Close Calls With Nonsense

My poem in the current Colorado Review was recently Verse Daily’s Poem of the Day.

Currently enjoying new, or new-to-me, books (not already mentioned in this space) by Patty Seyburn, Angie Estes, Patrick Pritchett, Jane Draycott, and, from South Africa via (I think) London or Manchester, Karen Kilalea.

Estes, Seyburn, Robyn Schiff (whom I wrote about recently already), and a few other poets are starting to seem to me like some sort of happy coincidence, or proto-movement– neo-glamor? the fabric baroque?– not just in their subjects but in how they handle their lines, their references, their often quite long sentences, their insistence that very complicated syntax and other high cognitive demands on the reader can coexist with high fashion and with a light touch. I may have more to say about such things in print sometime, especially if I don’t get the chance to review more of their books at length one by one, unless I change my mind (which is the peril of lit-crit blogging, I guess).

Still thinking about (another essay that may see daylight sometime next year) rules for how to read prose poems, with examples from Benis White, G. C. Waldrep, Geoff Bouvier, Ben Lerner, Killarney Clary, and a few others, perhaps back to Baudelaire. One of my (very, very bright) graduate students argued (if I understood him rightly) this week that “prose poem” is something like a diagnosis of exclusion (though he didn’t use the medical term): you know you are reading a prose poem if the text isn’t verse and isn’t any other kind of (consecutive, argumentative, expository, humorous or narrative) prose. Would Steve Monte agree?