Gerald Fleming's Prose Poem: "Crucifixion, Kinetic"

Along with Jerry's Commentary on a Prose Poem by Karl Shapiro

Apr 28, 2025

This post is part of a new series which gives excerpts from an anthology I edited called A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry. A Cast-Iron Aeroplan That Can Actually Fly

In this anthology I asked 80 masters of the prose poem to choose one of their own poems and to write a commentary about the process of writing it. Not only are these prose poems and commentaries interesting in themselves, but they prove that there really is no one way to write a poem, or anything else for that matter. They also are wonderfully insightful mini essays on prose poetry, which is why the anthology has been used in classrooms. Students, and poets in general, are always interested in learning how other poets compose.

Besides asking Jerry for permission to reprint his own prose poem and commentary, I asked him to choose a prose poem that influenced him and say something about it. Jerry chose a poem from Karl Shapiro’s book The Bourgeois Poet, and what he says about the poem is as insightful as Shapiro’s approach to prose poetry.

Jerry has spent his whole career championing the the prose poem, and is so gifted that I would need two pages to list his accomplishments. Instead, I direct you to Fleming and Fleming2 . There you will find past a newest volumes of poetry and criticism. His most recent book of prose poetry is The Bastard and the Bishop The Bastard and the Bishop How’s that for a title?

Gerald Fleming

CRUCIFIXION, KINETIC

Often, the scene depicted as tranquil—fait accompli, three men in their proper places, on crosses, assorted provokers and grievers below, sky leaden, sense overall not meat but vegetal, varnished, tableau.

Let’s say it did occur.

Then: cross? This planed and surfaced lumber in pictures we knew long ago—in Giotto, Raphael, even Goya?

No. Rough spar. Oak, or cedar. Maybe an adze hacked away the bark, maybe a few draw-knife marks, but it’s still tree, still round, chunks of its skin left on, bleeding sap, lots of knots—strong enough, though, to hold a man.

Each upright so tall no mother at night might take down a son, no brother a brother. And the cross-strut surely not mortised, fit tight/square to its vertical other, but cruder stuff: hemp-rope to lash the X together, coarse fiber, the cross-strut at front, main beam behind, rope laps raising it farther so that a man’s deltoids and pectoralis majors are either racked backwards, spine arched out from the upright, or else his arms straight, pinned at wrists and elbows, thoracic vertebrae torqued inward, rolled; he’s hunchbacked.

The tying’s done on the ground, of course, crowd gathered ’round, a few protesting at first, most goading, quick-tempered, spinning to kick dogs fighting underfoot.

And of the three: do they accede, span themselves over each cross? Not likely.

Struggle, boots to the gut, the men blindsided, bare-knuckled, yanked down, faces struck and kicked, clothes ripped, and their cursing—all three, and all three self-mucused and bloodied and pissed, pinned now at the wrists, ankles crossed and bound, four soldiers to a man, More rope! Knives tossed to slice the hemp, and they’re stilled now, fixed, the crowd cheering Yes!—one of the men in the crowd with a hard-on.

Some few curse the soldiers, their epithets kept under breath.

Three tall crosses, one by one to be raised.

Who dug these goddamn holes? Not deep enough! One-third the length of each pole! Who trained you fools—your mothers?

And the laborers, new men, bend again, fifteen minutes’ work, their blades shear rock, much complaint, the tied men still supine, new rubble beside the postholes, and now the call to raise: a soldier at each side of the struts, two at the vertical, they count, lift, the wet wood heavy and the bound man heavy, no balance to be had, pitching backward, swaying, Lift higher! says one with a helmet on, and the cross is lifted, lowered into its hole, voice of man on pole dolorous and lost in the crowd, but still it’s not plumb, It’s leaning, and they heave too far left, foolish workmen, compensate now too far right, finally straight, the workmen shamed, angry, There—now fill it in, shovelers packing rubble into the hole, slapping it with the back of their blades, the pole-holding soldiers still shouldering it, heroic poses in opposition to each other, more rubble, more soil. Done. Next one.

