"Phlogiston Footage" by Nicky Beer -- Verse Daily, 5/1/2013

from Pleiades
poem found here

 

First lines:
The lights dim. We creak in our seats.
A diver shadows the bottom of the Aegean Sea

 

prose hiding behind line breaks

— reformatted 9/30/15

Twice in a row, now, I have been offered a poem that fits perfectly into a subject I have been wanting to address. Though, here, it is more an experiment I want to try.

Before we begin, though, I want to congratulate Verse Daily for yet another botch job in transposing a poem to html. I am curious what the poem really looks like in Pleiades, for I have no confidence in Verse Daily's page writing ability, and as such question if the inserted, voiced sections are supposed to be full justified. (Notice the third one is not in italics, as I am sure it is supposed to be.) Now, if it was not full-justified in the original, then my question moves to Ms. Beer: why not? To be honest, whichever the case, I also do not understand why there are words in those sections that are hyphenated.

That said, my experiment: Since this poem is in sentences, and the line breaks seem arbitrary, let's print the poem out in paragraph form just to see what happens. (I add to the text what seems to me to be two natural paragraph breaks.)

The lights dim. We creak in our seats. A diver shadows the bottom of the Aegean Sea like a ponderous yellow-footed heron trailing a champagne wake. Mycenaean amphorae thrust their necks from the ashen sand, all rounding their lips to the same vowel shape as he plunges his glove down their gullets. We see his fist opening rubber petals to the camera, revealing another fist slowly loosening itself to a walnut-sized octopus. Nacreous and opaline, pied, rubicund, its eyes are damn near half of it, a livid doodle in his black hand. Now comes the calm intervention of the voiceover—baritone, gently professorial, just a touch embarrassed by the excess of its knowledge: One of the more unusual denizens of the coastal-Mediterranean waters is the phlogiston, commonly known to marine biologists as Octopus phlogistonus. While certainly no rival to the Giant Pacific Octopus in size, nor anywhere nearly as dangerous as the venomous Blue-Ringed Octopus, the phlogiston nevertheless possesses a certain attribute which for the longest time could only be described as magical. The camera tilts down into one of those ancient clay mouths. We gaze into shadow for a beat longer than seems necessary. Then: A flaw in the underwater celluloid. A flirt of acid on the film. A morsel of dust smuggled into the spool. A prank of chartreuse stipples the black, casts a fragment of ghoul-light on tentacles scrolled backwards. Wait a moment. Watch again. The animal takes small bites of the darkness, releasing crumbs of green light into the water, dozens of sparks leaping and guttering from its underside with mayfly brevity. Apocryphal evidence indicates one American soldier fortunate enough to catch sight of the phlogiston while stationed in Naples during World War II dubbed the creature The Little Zippo— There's no crashing grandeur here—it's the private self-sufficiency of the animal's gesture that charms us like a lonely whistle overhead in an empty street. And yet, drifting in its earthenware cul-de-sac, this diminutive marine Prometheus could not be more dull to itself: ... was discovered to be thousands of bioluminescent microorganisms inhabiting the keratin of the phlogiston's beak. The octopus scrapes the top and bottom halves of his beak together to rid himself of the surplus buildup. This agitates the parasites, which emit a faint greenish glow as they're released into the water. The "magic act" the octopus performs is, in fact, nothing more than a bit of absent-minded grooming. Which of our own human wonders may be little more than chemical whiff, an odd kink in the genetic helix? The thought's enough to make us shut our eyes, pull our ignorance a little closer, embrace it like a mildewed doll— dented forehead, chipped-paint stare and all. But we're still drawn to these tenebrous theaters, lulled by the tidewhir of the projector, detaching our terrestrial ballast as our lungs relax to airless anemones. Perhaps the light ruptures the darkness so that we may better know the darkness in the palm of our own hand. Now they're looping a scene in night vision chartreuse, the sparks first swarming the tentacles like spermatozoa, then rushing the lens, spawning with the clouds of dust in the camera's beam, silently trickling into our laps. Look how our hands become strange speckled cephalopods when we try to brush them away, the knuckles arched with primal alarm, poised to flee, to live out their own mysteries beyond our sight. The motor shudders. We whiff cordite. A single celluloid tentacle whips into the air, puddles to a glossy slither. What remains unknown—.   Note: The phlogiston is an invented animal.

So there you go. Simple experiment with a simple question: Was anything added to the text by breaking it up into poetry? The accompanying question: Was anything lost?

I leave that for you to ponder. I offer it as evidence to my continuing argument that much of what is considered poetry these days is really prose left-justified and with narrow columns. Since it is pointless to disguise my opinion, I obviously think nothing is added to the value of this particular piece; in fact, I think it flat works better as prose.

Except . . . . .

Once I started reading it in paragraph form, a whole lot of issues started to pop up. So what I have decided to do is to approach the piece as though I were commenting on a student's creative writing assignment.

