Monday
In 1991, the Iowa Review (reprinted in Modern American Poetry) asked Robert Hass, "Why a prose poem, and what is a prose poem?" Here's his answer:
I haven’t arrived for myself at any very satisfactory formulation of what a prose poem is. Certainly it has something to do with condensation…I don’t know how to define it in terms of genre, and when I was working, I guess I just stopped trying to think about that. What I did think about was what the conventions of the prose poem were. At the time that I was starting to write them, the prose poem, as it had been revived in America, was used almost entirely for a kind of wacky surrealist work, and I think that nervousness about using prose was that then you had to put a lot of what people thought was poetic—that is to say, wildness and imagination and free association—into it to make sure that it was poetry, because if it got too near the conventions and sentence sounds of expository prose or narrative prose…then it really wasn’t poetry. So almost as soon as I started working, I got interested in those boundaries: what the prose poem wasn’t supposed to sound like…
It almost seemed like photography to me, and it gave me a feeling that I wanted to experiment with the form…I wrote a whole lot of them, and I got interested in textures, the way that you would with a given palette…I felt excited because I knew it [a particular prose poem, "Churchyard"] was exactly what the prose poem wasn’t supposed to be. It was too much like the sound of expository prose…
Later, something else occurred to me: I was working in these forms because they had a certain outwardness that verse didn’t have. I think I was at a time…when things were going on in my life that I didn’t want to look at, didn’t want to feel. And I wanted to keep writing, so I unconsciously started writing prose to avoid the stricter demands of incantation. When I was doing it, it seemed to be exploratory; in retrospect, it seems a sort of long escape…
…the whole time I was working on the prose poem I knew that somehow I never particularly loved the idea of the prose poem. But it was interesting to me to think about a larger form that might mix verse and prose…
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Hass adds to these thoughts later, in a Poets Q&A. A reader asks, "I am interested in knowing what drew you to the prose poem form in Human Wishes. Also, do you think that the experience of writing those poems influenced the poems in Sun Under Wood formally, and perhaps thematically as well? If so, how?" Hass answers as such:
I talked about this at some length in an interview that was printed some years ago in the Iowa Review, if you want a fuller account, Paul. As I recall, I was writing the peice that became "Museum" in Human Wishes and I couldn't find in the rhythms of the verse a way to describe the reciprocity between the young couple I was trying to describe. So I turned aside to write it out in prose to clarify for myself what I was seeing. And once I felt like I'd gotten it in prose, there didn't seem to be a reason for trying to translate it back into verse. I had been working on some of the essays in Twentieth Century Pleasures around this time, and I found that writing them I would sometimes labor over the shaping of particular paragraphs in the way that I work on poems. So the two impulses seemed to fuse for me at the moment, and I became interested in the idea of the paragraph as a form. A phrase came into my head--the name of a posthumous book of essays by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Prose of the World"--and that gave me a push also. Later, looking back on those pieces, I came to think that I had begun writing in prose to avoid the deeper engagement with what I was feeling that verse would have required. Prose seemed a cooler medium. And in Sun Under Wood, particularly in "My Mother's Nipples," it's true that the things we can say in verse and the things we can say in prose became a theme.
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