The distant country : & other prose poems /

"These three selections taken from The dominion of dreams"--Foreword.

Dream tales and prose poems /

Clara Militch.--Phantoms.--The song of triumphant love.--The dream.--Poems in prose.

Quotidian metageographies: prose poems as nonfiction postcards

The prose poem is a flexible vehicle that is often used, in a range of guises, to drive explorations and excavations of the quotidian.

Having sex with capitalism: parodic in-citation in the prose poem sequence

In his Spleen de Paris or Petits poèmes en prose [Little Prose Poems] Baudelaire (1869) forges an instrument of supple and radical potential, declaring the prose poem a ‘dangerous’ hybrid, which he wills elastic enough and staccato enough, to register the flows, jolts and distractions for the flâneur in the increasingly industrialised Paris. Here,by the mid-19th century, plate glass and gas lighting enable conspicuous consumption. Itis most strikingly the romantic-erotic and the relation between poet and his delicious, execrable wife, his inescapable, pitiless Muse (Baudelaire 1989: 177] that provides the nexus for radical questioning of the whole socio-political economy. Departing from Johnson’s Défigurations (1979) and using Irigaray’s (1984) hypothesis that the economy of sexual difference is the founding trope for the discursive and thus political economy of differences – of culture, ethnicity and class – this article first looks at theway Baudelaire activates the heterosexual relation as a site for social critique. It examines how Perec continues Baudelaire’s prose poetry experiment, offering, pre-May 1968, a revolutionary critique of desire by exploiting formal constraints to deconstruct still further the consumer subject of capitalism. It then investigates Brossard’s ‘hologrammatic’ challenge (1991) to patriarchal regimes of representation and the forms of desire they outlaw. Finally, it suggests how new work by Walwicz (2015)develops and displaces this radical inheritance.

Like a porcupine or hedgehog?: The prose poem as post-romantic fragment

Prose poems are frequently characterised as fragmentary or incomplete in the way that they gesture to a larger, often unnamed, frame of reference; present small, sometimes unfinished narratives which are implied to be parts of larger narrative structures; and are often characterised by considerable indeterminacy. In this respect, it may be argued that prose poetry traces part of its lineage back to Romantic fragment poems—indeed, at least as far back as James Macpherson’s Ossian “translations”. In the Romantic period, fragments were understood as reflecting the idea of the imperfectability of contemporary human existence, aided by the antiquarian attraction of many Romantic writers to the ruins and relics of the classical past and an associated preference for the evocation of notions of infinitude and boundlessness. This paper argues that prose poems gesture to this Romantic genealogy in their concern with openness and diversity, and the reshaping of literary-aesthetic boundaries to metonymically explore incompleteness. The paper takes its name from Friedrich Schelgel’s Igel. Schlegel famously described the fragment as an Igel, or hedgehog, because of its autonomy and isolation from the wider world. One way of understanding the renaissance of the prose poem in the last 35 years, is to apply the Schlegelian metaphor of a hedgehog to contemporary prose poems in order to argue that this hybrid genre remains in dialogue with the fragmented literary works of the past. This paper argues that as prose poetry continues to explore fissured identity and plurality in a postmodern society, it owes a significant debt to postmodernism’s Romantic and fragmented inheritance.

The prose poem as Igel: a reading of fragmentation and closure in prose poetry

This paper takes up Nikki Santilli’s lament about the scarcity of scholarship on the prose poem in English to analyse two key features of prose poetry: fragmentation and closure. This paper argues that the prose poem’s visual containment within the paragraph form promises a complete narrative while simultaneously subverting this visual cue by offering, instead, gaps and spaces. Such apertures render the prose poem a largely fragmentary form that relies on metonymic metamorphoses to connect to a larger, unnamed frame of reference. In this way, the prose poem is both complete and yet searching for completeness, closed and lacking closure.The prose poem’s reaching outwards to embrace a larger, absent whole connects this literary form to Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘Athenaeum Fragment 206’ and to the Romantic critical fragment more generally. ‘Athenaeum Fragment 206’ has provided this paper with its title, as a metaphorical reading of Schlegel’s igel, or hedgehog, as fragment ‘implies the existence of [a form that suggests] what is outside itself’ (Rosen 1995: 48). The final section of this paper, analyses two prose poems from the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Studies Institute’s Prose Poetry Project. These works by Jen Webb and Carrie Etter are read for their appeal to metonymy in their exploration of time passing and ultimately, death. They demonstrate that prose poetry is both fragmented and open ended in ways very different from lineated poems.

The prose poetry project

The Prose Poetry Project was created by the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) in November 2014, with the aim of collaboratively exploring the form and composition of prose poetry. The ongoing project aims to produce both creative and research outcomes stemming from the resurgence of interest in the prose poem. It was initiated as a simple email exchange of prose poems between three founding members, with additional poets invited to join over the following months. There were no stipulations except that everyone was expected to write at least three prose poems within the year. At no stage was a definition of prose poetry imposed, or even suggested, despite the fact that some members of the group had never written prose poetry before. Through the process of making and sharing, however, various models emerged.The project was first showcased and discussed at an event within the Poetry on the Move festival in Canberra, 7 September 2015. At that stage, ten months from its inception, the project had accumulated over 600 poems. It ranged across four universities, two countries and eighteen poets (three of whom had yet to contribute). Six of those poets spoke at the event about the influence of the project on their personal practice, encouraged to do so in whatever manner they considered appropriate. Their various reflections, here collated, include: the challenges and delights of working within a form where all rules are suspended; the (questionable) distinction between the prose poem and flash fiction; the relationship with haibun; the nature of endings and a poem’s limits; and the way in which prose poems may elude some readers’ resistance to poetry in its more recognisable guise. In all these considerations, there is recognition of the benefits of working within a group, and of collaborative, creative play.

