TWO CULTURES OF THE PROSE POEM

Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. Edited by David Lehman. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2003. Pp. 346. $16 (paper).

Dreaming the Miracle: Three French Prose Poets: Max Jacob, Francis Ponge, Jean Follain. Translated by Beth Archer Brombert, Mary Feeney, Louise Guiney, William T. Kulik, and William Matthews. Buffalo, New York: White Pine Press, 2003. Pp. 206. $17 (paper).

Wood Asleep. By Gérard Macé. Translated by David Kelley. Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland, Great Britain: Bloodaxe (distributed in the United States by Dufour Editions), 2003. Pp. 145. $21.95 (paper).

Blindsight. By Rosmarie Waldrop. New York: New Directions, 2003. Pp. 114. $15.95 (paper).

David Lehman's stimulating anthology of American prose poems gives me the impression that I am Montesquieu's Persian contemplating the strange mores of an exotic country that is none other than my own. Having long lived in France, I believed up to now—you, too, perhaps—that the prose poem was a genre not often practiced by Americans. Lehman shows me (and will show you) that we should know better. With 115 contributors ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) to Sarah Manguso (b. 1947) and Jenny Boully (b. 1976), this varied, representative, and often provocative selection is "a cobblestone tossed into the pond," as the French say. The splash should surprise us into reconsidering preconceptions and misconceptions about a complex literary form that is "the result," as Charles Simic (b. 1938) nicely formulates the paradox, "of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does." Simic adds that the prose poem represents "the sole instance we have of squaring the circle." Square it he does in what, for me, is the most haunting piece in the anthology:

In his introduction, Lehman intricately analyzes the origins and specific distinction of the American prose poem. His disquisition offers much food for thought about a genre which, like the short story, resists definition. As he explains how Americans appropriate "such unlikely models as the newspaper article, the memo, the list, the parable, the speech, the dialogue," he essentially associates the American prose poem with "its use of the demotic, its willingness to locate the sources of poetry defiantly far from the spring on Mount Helicon sacred to the muses." Be the vantage point that of e. e. cummings (1894-1962) "sitting in mcsorley's," Robert Bly (b. 1926) watching a hockey match, or Lydia Davis (b. 1947) observing "a man . . . making deliveries in the garment district," most pieces chosen for the anthology illustrate this grassroots, sometimes anecdotal, orientation. Even the philosophically resonant fantasies of Russell Edson (b. 1935) begin with, say, an ordinary taxi, never matter that the vehicle "crashes through the wall" and, continues Edson, "that my room is on the third floor, or that the yellow driver is really a cluster of canaries arranged in the shape of a driver."

This recurrent demotic element in American prose poetry nonetheless brings to mind how some writers were attracted to "demotic speech" and dailiness long before Amy Lowell's excitement, in 1916, about "red slippers in a shop window." Beginning in the fifth century B.C., the dramatic "mime" perfected by Sophron, Xenarchus, Herondas, and others—that is, the written mimos, not mime as a silent gestural performance—became a direct ancestor of the prose poem or, at least, the short prose narrative and terse dialogue. The mimos drew its name from its imitation of the everyday, from its realistic staging of the "vulgar incidents" occurring in the lives of unimportant people. In the Poetics, Aristotle linked Plato's Socratic dialogues to the mimos, but observed that "this form of imitation is to this day without a name." The problems of defining the prose poem go back at least as far as Aristotle's quandary.

The greatest obstacle facing prose-poem investigators is comprehending how prose is given that extra something—a wisp of charm, an aura of mystery, an electric shock—convincing us that we are dealing stylistically with a prose poem—that is, poetry—and not, say, a newspaper sketch, an oft-humorous literary form that took flight during the nineteenth century and sometimes approaches the prose poem in spirit. The borders between the prose poem and the sketch (or the vignette) are not always clearly traced, as is illustrated, in Lehman's anthology, by Ruth Krauss's "News" (1961). Each item in the sequence mimics a newspaper filler:

In French literature, similar "news items" are associated with Félix Fénéon (1861-1947), though with the difference that the Symbolist writer collected bizarre or absurd faits divers that had actually been printed in gazettes. The contemporary master of this tongue-in-cheek genre is Marcel Cohen (b. 1937). His volume The Peacock Emperor Moth (1990) has appeared in translation, as well as a gathering of longer narratives, Mirrors (1980). Cohen's recent Faits: lecture courante à l'usage des grands débutants (2002) discloses in its title an ironic pedagogy: the literary news item (whether contrived or not), like some prose poems, incites "beginners" to discern the gruesome significance and dire outcomes of banal events.

