A short discussion on the merits of prose poetry appeared in my facebook feed last week, which I promptly misread as the above title and thought yes, perhaps that is right. In another conversation with the library's artist-in-residence, who had invited me to contribute to a zine she's constructing, she asked whether she should label my contribution as "poetry" or "prose" and I had no really good answer. (They were some of the plague letters fragments, which are more epistolary in nature, but probably still very much poems, though as a fiction writer, she was unsure.) A couple years ago, I applied to the NEA fellowship in the prose category, sending them the exquisite damage pieces, which are lyric prose. I had enough prose-labeled publications in journals and the book publication of the shared properties of water and stars backing me up, but it still felt like I was a fraud, though I'm not sure everything I write is poetry. (My application last year, filled with ordinary planet verse pieces, was similarly unsuccessful.) I describe my books in my bio and on my website as poetry/prose/hybrid collections, but would guess each of them falls more along one line or another. the fever almanac is the only book that is verse all the way through, while everything else varies after, if not dips into prose poems almost entirely. sex & violence, for example, with the only variation being the list poems in /slash/ . Then now, feed, which I'd describe as prose poems and lyric essay. The next book, dark country, is entirely prose essay and poems.
In bios, I tend to describe myself as a writer and book artist, which encompasses more generally the writing I do (poems, blogs, essays) and the art (zines, collage, installation, painting). But always think of myself more simply as a poet in the world, whatever form, written or visual that manifests as. Sometimes, even the images are poems, Years ago, when I compiled and wrote our submission for a very big academic library contest which we won, people joked that it would, of course, take a poet to catch the eye of judges in a sea of submissions. And in many ways, that application was a poem of sorts. Other submissions and library writings, also occasionally poems. In the last weeks of her life, in the care home, my mother, in better sorts, bragged to the nurse "She's a poet!" when I was visiting and it always seemed a weird thing to tell people. Sometimes, outside of the context of other writers, it's also a weird thing to say.
"Poet" has a lot of baggage, I suppose. At my cousin's wedding in my twenties, at the point where I was beginning my MFA studies, one of the other members of the wedding party, grooms side,who I had knew in high school, responded to that description by asking if I was "like really depressed or something.". I wanted to respond, "actually no, anxiety-addled, yes, but not usually depressed." Poets, in history, for the normies are usually either the traipsing around ala Lord Byron or crying, head in the oven, ala Sylvia Plath. That's if they even know those as reference points. I'd probably make a greater comparison to Poe and joke about human hearts beneath my floorboards and a fascination with dead women.
There was a time when I avoided "poet" as a descriptor, since it seems like such a strange thing to be in the ordinary world. Like a unicorn or a mermaid. Possibly fictitious and rarely spotted in the world. Sometimes I prefer to say I "write poetry" rather than "I'm a poet. " When I say I'm a writer, folks usually expect, when pressed further, that I will say novels or essays or news articles. And no, I say poems, about the time their eyes sort of glaze over. "Written anything I've read?" and me, "Well, how much poetry do you read?" Because sometimes, even poetry (outside of greeting card verse and maybe, this year, inaugural poems) is not a cultural reference point for the general public. Three times in the past couple years, I've stumbled upon normies (which I call non-poets) reading Rupi Kaur and want to recommend they read something better if they are going to read poetry at all. I'm not sure the Kaur audience would look at my work, or the work of many poets who write in prose, and understand that they are poems at all. And maybe they're not.
And maybe all of them are ghosts that take the forms of words. I loved the equation of hauntings with memories and emotions they talk about in The Haunting of Hill House. So maybe every poem and painting is just a ghost taking on form, as much as humans supposedly are ghosts contained in flesh and bone. Every story inhabiting it's form, whatever it is, like a spirit rattling cupboard doors and flickering the lights from time to time.
