Inhabiting Geometry: The Prose Poem as Container for Atmosphere & Gesture
Joan Fiset IFPE Languages Spoken and Unspoken
November 7, 2009
Discussion Panel: Moving Beyond Words
IOWA, JANUARY
In the long winter nights a farmer’s dreams are narrow.
Over and over he enters the furrow.
Robert Hass
In the mid-seventies a friend gave me William Stafford’s Traveling Through the
Dark. His poems seemed to know something. In hopes he would offer suggestions for
poems I was trying to write, I enrolled two years later in Stafford’s poetry workshop
at Centrum in Port Townsend.
Instead he offered two words, “permission” and “receptivity,” and created an
atmosphere of possibility where his only comments addressed our pens or the color of
our ink. He spoke of rising daily at 4:00 a.m. to write whatever occurred to him; if the
refrigerator hummed he noted it, then let it lead to the next “inkling.”
Four years later, Robert Hass, in his poetry workshop, described paragraphs on the
pages of a yellow tablet as “these things I’m writing.” He said, “I write to discover
what the Hell I’m feeling,” and spoke of how writing enables him to “lift out of the
flow of ordinary feeling into emotion.” “You want to be up there,” he said, “. . .we
want those intensities that bring us back changed and connect back into ordinary life.”
As he related the origins of the prose poem, acknowledging its purported birth
1
in 19th-century France, I fixated on its spatial aspects, its geometric shape. A deeprunning sense of relief accompanied the four posts locking into corners. Hass
elaborated, “. . .a space to range around in. . .go all over the place. . .tell a little story. .
.write a little essay. . .mix them all up together.”
His prose poems “Late Spring,” “Museum,” and “Tall Windows” and others
appeared in Antaeus later that year and are among the twenty prose poems
published in Human Wishes 1989.
When Jack Spicer described form as “the mental connecting tissue of poetry,” I
related his comparison to the way fixed poetic forms like the sonnet serve as
antagonists. Wrestling against constraints like a sonnet’s prescribed rhyme scheme
and metrical and stanza patterns paradoxically frees up the life of expression,
particularly in relation to difficult material such as the landscape of love informing the
complex network of most of Shakespeare’s 126 sonnets.
Within the form of a paragraph, the prose poem’s music can occur in the way of
jazz. Reflecting on his process in writing “Apparition of the Exile,” a prose poem we
will soon consider, Bruce Weigl states, “I was also thinking about something I referred
to as the music of the sentence and the music of syntax, trying to find ways to jazz up
the music inherent in the language by trying to invert typical syntactical patterns.”
When Hass had invited us to write prose poems, I’d found myself permitting stray
tendrils of language, associations, emergent half-thoughts, and strands of memory to
inhabit a sturdy rectangle. In doing so I began to learn the way of “receptivity”
2
Stafford spoke of and continued writing prose poems that gave voice to strands and
splinters of unspoken experience, one example being “Eternity”:
ETERNITY
On the table of a distant room a fan revolves. My father is
tall; his army khakis well pressed. It is hot in this summer
afternoon — “muggy” he says, and “stifling.” Cigarette
smoke wafts slowly out the open door. Patterns of sunlight
and shadow a shifting confluence, for the wind has begun
to pick up. This is the beginning of eclipse. Light grows
dim and then it will vanish. His mind turns back to lilacs.
He continues to smoke as if the sun had never disappeared.
And yet it has, of this there is no doubt. It is hot in this
summer afternoon, “muggy” he says, and “stifling.”
In the spring of 1995, Jim Benson, a senior in my high school English class, looked at
peppercorns through a Private Eye loupe, a magnifying glass modeled after an actual
jeweler’s loupe by Kerry Ruef, founder and director of “The Private Eye: (5X)
Looking/Thinking by Analogy.”
Ruef writes, “The secret of the loupe compared to a hand lens is that it cuts out the
rest of the world, intensifying visual feedback and concentration. By asking, ’What does
it remind me of? What else does it look like?’ the ’eye-mind’ keeps looking and thinking
by analogy and metaphor. What one sees through the loupe becomes very personal to
the observer. . .unfamiliar things seem familiar, abstractions approachable, the
unknown comfortable.
