When Prose Poetry Ended
I am writing about sin and redemption. There are things I have done which I can almost regret, and there are wishes I had lost that taste almost as good when I bring them back in some painful form. There is a path that describes an imperfect arc across the limits of my panorama, over horizon and past stacks of houses, and its curve is wild with change as it peaks at its middle before straightening up at the farthest end, where it touches something way beyond my vision. When the excitement of the trail’s zenith is behind us, what you were reaching for terminates this glorious arc.
The term prose poetry is unnecessary. It is an explanation the poems that fall under this heading do not need. In the hands of the enemy, it becomes a hopeless excuse that they prod when scrutinizing it. A poem is a poem, and every single poem that has used the word prose in its heading is a poem that needed no such distinction. Such terms are lines in the sand. At first, it was essential to bring up this prose aspect to the poetry under the growing excitement of a burgeoning form, but it soon became its own Achilles heel. You read numerous introductions wherein the writers defend the form with outrageous anecdotes of other poets lambasting prose poetry, and you can hardly believe it, but there it is.
Or there it was. It seems to be a chapter in the recent past, because you hardly hear of its practitioners anymore. All the books on prose poetry I have gotten my hands on are from twenty years ago or more, when the form was really spinning and making waves in the process.
It has gone the way of so many others. Unknowingly, I was practicing prose poetry of some sort when it was still around, just before its final years. And then it was somehow absorbed into the greater heading, and nobody talks about it anymore. Perhaps, it is so accepted now, that a poem could have anything, from traces of prose to complete pieces all in prose, and no one would raise a single complaint.
It is now a chapter, and that is the way it should be. Though I reluctantly call my poetic aspirations prose poetry, I deny it in public, on pure principle, and yet the guiding light I take from my forebears were the practitioners that camped at that fire.