Poetry Experiments: Prose Poem

Prose poetry has a foot in two genres as described by the Academy of American Poets: While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects.   (Source: https://poets.org/glossary/prose-poem)

"Graduation" by Edgar Kunz inspires the first poem prompt and "Dutch Elm Disease" by Valencia Robin, the second poem prompt.  Notice the differentiated challenge in each prompt.

Poem Prompt #1

Write a prose poem about a person in a very specific moment. Include sensory details and focus on poetic language versus prose language (which includes more articles and transitional phrases). Go for the jugular to concisely capture a specific scene, a specific source of tension.

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Poem Prompt #2

Write a prose poem about someone’s adverse reaction to surprising news – whether its humorous, tragic, or paralyzing.  How can you also use the setting to comment on the scene?

Something Extra

PoetryBones writers note their experience with the challenge:

• Though I was given more freedom because of the prose form, I actually wrote more concisely.  
• My poem storyline built momentum toward a significant point instead of meandering in the way that prose storytelling can.  The poem got to the point more directly. Didn't expect that.
• I used more specific word choice to create immediacy and intensity, like a poem does -- even though I was working with longer lines. 
• In an effort to be less 'prose like' I cut articles and transition phrases, and I thought it would seem artificial.  Instead the poem was more concise without being artificial. 
• This experiment helped me recognize my own rhythm.  I was choosing words to purposely fit a rhythm that was developing, which seemed to innately be my own voice and rhythmic style.
• Is there something about this form that leads us to intense stories, or was it the example poems that did it, that set our minds in that direction?  The poems I heard in the breakout room were intense and direct.

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I love this poem "Bird" and Herd's honest reading of it.  The grackles in the lot and the man who shows up " winged as an army of himself" haunts me each time I finish reading it.

Image source: hercirclezine.com

Bird
by Niki Herd

​Yesterday, at Shepherd and Gray, the parking lot was
filled with birds, black birds, actually grackles. It was a grackle
lot; instead of a bumper on a car, there were ten grackles, instead
of a sunroof, fifty grackles sat high, their bodies shimmers
under cheap strip mall lights as shoppers delayed their spending
to pull out phones and take shots, such spectators we were,
like that summer in July, when I was left again
to wonder who was the child and who the adult,
that Sunday evening that hung in the air like bug spray
when my father, the one who fed me and gave me his last name,
stood two stories on our family porch, every neighbor,
in all manner of dress, drawn from their homes, in the street
      watching.
Let me tell you how he spread his arms wide, like the man
he was before Vietnam, or before the schizophrenia.
Let me tell you how a child learns the alphabet by counting,
how she learns only 2 letters separate the words hero and heroin,
how he stood high on the ledge of a porch the child never much
liked because there was a crack in its wooden center as if the
      world
was waiting to open its jaws to swallow her body whole.
Let me tell you how that July evening didn’t hold death,
but instead was the preface to death. The point being he jumped.
Some will say there are worse songs to sing, others might believe
      it
a tragedy, but who are we to question the Gods when a man
unconcerned with the inconvenience of his presence shows up
in a parking lot winged as an army of himself? Eventually, lights
went dark in the shops and each watcher retraced their steps back
      home
to find their families, to rejoice over food, to laugh and settle the
​      night;
and the birds, steadfast they stood, not quite ready for flight--

PoetryBones has studied other notable prose poems
but toward different writing goals.  See:

• C.K. Williams' Blades in the "Hazy Memory" prompt
• Arielle Greenberg's The Expert in the "What Work Is" prompt

Other great prose poem resources: