Apologies for entering so late into this conversation, and also if I'm
repeating or wandering off the point. My email server seems to be related to
HAL, and is taking it on itself to bounce, lose or mangle messages without
consulting me. I hope this gets through unharmed.
In response to your initial question, Chris, about whether narrative and
prose poetry are mutually compatible, Russell Edson is a current example of
someone whose work is largely narrative.
One side of prose poetry which I personally find interesting is where it
edges onto the territory of haibun - the mix of prose and verse perfected by
Basho. Has anyone so far commented on this? (If so, I've missed it.)
I've pursued the form, using complete sentences, not fragmented thoughts
to try to document some revelation or epiphany -- that gleaned through
experience.
I also part company with the structure of the accompanying haiku, deploying
it not for its microburst of detail, but for its compression, its
distillation. Examples:
Paleontology
At the river's mouth, digging rocks as if engraving letters. Indigo algae
photosynthesizing discharges oxygen at the Cambrian layer. In upper layers,
animals with first shells overflow, emerge. Streams of trilobites impress
images like tracks deep in the universe. The root of rock below the
weathered grass opens its parched, brittle buds. From where have they come
like dry bones? Where do they go, like words?
though I wait... though
I strain my ears, there's
no sound and yet certainty
_ _ _ _ _ _
The Moment Between The Last Sparrows And The First Bats
At first, there are only sparrows - for some time there had also been
swallows in the otherwise empty sky. And when the fist bat finally appears,
it flutters over the small and red Campion flowers amidst the rock garden,
as if greeting them, and I recall crow calls that sounded all day throughout
the neighborhood, as well as the now familiar moment each day when a hawk's
shadow flits over my notebook. Now the sky is empty but filled with
expectation. Here and there a bat whizzes by across the yard in short, rapid
zigzags. A few last sparrows fly from roof to bush as if from far away and
searching for something left behind, chirping ever more softly as traffic
sounds from the now invisible city of Dunkirk swell up, only to be
transcended at nightfall by three little girls singing jump-rope rhymes.
High above it all floats a kind of threnody. To which the bats, now out in
full force, draw their sharply bent lines across the darkening sky.
looking on at all unseen
I try for an order true to it,
one I know isn't true
and can't last, as I know
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Rules are made to be broken. When I read "Scene preserved with light
crazing" or even "Approach of Bodies Falling in Time of Plague", I see
objects of equal interest combining to make one "main object" -- a scene.
There are pieces and there are additions added to balance the base. Is any
such composition ever so far from haibun?
Gerald Schwartz
[log in to unmask]
|