If the perspective is broadened, it is clear that the sketch, the short narrative, the short-short (let alone the short story) often similarly express a demotic spirit and rarely avoid the anecdotic, in both the etymological and evolved sense of the term. The Greek anekdotos means "unpublished," and the Italian term for "short story," novella, and its cognates (Spanish novela, French nouvelle, German Novelle, etc.) emphasize the obligation of the modern short story, which dates from Boccaccio's The Decameron (1350-53) and Cervantes's Exemplary Stories (1631), to bring forth something "new."

This exhortation to "reveal the new" (which should not be confused with the Poundian "make it new") can be qualified further. A generation or two before Poe pellucidly digressed on short prose narratives while reviewing Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales in 1842, German writers such as Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845), and Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) gave great thought to the matter of distinguishing literary genres and to the definition of the German Novelle. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) came up with a useful criterion: eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit, "an unheard-of [i.e., extraordinary] event that has really occurred." Though formidable exceptions exist, writers do often prefer relative brevity—discarding the decorative, focusing without adding commentary—whenever singling out a rare, outstanding incident; the incident suffices unto itself; it is the evocation of it that must be sharpened and polished. Even short-prose writers stressing the ordinariness and ennui of everyday life often so stress it that the ordinariness becomes out of the ordinary, as it were.

The German Novelle takes on ampler proportions (cf. Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, 1910) than the American short story and thus becomes what we call a "novella." This is why Heinrich von Kleist's Anekdoten (1810-11)—much less known than his plays and stories—are so pioneering: he moved from the Novelle toward genuine short-shorts that even approach the "demotic" prose poem (in the large sense that Lehman accords to the term). That these "anecdotes" were originally written for the Berliner Abendblätter illustrates the modern short-short's historical derivation, in part, from the newspaper sketch. Young Charles Dickens (1812-70) wrote such sketches; so did Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). Both writers, however, later expand their prose. Understanding what creative and intellectual decisions urged them to do so is perhaps not as straightforward as literary historians have suggested.

What strikes one with the mimos, the newspaper sketch, the short-short, and many modern prose poems, is the writer's urge to chart, to unveil, or at least catch a fleeting glimpse of, realities that are overlooked or disdained by more established, prestigious, mainstream, or academically acceptable genres. In this sense, the prose poem also often discloses or designates "new" realities and consequently has long enjoyed—or suffered from—an outsider status, as Lehman shows. He observes that "writing a prose poem can therefore seem like accepting a dare to be unconventional." He rightly links some American prose poems to French surrealism, all the while noting that "certainly the prose poem in the United States today is not as predictably unpredictable, in part because it has loosened its ties to the French tradition" and remarking that "there is a renewed sense that the homemade American prose poem is a thing that could not exist without the idea of America preceding it." William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), who disliked the "pace" of the French prose poem, is cited in this regard, and "three Improvisations" from Kora in Hell are anthologized.

Perhaps differences between American and French prose poems stem from how American and French writers comprehend the adjectives "surrealist" and "surreal." While perusing Lehman's anthology, I sometimes had the impression that, for American poets, these epithets imply—in a more restricted sense than in French—a bizarre, illogical or oneiric happenstance that has occurred—or is imputed as occurring—in everyday life, a definition by which I naturally recall Goethe's touchstone for the German Novelle. The bizarreness, illogicality, or oneiric atmosphere mostly emanates from the contents (the event evoked or recounted without frills) and does not particularly derive from the "poeticization" of one or more specific ingredients of style.

Should I maintain that, for some American writers, recording an unsettling happenstance (whether imaginatively constructed, dreamt, or eye-witnessed) in concise, enigmatically transitionless prose, suffices to make a "surrealist prose poem"? I cannot help but sense that French prose poets today, whenever they focus on odd or perplexing occurrences, often remain closer to the spirit of André Breton's rather exalted philosophical quest as well as, and especially, to his own high-literary prose style (used even when he was invoking the quotidian and its appurtenances). In other words, style per se, as much as what it conveys, remains in the forefront of the (French) writer's aim and the reader's experience.