My method here is first to mark the place in the text to which my comment is addressed; then to make the comment, as I would write it on a page. (Some language will have to be used to replace what would be done with non-verbal marks, like circling a word.)

• ["A diver shadows"] Do you realize that you are saying the diver's shadow is like a heron's shadow? So "yellow" makes no sense. Also, would anyone naturally call a tall, thin, almost fragile-looking bird like a heron "ponderous"?
• ["amphorae"] I don't think this personification of the amphorae works. It's a lot of energy going to the container, when really the energy should be saved for what's in it (whose introduction, in fact, doesn't even get half has much).
• ["loosening itself to a walnut-sized octopus"] Correct preposition? does a hand loosen to?
• ["Nacreous . . . ."] Sentence is a complete mess.
• ["commonly known"] You don't use the phrase "commonly known" to introduce its scientific classification; you say "it is ippidus bippidus, commonly known as the 'get the hell out of my nose' bug"
• ["Giant Pacific"] Why are you capitalizing the names of these two octopi, and not "Phlogiston"?
• ["could only be described as magical"] It was magical then, but now it's mundane? Why then the movie? (or this poem?) Or are you saying that up until the 18th century everyone literally ascribed the phenomenon to magic? Bad phrasing.
• ["The camera . . . ."] This entire paragraph is a mess. Adjectives and such are all over the place and out of control. It reads like your thesaurus puked on your paragraph. (The whole text reads that way.) Also, it starts with "a flirt" and ends with "dozens" without any building up -- so I ask, which one? A little, or a lot?
• ["apocryphal evidence"] A story can be apocryphal, but not evidence. If there is evidence, it's no longer apocryphal
• ["chartreuse" and "rubicund"] Great words, but chartreuse is not a color one generally hears associated with an animal. They sound forced. Q: does "rubicund" generally work in a context that is material, rather than biological?
• ["lonely whistle overhead in an empty street"] Which one? Overhead or in?
• ["could not be more dull to itself"] What does that mean? Are you saying the octopus is existentially bored with its own being?
• ["surplus buildup"] And yet "dozens" of visible specks are put out by an octopus the size of a walnut in what is apparently a very brief period of time? Your text makes it sound like the bacteria grows so quickly that if the octopus stopped for five minutes it would be wholly enveloped by the stuff
• ["chemical whiff"] I want to make this work, but in context can't
• ["embrace it like a mildewed doll"] I can't come up with a single thought that, once thought, would make me want to embrace it like a mildewed doll -- you are totally out of control ideationally
• ["But we're still"] Somebody shoot that sentence before it breeds!
• ["we try to brush them away"] Brush away what? Our hands? How do you brush away your hands? What do you use? Did they fall off, and they're creeping you out, and so you're brushing them away with your feet?
• ["primal alarm"] At the beginning of the paragraph we were talking about "little more than chemical whiff"; Where did primal alarm-type energies come from? Your sudden escalation is wholly unjustified, and completely out of left field.
• ["What remains unknown"] You got me. Not sure what this is about.
• ["Note:"] Never explain your jokes.

I think we can agree, what we really have here is some really, really bad prose, disguised as even worse poetry. Give this text any critical attention and you are going to come to that conclusion. Let me ask as I have before: would the above have ever made it past a prose editor? Why then did it a poetry editor? (I am, actually, embarrassed for Pleiades. Not the editors, the journal.) It is not like the work was written to the line breaks and without them it fell apart: the line breaks were arbitrary. And don't give me the "well it's poetry" justification. Just like being called the designated hitter does not magically mean a person can actually play the game, so also does being called "poetry" not magically cure a text of bad writing.

Or, at least, it shouldn't.

 

•
I actually may start doing this more often. The first questions of any "prose with line breaks" poem: Is there anything gained with the line breaks (or is it really just prose? and, What is concealed by the linebreaks?

"Ms. and Super Pac Man" by B.J. Best -- Verse Daily, 4/29/2013

from Pleiades (33.1)
poem found here

 

First words:
They met at Overeaters Anonymous.

 

the prose poem, and the question of the distinction between poetry and prose

— reformatted with minor editing 9/30/15
— a little editing 6/16/2013

This is a prose poem – or so it claims. But that is the question: what is a prose poem? It seems these days that people are very willing to take near anything under 300 words or so and call it a prose poem. But are they? Merely because they are short, does that make them a prose poem? How is a prose poem different from a short-short? How is it different from flash fiction. Are you willing to say there is no difference and "prose poem" is, merely, any short prose work? Let me reverse the question: is there anything about this little story that is not, merely, prose?

Let's look at two texts. First, T.S. Eliot's "Hysteria," often called one the best prose poems in English:

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: "If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden…" I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

and Franz Kafka's "Absent-Minded Window-Gazing" (translated by Willa and Edmund Muir; plucked from here):

What are we to do with these spring days that are now fast coming on? Early this morning he sky was gray, but if you go to the window now you are surprised and lean your cheek against the latch of the casement. The sun is already setting, but down below you see it lighting up the face of the little girl who strolls along looking about her, and at the same time you see her eclipsed by the shadow of the man overtaking her. And then the man has passed by and the little girl's face is quite bright.