The second one plumbed, and now to the third man, still on the ground, bound, the one they were told to nail. The nails flat-shafted, pounded on an anvil, tapered, black. The man’s right wrist bound tight, one nail straight through the capitatum. That’s no pain, they say, you woman. Want nails in the tips of your fingers? Now the left.

The man’s feet, wrong in literature and tableau, here crossed at the ankles, bound in hemp, loosed briefly so that each crossed foot can find a surface for nailing. Two men on their knees—each takes a foot, jerks it downward, works it around the side of the post, nails it in. The cord tightened again.

The man himself now, as if oiled: in blood, in sweat, in piss, and the noises he makes animal noises, inhuman. He is raised, the skies leaden, yes, the birds already circling, the soldiers folding their arms, well pleased.

COMMENTARY

Dancers, of course. Sculptors. And many two-dimensional artists—Bruegel, Francesca Woodman, Bacon. Jazz musicians for sure, classical a little less, Bach no, Vivaldi yes, Mahler, Hovhaness . . . and—my god, Mingus.

All of these arts outside of writing have better access to body, to kinetics, than we writers do, and I envy that.

I spend a lot of time in Paris, never tire of museums, even if it’s to sit down before a single painting for half an hour, leave.

One year not too long ago I was sitting before yet another crucifixion scene (am an ex-Catholic, yes, but the levels of allegory still stir me), and I must have been in a lousy mood, found myself a little pissy over the sterility of the scene depicted. (Could it have been Tournier? I don’t remember now.) Story was there, certainly, but not much body.

We have these bodies. They work, they sweat, they take pleasure, they hurt, they fail. I didn’t see any of that there, felt a push.

It’s rare that I begin a prose poem with conscious intention to treat a subject, even to go from Place A to Place Z. But here, combining my aversion to that sanitized scene with my own history of labor (carpentry, plumbing, endless digging) with an aversion to writers who do a single lick of work in a space of ten years & rush to write a poem about it (“Chopping Pinewood on a Snowy Evening,” etc.) I felt compelled to try to get it right—the details of it—to attempt entry into the mad dance of bodies involved in such a scene, sense of propulsion, the drive toward completion pushed along in the poem by the pulse & great wealth of language we’re offered, attempt to get a sense of repressed sexuality & the victims’ impotence, of voice & viscosity, violence, a final brief silence.

(I think the piece works best when read aloud.)

When Peter asked me to write about a favorite prose poem I went into a little panic: scroll after scroll of poetry rolled out in front of me. The old ones, of course, Aloysius Bertrand, Baudelaire, but so many others, then, now: name after name appeared on the chalkboard in my noggin, dizzying in prose poem history, ridiculously recent as that history’s been in the States. I can’t arrive at one favorite or a hundred, the form’s so rich, so varied. And Peter might not like me to say it here, but he himself has been a large part of the widening of the form in the States, the de-constriction of its definition.

Thinking about Peter’s request brought me to reprise an early influence, an opening into the form, a permission: Karl Shapiro, his book The Bourgeois Poet, published in 1962.

Random House, with singularly arched eyebrow, said, on the front flap,

“All of these new poems are in a form Mr. Shapiro experimented with occasionally years ago (there are two examples in Trial of a Poet, 1947) and which he has been using more frequently in recent years—a form in which he eschews not only rhyme but versification as well. It is his belief that these two traditional attitudes of poetry are nonessential and artificial impediments to the poetic process.”

That was it. Ha! Faint praise indeed. My guess is that he’d been under contract, and Random House was obligated to publish the book.

Reading Shapiro in grad school so many years ago spun my head around, as did the work of Russell Edson, of course, so in the early seventies I began working with the form, occasionally still engaging in writing verse poems.

Here’s Shapiro’s “#39” from The Bourgeois Poet. In the book’s design, the first word sticks out toward the left margin, then the poem is double-justified: a neat look, whether Shapiro’s idea or the designer’s. The poems are untitled—simply numbered.