Partly because of the philosophical stakes of language crafted in certain ways or toward certain ends, surrealists in general, and Breton (1896-1966) in particular, favored poetry to prose. There were exceptions to this rule. Breton made Julien Gracq (b. 1910), who was a novelist at the time and never officially a member of the Surrealist group, the "heir" to Surrealism. In his early novels and in his prose poems collected in Liberté grande (1946) and the underestimated Prose pour l'étrangère (1952), Gracq's richly adjectival and adverbial style could not be further removed from demotic realms. Gracq's subsequent short-prose meditations on historical events, literary figures, landscapes or his childhood defy classification. The highly conscious word order as a catalyst of unexpected meanings, the stunning precision of the imagery, and the melodic style nears these texts to what one would almost, though not quite, call prose poems. And when colloquial elements can more readily be identified in a French prose style (as in the vivid prose poems and short prose texts of Jacques Réda [b. 1929]), they often participate in an overall stylistic vision aiming at a less colloquial level of language. No more than for Gracq would "demotic" describe the linguistic texture of Réda's The Ruins of Paris (1977), his only—alas—short-prose collection available in English.

In that book, as in its several sequels, Réda sets out on those serendipity-seeking excursions, in and about the capital (and through the provinces), which were also beloved by surrealists ever on the lookout for the oddity. Precursors of Réda were the poet Louis Aragon (1897-1982), whose Le Paysan de Paris (1926/1953) is a prose work; and Breton, with Nadja (1928); one is tempted to add Léon-Paul Fargue (1876-1947), yet the short prose texts gathered in Le Piéton de Paris (1932) and other similar volumes are better classified as chroniques. Fargue's prose poems are published in Poëmes (1926), whose title gives pause because the book contains no verse and opens with an epigraph in the form of a musical score featuring a few melancholy and dreamy chords by Chopin. In his dedication, Fargue calls the prose poems "studies," just like Chopin's Études. Such, indeed, is the at once musical and experimental prerogative of much of the best prose poetry.

Also musical and experimental are the pyrotechnic, synesthetic short prose writings of Réda's mentor, C.-A. Cingria (1883-1954), as well as—in a quieter mode—the descriptions of rural landscapes and farm laborers which were produced by Gustave Roud (1897-1976). It is likewise thought-provoking that the lyric poet Apollinaire (1880-1918) wrote his paradigmatic "Zone" (included in Alcools, 1913) in a free-verse form that verges on the prosaic. That same year, 1913, poetry and prose overlap in "Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France" (1913), by Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961). Cendrars tellingly defines as "prose" this long, generally free-verse travel poem, which nonetheless comprises occasional end-rhymes, internal rhymes, and half-rhymes. This train-ride poem was much admired by Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), who likewise blends prose and verse in "A Supermarket in California." In that poem or prose poem, Ginsberg spots Walt Whitman—still another poet who introduced prosaic elements into verse—"poking among the meats in the refrigerator." Lehman shrewdly selects Ginsberg's text as well as others tantalizingly lying "between genres." In such examples, one senses that a poet who normally writes in verse or free verse is compelled by his very subject matter to "turn forward"—as the Latin provertere commands—to prose. As for French literature, perhaps the most difficult borderline case is Victor Segalen's Stèles (1929), a series of interrelated texts whose exceedingly long lines (or sentences, phrases?) ultimately conclude in a line break at the end of each strophe—or should these strophes be called paragraphs? Whether as a forethought or as a conscious decision made during the creative process, there exists a precise moment when "poetry [falls] into prose," as Gérard de Nerval (1808-55) perceived it.

Gérard Macé (b. 1946) quotes Nerval's remark in Wood Asleep, a stunning volume gathering—in a bilingual edition—the French writer's first three collections of prose poems: The Garden of Languages (1974), The Balconies of Babel (1977), Wood Asleep (1983). Macé's dense and sonorous prose-poem sequences immediately develop several layers of meaning, one of which engages with Nerval's perception so intensely that the three books could be said to form an overarching single book examining from several angles how poetry "falls" into prose—and what that falling implies.

It partly implies, or results from, our epistemological predicament: the disintegration, fragmentation, and dispersion of coherent meaning; our inability to come up with justifiable transitions enabling us to link events and emotions, ideas and descriptions; in brief, our incapacity to weave valid, continuous tales. Whence the prose poem? "Now that story-telling no longer catches on," declares Macé,

Vibrant imagery, crude language, literary references, children's fables, exotic sites observed while traveling, botanical precision, lexicography (the life-work of the above-mentioned Émile Littré was a remarkable dictionary, put together between 1863 and 1872 and still much consulted by French writers), anthropology and other "stream[s] of ancient knowledge"—like deciphering hieroglyphics—inform Macé's prose poetry. The (re-)discovery and "naming" of hidden age-old realities pertains to the essence of his prose poems. Sometimes his quest comes to a halt, as he dreams of the Mallarméan "great literal book open at the flower of another forest," namely the Dantean "selva oscura of what I cannot name." These pieces lead him to the brink of several such dark forests and their unfathomable mysteries.

