Prose Poems and Henry David Thoreau
It's been a long time since I last posted. I spent the spring, summer and fall working on a manuscript of new and selected prose poems. Since the late 1970s, I've written around 80 prose poems. Many remained unfinished in manuscript boxes stored in Alma and Riverview. I selected 27 poems from my published work, and completed 27 new ones. The revision process included a great deal of cutting and rewriting. Prose poems are just that--poems in prose form, and one of the challenges is to decide how much detail to leave in, and how much to remove. The form is demanding, as the writer walks a high wire between traditional lyric poetry and prose. If the poem draws too much description to itself, it fails. If it remains too lyrical, then it fails as a prose poem.
For me, the masters of the form include Thoreau, Francis Ponge and Robert Bly. Thoreau in his Journals wrote dozens of descriptive passages, and I'm including one here. They're found throughout the Journals, tucked between philosophic meditations and catalogues of plants and animals. This entry is particularly fitting, as the first snow is supposed to fall over Alma tonight.
A SNOWFLAKE
Very little evidence of God or man did I see just then, and life not as rich and inviting an enterprise as it should be, when my attention was caught by a snowflake on my coat-sleeve. It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six-rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were perfect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle. This little object, which, with many of its fellows, rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful, reminded me that Nature had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart?...I may say that the maker of the world exhausts his skill with each snowflake and dewdrop that he sends down. We think that the one mechanically coheres and that the other simply flows together and falls, but in truth they are the product of an enthusiasm, the children of an ecstasy, finished with the artist's utmost skill.
From The Journals, January 6, 1858
Notes Copyright Allan Cooper, 2009
For me, the masters of the form include Thoreau, Francis Ponge and Robert Bly. Thoreau in his Journals wrote dozens of descriptive passages, and I'm including one here. They're found throughout the Journals, tucked between philosophic meditations and catalogues of plants and animals. This entry is particularly fitting, as the first snow is supposed to fall over Alma tonight.
A SNOWFLAKE
Very little evidence of God or man did I see just then, and life not as rich and inviting an enterprise as it should be, when my attention was caught by a snowflake on my coat-sleeve. It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six-rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were perfect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle. This little object, which, with many of its fellows, rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful, reminded me that Nature had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart?...I may say that the maker of the world exhausts his skill with each snowflake and dewdrop that he sends down. We think that the one mechanically coheres and that the other simply flows together and falls, but in truth they are the product of an enthusiasm, the children of an ecstasy, finished with the artist's utmost skill.
From The Journals, January 6, 1858
Notes Copyright Allan Cooper, 2009
posted by Al Cooper at 8:06 AM
1 comments
