Poetry Postcard 32: Airbus A320

Prose poems: poetry or flash fiction? Discuss.

It seems that every time the prose poetry form is mentioned, it comes under attack. Isn’t a prose poem the same thing as flash fiction?

Good question. It’s one of those gray areas of the literary world. I read “The Prose Poem as a Modernist Genre” by Margueritte Murphy. It appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle.

Murphy's anthology of prose poetry.

My take on the article was that the prose poem is about tone. Whether the poem’s focus is on setting, sensory images, or character, it’s all about the mood created.

I have written a handful of prose poems. I tend to use the form for persona poems, written in the voice of an invented character. Is the choice about tone? Possibly. The speakers in my prose poems are invariably younger (under 25) and thinking through a philosophical change triggered by a minor event. (Am I that predictable?)

Not all prose poems work this way. One of my favorites, which combines narrative and character beautifully, is “A Story about the Body,” by Robert Hass. 

It begins, "The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week.  She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and  he thought he was in love with her." (Read the rest of the poem here. Recommended for HS and up only.)

Hass gives us two characters, a setting, and a problem -- all elements of story. So what makes this a poem? I don't have a simple answer.

Vintage Postcard #32

Poetry Postcard 32 was one of my original antique store purchases. (Correction: The card was a donation from poet Patricia VanAmburg, who saved it from a memorable flight with an authoritarian steward.)

When I was a child, we made an annual trip to England, where I have family. Visiting the pilots in the cockpit was always a highlight of the long flight.

But this is our post 9-11 world and pilots are off-limits  to passengers. The image of an empty cockpit intrigued me.

Airbus A320

I been thinking about this Lufthansa postcard for a long time, its empty cockpit full of lights and instrumentation, ‘cause it could be some kind of metaphor for life–God is my co-pilot and all–except the blank windows are wacked, like God’s flying me through heavy fog and even He with a capital H has to turn on autopilot and let the dang computers land this baby, which is fine if you believe God made the rules and stepped aside−now kids, play nice and no biting−if you believe that then He with a capital H can’t change the plane’s increasing velocity, the weather, or even snap his big-ass fingers and halt gravity, but if you don’t believe it, this ends up being a crap metaphor and this flight ends up screwed ‘cause I just got a look at the cockpit and there’s nobody home.

Laura Shovan

Postcard Information:

Lufthansa │A STAR ALLIANCE MEMBER

Cockpit, Airbus A320, Printed in Germany

What is your take on the prose poem/flash fiction debate?

If you’d like to study up on the issue, check out these links:

Poets.org: "Mutable Boundaries: On Prose Poetry"

Bark: "How To Tell Prose Poetry Apart From Flash Fiction"

anthologies:

At Amazon.com

At Powell's Books

At Amazon.com

and online journals:

The Prose-Poem Project, online journal for prose poetry

Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction

Prose Poem

Prose poem or flash fiction? Is there a difference? Opinions welcome in the comments.

Night Sounds

by Laura Shovan

Petula was fourteen, lanky and bony-kneed. Her husband, twelve years older, sent her to summer camp. She moved in short bursts of energy, like the crickets we caught between our palms on the grassy hill. Their legs tickled. We wanted tiny bamboo cages to hold them. I was seventeen and had a boyfriend. I wondered: what is it to be a wife at fourteen? Petula could not be like my mother, keeping the house, the kids, the meals while Father worked. When I was a younger, watching my parents kiss, I couldn’t squeeze myself between their legs. In love, at least, they were equals. Now, folded into my summer cot after lights out, I listened to the night sounds of the cabin. Girls breathed, sleeping, all around me. When I thought about my boyfriend, I envied Petula. Then I thought, "Does he make her?"

I saw him once. He was brown haired and bearded, soft. He watched his wife bounding between her friends like a worried father. Petula’s parents lived in the Virginia hills, had a house filled with children. She had been plucked, with their blessing, from her home. I thought, "His house is like a bamboo cage." But now, I say he gave her the summer. That was a burst of kindness.

"Night Sounds" first appeared in the Jewish Women's Literary Annual. It was subsequently published in Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone, CityLit Press (2010).

Prose Poem or Flash Fiction?

One of my favorite lessons this year was the portrait poem. I put it back on my school workshop menu after a long hiatus.

At St. Jane Frances School, teacher Pat Habicht and I brought books, fine art transparencies and photographs cut out from the newspaper for students to write about.

In this lesson, I tell students to first describe everything they see. Then, imagine the photo or painting is a television screen on pause. What happens when they press "play?" What does the person in the image do next?

Michael E. wrote in response to a painting from poet/artist Shonto Begay's wonderful book Navajo.

This could be a poem, if Michael works on line breaks. But it could also be the opening of a short story.

That's fine with me. The important thing in a first draft is getting ideas on paper. The author can decide what the piece will be later.

Rodeo 

by Michael E.

They are going to the rodeo, plowing down a long desert highway. The rider is in the back, with stores of food and tools, resting on the spare tire. Sore and tired after many rodeos, but it’s how he makes his money. He’s reading a magazine, dozing sometimes into a sleep. His friend sits opposite him snoring. The men and women in the front talk quietly amongst themselves.

Posted with permission of the poet and his family.

I can imagine the dialogue that comes next, what the men and women in the cab are saying about the rodeo rider while they think he's sleeping. 

More middle school poems are on the way as we count down to National Poetry Month.

Prose Poetry Friday or a Flash Fiction Fete?

Happy Poetry Friday! I'm still working through the 50 States.

It was Minnesota's 152nd birthday this week. It became the 32nd state on May 11, 1858.

The North Star State has had a poet laureate since 1934, but the position wasn't made official until recently (2007). Why?

In 2005, then-Governor Tim Pawlenty vetoed a Minnesota poet laureate bill, citing fears that an official poet laureate would lead to "a state mime, interpretive dancer or potter." Read more about it at the Library of Congress.

Current state poet laureate Robert Bly is only the third to hold the lifetime post.

I love his poem "Conversation with a Mouse," which is in the Poetry Speaks to Children anthology. If you've never discussed that poem with little ones, you're in for a treat!

My friend Christine Stewart of the Maryland State Arts Council and I were having a "warm" Facebook discussion about prose poems. (Read a definition of the term at the Academy of American Poets.)

She says, stop being lazy and work your line breaks.

I say, some narratives lend themselves to the form. If you force them into poetic lines, you pull the threads out of the story. Build them into a short fiction piece, the images lose their focus.

What do you think? In the era of Flash Fiction, is there a place for prose poems?

Here is a prose poem by Robert Bly to help you ponder the question.

A Caterpillar on the Desk


by Robert Bly

          Lifting my coffee cup, I notice a caterpillar crawling over my sheet of ten-cent airmail stamps. The head is black as a Chinese box. Nine soft accordions follow it around, with a waving motion, like a flabby mountain. Skinny brushes used to clean pop bottles rise from some of its shoulders. As I pick up the sheet of stamps, the caterpillar advances around and around the edge, and I see his feet: three pairs under the head, four spongelike pairs under the middle body, and two final pairs at the tip, pink as a puppy's hind legs. As he walks, he rears, six pairs of legs off the stamp, waving around the air! One of the sponge pairs, and the last two tail pairs, the reserve feet, hold on anxiously.

Read the rest of the poem here.

Still haven't decided? Here's an extra prose poem -- one of my favorites -- "A Story about the Body" by Robert Hass, with commentary by Robert Pinsky.

My friend Jama Rattigan is hosting Poetry Friday at her wonderful blog, Alphabet Soup today. Stop by for something poetic and tasty!