Wood for the fireplace, wood for the floor, what is the life span? Sometimes before
I lay a log on the fire. I think: it’s sculpture wood, it’s walnut. Maybe someone would find a figure in it, as children find faces in the open fire. (I never have.) Then I lay it on the flames like a heretic, where it pauses a moment, then joins in the singing. There’s oak in this cord, too. My floor is oak. I watched them lay this floor, for a vastly slower fire. The grooved pieces are fitted together; it’s more like a game than work; there are many choices. The grain falls arbitrarily, dark streaks and light, dots and dashes, swirls and striped shields.
Dead wood can last forever (Is it dead?). Dead wood glows in palaces, rosy and dark as masterpieces. I worship wood, split my own logs in the driveway, using a maul and iron wedges. The cracking-apart is hard and sweet. I touch wood for my superstition, using five fingers as an extra precaution. My gods would all be wood if I had gods, not stone or gold or Peter’s smooth-kissed toe.
In woodless Italy, houses are built without a sound, no ring of hammer on nail or wood. All is quiet, stone laid upon stone, rubble, cement, tufa, travertine, tile. Rarely you see some show-off house of wood, exotic among the blinding stucco, soft among the cool and stony facings, the marbly infinitude.

I love this piece for many reasons, and to love it doesn’t mean that other poets’ edgier pieces are not to be loved for different reasons.

In her earlier essay in Peter’s blog, the wonderful prose poet Denise Duhamel speaks of “a plainspoken directness.” That’s Shapiro here, for sure.

Look how he invites us in: “Wood for the fireplace, wood for the floor, what is the life span?” You say that out loud and it’s chant, almost a children’s chant, and voilá, here come children in the next line! We’re warm, we’ve got kids with us at the fire, but other stuff’s going on, too: the motif laid in from the outset: what is the life span? Not talking about wood here, we know, but wider, deeper. And the old devices used, too, the prosodics: first a chant to guide us in, then floor/before/fire as connective tissue, then the naturally-flowing alliteratives within their phrases (find/figure/faces/fire/flames) the singing now joined with the earlier, now-backgrounded chant that’s still with us… so much is here and throughout.

By suggesting sculpture Shapiro’s made a sculpture for the reader, each reader configuring it differently in mind’s eye.

And now Middle Ages—heretics burned, but vague here: is the speaker the heretic, or is the log? And now we shift, don’t stay on that for long—let’s keep this thing moving, Shapiro knows—he’s got us on the floor, we’re watching workers lay tongue-and-groove planks in a game of pattern, dots & dashes, striped (medieval?) shields.

From there we enter actual palaces, the wood a dark art, a worship; then back home, and here come the kinetics: the cracking apart is hard and sweet. Bam, bam, those sharp Hopkins-beats echoing maul and wedge. And still more kinetics: fingers tapping wood, and—what the hell? kissing Peter’s toe? Hopkins’ hot devotion now Carrara-ed, profaned.

(I know, I know: there’s no Hopkins here, but don’t you feel the layers?)

And now the trip to Italy! We were halfway there with that Carrara toe, so south we go to Puglia, or maybe Calabria, we’re there among the silent stone, the named stone: tufa, travertine, calcium-cold, the image of wood becoming exotic in the silent landscape he’s built, time itself less felt here, the lifespan motif set vs. the marbly infinitude.

Does this prose poem “tie up nicely”? It does not, should not. But in three paragraphs, within a run of hardly a wasted word (I would have cut “I never have.”), we’ve built a fire, sung with kids, laid out a floor, been transported in time, burned a heretic, insinuated ourselves into a palace, gone to Italy, died there.

Karl Shapiro, his Bourgeois Poet, 1962.

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Gerald Fleming's Prose Poem: "Crucifixion, Kinetic"

Along with Jerry's Commentary on a Prose Poem by Karl Shapiro

Gerald Fleming

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