Of these mysteries, the most hallowed is the origin of language. Often an ambience of the primitive and the transgressive, the raw and the cannibalistic, envelops allusions to the specific sources of the author's craft. Macé's three books—rejecting prosaic storytelling as such—also trace out the "story" of a young writer searching for the "lost" meaning of life and facing up to his budding literary desires. He gives glimpses of illiterate ancestors and a working-class upbringing; the "hobo castle" that he sights is inscribed as a "mallarmé castle" in his memory. Beginning with the violent image of wanting "to rip the tongue from the back of [his] throat and eat it raw," the writer obliquely chronicles a coming-of-age voyage, from the "fallow field of purgatory which in childhood preceded paradises of the vernacular," to exotic lands in which his desire for and acquisition of a literary language enables him to undertake still more intrepid journeys.

These questions of stylistic heritage and resolve bring me back to Lehman's anthology. For a few prose pieces, the dubious "poetry" relies on no more than a studied eccentricity. The most extreme case is "Cold Calls" by Tyrone Williams (b. 1954), who aligns blank pages at the bottom of which appear mystifying footnotes. Similarly limited in interest is "Hot Ass Poem" by Jennifer L. Knox (b. 1968). It begins "Hey check out the ass on that guy . . ." and offers no more crafted language to admire or transcendence to contemplate than variations on that enticing sight—which is probably the point.

My personal preferences go to writers whose formal and stylistic innovations are less ostentatious. There are no gimmicks and gadgets in the prose poems of, for example, Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947), Maxine Chernoff (b. 1952), Mark Jarman (b. 1952), Mary Ruefle (b. 1952), Killarney Clary (b. 1953), and Campbell McGrath (b. 1962). Also striking is "The Most Beautiful Word," by Linh Dinh (b. 1963), a poet born in Vietnam. He harrowingly evokes a war victim while artfully juxtaposing the distancing effects of irony and the sudden close-ups of a stark realist:

Such a scene recalls the graphic prose-poem "chapters" that Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) inserted between the longer stories of In Our Time (1924). In order to better understand the difference between prose and verse, experimenters might rearrange into a prose paragraph the lines of Hemingway's "Montparnasse," which Lehman has selected from 88 Poems (1979). For me, the line breaks are essential here for creating tension and surprise: the albeit prosaic-toned poem is thus "verse."

These slippery questions of stylistic sensibility and rhetorical effects involve how abstractions and concepts, and thus concision and concreteness—the latter as compositional ideals—are respectively received in French and English. French is a Romance language derived from Latin. In this respect, French writers have inherited—whether they like it or not—the Latin writers' especial concern with succinctness and syntactic logic. The terse, aphoristic quality of much Latin poetry and prose has long influenced the manner in which French—as a literary language—has been conceived, taught, and practiced. And this influence, reinforced considerably by the diction-purifying and grammar-standardizing precepts of the seventeenth-century Port-Royal school of linguists and philosophers, specifically affects the long and rich tradition of the French aphorism, which is still practiced today. A classic locus of aphoristic, symbol-charged and even sometimes quasi-imagistic "poems" made up of a very few sentences is the "Phrases" section of Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations (probably composed between 1872 and 1875).

This Latinic influence likewise casts light on a curiosity of French publishing: until recently, prose was often employed for translating foreign verse. In the authoritative Belles Lettres "Guillaume Budé" series, classical Greek and Latin verse has often been rendered into prose. For the French writer unfamiliar with Italian or English, Dante and Shakespeare wrote French prose. A versifier as gifted as Nerval put Goethe's Faust into prose. Some of Nerval's own prose writings—the quasi-independent sections of his novella Aurélia (1855) and of his stories in Les Filles du Feu (1854), as well as miscellaneous pieces—come close to being "long" prose poems. The same applies to the prose sections of Novalis's Hymns to the Night (1797), which represent early and seminal paradigms of German poetic prose.

