Encounters with the Prose Poem: An Impressionistic Essay
The text-lines are straight — but the meanings are not
Often mistakenly perceived as modern or contemporary in origin and style, the history of the prose poem stretches back several centuries and across different cultures. In seventeenth century Japan, when poet Matsuo Basho dared to combine haiku poetry with prose, haibun was born. In the early nineteenth century, a small collection of French writers, heralded by the work of Maurice de Guerin rebelled against the centuries-old alexandrine structure of traditional verse poetry and created a fresher, freer form of poetry of which Charles Baudelaire’s prose poetry collection Paris Spleen (1869) is most emblematic.
The Surrealists seized upon stream-of-consciousness writing to explore sexual, moral and personal taboos in the early twentieth century, some of which took the form of prose poetry. Several decades later, the American Beat poets used similar techniques to break out of conventional verse form — with startling imagery and rhythms often inspired by the jazz movement — their work, a reaction against the ideological conservatism of the fifties.
All of these forms are known by that maddeningly contradictory term — prose poetry. Regardless of the era and cultural milieu, the prose poem genre possesses an…
