Throughout all of literature, perhaps there is no form as paradoxical as the prose poem. In her book, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory, Natasha Saje quotes Michael Riffaterre, calling the form “the literary genre with the oxymoron for a name” (134). Put more simply, prose poetry is a hybrid genre. Despite the controversy within its very nature, prosaic poetry is a form rich with unique meaning and aesthetic, worthy of both examination and mere existence.

Fundamentally, there is the well-known distinction and dichotomy between prose and poetry. In other words, “poetry is generally written using a particular rhythm while prose is written more closely to natural speech,” Erin J. Hill explains in her piece on Language Humanities. Poetics has the intentional merit of designating each word both delicately and carefully, along with the surrounding white space. Prose, inversely, is ordinary language with the line not being treated as a formal unit; however, Michael Duncan discusses in JAC how, although rhythm, metre, and pattern is not typically obvious with prose poetry, the natural rhythm of thought and prosaic writing can lead to organic rhythmic cadences occurring.

Prose poems occupy more horizontal space than traditional poems, have less exposed end-words than an enjambed verse poem, and look like paragraphs. The form is denser, requiring more from the typical reader. Hannah Huff describes in her blog Notes of Oak how prose poems are also less “malleable” than poetry, and the writer needs to instead be conscious of indentation, blank lines, and paragraph length.

Therefore, just as paradoxically, the rule-set for the form of prose poetry is both the most simple and the most evasive. In his canonical anthology, The Penguin Book of The Prose Poem, Editor Jeremy Noel-Tod seeks to interpret the form simply as “a poem without line breaks’’ (xx), further adding “[w]ithout line breaks, the prose poem is free — like this paragraph — to extend across and down the page as far as the printer’s margins will allow. And it is in this freedom that we can locate the distinctive feeling to which the prose poem gives form: expansiveness” (xxix). The violation of what seems to be an inherent ruleset and understanding of poetics conjures and elicits strong feelings — one of the strongest justifications for the existence of art itself.

The Trolling of Prose Poetry

Such a form cannot exist without due criticism. Writing for Canadian Literature Magazine, The Walrus, Jason Guriel playfully touts in an opinion piece titled “Are Prose Poets Trolling Us?” how a prose poem is just “a stretch of prose willed into being something else by sheer force of naming. It’s an act of alchemy. It’s a leap of faith.” Guriel goes on further in a more critical commentary, saying the freedom of the form leaves “poets free all right — free to be slack, vague, clichéd, and repetitious.” If the aspiring prose poet were to look at this as the only criterion, would they only have to simply remove the line breaks from one of their already existing poems and suddenly have a prose poem? Inversely, an even more difficult question to answer would be if any simple truncated piece of prose would constitute prose poetry.

The elusive, chameleon-like characteristics of the prose poem tend to raise the question of whether the work is, rather, flash fiction or postcard fiction. Answering these questions, pragmatically speaking, Maureen Buchanan Jones in her blog Writing Full Tilt clarifies that “[f]lash fiction is a close cousin to prose poetry, because it is a compressed narrative, relying on poetic elements to deliver a complete story in anywhere from 100 to 1000 words.” The difference and contrast is within the mechanics, as Nancy Stohlman highlights on her website, “[p]rose poetry is driven by imagery and emotion whereas flash fiction is driven by narrative.” A more literary contrast could be described as how the “prose poem demands a kind of double-take, builds a double-exposure into the visual space of the poem,” as Sarah Gridley explains in her article for the Kenyon Review.

The prose poem is an argument in and of itself — a form that questions what it even means to be a poem. Its nature pushes against what is considered traditional or expected in the world of literature, requiring both the writer and reader to examine their preconceived notions of prose and poetry. By embracing paradox and contradiction, prose poetry offers a fresh, if sometimes contentious, perspective within the literary landscape. In this vein, its very existence is validated by the conversations and discourses it perpetuates, epitomizing the ever-evolving nature of literature itself.

