An Informal Occasion with Robert Hass

Abstract

RH: I haven't arrived for myself at any very satisfactory formulation of what a prose poem is. Certainly it has something to do with condensation. If it's narrative in form and gets to a certain length, it's probably a story; if it's very short and in a book by a fiction writer, it's a sudden fiction; if it's in a book by a poet, it's a prose poem; and if it gets to a certain length, it's an essay, or a sketch, or something like that. So I suppose condensation has something to do with it. I don't know how to define it in terms of genre, and when I was work ing, I guess I just stopped trying to think about that. What I did think about was what the conventions of the prose poem were. At the time that I was starting to write them, the prose poem, as it had been revived in America, was used almost entirely for a kind of wacky surrealist work, and I think that nervousness about using prose was that then you had to put a lot of what people thought was poetic ?that is to say, wildness and imagination and free association ?into it to make sure that it was poetry, because if it got too near the conventions and sentence sounds of exposi tory prose or narrative prose or something like that, then it really wasn't poetry. So almost as soon as I started working, I got interested in those boundaries: what the prose poem wasn't supposed to sound like. I think I came on it in the first place from writing prose. When I was writing essays, I found that there would be a passage where I wanted to give an example, or tell a short anecdote to make a point, and that I would find myself laboring over the making of that paragraph with the kind of pleasure I get from working on a poem. So that was in my mind with Museum ? the prose poem about the young man and woman handing their baby back and forth in the restaurant. It was very hard to ... I had seen it and I was very moved by it, but I couldn't find a rhythm for it. Each time I got into it there was some prosodie problem with the business of people handing each other the baby, back and forth. If I wrote it sort of