A Talk with Gary McDowell & F. Daniel Rzicznek

What Prose Poetry Means to Us

An Interview with Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek, Editors of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry, by previous Poetry Editor Linwood Rumney

BUY GARY AND DAN’S BOOK: http://www.rosemetalpress.com/Catalog/prose_poetry.html

Part personal testimony, part literary criticism, and part contemporary anthology, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry, published in April and edited by Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek, takes an appropriately hybrid approach to studying, critiquing, and cataloging recent developments in and thoughts about a truly unique tradition in poetry. Combining personal reflections of contemporary poets writing prose poems with a sampling of their work, this book provides a multifaceted perspective on prose poems. Gary and Dan give readers the chance to explore many established and up-and-coming writers-including Nin Andrews, Denise Duhamel, Maxine Chernoff, Gary Young, Carol Guess, and Jeffrey Skinner-while presenting a platform for struggling with the questions that tend to plague prose poetry (What is it? Who writes them? Why?).

This book has something for everyone interested in prose poetry, the initiate and veteran alike, and might even have a thing or two to say about flash fiction and short shorts. For the literary critic attempting to situate prose poetry in literature (as genre, form. or sub-genre), this book is the only definitive forum to listen to poets talk about their personal experience with and understanding of prose poetry. For those trying to figure out what all the fuss is about, Field Guide to Prose Poetry provides a necessarily complex overview of the tradition while pointing readers in the direction of important prose poets.

I recently had the chance to interview Gary and Dan regarding their new book.

Redivider: Big questions first.  Why did you feel it was necessary to put this book together?  And why did you decide to combine samples of prose poems with poets’ personal reflections on prose poetry instead of pursuing more traditional approaches, such as an anthology of contemporary American prose poems or a collection of essays about prose poetry?

Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek: The easy answer to the first part of your question is that we had been looking for a book with the same goals we’ve undertaken and couldn’t find one. Both of us had encountered a variety of texts dealing with both the critical reception and aesthetic traditions of prose poetry (work by William Matthews, Russell Edson, Carl Phillips, etc), but we couldn’t find very many essays (in fact, none at all!) that discussed this art form from the poet’s point of view. We yearned for personal essays that included juicy details about frustration, rejection, success, and tangoing with the Muse (are writers perhaps the ultimate self-voyeurs?) and our searches left us consistently unsatisfied. So after recognizing the gap we determined to fill it ourselves. We initially planned our book to be just essays and from the start we wanted to avoid the academic in favor of the casual and personal. We wanted the book to be the ultimate summer reading for lovers of the prose poem. One of our first outside readers (thank you David!) suggested that we feature a prose poem alongside each essay and in the beginning this feature was open to either a poem by the essayist or a particular prose poem by someone else that the essayist found influential, inspiring, or overlooked. Down the line this feature was tweaked yet again when Peter Conners at BOA Editions (thank you Peter!) suggested that we limit the selection to only the essayists’ poetry and include a broader range, two to four prose poems per author. Shortly after signing our contract with Rose Metal Press, we and the editors of RMP agreed that we should hone it to two poems per author to eliminate sprawl but retain some variety. So this anthology was really an ongoing collaboration between not just ourselves but also our friends, readers, and editors. Having a book that functions as both an anthology of essays and an anthology of prose poems stays, we think, true to the roots of our subject: the in-between, the not-quite-pigeonhole-able, the breathtaking hybrid happy to flourish in the margin between “not quite” and “almost.”

R: In your intro, you both seem pretty comfortable with and committed to thinking of the prose poem as a form of poetry, instead of thinking of it as a sub-genre of poetry or its own unique genre.  Of course, the approaches of the contributors to Field Guide in locating the prose poem vary widely.  Could you explain your decision to talk about prose poetry in this way?

