Mind the Gaps

“Thank you for letting me read your new poems. It was like being alive twice.”
       —Li Po, letter to Du Fu

The prose poem begins life as a paradox and a provocation. On Christmas Day 1861, Charles Baudelaire sent a letter to Arsène Houssaye, the editor of L’Artiste and Le Presse, journals that had published some of Baudelaire’s short prose pieces. “Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness?” he wrote to Houssaye. The letter was first published as the preface to a posthumous collection of 50 prose pieces titled Petits Poèmes en prose (later, Le Spleen de Paris). Along with the neo-Biblical rhythms of Walt Whitman’s ever-expanding editions of Leaves of Grass, Baudelaire’s “little poems in prose” inspired a generation of French Modernists to undertake experiments in what they called vers libre or free verse: poetry untethered from meter, the feature that had distinguished it as a literary form, in the West at least, since Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

After an initial period of heated controversy, free verse was assimilated into the wider current of poetry and not long thereafter became a dominant mode of lyric production, perhaps because the use of lineation allowed practitioners to point to a visual continuity with recognized verse forms. The prose poem, however, was regarded as something of a curiosity and a gimmick and remained marginal until the late 20th century. Implicit in the term is a conceptual challenge. If poetry can be written in prose, in what sense is it poetry? What distinguishes it from prose forms such as novels, short stories, feuilleton pieces, vignettes, flash fictions? What even is poetry?

These questions have yet to receive satisfactory answers, though not for want of trying: one perennial subject of the prose poem is the inquiry into its own generic status. Despite—or perhaps because of—this fact, prose poetry has become increasingly popular over the past 30 to 40 years, especially in North America, where it is recognized as a standard form. Nearly all great postwar poets tried their hands at writing prose poems, several major poets published collections of prose poems (John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Simic, Anne Carson, and Claudia Rankine, to name but a few), and for some, prose poems are the focus of their output (for example, Rosmarie Waldrop). During the same period, we largely punted on the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for the poetic as such and settled somewhat uneasily on an institutional definition of poetry: a poem can be whatever anyone recognized as a poet calls poetry. The prose poem was finally admitted as a member in good standing of the community of forms, but that admission came at the expense of anyone’s being able to say definitively what poetry really is.

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Baudelaire’s provocation has been effective, but the paradox of prose poetry is merely apparent—and always has been. In 1821, the year Baudelaire was born in Paris, Shelley wrote, “The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.” The error—by vulgar Shelley means “widespread”—is forgetting, the literal enemy of truth since Homer’s time. What has been forgotten is that at first, meter was not a formal feature of poetry at all. Poetry is not originally a literary genre; it is a medium, and meter is not ornamental—it is functional. In Dark Age Greece, the aoidos, or epic singer, acted primarily as a human data storage system for a society without writing. The function of meter was to aid in the memorization of large quantities of information, a task for which an aoidos trained from early youth. The classicist Eric Havelock compares the Iliad and the Odyssey to encyclopedias embedded in narrative. For an intuitive example of how this works in practice, compare how much easier it is to memorize, say, the elements of the periodic table when they are set to music rather than learned by rote. Now imagine trying to remember how many ships each Greek kingdom sent to Troy.

When the letterforms of the Phoenician abjad were imported into Greece sometime in the eighth century BCE and then supplemented with vowels, forming the phonetic writing system known as the alphabet, transcription of spoken language became possible for the first time. In the oldest surviving Greek papyri, poetic texts are composed of strings of capital letters, without punctuation, spaces between words, or lineation. The columns of poetry on papyrus rolls are often visually indistinct from prose. Lineation is primarily a graphic convenience introduced for the purpose of scholarly reference or for ease of recitation; it becomes a convention of page layout only after the parchment codex replaces the papyrus scroll in the fourth century. And sometimes long after. To give an example from another tradition, the late 10th or early 11th century Nowell Codex, better known as the Beowulf manuscript, has, like other Anglo-Saxon poetry, no line breaks. Any meaning readers or poets are tempted to attribute to a lineated poem’s relation to the empty space of the page—and contemporary poets have seldom managed to resist this temptation—is nothing more than an artifact of the historically contingent evolution of a particular media technology and the forgetting of this fact.