I have to put them within the post, here, because the whiz kids at other poetry sites (like Poetry Archive, Poetry Foundation, and AllPoetry) don't seem to realize it is a prose proem and have it on screen left justified, with broken lines. (If you look at the html, the poem is actually by hand broken into lines.) [Note: PoetryFoundation corrected it the next day, after I pointed it out. 4/30] And since I put up one, then why not also the other. I put them there mostly for you to read. To compare.

"Hysteria" is a prose poem. "Window-Gazing" is a story. You do not every see "Hysteria" called a story, and I have yet to see Kafka's short-shorts called prose poems except in the loosest manner (as a kind of association with them, rather than identity with them.) So read them. Granted, these are only two texts; but can you find something different between them?

Let me offer a suggestion: is, perhaps, the Kafka piece, simply, prose. It uses prosaic forms, it plays with prosaic technique and effect (here, the creating of suspense and realization within a linear narrative). Does it not seem that the Eliot piece tries for something more, if not, even, different?

To be honest, I have rather come to dislike the idea of the "prose-poem," because so little effort has been put into maintaining any singular identity to it. (Which is unfortunate, because the idea of a "prose poem" – the idea that Eliot was playing with, and that Mallarme played with – could be a fascinating form.) And, in contemporary poetics, just as people are willing to accept anything with line breaks as a poem (rather than prose with a narrow margin), so then also can any short prose work be considered "poetic." So perhaps the answer to the question of what is and is not a "prose poem" lies less in form – because it is absurd to think "brevity" is the single and only source of the "poem" part of the title – and rather in the simple question: What is the difference between poetry and prose?

Just for fun, let's take a look at The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. This is the opening of the entry "Poetry":

A poem is an instance of verbal art, a text set in verse, bound speech. More generally, a poem conveys heightened forms of perception, experience, meaning, or consciousness in heightened language, i.e., a heightened mode of discourse.

"A heightened mode of discourse": what Wordsworth calls "calculated" language. Notice how the definition moves away from any specific area of effect (perception, meaning, or what) and turns instead to the more elemental idea of "heightened language." And I think that is both a simple enough – and sufficient – distinction between prose and poetry: that which is poetic rises above the prosaic through a heightened attention to, and manipulation of, and creation out of language. Manipulation in what specific way, attention in what specific way, and creating in what specific way is are questions unnecessary to the general, encompassing idea. As such, there is no requisite form (or such) to poetry – and you can legitimately have such things as the prose poem set next to villanelles. What is constant, though, what is necessary and requisite, is "heightened." Which is, rather and in truth, what I look for when I read poetry: I want to come upon something that has been created – which means looking also at the language – and not something merely related, and conveniently broken into lines to get it past poetry editors, when prose editors really wouldn't give it a second thought. I want to see crafting, not mere "writing."

Poetry – be it line broken otherwise – is a challenge: a challenge to skillfully and brilliantly manipulate language to create a heightened experience, one beyond what you find in mere prose.

Of course, as i said, this idea rather takes the question of form out of the definition. Which is good, because Broch's The Death of Virgil (for example) is very much a book length poem, even if not broken into formal lines, and needs to be identified as a book length poem: or, at least, and perhaps more accurately, as a poetic book. Line breaks are merely one way of heightening language, not an identifier – which is why I rail so consistently against poetry that is really just prose with arbitrary line breaks. Simply, such texts are not interesting! You've shown me nothing, of poetic skill, ability, talent, or performance. You've merely written some (usually drab and melodramatic) prose, and broken it into lines. Am I to accept that that is the extent of your poetic ability? Two-inch lines and a stanza break after every third?

So, we return to the Pac-mans. Don't ask yourself, "Is this a prose poem?" Ask yourself, "Is this poetic?" Is there heightened language? Is there literary performance beyond the prosaic? Or is this merely prose? Which is fine – let it be a short-short. Nothing wrong with that. And I leave it to you to decide. But I think there is damage done if you accept the merely prosaic as poetic; damage done whether that prose is written in paragraph form, or with line breaks: that is, a lowering of the bar, a diminishing of beauty. A willingness to accept mediocrity, or worse, in a field that, by it's very idea, should be demanding attempts at brilliance.

 

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That little correction – from a "book length poem" to a "poetic book" – may be far more important than one might think at first. For it moves the idea of "poem" out from the nominative and into the descriptive. It is a very different standard of judging to say "is it poetic?" rather than "is it a poem?" Playing to definitions is far easier than playing to characteristics. Saying "is it poetic?" puts the emphasis on rising in performance; whereas "is it a poem?" merely asks, "can it fit in this (insanely broad) category?"