G & D: As mentioned in our answer to the first question, when we first started searching out essays on the prose poem, we found very little, but we did find a lot of traffic on the poetry blogs and websites relating to what seems to be a very controversial and heated conversation trying (and with what appears to be little success-more on that later) to define the differences, similarities, and definitions of and between the prose poem, the flash fiction, and the flash non-fiction.  While writing our introduction we toyed with exploring the topic ourselves but decided in the end that rather than opening a can of worms we didn’t want to spill all over ourselves we’d stick with our initial idea instead: that the prose poem isn’t a separate genre, isn’t the fifth missing branch of study (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama), but rather, simply, a form of poetry just like a sestina, a sonnet, a villanelle, a shadorma.  We write a poem because, as Frost said, we want to discover, we want our emotions to find their thoughts and our thoughts to find their words.  And when we get that lump in our throat (Frost, again), we follow it wherever it leads us, and sometimes we end up pentametered, dressed for a formal shebang, and other times we end up sentenced and paragraphed, ready to play in a prairie, in an open field, no margins but the natural ones, no guides but the rhythms themselves.

We decided, in our introduction, to stay away from the prose poetry vs. flash fiction argument mainly because we feel the distinction is less important than the work that comes from the writing of each form.  It makes for an extremely fun and exciting debate, no doubt, but it also turns what are incredibly vital modes of writing into little more than boxes one might check when asked what the thing being written is.  We’re less interested in defining a difference and more interested in championing the short form in all of its incarnations. [Plus, Rose Metal Press and Tara L. Masih have already laid down the law with their brilliant The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Flash Fiction, so the conversation, however obliquely, is already well underway and thriving].

As our contributors’ essays started to come in, we noticed that some of them called the prose poem a “genre” while others called it a “form,” but what made these distinctions so interesting was the way, as you mention, each essayist tackled defining and appropriating the form in their own writing lives.  And that’s what we were after: how do our poets think outside the line, outside the traditional parameters of verse, while maintaining the very essence of poetry?

R: While putting together the personal accounts of your contributors, did any trends emerge that surprised you in the way that the poets talk about their relationship to prose poetry and how they came to be, at least sometimes, prose poets?

G & D: We sent letters to our potential contributors, and in those letters we offered a few possible ways into the type of essay we were looking to receive.  For example, we suggested our contributors trace their influences by talking about their earliest memory of the prose poem and then following that, chronologically, to some of their more recent influences in the form.  Regarding trends, we definitely saw a huge number of our contributors naming similar influences: Russell Edson, James Tate, Charles Simic, Gertrude Stein, Killarny Clary.  We also saw a large number of contributors talk about the professor, teacher, mentor, or poet-friend who introduced them to the prose poem; often times these ‘introducers,’ if you will, and the form itself, of course, took on a shamanistic, other-worldly quality: our contributors were in awe of this new form and almost couldn’t believe that it had existed previously without their knowledge, but it had, and in plain view been there all along, waiting.  We saw this a few times and both nodded in agreement: we’d been there!  It was an exciting discovery.

Another thing that we found exciting was how many of our contributors came to the prose poem through prose writers, or writers who more traditionally, anyway, are known as prose writers and not poets: James Joyce, Jayne Anne Phillips, William Faulkner, Marcel Proust.  The example and influence of poetic prose found its way into several of the essays.  This isn’t surprising, certainly, but it does show that the prose poem form isn’t only accessible through reading already existing prose poems.  Sometimes the prose poem is born, simply, through a strict, unbridled love affair with the sentence, with the paragraph.

R: As you and many of the contributors to Field Guide discuss, prose poetry certainly seems to have a lot of momentum lately.  Most well-known poets seem to be at least experimenting with it, and many are writing collections that contain only prose poems.  At the very least, it doesn’t seem that the kind of argument that Louis Simpson used to keep Mark Strand’s The Monument from receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 would make it very far today.  What do you think accounts for the rising popularity and acceptance of the form?  And on a related note, do you think prose poetry will ever be considered a truly mainstream part of poetry, or is it by its very nature somehow marginal?