Does this practice of translating foreign verse into prose constitute another "French exception"? Perhaps, but the phenomenon demands further reflection because it relates directly to the prose poem. Standard bilingual dictionaries reveal that there are many more words in English than in French. For a given French term, two or three or more English words—each with its shade of meaning—may be a potential candidate for the equivalence. Such disproportion speaks for the empirical resources of English, as opposed to French, a fact that is, incidentally, sometimes tendered by scholars wrestling with why the Pole Jozef Kor zeniowski—who spoke French fluently from childhood and who lived in France for a while as a young adult—opted for a language that he commanded less, English, when he began Almayer's Folly in 1889, under the name of Joseph Conrad. The novelist-sailor presumably needed that precise English seafaring terminology.

Yet being outnumbered in words does not imply an insurmountable handicap for French prose poets. They rely differently on syntax, on etymology where it is apparent, on the propinquity of certain words, on their resonance and connotations, and especially on that crucial element in any prose poem: transitions (or the lack thereof) between sentences and paragraphs. Moreover, because of the wider semantic range of many French words, a French prose poet can arguably create particularly intense, sometimes polysemous, images and symbols. Macé says no less in "A Detail from Hell" (from Wood Asleep), when the lexicographer Littré glimpses

Not coincidently, one of the oldest and most lasting mainstays of French verse and prose poetry is "symbolism" considered as a squeezing—into those narrow corsets—of as many meanings and connotations as possible. These linguistic limitations and potentialities must be taken into account when considering the prose poem. In all languages, the prose poem—because of its particular compression—must accommodate (or reject) images, symbols, and concepts more conscientiously than does expansive prose.

Ever since the Second World War, and partly because of the lingering surrealist notion of surpassing rationality by yoking together heterogeneous ideas and images, French poets have debated how "concepts" affect both verse and prose poetry. Yves Bonnefoy (b. 1923), whose oeuvre includes both genres (see Rue Traversière et autres récits en rêve, 1987), has examined this question in his essays by dissecting the poetics of Baudelaire (1821-67), Rimbaud (1854-91), and Mallarmé (1842-98); these poets struggled, not only with the arduous craft of versification, but also with the conceptual presumptions of a romantic, symbolist, realist, or naturalist stance.

Of the three important poets featured in the White Pine Press volume under review, Francis Ponge (1899-1988) similarly investigated the role of concepts. For Ponge, words were "concepts" and things, "conceptacles." "One needs to arrange many words in a new way," he stated, "to destroy a word, a concept." His piece "The Crate" progresses accordingly; the ordinary object is first made tangible by means of an alignment of words phonetically close to the word cageot ("crate"):

Ponge's strategy for destroying concepts provides a telling parallel to T. S. Eliot's notion of "forcing . . . language into its meaning." (Lehman includes Eliot's strange and initially quite violent prose poem "Hysteria," dated 1917, about the narratorbeing so "involved" in a woman's laughter that he is "lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat.") These acts of linguistic and per ceptual violence—"destruction was my Béatrice," claimed Mallarmé—belong to the modern poet's and prose-poet's role. Proverbial French "abstractions" in poetry often represent a paradoxical desire to break through them and, by this act, to catch sight of unusual slices or levels of reality.

Elsewhere I have suggested that American poets tend to begin with a fact and work toward an idea, while their French counterparts begin with an idea and work toward a fact. In the French prose poem, one of these initial ideas may indeed entail smashing through ideas, as the poet—rather like Edson's taxi—would smash through a brick wall keeping him or her from an ardently desired reality. In other words, for a prose poet like Ponge, the objectifying poetic process, aiming at grasping the "thing-in-itself," must necessarily take into account the ab-original idea, the inconvertible starting point, which is often the Cartesian cogito ergo sum as well as its logical consequence: "Because I am, the outside world also exists." Because Ponge's poems are not so much about things as about how he endeavors to break through conceptual obstacles (beginning with the solipsistic Cartesian departure point) and thus about how he envisions writing about the things in question, the paradox of his ideally self-effacing strategy is that he emerges, as a narrator, all the more imposingly. Yet his point about concepts is well made, and his language is exceedingly well crafted. In The Garden of Languages, Macé similarly identifies a "cancer of sense," as he declares in one prose poem, that can hatch "its black eggs beneath a thousand metaphors of love." Could it be that somewhere in this neighborhood exists a meeting point for French and American writers, where the French aspiration to break through concepts and attain a kind of "reality" encounters the demotic proclivities that Lehman discerns in American prose poetry?

