Poets Commenting Briefly on The Creative Process

And Specifically on the Incurably Lovable Prose Poem

When I was a young poet, one of my favorite anthologies was Alberta T. Turner’s Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process. In 1977 when it was published, people began speaking seriously about the writing process, even in freshmen composition courses. What made Turner’s anthology significant was that poets no longer feared that they might diminish their genius by describing how they wrote. Some of the poets in Turner’s anthology even reproduced various drafts of their poems with original cross-outs and annotations, so we could see how ideas and strategies for poems came about. Their commentaries affirmed my suspicion that there was no one way to write a poem. 

Turner’s questionnaire was very specific, so much so that some poets refused to participate. They thought her questions were uninspiring or too rigid. One poet, whom she did not name, in a fit of hysteria, likened the questionnaire to something out of 1984, which suggested how distasteful it was for some poets to discuss process. After all, one way to crown yourself a genius is to suggest that your poems are tiny gifts delivered by the gods in the wee hours of the morning, bestowed upon only special people, of whom you are one.

I was thinking about Turner’s book when in the last two volumes of The Prose Poem: An International Journal (journal I founded and edited for nine years) I asked a few selected poets to choose one of their prose poems and to write a commentary on it. Unlike Turner, I didn’t give much guidance. It would be nice, I said, to comment on it as a prose poem, but I didn’t want to restrict anyone. As it turned out, many of the poets chose to discuss the prose poem as a genre, anyway. But what was most interesting to me, and, hopefully will be to you, was how apparent it was that we all write very differently.

Many years later I decided to edit an entire anthology of these commentaries in a book called A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry available here. A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly More examples from this anthology can be found at Peter Johnson's Selected Works

Below are two Masters of the genre, Russell Edson and Charles Simic, speaking about their process of composition.

Russell Edson

THE TUNNEL

            I went tunneling into the earth . . .

My wife and I going through an inventory of reasons, found nothing sufficient to the labor.

            Still, she allowed, as I, that a direction once started, as if desire, and the desire to be desired, were mutually igniting, drew the traveler to its end without explainable reason . . .         Yet, does not the southern direction in extreme horizon look to the north, even as that of the north, finding the apex of its final arc, nod wearily south . . . ?

            So I went tunneling into the earth, through darkness that penetration only makes darker, faithful to the idea of light, said always to be the end of tunnels; perhaps not yet lit, but in the universe moving in rendezvous, thus to shimmer under the last shovelful of earth . . .

COMMENTARY

Looking at this piece again after a long time, it does seem somewhat overly punctuated and full of clauses, as if it has longed another way than sentences and paragraphs. But it is the blah blah and hiss of prose since having first met literature in company of Dick and Jane that holds me in mystery. Dick and Jane, they had a dog named Spot.

I went tunneling into the earth . . . / For what? Gold? To make a grave? Or simply to find a more direct route to China? So-called deep meanings bore me. They’re so common as to run in the streets like tears. One assumes meaning even if one is looking the other way as the work unfolds. Language is meaning without one’s having to dig a tunnel for it. I had no idea what the speaker would do with his first line. But as the piece continued it seemed to be making fairly good sense, even if its speaker, claiming to be tunneling into darkness expecting light, didn’t. The contradiction between the keys of one’s keyboard and what they can type make for a kind of ticklish fun, jellifying one’s brain into shimmering delight.    

But, as I look as the piece again, though short, it moves with obsessive detail in its back and forthness, like a contract being drawn between reality and paranoia, that finally resolves itself in the cliché about the light at the end of tunnels. Incidentally, I like writing soliloquies when possible; they’re easier than having to write two voices. And of course it’s always a piece of luck to find a cliché that fits one’s work. The cliché is greatly underrated, when, in fact, it’s a valuable tool of understanding: acting as a shorthand that frees the writer from having to do too much on his own. After about fifteen minutes one wants to try something else. As I say, writing is ticklish fun, but too much tickling makes me nervous. This is why the prose poem is a good device for the nervous writer. Ideally, prose poems are short, which allows the writer to move from piece to piece rather quickly. But the best part is that so little is expected of the prose poem that the writer doesn’t really have to push himself too hard, or to write at all if he just happens not to be in the mood. “The Tunnel” at the time just happened to fit my mood. And as I read through it again, it still does. All a writer really needs is some intuition, and a fair memory for clichés, and the desire to make something out of almost nothing at all. For no matter the content or nature of a work, there is the grand abstraction beyond the self. The shape of thought, the impersonal music of silence hovering over every page like a ghost emptied from a land of shadows . . .

And now for Charles Simic, someone who truly deserved the MacArthur Genius Award, though I am sure he felt the “genius” part of it to be silly. I loved this tongue-in-cheek approach to process.

Charles Simic

I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.

It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.

COMMENTARY:

 I remember the night well. It was quarter to three and I was about to compose a poem. My dog Igor was barking viciously at the moon out in the yard and getting on my nerves. In my laboratory, Ligeia had just put the final cleaning touches to a test tube and was reaching for a jar labeled prose poetry on the shelf, when to my horror I noticed that this admirable woman of rare learning known for her singular yet placid cast of beauty was chewing bubble gum. I threw a fit so loud and protracted, it even made that stupid dog out there shut up. You’d think, I asked heaven to be my witness, that after everything she had to put up cohabitating with that bum and souse, Edgar Poe, she’d have learned how to conduct herself in the presence of another lofty poetic genius sensitive to the slightest distraction? I must have blacked out after that, since I remember nothing else of that horrible night.

So how did the poem get written then? I’ve no idea. What I can swear on a stack of Bibles is that never in my life did I sit down with the intention of writing a prose poem. My book of untitled prose fragments, The World Doesn’t End, was not originally labeled prose poetry. In fact, the manuscript I sent to the publishers wasn’t called anything. What I had done is to copy some of my nearly illegible scribblings from old notebooks, which after I rediscovered them and read them, struck me as having poetic qualities of their own and strung all together surprisingly read like a tongue-in-cheek autobiography. After tinkering over them for several months and reducing the manuscript to sixty-eight pieces, I showed them to my editor at Harcourt who to my surprise offered to publish them. However, just before the book was to appear, I got an urgent call from her asking me what do we call this? Don’t call it anything, I told her, but she explained to me that a book needs to be called something, so that libraries and bookstores know on what shelf to put it. After giving the matter some thought, I agreed to call it prose poetry.

Looking at the poem today, I can guess what was in my mind when I wrote it. Warning children about being stolen by the gypsies if they wander off is a stock phrase East European grandmothers and mothers use to scare children. As a city kid, stuck living in an apartment building, the life of the gypsies, from what I saw of it in Yugoslavia, seemed far more attractive to me. Of course, I knew my little tale about how I kept changing identities had to be short. I had read and liked plenty of prose poetry before I wrote what I wrote here, but I admired most of all the brevity and stunning lunacy of Max Jacob’s, Daniil Kharms’ and Russell Edson’s finest poems. They are like parlor magic tricks which make you scratch your head after you see them, like the one called “Miser’s Dream” where a seemingly infinite supply of coins is plucked out of the air by the magician. That’s the marvel of a prose poem too. It looks like prose on the page, but acts like a poem in your head.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories