The Text as Richard Serra Sculpture: On Reading the Prose Poem

Abstract

The dismay at the term prose poem which some in the literary mainstream and many outside of it feel, is part of the power of the prose poem itself - the duality, the seeming irrationality - of the term is at the heart of the form’s power. It exists in two worlds. It is of two minds. And although this is true of the best of poems, the form of the prose poem, it’s traditional prose look, is camouflage for its subversive nature. It subverts the world of the readers of both poetry and prose. It subverts the rules of the rational world - the mainstream world - with its seemingly familiar form that is invaded by the irrational, the surreal, the magically real, the absurd, the imagistic, the truly symbolic. The prose blocks are wrought like the steel sheets of a Serra sculpture so the sentences twist and curve and cause us to have an experience through which the world and how we understand it has been, if only momentarily, transformed.