Alessander's Mad Poets (AMP!) Forum Prompt: Prose Poem

Prompt: Prose Poem

Something must have been bugging my father the day I asked him for fifty cents in the upstairs kitchen, because although he was always a sweet and gentle man and gave me most everything I asked for, this time he turns around from the sink where he is washing dishes and starts swinging at me fronthand and backhand, again and again, his face contorted with a rage I never saw before or again.  I shriveled into the chair by the kitchen window sobbing and begging this stranger to stop.  Eventually he does, and the silence of the rest of our lives swallows the moment forever.

                                                                                                   –  Fred Moramarco

Three sentences about a moment that changed one’s life!  Is this a vignette, a tale, a short short story, a sketch, an anecdote [flash-fiction, micro-fiction]?  We could call it any of those – or we could call it a little poem in prose.

That it is written in prose doesn’t mean it isn’t poetry; it only means that it isn’t verse [line breaks that are not predetermined by the end of the page]…French Poet Charles Baudelaire was largely responsible for popularizing the prose poem with his collection Paris Spleen.

Here’s another example:

“Considering the Accordion”

The idea of it is distasteful at best.  Awkward box of wind, diminutive, misplaced piano on one side, raised braille buttons on the other.  The bellows, like some parody of breathing, like some medical apparatus from a Victorian sick-ward.  A grotesque poem in three dimensions, a rococo thing-am-a-bob.  I once strapped an accordion on my chest and right away I had to lean back on my heels, my chin in the air, my back arched like a bullfighter, or flamenco dancer.  I became an unheard-of-contradiction:  a gypsy in a graduate school.  Ah, but for all that, we find evidence of the soul in the most unlikely places.  Once in a Czech restaurant in Long Beach and ancient accordionist came to our table and played the old favorites: “Lady of Spain,” “The Sabre Dance,” “Dark Eyes” and through all the clichés his spirit sang clearly.  It seemed like the accordion floated in air, and he swayed weightlessly behind it, eyes closed, back in Prague or some lost village of his childhood.  For a moment we all floated – the whole restaurant: the patrons, the knives and forks, the wine, the sacrificed fish on plates.  Everything was pure and eternal fragilely suspended like a stained-glass window in the one remaining wall of a bombed-out church. 

                                                                                                                                            – Al Zolynas

Prompt:  like these two poems, try your hand at writing a poem in the format of prose (meaning that the lines must extend to the end of the page, like a paragraph).   There are a number of ways you can write a prose poem.  You can make the poem narrative and filled with action or even dialogue like in the first poem, or you can make it more descriptive or surreal like “Considering the Accordion”. 

Stuff to consider:  Be very selective what subject matter you choose.  Try to minimize the subject to something that happened in one place and time, lest you run the risk of turning the poem into an actual story.  Also, since the prose poem hinges on conciseness, be extra cognizant of which adjectives, verbs and details you employ.  You can easily google “Famous Prose Poems” (I recommend Baudelaire’s) to get more ideas as to where you can go with the genre.  Other than that, have at it!