The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice Book

If you're interested in exotic (or drab, maybe) birds like prose poetry, this is a fine place to sit and chat with 34 practitioners who tell us what prose poetry means to them. After each short essay, the writer/poet offers two to three of his or her own prose poems just to show us what s/he means.

As for definitions, good luck. The long and short of it is this: prose poetry is either both prose and poetry or neither prose nor poetry. Pick your poison or ambrosia. But it appears to be liberating to some, especially for poems that don't seem to come alive in lines and stanzas and white space.

You will also learn that this new-fangled beast isn't as new-fangled as you think. Some old French dudes were at it some time ago. Guys with names like Rimbaud and Baudelaire.

For me, like auditing a course. And yes, I've been a good student and tried my hand at it, too. Inspired. Anything that inspires writing is a good thing by definition.

Here's a quote from the final essay by David Shumate:

"The prose poem is often the object of derision among poetic purists. They consider the loss of the poetic line a final blasphemy. They've relinquished rhyme. And meter. But never the line itself. They claim a poem must be vertical. A poem must look like a poem.

"Maybe they're right. Maybe there is a special purgatory for our kind. Perhaps I'm already a resident there. That would explain a lot...

"But I've overheard some fairly comical conversations between poets concerning the proper placement of a line break. Should it go here? Or here? Or here? Often it comes just to the brink of fisticuffs. Then the poet goes off and reads the poem to an audience, completely ignoring the line breaks he fought so hard to justify. Often if they do read their own line breaks rigidly, the overall effect can be a sort of literary stutter as if there might be a sudden shortage of air in the room."