“Image Machine”

Abstract

This chapter focuses upon Gaspar Orozco’s book-length prose poem sequence Book of the Peony. It posits the idea of the textual sequence as resembling an “image machine”, a machine for projecting images, and considers how various aspects of Orozco’s text contribute to this effect. This is set within the wider context of visual metaphors in relation to prose poetry, in order to demonstrate that this “image” effect is enabled by specific aspects of the prose poem (and especially the prose poem sequence), notably the apparent “throughness” or transparency of the text, and the boxing or framing effect of a prose poem. It argues that, like that other great modernist invention, the cinema, the prose poem sequence operates by means of a perceptual trick, an illusion of speed and transparency that fruitfully wrong-foots the reader.