Caminha sílaba a sílaba

Eugénio de Andrade (1923-2005) é um dos mais celebrados e traduzidos poetas portugueses contemporâneos, com mais de trinta volumes de poesia, e vários prémios nacionais e internacionais. Como poeta atento e turista curioso, Andrade viajou com frequência para Espanha, França, Itália e Grécia, ao encontro de outros escritores (Vicente Aleixandre, Dámaso Alonso, etc.), e visitou diversas cidades e locais históricos. Recorrentemente, menciona Madrid, Valverde del Fresno, Roma, Delfos, Tebas, Súnion, Veneza, Brindisi, Corfu, etc. Em resultado destas viagens, existem, na sua poesia, poemas em prosa e crónicas, abundantes referências aos países, cultura e paisagem natural do Mediterrâneo. Eugénio de Andrade captura poeticamente o ―genius loci‖, realçando os laços entre os povos, a fauna, a flora e o clima. Desde os primeiros escritos até ao seu último livro, o poeta coerentemente apresenta uma ―visão mediterrânica‖. Recorrendo às suas obras e a excertos de algumas das entrevistas que concedeu, este artigo exemplifica, analisa e avalia estes aspectos, explorando uma faceta menos conhecida da obra eugeniana.

Convergences/divergences : le dialogue intermédial dans Vues et visions de Claude Cahun

Ce mémoire étudie les rapports texte/image dans Vues et visions de Claude Cahun, première œuvre composite créée en collaboration avec la peintre graphiste Marcel Moore. L’objet littéraire protéiforme, appartenant au genre de l’iconotexte (Alain Montandon), instaure un dialogue intermédial entre le textuel et le visuel au point de déconstruire l’horizon d’attente du lecteur : celui-ci est incité à lire et à voir alternativement les poèmes en prose ainsi que les dessins de sorte que les frontières qui définissent l’espace du littéral et du figural apparaissent poreuses. Subdivisé en deux chapitres, notre travail s’attachera dans un premier temps à mettre en lumière le rôle de l’écriture qui intègre certains dessins de Moore. En nous inspirant de l’iconolecture (Emmanuelle Pelard), nous tenterons d’effectuer des liens entre la plasticité et la signification littérale des signes linguistiques qu’illustrent ces images-textes tout en étudiant les correspondances thématiques et formelles qu’elles entretiennent avec les poèmes de Cahun. Le second chapitre étudiera la manière dont le figural investit le texte littéraire en adoptant une approche intermédiale. Après avoir abordé la figure du double, une partie de l’analyse sera consacrée à la figure de l’allusion, une stratégie d’écriture pour introduire le visuel au sein du textuel, ce qui nous permettra d’entrer en matière pour étudier « l’image-en-texte » (Liliane Louvel). Enfin, l’effet-tableau ainsi que l’anamorphose seront employés comme cadre d’analyse afin de penser le dialogue qui se noue entre le pictural et le texte littéraire dans Vues et visions.

Dream Animals

Dream Animals is a collection of prose poems based on fairytales, encounters with animals, dreaming, real-world scandals, and strange encounters

Pegs

This book of poetry challenges the western tradition's bias against the mundane and ordinary and advocates for a poetry of the quotidian. The peg is at once familiar and yet defamiliarised in these prose poems. In addition to its usual purpose as an object to hold clothes on the line, "peg" also stands for a measure of alcohol and a verb for "throw", among other things.

Exhumed [book of poetry]

Unpredictable and boisterously entertaining, Cassandra Atherton’s Exhumed is a collection of interconnected prose poems exploring the reanimation of canonical texts against a backdrop of popular culture references: William Carlos Williams, Nabokov, Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson are paired with ‘Happy Meals’, Hill’s Hoists, Bonds t-shirts and the Moonee Valley Bistro. Divided into two parts – ‘Inter’ with its play on intertexts and ‘Disinter’ where the references are unearthed, these prose poems are fractured moments centred on love, betrayal, abandonment and death. Atherton’s appeals to l’humour noir and the politicisation of the poet’s private spaces make for an exhilarating and intoxicating read.

A voz baudelairiana em Fleurs de Ténèbres de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam

Este estudo tem o objetivo de apresentar uma análise do conto “Fleurs de Ténèbres” publicado na obra Contes cruels (1883) de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838-1889). O trabalho visa, ainda, de forma particular, destacar elementos que permitem apontar relações de aproximação entre o conto villieriano e os poemas em prosa “La corde” e “Le tir et le cimetière” de Charles Baudelaire. Com efeito, a influência baudelairiana na escritura de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam diz respeito tanto aos procedimentos estilísticos quanto ao idealismo filosófico.

A liberdade grande de Julien Gracq

Julien Gracq é um dos mais importantes romancistas franceses do século XX. Em 1945, publica sua única antologia de poemas em prosa, Liberté Grande. A alta voltagem poética dos textos da coletânea distancia-se do lirismo contido da prosa romanesca do autor. Infl uenciado pela poesia de Rimbaud e pelo surrealismo, os poemas em prosa de Gracq afirmam o primado da imaginação criadora sobre as imposições e limitações do real, como se pode constatar pela leitura do primeiro poema da coletânea “Pour galvaniser l’urbanisme”, objeto de estudo deste artigo.