Movable type helped standardize the layout of metered verse, but limited literacy rates in Western Europe and North America meant that the reception context for poetry—even for Renaissance shape poetry and an early modern blank verse epic such as Paradise Lost, which were clearly written to be read rather than listened to—remained overwhelmingly oral, public, and collective until the first quarter of the 19th century, when Shelley wrote his Defense of Poetry. Lyric still occupied relatively high status in the literary field, but in the age of the steam press, the oral-mnemonic functions of meter (as well as rhyme) had become vestigial, purely formal features whose purpose had been reduced to signaling participation in a literary tradition that was only tenuously connected to the institutions of societies increasingly dominated by the market. Baudelaire’s “little poems in prose” mark the moment at which the reception context of poetry definitively tips into the territory proper to its competitor, the novel: the lonely reader in a tiny room of a rationalized metropolis, whose silent contemplation of printed symbols in a mass-produced collection purchased in a bookstall or shop is broken only by the cry of the glazier from the paved street below. Nor is it a coincidence, as Jeremy Noel-Tod remarks in his introduction to The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018), that Baudelaire’s ambitious dream should finally come to fruition at a time when late-capitalist digital technologies have turned even the novel—the crown jewel of literate media—into a distressed genre. All phonetic writing has its rhythms and its music, but whether it is a sonnet or a short story, as long as it is consumed visually and in silence, these are only metaphors. The presence of meter (rhyme, lineation, etc.) may suffice to single out an instance of writing as poetry, but those who still wish to find the authentic signature of the poetic—the one that obtains for oral as well as written forms, for verse as well as prose—must look elsewhere.

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Perhaps, as the poet and academic Jeff Dolven intriguingly suggests, one should look to poetry’s distinctive relationship to time. In a recent interview with the philosopher Justin E.H. Smith, Dolven “ventures that poetry is the art form that strives toward instantaneity.” Even in epic oral narratives such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the meter—and other putatively formal features, such as the famous Homeric epithets—“establish the eternity” of the characters, returning, say, Odysseus, over and over again to “what he always was.” This “all-at-onceness,” Dolven argues, distinguishes poetry from the way prose unfolds in time. But if the formal features of epic work solely in a culture that has established the reception context for experiencing this temporal effect, what of poetry written after this culture has disappeared? What of the prose poem?

“When ‘free verse’ took a step away from meter, it was a step away from the oral,” Rosmarie Waldrop writes in her 1998 hybrid essay “Why Do I Write Prose Poems (When My True Love Is Verse),” which is included in Keeping / the window open (2019), a selection of texts by her and her husband, the poet Keith Waldrop. “The prose poem moves farther in this direction.” Few contemporary poets are as qualified to discuss the nature of the prose poem as Waldrop, who has written several collections exclusively or largely comprising prose poems. She translates work from the French and German, including Jabès and Albiach, Celan and Mayröcker, and is coeditor of the legendary small press Burning Deck with Keith, who is also a translator of, among other things, a prose edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Her publisher, New Directions, has called her the “American maestra of the prose poem,” and although it is a publicity blurb, the title is entirely deserved.

Unsurprisingly for someone who left her native Germany for the United States in 1958, at age 23, and who has made her living, in part, as a translator, Waldrop’s major theme is betweenness. Boundaries, borders, sutures, edges, cracks, empty spaces, seams, and gaps form a complex of motifs in her work. Waldrop uses metaphor to explore various liminal states and situations: being not only between nations, languages, and persons (sometimes women and men, sometimes lovers in general, sometimes she and Keith specifically) but also between mind and body, expression and intent, primary and secondary texts, verse and prose. Over the course of her career, she has developed two overlapping metaphors for the strategy she uses to navigate betweenness, which refer to the way she détourns semantics and syntax respectively.

The first might be called curvature via its variants: curve, curves, and curving. She deploys these words (and their cognates slope and arching) in unexpected ways, typically by altering the part of speech the context of the sentence would otherwise seem to call for, as in “everything in our universe curves back to the apple” (“Lawn of Excluded Middle”). Where at first readers expect curves to modify or define everything, it is instead used as a verb, to mean something more like “returns to a symbolic point of origin whose metonym is itself a curved object.” (When this phrase is repurposed as the title for her 2006 collection Curves to the Apple, the word also takes on nominalization and becomes even more polysemic.) The intuition is that betweenness presupposes a flat, Euclidean plane where entities, substances, or concepts can be visualized and kept separate. And just as with Riemannian geometry or general relativity, in which this plane is understood to be curved, curving the language in which these entities, substances, or concepts are represented makes demarcating their boundaries impossible.