In any event, Lehman rightly underscores the French contribution to the prose poem. Like most commentators, he attributes its birth to Aloysius Bertrand's collection Gaspard de la Nuit, posthumously published in 1842. Such an attribution seconds remarks made by Baudelaire, who paid homage to Bertrand as a mentor when he began composing his own prose poems in 1857. Baudelaire's efforts were eventually gathered in the now-famous volume Petits poèmes en prose, which was first entitled Le Spleen de Paris when an initial sampling of it appeared in 1864. Soon thereafter, Rimbaud arrived on the scene. He boldly added new dimensions to the genre with A Season in Hell and Illuminations. As Lehman aptly remarks,

Finally, Mallarmé, Max Jacob (1876-1944), Henri Michaux (1899-1984), Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960), René Char (1907-88), and the aforementioned Ponge, "made Paris the indisputable capital of the prose poem," as Lehman points out.

Add to that list Jean Follain (1903-71), a selection of whose mysterious, subtly crafted prose poems have now once again been made available in English, in the White Pine Press volume. (Some versions included in this important volume were originally published, long ago, in small press editions.) Follain strikes the perfect balance between stylistic grace and semantic enigma. He employs not the slightest formal trick. He does not need to: his gaze over the surface of the world actually (and discretely) probes very deep. Besides bringing out the "chant [that] goes up from every object"—with so much more naturalness than Ponge—and creating touching, melancholy atmospheres, Follain ponders time and again the significance of an everyday world that seemingly possesses no more coherence than a myriad of simultaneous disparate occurrences. He juxtaposes the occurrences in a way depicting life as a hodge-podge, at best a motley tapestry, of vanishing moments:

As precursors of the English-language prose poem, Lehman cites the King James Bible, Shakespeare's prose (in Hamlet), John Donne's sermons, Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and other pertinent examples. Let me add that similar prose-poem antecedents in French literature can be identified as far back as Aucassin et Nicolette (late twelfth or early thirteenth century), a love story alternating verse and poetic prose, and perhaps even in the metrically cadenced prose sermons of Saint Bernard (1091-1153). As to more recent (pre-Baudelairean) periods, prototypes of the prose poem emerge in certain prose passages of the plays of Molière (1622-73), in various "pensées" by Pascal (1623-62), in sermons by Bossuet (1627-1704), in Télémaque by Fénelon (1651-1715), in sundry descriptions of nature by Rousseau (1712-78) or Chateaubriand (1768-1848), not to forget in some of Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721).

The respective evolution of the prose poem in the two literary traditions therefore differs less than it appears to Lehman's eye. His dichotomy of prose versus verse (as opposed to prose versus poetry), wherein "verse is an adjunct of poetry and not an indispensable quality," in fact applies to most European literatures. It is the line break (or not) that matters, since, as Lehman sees it, the salient difference between verse and prose is that the former "occurs in lines of a certain length determined by the poet whereas prose continues to the end of the page."

Regrettably, it is hard to go further. And when one meditates on how certain poets admit to having been influenced by certain kinds of prose (be it "poetic" or "pedestrian"), the formal line break (or its absence) probably has little to do with what an apprentice poet seeks out or harkens to. Take the case of General Makriyannis (1797-1864). He was an illiterate hero of the Greek War of Independence who later taught himself how to write the demotic language that he spoke, so that he could bear witness to what he had done and seen. For modern Greek readers, the outcome—the magnificently rugged, precise descriptions of his Memoirs (composed during the years 1829-51)—is truly miraculous. The Memoirs deeply influenced the poetic prose, the prose poems and perhaps indirectly even the verse of two of the greatest modern Greek poets, George Seferis (1900-71) and Odysseus Elytis (1911-96). Both poets often paid homage to Makriyannis's prose, which, however, is neither "short" nor ostensibly "poetic."

In other words, the genuine mysteries of poetic prose and the prose poem dwell far upstream: in the creative processes of each writer, in the emotive, ratiocinative, and recollective movements of the mind as he or she writes, and then in the ways these movements are metamorphosed into style. In one of the short prose texts of En lisant en écrivant (1980), Gracq compares these processes to an espaliered fruit tree, all the while offering a sharp critique of biographies. For him, investigating a writer's "living environment" is like confusing the guy wire with the espaliered branch that twists around it. The branch draws no nourishment from the wire and ignores its existence. A biographer needs to "prune," warns Gracq, everything that has not occurred during those "hours" when the writer's self "listens profoundly" to the world. Gracq correspondingly develops the idea that a writer senses, before he writes, the totality of the work he intends to compose. This totality is like a melody ("as charged with energy as impossible to decompose") which the writer intimates and for which he must seek "the instrument"—in certain cases, accordingly, the prose poem or the short prose text.

