Ask Gerry LaFemina discussion

Hi Gerry!
I have read some (not all yet -- time must be my personal unit of currency) of Notes for the Novice Ventriloquist. I am intrigued and moved by these prose poems. They carry your voice: the one I know from your poems, in which the line is the unit that purchases the reader's imagination and emotional response. In prose, the sentence typically plays that role. But I think there is something other than mere sentence-creation here that carries the weight of these prose poems. They remind me of flash fiction, engineered like just the small turning points of a roller-coaster for maximum physical response to minimal stimulus. But they read like poems, with conservation of language and effective lyricism employed to elicit that visceral reaction. I'd like to know what you see as the base unit of your prose poems, and what strategy you find most effective in revising them. Thanks!

Debbie, thanks for getting the book. And I'm glad you're liking it. The sentence is the rhythmic foundation of the prose poem, but remains about phrasing (remember, Williams said that the American poem was less about meter and more about phrasing). I think, though, what you might be seeing is the prose poem's relationship with the lyric--its driving ambition is lyricism as opposed to the narrative drive of flash fiction. Does that make sense?

Yes. That is it--the "driving ambition is lyricism."
The poem that first caught my eye and hooked me was "Junk Mail." I see it now in that one, the lyricism, immediately in the first line, er phrase. The language is definitively poetic in the repetition of the urgent "it" sounds. But the shepherd's crook is in the inverse sounds -- the long "i"s followed by softer vowels. The length of the piece seems well suited to sustaining that sort of language. It would take quite a lot of energy to keep it going -- a Melville-strength dose! I'm still curious about the choice of this form though. It what ways does it offer you more (more what? freedom, effect?) than does contemporary lyric poetry? I think quirky, metaphoric content especially suits these pieces. It is a very compelling form.

I spent years resisting the prose poem while being kind of fascinated by them at the same time. Late last year I finally wrote a few, then a few more. The danger I have in writing prose poems is the danger I have any time my line wanders too long, which is the language kind of flattens out (right now I'm writing fiction, and encountering the same problems). I want the language in a prose poem to be as energetic as the language in any other poem. My original model for prose poems was Illuminations when I was 14, which might explain why I was so reluctant to try after that. But finally, the language has to be doing interesting things.

To answer something Debbie asked, I do find myself getting a bit more playful/ surreal in prose poems than I have in lined poems.

Al, thanks for answering the question!

I have written a number of essays on the prose poem, Deb, and I think Al's answer is pretty spot on. When I discovered my "voice" my poems, I discovered the limitations (personal limitations) the poem has for me. The prose poem--with it's implicit "what is this?" that comes with the name "prose poem" (it's either/or-ness or neither/nor-ness as I call it an essay)--allows me to be playful in a different way. I'm allowed to be surreal, I'm allowed to go wild.

So the prose poem is like going to the playground. It's got rides, it's got wildness, it's got a different potential.

And Al, I know what you mean about the language of fiction getting sluggish. I worry about that all the time--but our training as poets at least lets us edit for rhythm.

When I read or write prose poems I often think about the music that works with the voice of the poet. I have been reading "Steam Punk" lately and as I explore NYC thru the words that Gerry writes I hear city jazz, Tom Waitts and a bit of Leonard Cohen. I guess what I am trying to say here is that good prose poems have many layers for me; the words, the sounds, the colors, the art and the voice of the poet

The playfulness of the prose poem is what attracted me. I am glad to hear you both discuss that aspect. Serious business is peeking around and out from under things as well, though. The dichotomy is delicious.

Al wrote: "I spent years resisting the prose poem while being kind of fascinated by them at the same time. Late last year I finally wrote a few, then a few more. The danger I have in writing prose poems is th..."

Al, I got a much later start than you in reading everything wonderful in the world. I suppose I would have resisted it too, after encountering symbolist prose poetry at 14. I was reading Dreiser then, and adoring the straighforwardness of prose alone. Do you like the Fowlie translation of Rimbaud? I do love to read Baudelaire and Rilke. I can't put it off any longer; I must read Rimbaud for myself now.

Deb, just so you know, I'm teaching a prose poem class at Frosty on Wednesday evenings this semester....

I came to the prose poem after I did this translation project of a Turkish surrealist--I would work on these translations for a few weeks and then didn't know how to return to my own poems: I had these wild images that couldn't be tamed by my line. So I started these paragraphs, and they eventually became Zarathustra in Love, a small collection of prose poems that came out in the late 90s. I write a few prose poems a year; mostly as a way of handling the radical/whimsical/fantastical.

I like this: "[the prose poem's] driving ambition is lyricism as opposed to the narrative drive of flash fiction." I've never ventured into prose poem-land because, well, I haven't felt limited by the line. But I'm hearing "radical/whimsical/fantastical" associated with it, which is what the line offers me, a chance to pirouette right at the line break into a new direction. If I can find that sensation elsewhere, I'm all ears.

Steve, Thanks for the kind words about Steam Punk--those are poems though as opposed to the little paragraphs of Notes for the Novice Ventriloquist. I'm always thinking (like Valerie) about the possibility of the line and all its intangibles when I write poems.

I guess, for me, Valerie, I think of the prose poem as being a place where the images that don't fit my lineated poems, the raffish and rakish stories, puns, etc that for some reason just don't "work" in another genre. Just as I started writing fiction to work through stories in ways my poems couldn't so too does the prose poem allow me to work in ways that my conception of the poem prevents me from working in.

I love thinking of the prose poem as that place poets, and I suppose fictions writers too, can go when things don't fit. I just give up, or move on. An idea is coming on for all the left over material...

I'll say this, Valerie, it's only happened once where something I wrote as a prose poem became a lineated poem, but failed poems often find a second life as prose poems.