Reviews for Great American Prose Poems

The average rating for Great American Prose Poems based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-12 00:00:00 Eric Thayer To continue a Harryette Mullen metaphor, this book is the sort of book I read when I want to make-out with the English language. It reminds me why I love to write and read great writing. It reminds me why prose is my favorite when it is poetry. It reminds me why I love representing the abstract with the concrete. A bowl of dead bees, a bear pushing a woman in a wheelbarrow, pushing another woman over a cliff - it's all here. Few compilations contain such a great selection and few books leave me looking back up at the world and savoring a richness that could even inspire a horse.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-05-06 00:00:00 Anna Woody Actual rating: 3.75 This was a solid collection, but definitely not the best I've ever read. As the title suggests, all of these pieces are prose poems. A prose poem is, in its most basic definition, a poem that is in prose, meaning it has no lines or stanzas, but rather is all about sentences and paragraphs. Lehman explores all this in his informative, if rather pretentious, introduction, which does do a nice job of exploring how the prose poem became an established form. Unfortunately, because the writing of a poem in prose rather than in verse is a break from standard practice, the prose poem has an inherently "subversive" element. Many selections in this anthology seem to have been chosen for how well they play up this "subversive" quality, not for any real poetic merit. This (for me at least) showed up in works like "Calling Jesus", "Five Fondly Remembered Passages from My Childhood Reading", "Why I Hate the Prose Poem" (which was one of my absolute least favorite poems), and "Hot Ass Poem". These works often fell down on the musicality and power that I expect of any good poems, regardless of form. My first criterion for a good prose poem is that I would have to appreciate the same words if they were in a verse poem, and a number of pieces did not meet that requirement. Some of the "true" formal experiments were also unsuccessful. The poem "Chekhov: A Sestina" was actually rather good, but the "prose sestina" was not a form that I felt worked well. A sestina is a verse form where all lines end with one of six words, repeated in a prescribed order. How does a poem without lines mimic this? By making each sentence end with one of the "sestina words" as if it were a line. While this sounds good in theory, it gives too much emphasis to the end-words and ends up somewhat choppy and forced, just as a regular sestina would if all lines were end-stopped. On the other hand, the book was also full of wonderful poems by a wide variety of authors. Some, like Agha Shahid Ali, Allen Ginsberg, and John Ashberry, I have had at least read one or more of their poems. Others, such as Ira Sadoff, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Richard Blanco, I had never encountered and am now excited to look for more of their work in other anthologies. I really liked many pieces, but among my favorites are Margaret Atwood's "In Love with Raymond Chandler", Maureen Seaton's "Toy Car" and "Lateral Time", John Yau's "Predella", Anselm Berrigan's "The Page Torn Out" (another one that experiments with form; it is structured as a play), and Elizabeth Bishop's "12 O'Clock News". The presence of these and other truly great poems saved the collection from its weaker offerings and made the book a worthwhile look at a poetic form. The collection is organized chronologically by author's birth date, and then by publication date when one author has multiple poems. This makes the anthology a scattered history as, particularly later on, the publications of poems do not reflect their place in the book and it can be hard to find a particular author, but it worked as well as just about any other system could. While probably best for those with a vested and/or scholarly interest in poetry and this form, it did make for an enjoyable read.