Louis McKee, American Book Review, Sept/Oct 2002
I will not begin, Once there was a man
who loved me. Anyhow, there were sev-
eral, and only one persisted. We didn't
speak of clothes, the self demanding all
attention, all emotion: that was the badpart, and forward motion doesn't stop it,
doesn't stop the wonderful moon. Still,I've nothing to say about him, his one
tender gesture of laying his cheek against
mine…("Tale")
When a book announces up front that it is a vehicle of prose poems, I am stopped momentarily. I have an odd reaction to prose poems. Often I enjoy them, find pleasure in their usually small boxy sense; but I wonder, when I’m done, why the poem was written in prose. Why give up the tensions and surprises that come with line breaks, with enjambment? I look for justification in the piece itself, but there is usually none, none that I can see.
Prose poetry is beyond the pale,
not exactly outlaw, but
unusual enough to, draw,
a second look.
Robert Bly, a practitioner in the craft of prose poems, as well as in poems with broken, loosely monitored lines, spoke about this, "Prose...is the natural speech of democratic language," he said, Another day, in another social atmosphere, the crisply counted feet and measured lines were perhaps more appropriate, made more sense, These times, though-these were moments of democracy, "If one tries to live in one's own age, it doesn't mean abandoning poetry," Bly told Peter Johnson, editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal; "the task is to keep the mystery, the high spirits, the subtlety, even the verbal brilliance'", while letting the sentence itself-not the foot or the line-be the primary unit."
At first, you don't turn the antique coin,
don't feel the chip in the crystal, the
dented armor, you just coo in admiration,
You simply close your hand around what-
ever shines-a gift to keep but never look
at, like the luxury of traveling somewhere
together in a car,." ("Whatever Shines")
The sentence.
Maybe it's simply the label that's troubling, When Naomi Shihab Nye publisher
her Mint (1991), she insisted on calling the pieces paragraphs. And Stephen
Dunn, after Riffs and Reciprocities (1998), refers to those pieces as
paragraphs, as well. Anne Waldman's Marriage (2000) is called a sentence. Pun
intended?
Baudelaire's
Petits poemes en prose (1868) is often cited as the start of the new idea.
Original, experimental-though these words can hardly be used for the common
convention we know today. But still, prose poetry is beyond the, pale, not
exactly outlaw, but unusual enough to draw a second look. Russel Edson and David
Ignatow mined them for humor. James Wright and Jack Anderson found loaded wisdom
there. And Bly investigates “objects.” Nonetheless, it is a woodland where a
charlatan could easily hide among the thickets. Baudelaire, however, had a sense
of his craft: “Who is there among us who has not, in his ambitious moments,
dreamed up the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without
rhyme, supple enough and unruly enough to adapt itself to the lyrical motions of
the soul, to the undulations of the daydream, to the sudden starts of
unconsciousness?”
All this is probably too much. Looking too close. I’m reminded of the Dylan Thomas lines:
The goose that laid the golden egg
Died looking up its crotch
To find out how the sphincter worked.
Would you lay well? Don’t watch.
I don’t want to kill the golden goose. And how the sausage (or nugget) is made is more than we need to know. I certainly do not want to take the magic out of these poems – because there clearly is magic here.
Evening comes so slowly it is mere dis-
covery; small white flowers blossom in my
spine… (“Near Drowning, Ihla Comprida, Brazil”)
Despite the cover’s claim, there are other than prose poems in this collection. McGookey seems to move effortlessly from verse in broken lines, hard-won and ripe with reason and tensions, to blocks of prose paragraphs, as weighty and rich as they look. And as much as I think it is with good reason, I wonder. The liquidity of the poured poem finds its own container, embracing, as it creates, its form. While there is a sense of generosity of prose, it is not better, or worse, than the compressed energies of lined poetry. What it is is perspective, a different slant, one that affects both the poet and the reader. So, certainly, there is method to her madness, and lineation has a purpose, as do the heavy bricks of poetry; the rich, dense prose, and the more airy pieces, with their branches reading out, are just that – airy, and light, and magical:
Music drawn across sky:
beautiful arc, not to forehead, nose
to lips and chin. White, white skin.The line believes itself: look, a life story.
Hands clasped,
a voice that will not leave or sing,
strong, square chin.
Little light, ice spilled like glass
in the road. Black notes rise,
black butterflies, heavy in the sweet air.
("At the Piano, June")
These poems know no bounds; they are musical, leaping, magical. Whether laid out in long horizontal democracy or left to stand, like branches in the night. They are loosed in time, drawing on the poet's grandmother's journal, on photographs, and on imagination. With a finely crafted language of subtlety, with many shadings, a feel for syntax, and keen attention given to the ear, McGookey invokes a dozen different kinds of pleasure:
It is easier to be compassionate when one has time: I took strawberries to the old woman who lives down the road. I helped another one to her car. A butterfly lay on the dirt road and I picked it up by its wing. Already in writing it, the event has changed; say I saw right away the butterfly's body was crushed, say its wing smudged my thumb. Say it rained all day and all day yesterday and ruined the strawberries in the field, which leaves me at the old lady's door empty-handed. I am done with compassion; I wish someone would tell me to stop, to get down on the floor with the dog, where I could admire light from the window coming through glass vases. So it is a small thing, change of self, change of light. Already what I. meant to say is further away than when I began: the question is reduced to whether the dog barked when the real estate agent unrolled her yellow tape measure. Or whether the lilting bird in the pines kept calling its two-step call into the day, into me. ("Bird in the Pines")
I wonder if there
isn't some sense of safety in prose poetry-a comfort level? No standards have
yet been set, no hoops to jump through, unlike the demands of prosody that
have evolved for broken-line poetry. Maybe this is the appeal: the nearly
subconscious move to layout lines like an ending river, as opposed to those
jagged right margins. And is it an unconscious hand, too, that moves us back to
the margin when we cut, with little warning, to start again.
McGookey is a fresh voice, an innovative and daring poet who is worth our attention. Her motives and designs are not important; Whatever Shines is a strong first book, and a pleasure.