The second, better-known, metaphor is “gap gardening,” a term Waldrop first uses in the prologue to her collection Reluctant Gravities (1999) and that furnishes the title for her Selected Poems (1972–2010). As she describes it in “Why Do I Write Prose Poems,” gap gardening is a collage technique in which the jagged right margin of verse is relocated to the heart of the sentence itself. It relies on punctuation to intervene in pre-existing sentences—truncated by a full stop or extended by a comma—some drawn from common idiomatic phrases, some drawn from primary texts. In the “gap” created by the punctuation rather than by the line break, “the empty space I place at the center of each poem to allow penetration” (“Lawn of Excluded Middle”), Waldrop interrupts the sentence or continues it in a different way. The shadow of the original or expected meaning remains present even as the context of the following sentence or sentence fragment shifts it toward a new, or rather hybrid, meaning.

Consider the following paragraph from the sequence “Facts” in The Reproduction of Profiles (1987):

Flooding with impulse refracts the body and does not equal. Duck wings opened, jeweled, ablaze in oblique flight. Though a speck in the visual field must have some color, it need not be red. Or beautiful. A mountain throwing its shadow over so much nakedness, or a cloud lighting its edges on the sun, it drowned my breath more deeply, and things lost their simple lines to possibility. Like old idols, you said, which we no longer adore and throw into the current to drift where they still

The initial expectation of the first sentence is that it will tell readers what flooding with impulse “does not equal.” But the full stop turns the candidate duck wings into the subject of the next sentence and the adjective opened into a verb. Unless, that is, the second sentence is a fragment that, despite following it in the paragraph, begins a new line of thought autonomous from the first. In either case, this is a kind of refraction of meaning, bent by its context, through which the sentence can be read as having multiple meanings that do not equal each other.

The third sentence is taken from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 2.0131, which in C.K. Ogden’s translation reads, “A speck in the visual field need not be red, but it must have a color; it has, so to speak, a color space round it.” Waldrop places Wittgenstein’s abstract proposition in a different local and generic context (so that the “speck” seems, if undecidedly, to refer to the “duck wings,” giving it a poetic rather than discursive usage) and then turns the independent clause into a sentence by replacing Wittgenstein’s semicolon with a full stop. She then steers the phrase into different conceptual territory—aesthetic judgment rather than sense perception, though both beauty and redness are secondary rather than primary qualities of objects—only to return to Wittgenstein in the last sentence, where the “old idols” recall the “ladder” of the penultimate proposition of the Tractatus, which likewise must be “thrown away” once “climbed,” that is read and understood.

Wittgenstein, of course, followed his ladder metaphor with the famous concluding line: “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” If Waldrop’s old idols, by contrast, seem “still” to drift in readers’ consciousness, the truncation of that sentence turns still into a verb, “to make quiet.” In each case, Waldrop’s gap gardening technique multiplies meanings and preserves them rather than cancels them. Here the intuition is that by entering into the sentence, creating an artificial caesura there and seeding new meanings in it—the flora that most often appear by name in Waldrop’s work are the biblical-Newtonian apple tree and the Whitmanian blade of grass—the language that sprouts up will overgrow the conceptual boundary that previously constituted the betweenness itself and render it untraceable.

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Betweenness nonetheless remains a spatial metaphor and, as such, is incomplete. In Waldrop’s new book, The Nick of Time (New Directions, 2021), which collects the prose sequences written since Driven to Abstraction (2010) and contains some of the finest writing of her distinguished career, temporality, always an underlying concern of her work, moves unmistakably to the fore. As with some of her previous books, Waldrop deploys the vocabularies of physics (Democritean-Epicurean atomism, Newtonian natural philosophy, or quantum and particle physics) and the philosophy of language (Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy, language poetics, and comparative linguistics, such as in the sequence “Mandarin Primer,” in which she considers how experiences of time vary depending on whether one thinks in a phonetic language like English or non-phonetic languages like Chinese). But in The Nick of Time, these two dimensions of temporal experience are harnessed to a third: the existential dimension.

The proximate cause for this increasing emphasis on time is—to cite the title of the final poem in the collection—“Aging,” which entails the slow atrophying of mental and bodily functions. Of particular personal concern is Keith, who at age 88 has begun to lose his memory, that is, his relationship to the past, in which Waldrop herself has a place and an existence and which has always been intimately involved with being a poet. “If memory serves it was five years ago that yours began to refuse,” she writes in “Bits and Pieces,” the second movement of the opening prose sequence “The Second Hemisphere of Time,” which investigates temporality with the resources of phenomenology. She compares the pain she sees on his face as he attempts to remember something to his “hold[ing] a mirror to what has no image” or to the effort it requires to speak a “foreign language” in which the “words are forgotten in the moment before they are uttered.” “From that distance you tell me you once had a German wife,” she writes, with excruciating pathos. “I am that German wife” (“Escaping Analogy”).