Jim compared the peppercorns to “craters.” They reminded him of “the hole in my
backyard.” This led to his prose poem “Foxhole”:
3
FOXHOLE
We were tough soldiers when I was in fourth grade. Pat,
the neighbor boy, was always on my side. We needed a
secret advantage to win: a foxhole. We dug for hours and
hours, used a collapsible army shovel from the military
surplus store. At night we covered it up with plywood.
When the hole was deep enough to stand up straight in, Pat
scooped dirt from the bottom with a Tupperware cup. He
handed it to me to dump out. We hid from the enemy in the
dark dampness, and climbed out to attack. When we
covered the hole with branches it was a booby trap. My dad
made us fill it in; he said it was dangerous. Someone could
get hurt. We didn’t want to fill it in, but knew it was time.
There is still sunken dirt where our hole was.
His father, a sniper in Vietnam, had never talked about it. What little Jim knew of his
father’s war experience his mother had told him. This brought to mind my own father’s
silence in relation to his years of combat in World War II. About it he wrote:
Emotions run deep and change with startling
rapidity in war time. One cannot recall them in
tranquility as Wordsworth did his daffodils —
the emotions are too kaleidoscopic in recall to
allow for sustained meditation or philosophic
evaluation. One vivid memory quickly dissolves
into another resulting in an ever changing
montage of feelings.
A week after Jim wrote his prose poem, I read an editorial by a journalist whose
monthly column focused on the military. He wrote about the Seattle Vet Center, an
outpatient arm of the VA, where veterans “caught in a web of grief” processed their
experience in groups and with individual therapists.
At the end of the 1995 school year, I left teaching to volunteer at the Vet Center.
Team Leader Don Johnson, a Korean War veteran, agreed to let me try using
4
metaphorical and other right-brain strategies with veterans suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and shared his paper “PTSD and Healing.” Johnson’s
description of trauma’s lasting impact resonated with my father’s words:
It is difficult to identify with that former self. It
is as though the individual’s life has been
segmented, severed into pieces made up of
times between significant personal events like
stones scattered on a sandy beach or beads
lying on a woman’s lap. . .without structure or
mortar. . . . Is there only one ‘correct’ place for
each stone? What about the missing beads, the
buried stones?
Bounded by geometry, memory’s split off “beads” and “stones” can sometimes
return through a context of atmosphere to be refigured and reclaimed, retrieval kin
to T.S. Eliot’s metaphor of poetry as “a raid on the inarticulate” in Four Quartets.
Inherent within this rectangle are four corners. I began to think on the corners
themselves.
In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard suggests the corner is “a haven,” and
“this most sordid of all havens. . .deserves to be examined.” He describes the
corner as “a sort of half-box, part walls, part door serving as an illustration for
the dialectics of inside and outside . . . “
Consciousness of being at peace in one’s corner
produces a sense of immobility, and this in turn
radiates immobility. An imaginary room rises up
around our bodies, which think that they are well
hidden when we take refuge in a corner. . .We have
to designate the space of our immobility by making it
the space for our being.
5
A prose poem’s corners can hold and contain the unbearable aftermath of war.
The internalized atmosphere of the “sordid haven” resonates with British
psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s concept of “nameless dread,” the primitive terror of
annihilation a baby experiences in the absence of another mind to receive, attune, and
provide reverie for its own.
After volunteering with veterans I earned an MA in psychology then worked as a
Readjustment Counselor at the Vet Center for two years. During this time I
introduced a writing group of Vietnam veterans diagnosed with PTSD to the loupe.
For a Marine Corps rifleman, a dandelion seed brought up a memory of flares. He
wrote:
The dandelion seeds look like memory’s freeze-frame
of fireworks, or night flares popping out there
somewhere, casting light on nothing, nothing moving,
a night landscape in stasis, the death of another day.
We’re looking for something, someone out there but
they won’t let themselves be seen; they’re part of the
landscape, part of this land; they live here and we don’t
hear them either. Another flare pops. We stare into its
brief light and come away with nothing, take nothing
home, and the children play on burned-out tanks.
Once called up, “memory’s freeze-frame of fireworks, or night flares” can
begin to illuminate the territory of the “nothing” whose invisible enemy is one with
the landscape.
During World War I Bion served in France as a tank commander and
6
“reluctantly” accepted the Distinguished Service Order and the Legion of Honour.
