Prose Poetry in Australia

Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton

Prose Poetry in Australia

1. The contemporary prose poem

Prose poetry is a resurgent literary form in the English-speaking world. So many people are now writing prose poems that the form has moved from the margins to the mainstream—at least among poetry readers—in less than thirty years.  An important moment in this shift was the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry to Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End in 1990. However, even more significant is the way in which prose poetry has been adopted by so many diverse writers. This proliferation of prose poetry has meant that the potential of an often poorly understood form is finally being realized. Poetry, so long associated with techniques of verse, is now frequently dressed in the manners of prose; the divide between ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’ has effectively closed;  and the idea that the ‘poetic’ has to be manifested in lines that finish before the right-hand margin no longer always holds.

In his essay ‘The Prose Poem as an Evolving Form,’ Robert Bly delineates three types of prose poems: ‘fables,’ ‘fire prose,’ and ‘object/thing,’¹ and these categories give some indication of the diversity of the contemporary prose poem. However, in making these distinctions Bly risks limiting rather than liberating the bounds of the form. For example, prose poets in various countries are writing extended sequences of works, stretching the form’s potential, including epistolary prose poetry such as Bernadette Mayer’s The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994), essayistic prose poetry such as Fanny Howe’s long prose poem ‘Doubt’ (2003), and travelogue prose poems, including James Wright’s The Shape of Light (Companions for the Journey) (2007).

In 1976 Michael Benedikt pointed to five properties that contemporary prose poems have in common. He claimed, in general, that they turn on ‘ individual imagination’ and, further, that they demonstrate an attention to the unconscious; they employ an ‘accelerated use of the colloquial’; they have a visionary thrust; they are often humorous; and they contain an element critical of oppressive realities.² This is an astute summary of much prose poetry, but it does not encompass the full range of approaches, properties, and varieties evident in contemporary prose poems any more than Bly’s summary does. There are lyrical prose poems that do not employ humor, narrative prose poems that do not engage with oppressive realities, descriptive prose poems that lack any attention to the unconscious, experimental prose poems that mainly focus on disrupting conventional expectations of language, ekphrastic prose poems, and so on.

Such diversity does not challenge the integrity of the prose poem form nor does it mean that the form is too unwieldy to be meaningfully discussed. Rather, it attests to prose poetry’s resilience, along with its capacity to embrace great variety and to surprise in its expressiveness. Such qualities are a characteristic of many significant literary forms as writers test the boundaries of what they are able to achieve within given parameters and, in doing so, compel a form to continue to evolve.

2. Prose poetry in Australia

Australia has an underresearched, relatively well-hidden and distinguished prose poetry tradition. In the late 1970s and 1980s, poets such as Andrew Taylor, Bruce Beaver, Thomas Shapcott, Laurie Duggan, Ania Walwicz, joanne burns, Rodney Hall, Philip Hammial, and Gary Catalano produced book-length collections of prose poetry. However, some of their work—as in the case of Gary Catalano’s fine prose poems—are not easily accessible, especially in book form (although there is more Australian prose poetry online than there used to be). In recent years, renewed interest in the form is evident in the way that many Australian poets, some of whom had never previously written a prose poem, have been adding prose poetry to their poetic repertoires.

In 2011 the first anthology of Australian prose poetry, The Indigo Book of Australian Prose Poems, edited by Michael Byrne, was published by independent publisher Ginninderra Press. While the anthology was criticized for its emphasis on ‘baby boomer poets and lesser practitioners,’ and for selections that appear more like ‘misplaced paragraphs than prose poems,’³ it signaled that a prose poetry tradition was beginning to establish a firm foothold in the Australian literary community. Also, in recent years, a growing number of prose poems have been published in the annual The Best Australian Poems anthologies.

The move towards prose poetry is part of a broader trend. Australian creative writers are increasingly interested in making use of narrative and poetic forms that do not sit comfortably within conventional genre classifications. Although traditional literary genres, such as the novel, lyric poetry, drama, and short fiction have been at the centre of Australian literary practice since European colonization in the eighteenth century, many writers are looking for new ways to respond to their encounters with contemporary fragmentation and multivalency— and to register the disparate, the diverse, and the ‘broken’ in postmodernity. Contemporary Australian culture requires the use of unconventional literary forms in order to speak truthfully about issues centred on identity, the interpenetration and mixing of cultures, and the desire to find authentic ways of speaking amid postmodernity’s heteroglossia.

