Of late I’ve been lamenting about being stuck in a rut as far as my essays go. I’m starting to get a voice going that I feel mildly successful at, but at the same time I fear being pigeon-holed. Will I always have to write in this semi-humorous, gently curmudgeonly voice for the rest of my life? Is my greatest aspiration to become E.B. White? Well, yes, probably. I mean, who wouldn’t want to write both Once More To the Lake and Charlotte’s Web? Salutations! But still, there’s a part of me that wants to shake things up a bit – to do something that essayists don’t typically do (at least the ones that get paid) and maybe write something that is a little more fun to write. You know, something with lots of exclamation points!!!
Actually, what I’ve been thinking a lot about is how to bring in elements of poetry – or, at least, elements of the things that concern poets – into my writing. I admire prose writing that, like the best of poetry, conjures images and emotions out of thin air – unexplained without careful study, but present to even the most common of readers. I like writing that can border on the realm of the obscure, without crossing over completely.
Like most essayists, my thoughts were hardly original. Reading this, I’m sure the first thing that jumped to your mind was The Prose Poem – a form practiced Moderns and Beatniks alike. There have been some heated debates, but, according to wikipedia, scholars have mostly settled on calling the Prose Poem poetry. Here’s an example from Charles Simic’s Seven Prose Poems, (published at The Cafe Irreal):
I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on.
The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.
Which, I have to say, I like very much even though I’m not sure I know why. It’s definitely not the kind of thing that I could write, but I like the idea of it. It seems to me that on the imaginary line that marks Poetry from Prose, this sits just on Poetry’s side, or more on poetry’s side, anyway. If Poetry can experiment with prose, then why can’t Prose experiment with Poetry? Is there writing that exists on my side of the border?
It turns out that of course it does, and it even has a name – The Lyric Essay. While flash fiction and other short form nonfiction can also dip into the poetic, the Lyric Essay more specifically and intentionally plays with image and sound in order to express a tangled narrative. This too has its complications. Some Lyric Essays are more poetic than others, and maybe drift freely into what I would properly term prose poetry. To my mind, a lyric essay must be somewhat concerned with narrative – it must remain a story, however much it revels in language. Maybe this is a useless distinction – who cares what is or isn’t poetry or prose, so long as its good, right? But I need that line, if only because it makes it feel more possible for me to write myself. To demonstrate, here’s an excerpt from Stephen Kuusisto’s Night Song (published in Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction):
A blind kid rarely sleeps. Small blind people hear a hundred sounds and learn early to make analogies,
I hear the trees that surround our New Hampshire house. A spruce sways in the wind and so I think a door is opening, a door with rusted hinges and locks.
At sunup while my parents sleep I dress quickly and slip from the house. I walk through a meadow, blindly following patterns of light and shade until I reach the university’s horse barn. Somewhere in all this cool emptiness a horse is breathing. He sounds like water going down a drain.
I take on step forward into a pyramid of fragrances.
What a thing! To be a young boy smelling hay and leather and turds!
What a thing!
And the horse gurgles like water in the back of a boat.
Mice scurry like beaded curtains distrubed by a hand.
I stand in this magical nowhere and listen to the full range of sounds in a barn.
I am a blind child approaching a horse!
Behind me a cat mews.
Who would guess that horses sometimes hold their breath?
The horse must be eyeing me from his corner.
Now two cats are talking.
Whin pushes forcefully at the high roof.
Somewhere up high a timber creaks.
My horse is still holding his breath.
When will he breathe again?
Come on, boy!
Breathe for me!
Where are you?
I hear him rubbing his flank against a wall.
And now he breathes again with a great deflation!
He sounds like a fat balloon venting in swift circles.
And now I imitate him with my arm pressed to my lips.
I make great flatulent noises by pressing my lips to my forearm.
How do you like that, horse?
He snorts.
I notice the ringing of silence. An insect travels between our bursts of forced air.
Sunlight heats my face because I’m standing in a long sunbeam.
I am in the luminous whereabouts of horse! I am a very small boy and I have wandered about a mile from home. Although I can see colors and shapes in sunlight, in the barn I am completely blind.
But I have made up my mind to touch this horse.
Judging by his breathing, his slow release of air, that sound of a concertina, judging by this, I am nearly beside him. And so I reach out and there is the great wet fruit of his noise, the velvet bone of his enormous face. And we stand there together for a little while, all alive and all alone.
***
I don’t know about you but that blew me away. It seems clearly rooted in prose, but in what memoir could you get away with a (perfect) line like “I am in the luminous whereabouts of horse!”? And the sudden, unexplained turn at the very end – “all alone.” I’m not sure, prosaically speaking, that is fully justified – it seems sudden. But emotionally, poetically, it fits.
This being a blog, and not a personal soapbox, perhaps I should turn the question to you, gentle reader. When you are this close to the line – what should be poetry, and what should be prose? And should we even care?