After the war, in his analytical training, he worked with veterans suffering from
PTSD, then known as “shell shock.” In “The War Memoirs: Some origins of the
thought of W. R. Bion,” Kay M. Souter writes, “The battlefield. . . gave him searing
insight into what a person needs when in extremity: the sympathetic presence of
another mind.”
In their own way, the loupe in combination with the prose poem’s form serve as
gesture and container for unmetabolized fragments of traumatic experience. By
offering a circumscribed circumference, the loupe invites the senses to “think” in
response to what is encountered. My own experience with the loupe has been one
of containment within a safe yet spacious zone. “Cold”was evoked by the memory
of a snowman as I looked through the loupe into the white underside of a tortoise
shell:
COLD
Schoolyard, black tar and chain link fence. Icy patches
of sooty snow clumped in the corner. When the recess
bell rings everyone runs outside to play, but I sit on
the cement stairs trying to warm my hands. This
morning we drew snowmen with twigs for arms and
tall black hats. Mine has no mouth, only eyes with a
carrot nose. He wanted to say something, but I
wouldn’t give him a mouth. Now he talks from the
corners of the schoolyard. The biting chill that numbs
my fingers and toes freezing my face and ears is him
saying, This is what I was trying to tell you.
7
While the loupe invites almost imperceptible traces of lost sensory memory to
resurface, slices of fruit on a plate or a breeze through the window catalyze them as
well. The indelible impact of the Vietnam War is reflected in the following prose poems
and in the words of John Akins who served in the Marine Corps in 1968 as a rifleman in
the infantry and received the Purple Heart.
A member of the combat writing group, Akins went on to publish Nam Au Go-Go, a
memoir, and On the Way to Khe Sahn, a volume of poetry, which includes “Witness,” a
talk he gave at his son’s high school. In it he describes “what violence does to you. .
.how it stops the sweeping arm of your emotional radar.” “. . . [C]onnections are
pulled for hope, meaning, and dreams. . . you die inside.”
Established poets Bruce Weigl and Yusef Komunyakaa both served in Vietnam.
Weigl’s “Apparition of the Exile” and Komunyakaa’s “Grenade” utilize the form of
the prose poem.
Enlisting in the army shortly after his 18th birthday, Weigl served in Vietnam
from 1967-1968 as an infantryman with the 1st Air Cavalry and received the Bronze
Star. He writes, “The war took away my life and gave me poetry in return. . . the
fate the world has given me is to struggle to write powerfully enough to draw
others into the horror.” “Apparition of the Exile” is included in Song of Napalm,
nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1988.
When asked what led to him writing this poem, he replied:
8
It was a little cool air blowing through the window
that wanted to take me back to something but I
didn't know what. And then my friend came into the
poem; a fellow veteran who one day stopped talking
and wouldn't leave his house, and then his room
because of what had happened to his squad in the
war. In the end of course, all of them are me.
APPARITION OF THE EXILE
There was another life of cool summer mornings, the dogwood
air and the slag stink so gray like our monsoon which we loved
for the rain and cool wind until the rot came into us. And I
remember the boys we were the evening of our departure, our
mothers waving through the train’s black pluming exhaust;
they were not proud in their tears of our leaving, so don’t tell
me to shut up about the war or I might pull something from my
head, from my head, from my head that you wouldn’t want to
see and whoever the people are might be offended.
From the green country you reconstruct in your brain, from the
rubble and stink of your occupation, there is no moving out. A
sweet boy who got drunk and brave on our long ride into the
State draws a maze every day on white paper, precisely in his
room of years as if you could walk into it. All day he draws and
imagines his platoon will return from the burning river where
he sent them sixteen years ago into fire. He can’t stop seeing the
line of trees explode in white phosphorous blossoms and the
liftship sent for them spinning uncontrollably beyond hope into
the Citadel wall. Only his mother comes these days, drying the
fruit in her apron or singing the cup of hot tea into his fingers
which, like barbed wire, web the air.
Yusef Komunyakaa was in the US Army and stationed in Vietnam from 1969-1970.
During this time he worked in South Vietnam as an information specialist and as an
9
editor for the military paper, Southern Cross. He earned a Bronze Star. Dien Cai Dau
relates to his experience as a soldier in Vietnam. In 1994, he received the Pulitzer Prize
in poetry for Neon Vernacular.