In another sequence, “White is a Color”—notably, a color that has “come to stand in for time,” “a phrase unable to find its margin”—Keith slips and falls on a curb. He breaks a vertebra, and she has a vision of “your dead ris[ing] from the undertow and drift[ing] through your body.” Aging also brings with it the death of loved ones, and in the gaps between each of the 10 prose sequences in The Nick of Time, she has planted a “Lament” for her fellow poets Barbara Guest, Robert Creeley, Anne-Marie Albiach, Michael Gizzi, and Edmond Jabès. The poems are a means of “calling” each “across the border of death” (“Lament for Edmond Jabès”) because it is precisely the “artist” who “is concerned with appropriating the dead” and “inviting” them “to new life” in language (“Cut With the Kitchen Knife”).

However much “two words next to each other resonate presence” (“Lament for Michael Gizzi”), writing cannot fully close the distance between presence and absence, because “ink is the color where you are not” (“Loving Words”). This distance, the gap of gaps, can be altered but not totally erased through curvature or gardening, despite the “almost physical wanting of continuity” to “smooth” it “over” (“Bits and Pieces”). Poetry nevertheless has a role to play in the defense of being against nothingness. As she does with the line, Waldrop turns her back on the attempt to transcend time to instead burrow into it to “obstruct the passage of time” from within the sentence (“Otherwise Smooth”). Time cannot literally be brought to a halt, let alone reversed, but perhaps the experience of it can be “interrupted” (“The Almost Audible Passage of Time”) if one uses language to “imitate duration” rather than “mimic passage” (“Natural”).

Thus, time also bears on the question of literary genre, of “worries” about “what is poetry and what is prose,” as Waldrop, appropriating a sentence of Gertrude Stein’s, puts it (“Otherwise Smooth”). At the end of “Why Do I Write Prose,” Waldrop says, “‘distraction’ is exactly ... what poetry worth the name gives us.” Given the ordinary meaning of distraction, this definition is at first counter-intuitive, but Waldrop is referring to the means poetry has at its disposal, not its end. The English word distraction is derived from the Latin distractionem (“a pulling apart, a separating”) and its past-participle stem distrahere (“draw in different directions”)—in other words, what Waldrop does when she gap gardens in a sentence. For readers, the effect of distraction properly understood is its semantic opposite: absorption.

Whereas the temporal strategy of most novels is to accelerate the speed of reading with smooth sentences that conform to semantic expectations, thus achieving the kind of exit velocity called “escapism,” the temporal strategy of the poem is to multiply meanings and defy expectations to burrow into the moment, distending it and expanding the impression of its duration. (The extent to which this observation does not hold for a modernist novel such as The Making of Americans or The Waves or a postmodern novel such as J R or Wittgenstein’s Mistress is precisely the extent to which these novels can be described as poetic.)

By creating the expectation of a particular meaning via allusion, then by pulling apart phrases and drawing readers in a different direction, Waldrop’s curving of semantics and gap gardening in syntax disrupts the smooth flow of the normative prose sentence. “Gap gardening,” she writes, “which moved inward from the right margin, suspends time” (italics mine). Her technique slows reading and intensifies the experience by sharpening one’s attention—an effect that is even more pronounced when it appears in prose, where it cuts against the grain of generic expectations, than in verse, where it does not or does to a lesser degree.

Not without reason is The Nick of Time full of remarks such as “my writing is so slow it’s more like gravitational condensation.” It is in producing “duration” that Waldrop’s practice as a prose poet matches the effect of “all-at-onceness” that Dolven cites as the key feature of the Greek oral epic and proposes as the signature of the poetic as such. With the achievement of the experience of the suspension of time, the long search “for oral forms in a culture of writing” comes to a happy end (“This Delay”).

The title of Waldrop’s collection comes from the common idiomatic phrase “in the nick of time,” with the introductory preposition “nicked” off. As with the phrase, time “nicks” everyone, cuts everyone with the sharp edge of its passage, wounds everyone, shaves a little away with each passing moment. But the phrase “to nick” has a second meaning: to steal. And if “being nicked” by time is human fate, humans have developed, over the course of history, a few strategies for “nicking” a little of it back. One of the oldest, and arguably most effective, is poetry.