Some ancient thinkers nevertheless attempted to penetrate these creative mysteries by inquiring how the brevity or relative "amplification" of a prose text (or poem or play) inherently arises from a given subject matter. Following in Greek footsteps, Horace, Cicero, and Quintilian were especially concerned with concision and prolixity: they asked, for instance, why the playwright Terence gave his character Simo, in The Girl from Andros, a hundred lines to develop Pamphilus's character, but only two or three to tell about Chrysis's body being laid on a funereal pyre; why Homer chose to make Menelaus's speeches concise and Odysseus's verbose; why brevity could induce obscurity, and what obscurity entailed; why some short narratives seemed "concise" and others simply "short" or "brief," the former containing not a single superfluity, the latter leaving out something that was necessary, that is, leaving something necessary to be desired. The ancient critics astutely noted how compression and fragmentation profoundly affect the haunting and riddlesome qualities of short literary forms.

This whirlwind tour of prose poems, short prose, and poetic prose in European literary history should suggest that a sort of longue durée of short literary forms profoundly affects each national literature, as well as, more broadly, European and even world literature to the extent that foreign work has wielded influence either through translations or through the filters of poets or writers conversant with foreign tongues. Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) notably asserted that his book Hotel Lambosa (1993)—from which Lehman chose three samples—did not collect prose poems, but rather stories in the manner of the Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories (1923-72). It is true that Koch's "On Happiness" is more a mini-essay than a prose poem; and the salient fabular qualities of "The Allegory of Spring" distance it from prose poetry as well. Closer is "The Wish to Be Pregnant," whose imaginative and narrative leaps between paragraphs render it funny and bewildering enough to approximate a "surrealist" American prose poem.

This longue durée of short forms so obviously envelops—so nourishes—the micro-history of the Baudelairean prose poem (and its direct descendants) that I find myself questioning Lehman's observation that "the prose poem has a relatively short history" and, more specifically, that "in France, the prose poem quickly became a genre" whereas "in the English-speaking world, the prose poem never quite graduated to the status of a genre." At any rate, he underestimates the breadth and variety of contemporary French short-prose activity when he implicitly maintains that the American prose poem, but not its French counterpart, "veers off decisively to accommodate the sui generis work that transcends category." In making this distinction, he quotes the French scholar Suzanne Bernard's vague "four requirements" for the prose poem: "it had to embody the poet's intention, it had to have an organic unity, it had to be its own best excuse for being, and it had to be brief." These unilluminating requisites fail to elucidate certain French prose poems and "poetic prose" texts, beginning with a "novel," Sébastien, l'enfant et l'orange (1942), by Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange (1910-94). The critic Michel Leiris called this book a "novel-poem" because the style or what he terms the

Leiris perceived that Fardoulis-Lagrange maintained a "striking equilibrium" between references to everyday life, "as in the most naturalist novel," and a transfiguration or "shattering" (mise en pièces) of reality, "as in the most subjective, lyric poem." Later novels by Fardoulis-Lagrange—Les Caryatides et l'albinos (1959), L'Observance du même (1977)—fit Leiris's definition even better. In brief, language is as much the story as the story it recounts; language shares, with the contents, the center of attention; its staging and its revelation belong as much to the author's intent as the telling of the tale, the describing of the scene, the re-creating of a character's voice. It seems to me that a (short) prose text to which one cannot ascribe this co-eminence of language is not quite a prose poem. It is a mime, a sketch, a vignette, an aphorism, a short-short, or whatever, but not prose poetry. This is not to say that such work is inferior.

To wit, in contemporary French literature, as in the literatures of other European countries, there is much strange and delightful sui generis short prose comparable with, for instance, the Martial-like insults of Gabriel Gudding (b. 1966), the bemused and disabused Letters to Wendy's of Joe Wenderoth (b. 1966), the "ten-second essays" of James Richardson (b. 1950), or the one-sentence maxims of Joe Brainard (1942-94).

One of Brainard's one-sentence forms was in fact adopted by Georges Perec (1936-82) for his own series based on the words "Je me souviens. . . ." The Brainard-Perec "I remember" series offers an instance—probably unknown to most readers of Lehman's anthology—of a Frenchman borrowing a short-prose form from an American, and not the other way around. Like other techniques invented or adapted by the Oulipo writing group (the "Workshop of Potential Literature"), of which Perec was a key member, the Brainard-Perec "I remember" one-liner has become a typical junior-high writing-class exercise in France. Examples of contrived formulas—such as the lipogram—enabling writers to create a sui generis poetic or prose work go back to at least the fifth or sixth century B.C. Because of arduous, self-imposed constraints, many sui generis writings are necessarily short.

