"The Millennium": A Prose Poem and Commentary

With a Prose Poem by Attila József, and a Few Words about Literary Influence

Nov 25, 2024

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 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 are like mini essays on the prose poem, which is why the book has been used frequently in MFA programs.

In this the Susbtack posts I’ve already published from this anthology, I also asked [poets to choose a prose poem that influenced them and to write something about it.

Humbly, accept my own below contribution to the anthology.

“The Millennium”

In the basement, in the playroom, Ken’s throwing darts at another Ken while the flies of fairy tales nod off on a concrete wall, on a red plunger by the sink, on a lonesome cue ball. Upstairs, a pair of twins dancing on a hardwood floor, pushing tiny Santas in miniature baby strollers. I need help to sit down. “Next you’ll be wanting a back rub,” my brother says, then leaps from a coffee table, toppling our Christmas tree. Not enough bulbs to poke holes through this night’s black logic. No one strong enough to turn The Great Telescope, still partially unwrapped.
Four hours to midnight, my niece embracing her Sleepy-Time Barbie, eyelids set to close at the turn of the century.

[From While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems by Peter Johnson While the Undertaker Sleeps

COMMENTARY

“The Millennium” is the last poem in Pretty Happy!, my first volume of prose poetry. The poem came as a surprise, and it changed everything for me. I’m very fond of Pretty Happy!, but, looking back, I see how haunted it was by other texts. I’m thinking of Kafka’s parables; Novalis’s short prose; the character sketches of the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus (whom I had translated in graduate school); and even things as silly as the “Fractured Fairy Tales” episodes from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show and sketches from my beloved old copies of Mad magazine. Those influences were present long before I came to the oneiric landscapes of Charles Simic, Russell Edson, and Max Jacob. That’s not to say I didn’t have a voice or subject matter. By birth and inclination I’m a mix of high and low cultures. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood near the steel plants in Buffalo, New York, but I went to a Jesuit high school where I studied and translated Greek and Roman classics. It’s not surprising that in one of my later prose poems I have Socrates picking a booger from his nose while pontificating on father/son relationships. But how to the find the right way to express my high/low sensibility? How to find a style that was, well, “natural?” I didn’t want to write paragraphs that were as mind-numbing as cooking recipes. I didn’t want to write prose that was prosaic and that didn’t reflect the fragmented way I process the world.

And then “The Millennium” arrived.

It was 1995 and I was back in Buffalo, sledding with my son on Christmas Eve as the world inched its way toward the Millennium. We were riding a sled made from plastic as thin and durable as cellophane. We went hurtling over a snowboarding hump, and when we landed I heard a crack and felt a sharp pain in my back. A half an hour later I was in an emergency room with a number of drunks who had tumbled down the stairs at a Buffalo Bills football game. Three hours later, I was hauled off to Mercy Hospital. I needed no operation but was told if I fell down over the next month or two I probably would be paralyzed. So sitting on a couch in my mother’s living room, stoned on Darvocet and Valium, I took in my surroundings, grabbed my notebook, and decided to write a poem. Many of the images were readily available: my niece’s Barbie and Ken dolls, my mother’s artificial Christmas tree, the red plunger by the sink, a lonesome cue ball banging into another ball in the basement.

But then the “flies of fairy tales” appeared, and the poem became a bit more apocalyptic and improvisational, as images and dialogue, real and imagined, collided, with the soundtrack of the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” providing background music from my portable CD player.

For once I never intruded on these images or sounds. Of course the poem went through revisions, but the method, if that is an accurate word for letting one’s imagination roam and make unusual leaps and connections, was new and exciting for me. After “The Millennium” I felt comfortable with the poetic process, and most of the poems preceding it in the book were written after it. I no longer was writing with Kafka and my other influences looking over my shoulder. I guess I’m saying that no method was imposed from the outside, or even sought after. The method was me; it was how I thought. It would never assure me of writing a good poem, but at least I’d be writing authentic ones from now on. I would no longer be a copycat. An imposter.

And did the freedom of the prose poem allow me to make this leap? Of course. If I’m walking down the street on the way to a friend’s house, I have to stop at traffic lights or make turns. Isn’t that what verse poetry is? Isn’t that why it’s called verse, from the Latin verto, to turn. In contrast, the prose poem is like an open pasture where no direction is necessary. Where anything can happen. Where contradictions and juxtapositions (those odd leaps that often transcend logic) are not only welcome but expected—contradictions and juxtapositions that would become even wilder in my next few darkly comic collections.

And now a poem and my commentary on it from Attila József (1905-37), who was an early influence on me.

“Attila József”

Attila József,
            I really love you, please believe me. This is something I inherited from my mother. She was a good woman. After all, she was the one who brought me into the world.
            We may compare life to a shoe, to a laundromat, or whatever. Nonetheless, we love it for reasons of our own.
            Saviors, there are enough of them to save the world three times a day, still, nobody seems to know how to light a match. I am going to have to give up on them.
            It would be nice to buy tickets for a trip to our Self. It must be somewhere inside us.
            Every morning I wash my thoughts in cold water. That way they come out fresh as a daisy.
            Diamonds can sprout good warm songs if you plant them under your heart.
            Some people will stay pedestrian no matter what they ride: horse, car, or airplane. Me, I just lie around in the morning song of larks and still make it over the abyss.
            Let us carefully save our true souls like the clothes we keep spotless for the days of celebration.
(translated by John Batki, and anthologized in Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem Models

I have always had trouble with the idea of literary “influence.” There is a stink about the word, as if a poet has slavishly imitated another poet. That’s why I think the word “permission” works better. When I think of certain prose poems that have influenced me, they and their authors have, more accurately said, given me permission to do what I was doing already, just maybe better, in the sense that I may pick up new strategies for structuring a poem, or perhaps the poem mines a thematic concern I haven’t thought about and may want to explore.

“Attila József” has the all the qualities that I admire about a certain kind of comic prose poem. At its heart, the prose poem is a subversive form, part poetry, part prose, capable of paying homage to and subverting sacred topics and literary genres, all at the same time. The above prose poem does this beautifully by toying with the letter-writing and autobiographical genres, substituting highfalutin language and imagery with mundane details and observations from a curious narrator, who is bent on making wild leaps in thought through juxtapositions of imagery while simultaneously stretching metaphor in interesting ways (“I wash my thoughts in cold water”; “Diamonds can sprout good warm songs if you plant them under your heart”).

In short, Attila József makes one look at the world and and how the Self processes it with new eyes.

But I was attracted to this poem mostly because of the comic self-conscious first-person narrator who takes himself way too seriously, whom we must view ironically because of his exaggerated self-consciousness. I had always felt a kinship with these kind of narrators, who I first encountered in high school in the poems of Catullus, but it was a game changer for me to see how this kind of narrator could orchestrate a prose poem.

Although “The Millennium” is not one of my most comic poems, and although my “I” in the poem is not as comically self-conscious as many of my first-person narrators, the juxtaposition of the happy grand narrative of Christmas and the innocuous Barbie and Ken myth, becomes darky comic and foreboding.

For more on Attila József, go to Attila

Old Man Still Howling at the Moon

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