The Prose Poem

The Prose Poem is either a profound paradox or an absurdist joke—in your tiny handheld mirror is an even smaller figure repeating a question as if it were a riddle: “A poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of fiction,” quips Russell Edson, or if we go back far enough, Baudelaire: “What is beautiful is bizarre.” In this creative writing class, we’ll question the deliberations of poetry without line breaks. We’ll consider prosaic description, fictional narrative, storytelling and memoir, only to abjure each in turn. Students will read several contemporary collections in this hybrid literary form and participate in workshop to develop, write, and revise five new prose poems. This course is generative: students will leave with an understanding of how their poems might relate to the larger questions of this tradition.