The only American member of Oulipo, Harry Mathews (b. 1930), is likewise anthologized by Lehman because of his diaristic 20 Lines a Day (1988). French journal-like prose poems have appeared as well. One of the most sophisticated prose stylists and learned French versifiers, Jude Stéfan (b. 1930), has written a "False Journal" (Faux journal, 1986) of such prose pieces (the very title of the book stresses its creative artifice), followed by two other "anti-biographical" notebooks of short prose: Senilia (1994) and Silles (1997). Stéfan's most recent book of caustic aphorisms, diaristic short prose, and ironic mini-dialogues (one could almost say "mini-mimes") is in fact called Le Sillographe (2004), in honor of Timon of Phlius (probably born toward the end of the fourth Century B.C.), otherwise known as "the sillographos" because he penned parodies and (self-)satire. Stéfan similarly mocks contemporary literary mores and personalities, including himself. Besides being a poet, he is a highly regarded author of short stories; in other words, short prose that is not so short after all. Yet this new book, as well as other recent volumes, have revealed a propensity to much shorter forms, both in prose and in verse. One of his mini-dialogues in Le Sillographe correspondingly begins at the end of an implied discussion (which is not recorded for the reader) and evokes, not "falling into prose," but rather falling from relatively long prose into very short forms:

Similar pieces liven Lehman's anthology. A particularly subtle example is "Why I Hate the Prose Poem" by Tom Whalen (b. 1948):

Does this poetic (?) or logical (?) demonstration of why the narrator hates the prose poem constitute a prose poem? And in what thematic and stylistic ways (if any) is the emotion of hate expressed by this intriguing piece? Whalen has, incidentally, translated some of the obliquely charming, ultimately baffling short prose texts and prose poems of Robert Walser (1878-1956), a Swiss German writer who has been widely translated in France and other European countries. Walser's influence has now marked other continental short-prose writers.

Some poets anthologized by Lehman are footbridges back and forth across the Atlantic. The first is Poe, much admired by both Baudelaire and Mallarmé, though surely more because of his audacious symbolic subject matter than because of his formal astuteness. (Baudelaire, by the way, also translated Longfellow.) Others are Simic and Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), both Europeans by birth who remained Europeans by sensibility. Milosz's "Esse" (1954/1988), set in a Paris métro car, is a splendid mixture of sensual yearning, precise vision, and philosophical acumen. "She got out at Raspail," Milosz concludes, and "I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees."

Another hardy Atlantic voyager is Rosmarie Waldrop (b. 1935). Five prose poems from The Reproduction of Profiles (1987) are highlighted by Lehman. Her latest collection, Blindsight, offers similarly challenging and, often, somehow secretly or unexpectedly personal pieces. The title derives from a term forged by the neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio, who studied how people actually "see" more than what they are aware of seeing. Extremely concise, resolutely alluding (if sometimes obliquely) to the essential elements of a human being's intimate experience (which comprise what others falsely view as insignificant phenomena), Waldrop's prose poems map out, or at least credibly intuit, frontiers beyond the routine limits of one's mind and body.

Such writing is experimental in the strictest and noblest sense of the term. Some of Waldrop's prose-poem sequences imagine—in collage-like fashion—the experiences of certain famous artists, writers, and historical figures (spied upon during their secondary occupations), while elsewhere she seemingly addresses herself. This especially obtains in the oft-moving opening sequence, "Hölderlin Hybrids," with its themes of aging, illness, death, and courage:

Waldrop's sparse, twisted, and wrenched language is a precise and original tool for rendering at once intimate emotions, graphic images, and philosophical speculation:

Rather in the way that Damasio's neurological research underscores the primacy of feelings in decision-making processes, it is perhaps in the prose poem—with its multilayered formal and internal ambivalences—that we can best surmise the conscious or unconscious impulses enabling a writer to translate emotions and perceptions into words. Reminding us of the poet's ancient responsibility in this regard—to be a guardian of language and to probe ever deeper into human experience—Waldrop phrases it thus: "How sense waits on soul, and soul on sense, is called the origin of language." She shows that this is the domain par excellence of the prose poem.