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suddenflamingword's review
3.0
While not a bad book, it's not clear who this is an introduction for. It's a bit too academic in style to be for a lay audience, yet feels a bit undercooked to be a technical discussion.
To begin, it's broken into 3 that provide the history of the form ("Beginnings"), what distinguishes the form ("Against Conventions"), & the enactments of the form ("Methods And Contexts"). Yet the chapters don't really prove why it should be structured this way and, in fact, this tidbitting gets in the way of a more wholistic understanding of the form. By the time you get into their discussion of the relationship of urbanization (historically and now) to the structure/rhythm of prose poetry in chapter 3, you're already in Part 2 where that's forgotten for a new conversation about the prose poem's focus on a lack of closure.
This also leads to a fairly fundamental problem, imo: as soon as they provide a definition of the form, they have to erase it for another definition. Prose poetry is about a lack of closure - but so are these lineated poems. Prose poetry is demotic - except some of them aren't. Prose poetry is often defined by its box form - although not always. I get this is, per the authors, a protean form that's hard to pin down (except when they're semi-complaining about people on Tumblr misclassifying prose poems). But in an introduction that seems this bold, and which describes the form as "nothing less than the most important new poetic form to emerge in English-language poetry since the advent of free verse," I'd expect a definition not defined by its exceptions. The risk of classification.
For the optimal experience, I'd recommend not reading this book in order. How Hetherington and Atherton envision an introduction, it seems, is morsels for discussion. It's not a great introduction to prose poetry (read the anthologies and collections in the bibliography instead), but an introduction to the concept of prose poetry. In that vein I guess I've answered who Prose Poetry is for: English/Literature/Creative Writing classes. Otherwise, to their credit, they thoroughly summarize their theses in the end:
To begin, it's broken into 3 that provide the history of the form ("Beginnings"), what distinguishes the form ("Against Conventions"), & the enactments of the form ("Methods And Contexts"). Yet the chapters don't really prove why it should be structured this way and, in fact, this tidbitting gets in the way of a more wholistic understanding of the form. By the time you get into their discussion of the relationship of urbanization (historically and now) to the structure/rhythm of prose poetry in chapter 3, you're already in Part 2 where that's forgotten for a new conversation about the prose poem's focus on a lack of closure.
This also leads to a fairly fundamental problem, imo: as soon as they provide a definition of the form, they have to erase it for another definition. Prose poetry is about a lack of closure - but so are these lineated poems. Prose poetry is demotic - except some of them aren't. Prose poetry is often defined by its box form - although not always. I get this is, per the authors, a protean form that's hard to pin down (except when they're semi-complaining about people on Tumblr misclassifying prose poems). But in an introduction that seems this bold, and which describes the form as "nothing less than the most important new poetic form to emerge in English-language poetry since the advent of free verse," I'd expect a definition not defined by its exceptions. The risk of classification.
For the optimal experience, I'd recommend not reading this book in order. How Hetherington and Atherton envision an introduction, it seems, is morsels for discussion. It's not a great introduction to prose poetry (read the anthologies and collections in the bibliography instead), but an introduction to the concept of prose poetry. In that vein I guess I've answered who Prose Poetry is for: English/Literature/Creative Writing classes. Otherwise, to their credit, they thoroughly summarize their theses in the end:
Prose poems are fragments that resist closure, with a characteristic compression and brevity giving priority to the evocative and the connotative. Prose poetry functions analogically, metonymically, and metaphorically, and frequently explores unseen or unconscious forces. It is often dreamlike, it makes meanings glancingly—laterally indicating issues other than those it explicitly encompasses. It refashions prose for poetic ends, often exploiting the compressed, rectangular paragraph, and sometimes making use of a variety of typographical features to emphasize that it represents no ordinary species of prose. It presents many surprises and unsettles, or makes strange, the reading experience. It moves quickly through its themes, yet its poetic tropes have the capacity to slow the reader’s apprehension of time. Its complex rhythms invigorate its sentences, and it uses visual imagery to present scenes of great immediacy.
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