GRENADE
There is no rehearsal to turn flesh into dust so quickly. A hair trigger
a cocked hammer in the brain, a split second between a man &
infamy. It lands on the ground — a few soldiers duck & the others
are caught in a half-run — & one throws himself down on the
grenade. All the watches stop. A flash. Smoke. Silence. The sound
fills the whole day. Flesh & earth fall into the eyes & mouths of the
men. A dream trapped in midair. They touch their legs & arms, their
groins, ears, & noses, saying. What happened? Some are crying.
Others are laughing. Some are almost dancing. Someone tries to put
the dead man back together. “He just dove on the damn thing, sir!”
A flash. Smoke. Silence. The day blown apart. For those who can
walk away, what is their burden? Shreds of flesh & bloody rags
gathered up & stuffed into a bag. Each breath belongs to him. Each
song. Each curse. Every prayer is his. Your body doesn’t belong to
your mind & soul. Who are you? Do you remember the man left in
the jungle? The others who owe their lives to this phantom, do they
feel like you? Would his loved ones remember him if that little park
or statue erected in his name didn’t exist, & does it enlarge their
lives? You wish he’d lie down in that closed coffin, & not wander
the streets or enter your bedroom at midnight. The woman you love,
she’ll never understand. Who would? You remember what he used
to say: “If you give a kite too much string, it’ll break free.” That
unselfish certainty. But you can’t remember when you began to live
his unspoken dream.
Komunyakaa says he “woke up in the morning with ‘Grenade’ in my psyche. I
wished to think of other things, but the images wouldn’t let go of me. ‘Grenade’ is
informed by the rhythm of intention. . . For me, ‘Grenade’ can only exist in the tonal
10
shape of prose. . .I haven’t been able to change a word.” “Poetry” he says, “is a kind of
distilled insinuation. . .a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question.
Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal
assault.”
What Komunyakaa discerns in regard to poetry resonates with the life of
perception the loupe makes available through a parallel process.
During World War II, William Stafford was a pacifist and Conscientious Objector.
As a registered pacifist, he performed alternative service from 1942 to 1946 in the
Civilian Public Service camps operated by the Brethren Service Commission of the
Church of the Brethren. This consisted of forestry and soil conservation work in
Arkansas, California, and Illinois for $2.50 per month.
In his introduction to Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford
1937– 1947, Fred Merchant writes:
In his first decade of writing, and in particular in the
four years he spent in the CPS Program, William
Stafford discovered writing poetry was for him an act
of deep listening. . . to the voices in his world and
listening inwardly, to signals emanating form the
deepest levels of his own being. One name for that
would be conscience. . .a “knowing-with.” It proposes
we find or create a sense of right relation with one
another, with the world around us, and with ourselves.
How can one know what those right relations are?
Stafford might answer by saying one has to learn to
listen deeply.
11
Pause
I’ll conclude with “Meditation,” a poem William Stafford wrote in March of
1943 at Los Prietos, California:
MEDITATION
If I could remember all at once — but I have forgotten.
Still, some day, looking along a furrowed cliff, staring
Beyond the eyes’ strength, I’ll start the avalanche,
And every stone will fall separate and revealed. . . .
12
References
Akins, John. (2004). On the Way to Khe Sanh: War Poems. John Immel Akins.
Bachelard, Gaston. (1964) The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press.
Eliot, T.S. (1943) Four Quartets, Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Fiset, Joan. (1997) Now the Day is Over, Blue Begonia.
Hass, Robert. (1989). Human Wishes. The Ecco Press/New York.
Hass, Robert (2007). Time and Materials. Harper Collins.
Johnson, Don. (1995). “PTSD & Healing,” unpublished manuscript.
Komunyakaa, Yusef (2008). Warhorses. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Ruef, Kerry. (1997).The Private Eye: Looking/Thinking by Analogy — A Guide to
Developing the Interdisciplinary Mind. Skylight Professional Development.
Stafford, William. (2008) Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William
Stafford 1937–1947, Graywolf.
Souter, Kay M. (2009). “The War Memoirs: Some origins of the thought of
W.R. Bion,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Weigl, Bruce. (1988) Song of Napalm. Grove/Atlantic.
13