throat, staining my collar and bodice. My dress was the dress of the blue doll. I walked on the water through the walls into the forest to a rocky hillock. I cut a path and ascended barefoot.

I lay face down on the crest, humming the music of a fluted sun. I was no longer angry. I was no longer than the span of a note sounded by a thrush in the wood.


from 'Auguries of Innocence' which has several more incredible prose poems.

[detritus]

The bulk of "Hymns to the Night" by Novalis. George Trakl...

[uranderson]

Invisible Cities, the novel by Italo Calvino, reads like a series of prose poems.

You can find excerpts here.