Prose poetry comfortably crosses traditional genre boundaries and, in doing so, enables intimate lyrical gestures to be joined to a (limited) narrative discursiveness, signalling that the ‘prosaic’ and the ‘poetic’ are frequently bound together. It offers writers ways of sidestepping both the forward-moving, teleological, time-conscious pressures of conventional narrative methods and the sense of closure so often associated with the traditional lyric. Much human experience in the twenty-first century may best be expressed through the creation of prose poetry’s ‘ in- between’ literary spaces (and associated tropes of absence and indeterminacy), and Australian prose poetry prioritizes spaces of uncertainty and anxiety—sometimes for the purpose of reworking the British and American canon.

Further, Thomas Shapcott has identified the wit, defiance and subversion of Australian prose poetry:

[T]he Australian evolution of the prose-poem is no merely pallid thing, a sort of pale reflection of the wan English versions It also has something of the Australian laconic wit and defiance, and it can get under the skin of the more conventional verse structures, which bear the ghostly train of the measured cadence still. As Kevin Brophy says, the prose poem is subversive. That is something Australians have always been good at, even if they are outwardly cautious and conformist.⁴

Shapcott’s characterization of the prose poem in Australia speaks directly to the nation’s colonization by the British and its subsequent ‘unsettlement.’ Australian prose poetry is a different breed than its English counterpart, having more in common with American prose poetry. Perhaps this is because both Australia and America are relatively young nations with indigenous dispossession as an essential part of their foundations.

Prose poetry is particularly well suited to the expression of the Australian postcolonial disconnection. Bill Ashcroft argues that:

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the  concern with place and displacement. It is here that the special post- colonial crisis of identity comes  into  being;  the  concern  with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place.⁵

As a hybrid form, prose poetry celebrates the blurring of established boundaries and opportunely registers the kinds of experiences that are neither fully coherent nor entirely resolvable. When Michael Chanan writes that ‘Colonial (and postcolonial) melancholy arises from an unresolvable contradiction within the (post)colonial subject’ and that ‘colonial melancholy is a condition in which the concept of the nation is falsely embedded through the colonial relations,’⁶ one may apply such statements to the Australian context. Australia is an independent nation and yet it is still in the process of finding ways to articulate an identity that properly and sufficiently acknowledges its colonial past.

3. Conclusion

We may not all wish to speak in prose poetry all of the time—such conversations would be hard work. However, prose poetry as a significant hybrid form is one avenue for bridging the various divides between our desire for narrative satisfaction,  the pleasures of lyric coherence and reassurance, and the less polished and finished subjectivities we know. Our awareness of these subjectivities tells us a great deal about what it is to be human in the twenty-first century. Prose poetry as a form speaks to this humanity in its fragmentation, regeneration, contradictions, irresolutions and intensities. In Australia, these issues are often reflected in postcolonial and potentially ‘unsettled’ responses to the nation’s history and competing agendas shaping its future.

NOTES

1       Robert Bly, quoted in Holly Iglesias, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry (Niantic, CT: Quale Press, 2004), 13.

2       Michael  Benedikt,  ‘Introduction,’  The  Prose  Poem:  An  International  Anthology (New York: Dell, 1976), 48-9.

3       Ed Wright, “Review: The Indigo Book of Australian Prose Poems, Ed. Michael Byrne,” Mascara Review, April 27, 2012, http://mascarareview.com/ed-wright-reviews- the-indigo-book-of-australian-prose-poems-ed-michael-byrne/.

4       Thomas Shapcott, “The Prose Poem in Australia—and Elsewhere,” Text:  The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, vol. 6, no. 2 (Oct. 2002), http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct02/letters.htm.

5       Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 8.

6       Michael Chanan, “Revisiting Rocha’s ‘Aesthetics of Violence,'” Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory, and the Performance of Violence, ed. by Joram ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer (New York: Wallflower Press, 2012), 92.