The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem. Edited by Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville

Abstract

In the Introduction to this sparkling volume, framed with reference to remarkable books by Suzanne Bernard, Barbara Johnson, and Jonathan Monroe, the editors provide a clear map of the unmappable: the history and shape of the prose poem and its practice. Their map also sets out the Franco-American axis of the book, reaching out to Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese literatures. Having alluded to current anglophone practitioners such as Anne Carson and Rod Mengham, the editors show how the drift in poetry from verse to prose emerges in Baudelaire before it then darts into Mallarmé and Rimbaud. Prose poetry opposes the tyrannies of verse, metre, and rhythm, but verse and prose together also create opportunities to rethink poetry and its relation to the world. Like the flâneur emblematizing the elusiveness of prose poetry, this review offers a subjective sketch of the range of themes running through this clearly organized, highly informative, and still kaleidoscopic volume. One is the suggestion that prose poetry is an act of translation, presenting Baudelaire’s translation of Thomas de Quincey as prose poetry in action. Le Livre de jade (1867) is revealed as another catalyst in this verse–prose trans-formation: Judith Gautier’s collection of seventy-one poems ‘translated’ from their Chinese originals (there is repeated use of ‘selon’), which anchor poetry resolutely in everyday sensations and objects. An inverse journey is charted in relation to European prose poems rewritten and thus engendering new forms in Japanese. The experience itself of translating prose poetry is described in Piotr Gwiazda’s wide-ranging account of his 2013 English translation of Grzegorz Wróblewski’s Kopenhaga. Intermedial and well as inter-linguistic translation is an integral element in the work of this Companion, showing the prose poem and painting in continuous interaction, with the syntax of prose rather than the metre of verse providing an essential stimulus. The interaction of visual art and poetic syntax — rather than poetic form — revitalizes not only form itself but the materiality of language, including the use of the page. For Jean-Marie Gleize the page lights a fire under the pursuit of expressiveness and for Anne Portugal it opens poetry out to the flexibility arising from the simultaneity of different discourses. A series of texts by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group of American poets, active in the late 1960s and 1970s, is explored for its use of columns, giving voice to asylum seekers’ pleas alongside professional accounts of medical imaging of the uterus. The productivity of intermedial border-crossing between prose poetry and film is also examined, in relation to Jérôme Game among others. Ultimately the work of the prose poem emerges as a series of challenges to the ways poetry and its readership are recognized, categorized, refashioned, and marshalled. The volume is plural in both content and tone, ranging from the philosophical to the cultural and historical, addressing issues of gender and the environment, and embracing the memoir as well as writing approaching the lyrical essay, itself identified as one of the threads in the development of prose poetry. This enthralling volume speaks in many engaging ways to students and scholars alike, and to anyone interested in the way aesthetics interacts with the fabric of life.