A Bizarre History

Prose poetry has a relatively brief western canon — the form originating in 19th century France, a nation calling home to many other traditional poetic forms. Louis Bertrand’s “Gaspard de la nuit” (Treasurer of the Night: Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot), published in 1842, is considered the first book of prose poems, though Bertrand did not use that term (Ziegler). The form came into true fruition by the French Decadents — poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont, utilising prose poetry as rebellion against the constraining traditions of French verse. The prose poem was also briefly popularised in England in the 1890s by writers such as Oscar Wilde (Brophy). More recently, the American prose poem has found resurgence with well-known names “ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), and Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) to Sarah Manguso (b. 1947) and Jenny Boully (b. 1976)” (Taylor). These contemporary writers contended with working poetic language into any writing, regardless of form, no longer having reliance on “the line” being sacred, but rather being sacrilegious.

There are also several examples of the form outside of the French origins — the Japanese literary genre of the Haibun, coined in the 17th century by Matsuo Bashō, is a combination of Haiku and prose (Nezhukumatathil). There is also the lesser-known Prosiemtrum, a “term which is used to denote a range of classical, mediaeval, Renaissance and even modern texts which exploit a combination of prose and verse” (Braund). Even earlier, “the prose poem started in China during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), where it was known as fu, or rhymed prose”, as “prose provided the necessary exposition for a piece, and the verse its rhapsodic language” (Marcus).

A handful of Canadian prose poets come to mind, such as the works of Gwendolyn MacEwen (Braid et al.), or the novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept written by Elizabeth Smart entirely in the form; however, despite the many similarities between American and Canadian literature, “the evolution of the nebulously-termed ‘prose poetry’ has been different.” Particularly in how “the prevalence of the metaphor-driven lyric narrative” in Canadian poetry has kept “conversations of the prose to a minimum, and the pervasiveness and possible distinctivenessess of the Canadian form” (McLennan). In comparison to other traditional forms of poetry, there is a rather disappointing lack of canon in Canadian prose poetry.

An example of Canadian prose poetry provided by the anthology book In Fine Form: A Contemporary Look at Form Poetry, is “Sisyphean” by Patricia Young. In analysing the piece, it is interesting to note how much resemblance there is to fiction — characters, a man and his son, are the focal point of the poem, with italicised dialogue interspersed within the paragraph, driving a narrative of generational environmental despair and optimism. Rich imagery is not absent, however, with Young personifying the ocean’s “wondrous belly spitting up more and more booze bottles, lampshades, condoms, bits of synthetic rope”, as well as the alliterative nature of the final bittersweet lines of the poem: “[w]hat you got there, Bub — doll’s head, BB gun, baby’s bootie?” (158). What makes this piece poetry more than anything, though, is the lingering, unanswerable question Young leaves the reader with — symbolised by the image of Sisyphus, the Greek mythological figure who was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again, forever.

Another example from the same anthology is “Horses” by Glen Downie. Unlike Young’s poem, Downie’s piece is easier to fit the form holistically. The poem begins in media res, with imagery of hooves in grass galloping, as opposed to a character-fixed narrative. Downie discusses the idea of horses, and how the species is interconnected with labour and their relationship to us as “a working team, yolked in rigid marriage”, to the point where if a horse were to “break its back or leg, its life of service ends” (157). This piece far better exemplifies the prose poem in the way a concept is explored and vividly described as opposed to a linear story being told (Braid et al.).

An Unsatisfying Conclusion

Regardless of the amount of academic rigour applied in attempting an objective definition, there is not one to be found for the prose poem. What is lost without the line break? What is gained? As the 19th Century French poets declared, the form is an abandonment of rhyme and rhythm within poetic text — still, existing within compressed thought and intensity. Existing within the purgatorial boundaries of free verse and garden-variety prose. The prose poem is a climax — a brief flash of ecstasy — for “[e]ven when it has a narrative arc, the prose poem often leans on a single moment” (Braid et al.). Charles Baudelaire, father of the prose poem, said it best in a letter he wrote to Arsene Houssaye, ending up in the preface to a book of his written in the form, Le Spleen de Paris:

“the miracle of a poetic prose, musical though rhythmless and rhymeless, flexible yet rugged enough to identify with the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs and flows of reviere, the pangs of conscience.”