G & D: We think prose poetry still has detractors, but not public ones. From the baffled MFA workshop student asking “but why is it a poem?” to the unenthused skeptic raising his or her hand during the Q&A of an AWP panel to ask “but WHY is it a POEM!?,” detractors of prose poetry will always be around. We’re not particularly bothered by detractors. We know detractors of sonnets and sestinas and they cost us zero sleep, and we’re reluctant to make awareness of prose poetry some sort of personal crusade aside from the facts that people are reading it, writing it, and thinking, talking, teaching about it. That’s why our book exists. The reasons for the popularity of this form stem from its existence (now in progress for at least four decades) as a viable and accessible form for reader and writer alike. Prose poems tend to be smaller, funnier, and more charismatic (but by no means to do we think these terms apply to all prose poems) than the average free verse, or even formal, poem and probably attract admirers for the same reasons various forms have flourished at various times throughout the history of poetry: audience, culture, and history converge to create a minor fuss. As for the mainstream, we’re unable to define one particular main stream of poetry, but an ever-expanding system of intertwining currents. Prose poetry is a recently introduced species with a tendency to swim rapidly upstream, make a meal of your bait before getting away clean, and then leaping (for only a shy moment) into the sunlight to show you something you hadn’t even remotely expected to be possible: a rather plain looking fish with the ability to sing.

R: What advice would you have for poets and readers new to prose poems?  How should they approach the writing and reading of them?

G & D: I think we’d give the same advice that we’d give to someone new to any new form or genre: read, read, read!  Read everything, read widely, read narrowly, read until the prose poems become a part of your bones, until the form becomes invisible.  Like a young reader approaching poetry for the first time, there’s often a sense of confusion, a sense of apprehension when a new reader approaches the prose poem, but we’d proffer that this is normal, that the sense of apprehension comes from that little space inside your brain that fears new, that fears different, that fears change.  Fight that feeling and keep reading.  Aside from that rather sideways advice, we’d also recommend a few poets that might be useful to start with, poets that have invented, enriched, and furthered the prose poem in unique ways (though it must be said that this list could include and exclude any number of poets in any number of combinations…this list is just the one that sprang to mind this morning): Charles Baudelaire, Russell Edson, Killarney Clary, Rosmarie Waldrop, James Tate, Charles Simic, Max Jacob, Gertrude Stein, Zbigniew Herbert, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, Lyn Hejinian, Anne Carson, Robert Hass, and any of the poets featured in the anthology, of course! [Also, we've included an in-depth reading list at the back of the book, so that's also a great resource for finding prose poets of interest.]

As for approaching the writing of the prose poem, sometimes emulation is the best way to get started.  Once a poet has read a few prose poems, perhaps the urge to try their hand at one will become unavoidable.  That’s how we got started: we were reading these little beasts and couldn’t help but feel drawn to their mysteries, their unfathomably deep and widening wonders, their field-like quality.  We wanted to drown in the waters of the prose poem, but once we finally jumped in, we realized we could swim.  Maybe you can, too?

Gary L. McDowell was born and raised in suburban Chicago. He earned a BA in English from Northern Illinois University and an MFA in Poetry from Bowling Green State University. He currently teaches writing at Western Michigan University where he is studying for his PhD in Contemporary Poetics and American Literature. His first collection of poems, American Amen, won the 2009 Orphic Prize and will appear in late 2010 from Dream Horse Press. He is also the author of two chapbooks, They Speak of Fruit (Cooper Dillon, 2009) and The Blueprint (Pudding House, 2005). His poems have been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize, and have appeared in various literary journals, including Colorado Review, Indiana Review, The Laurel Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, and Quarterly West. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with his wife and their young son, Auden.

F. Daniel Rzicznek’s books include Divination Machine (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2009), Neck of the World (Utah State University Press, 2007) and Cloud Tablets (Kent State University Press, 2006). The recipient of a 2010 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, he currently teaches at Bowling Green State University.