Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse

Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

by Stephen Fredman, Albert Gelpi (Editor)

Poet's Prose is the first scholarly work devoted exclusively to American prose poetry and has been recognized as a groundbreaking study in contemporary American poetry. Many recent American poets have been writing prose; Fredman has set out to determine why and what it means. Three central works of American poets' prose are discussed in detail: William Carlos Williams' Kora in Hell, Robert Creeley's Presences, and John Ashbery's Three Poems. In these chapters, Fredman both carefully teaches us how to read these difficult works and examines their philosophical seriousness. In a final chapter and a new epilogue, he discusses the newest trends in contemporary poetry, the "talk poems" of David Antin and the prose of the Language poets, in which poet's prose forms an important aspect of the "theoretical poetry" now being written.

214 pages, Hardcover

First published January 26, 1984

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

The goal of this highly specialized, critical book is to prove that because “prose has become the ‘natural’ signifying practice of the modern age”(3) and “the fundamental project of modern poetry… [is now] the investigation of language” (4), poets must integrate the stylistic and philosophic tools that prose writing offers in order to “find ways both to acknowledge the power of prose and to subvert its authority from within” (156). To show this, Fredman thoroughly examines prose works by the poets William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and John Ashbery, offering many valuable techniques that prose writing added to these accomplished poets’ work, such as how conjunctions can be used “to propel [readers] into the approaching sentence,” whether or not the connecting sentences are related (29). But overall, the philosophic implications of this practice were definitely given more critical attention and grabbed me more than any craft talk.
From the Williams discussion, I learned of his allegiance to Gertrude Stein’s assertion that poetry and words are things, artifacts themselves, not mere allusions to a greater literary tradition (24), and that it was this belief that led him to write the experimental work, Kora in Hell.
The analysis of Creeley’s Presences yielded an interesting dialogue about his ability to map attention through “the interrogation of and listening to language” without worrying about “how [the poem] is going to end,” but instead letting his attention lead him to its intuitive conclusion (68-69). To justify this, Creeley says poets must “believe that an event is constructed of all the elements in a given space at a given time, [and thus] there is no need to suggest a symbolic depth that begs us to penetrate appearances and ferret out essences” (89). In other words, one must believe in the Nietzschean concept of ‘superficial profundity’ (72), that by being so in “the now” universality will surface (78).
Lastly, Fredman looked at Ashbery’s Three Poems, a work that he believes realizes “that the goal of a complete mimesis of life’s way of happening is unattainable…, [so it] moves toward an acceptance of the fact that imagination and reality cannot be coextensive, that both putting in and leaving out are essential for understanding”(125). All of these texts have much in common with the current Language poetry movement, which attempts to tear down the fourth wall of writing, to expose the self-consciousness of the act and examine language as an art, an artifact, and not as a representational system.
As a poet who still practices the art of the personal lyric and its clarity, I am at once in awe and a bit skeptical of this book’s hypothesis. Even Fredman admits that if all verse goes in this direction “the more foreboding and opaque the writing may seem to any but the most intrepid, active reader” (147-148). Yet, the book as a whole really challenged me to think about why I write poetry and if that motivation is enough to drive me through a career in the art. Until I am better able to tackle such a big question, though, the book did spark many other fascinating debates in my head, one of which I will riff on a little more in the next paragraph.
While reading this book, I was constantly taking in information and rarely able to integrate it into any of my own philosophies or apply it to my craft as of yet. Yet one thing I did note while reading was the fact that almost all the poets (with the exception of brief discussions of Gertrude Stein and Lyn Hejinian) who are exploring this tactic are straight, white males. Now, I’m not going to get on the same bandwagon that denies research only done on this ubiquitous group as redundant and inapplicable to others, but I do think because of the psychological implications and motivations of this exploration that this bias deserves some attention. It interests me here because we have a group of men, living relatively oppression-free existences, searching for a way to point their readers toward a way to “experience” writing instead of trying to relay experience with it. This pursuit immediately makes me think that these men, because their lives are constantly reflected in the broader culture, their stories told over and over again unmitigated and unfiltered by prejudice, have moved beyond needing to process and represent their existence, so they are looking for other ways to use their art. For them, it becomes about individualizing their unique consciousness because their group identity is well developed. They search for a way to “not-understand” (108) themselves because America thinks it has them nailed. I won’t let this obvious oversight in Fredman’s logic keep me from learning from this book’s fiercely intelligent commentary, but I felt it needed noting.