I feel about prose poems rather like Bob Wrigley felt about them in a workshop last summer: "Well...they're prose." I just think I don't get them or that I'm not the proper audience. Or maybe my preference for prose poems is limited to a select few writers and no one else can touch them. I seem to go for the loopiness of a Russell Edson or the plain (though not simple) beauty of a James Wright. Too many of them get stuck in surreality or, like regularly lineated poems, strain too hard to be significant. I'm all for surreality, but only the kind which has a toenail in reality. Anyway, one of the two mags I read for is running a book contest now, and we're all reading various mss's. And there's a shit-ton of prose poems coming in. It's neither good nor bad; I wonder what the appeal is.
In any case, I find myself glossing over the great majority of them, which is of course not fair. Doubtless another sign of getting stuck in my ways. The one bona fide prose poem I have ever written later became lineated the old fashioned way, because I read it aloud and heard a regular old poem. I just ask myself, with such beasts, is there some musical or artistic reason for making it look like a paragraph? A lot of so-called prose poems are actually flash fiction or (see above) disguises for pretty conventional moves.
The good ones, like Wright's, still concern themselves with highly charged moments of time. I read a good one and still feel I'm reading something like a poem but where perhaps the sentence is the carrier of the poetic moment, not the line. Maybe I'm really saying they're difficult for me to write.
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