The prosepoem (or poetic prose: six of one, half dozen of another) that follows is from my book of prosepoetry Plum Blossoms, an account of Master Ko's peregrinations about Japan in 81 verses:
benri-ya---you say 'han-dee-mahn'---that's all ... leaning on a wooden handled broom with long reddish bristles, an old man wearing a patched and threadbare saffron robe, runs a knobby knuckled hand over the short grey stubble on his head, looking at mia, sucking his yellowed teeth, 'bout time you come, he said ... handyman? laughing, handyman ... when dry he swept clean the stone steps up haguro to the shrine; when wet he cleaned the temple, the lodgings, the pagoda, the bell tower or simply sat in his small hut ... how long? how long, he muses, how long: since before dirt, laughing, bobbing his head, a few swipes with the wooden handled broom, came after hiroshima, sucking his teeth, a-bomb ... bad comes from too many heads in soup, laughing, bobbing his head ... live here good place with myself
Prose such as 'benri-ya' creates ripples of indignation in the thoughts of many readers and writers. Fish or foul, they wonder. Cross-grinned stuff. Agathokakological as blessed. To add to the disgruntlement, I tend to eliminate capitals and most punctuation marks. Heresy, no doubt. In my defense, I yield the floor to poet David Schumate who has written what seems to me the definitive word on prose poems, as he comments on William Stafford's estimate of the genre in an old journal called Double Room:
I am drawn to Stafford’s suggestion that the prose poem is an honest form which renounces using white space to “bamboozle” a reader and instead forces heavier reliance on other poetic conventions. I am also drawn to the relative homeliness of the prose poem. Its inelegance. A blob in the shape of the state of Kansas. A bulbous dirigible hovering there at the top of the page. Most of the assembled spectators would think it could never fly. But cut the tethers. And stand back. If it’s crafted well, it will hover out over the fields in defiance of all poetic gravity and leave the crowd in awe. But beware. It all pivots on the engineering. And the gases that lift it. The Hindenburg is in ashes.
The genre does have a long history. Many Biblical stories are cited as early examples of the style. Generally, the origin of the form is attributed to French and German poets of the 19th century who rebelled against the strictures of formal poetics ( the Alexandrine, for example).
While researching John Donne's 'No Man Is An Island' (1624) I was surprised to find that many commentators have labeled his Devotion Upon Emergent Occasions as poetic prose. Devotions were a common 17th century genre that focused on mortality and repentance often turning to the immediacy of poetic prose and personal prayer to examine the nature of human suffering and divine mercy.
Mr Donne, lying ill in his bed, scribbled off his Devotions in one sitting, and sent them off willy-nilly to the printers. The last word will be his. Poetry? Prose? Or? 'Meditation I' begins with something of a thunderclap:
O miserable condition of man! which was not imprinted by God, who, as he is immortal himself, had put a coal, a beam of immortality into us, which we might have blown into a flame, but blew it out by our first sin; we beggared ourselves by hearkening after false riches, and infatuated ourselves by hearkening after false knowledge. So that now, we do not only die, but die upon the rack, die by the torment of sickness; nor that only, but are pre-afflicted, super-afflicted with these jealousies and suspicions and apprehensions of sickness, before we can call it a sickness: we are not sure we are ill; one hand asks the other by the pulse, and our eye asks our own urine how we do. O multiplied misery! we die, and cannot enjoy death, because we die in this torment of sickness; we are tormented with sickness, and cannot stay till the torment come, but pre-apprehensions and presages prophesy those torments which induce that death before either come; and our dissolution is conceived in these first changes, quickened in the sickness itself, and born in death, which bears date from these first changes.
