Snow in the Prose Poem
by Doug Martin
I enter snow when I enter a piece of good writing, when I enter a paragraph through the sentence, whether or not snow resides in the short-short, prose-poem, or not. Nonetheless, if we are certain that the sentence is just as significant a measure-marker today as the line, many writers have fallen into a "911 syntax." When each sentence begins with a monotonous subject/verb construction, without clausal variation, the sentence’s heart explodes, the EKG machine goes straight, and just reading the reader falls into a coma, praying the paramedic vehicular sirens arrive to resuscitate.
When we travel our eyes reading through the heavy sentence of the prose poem, we smooth the snow from its road if the language is not too heavy to plunge through. If the diction is muddied with too many polysyllabic words, too many abstract nouns and formal verbs, even the plow sinks and will refuse to move. School is cancelled. We learn nothing. We are dead on arrival.
Pound, in the Cantos, slid smoothly through prosodic centuries of the Anglo-Saxon alliterative-accentual-quantitative measure to the infant iambic pentameter of Chaucer, to free-verse and back again in one brief stanza. In an object poem, however, something else is taking place between movement and stasis. It is neither standing or moving (same for syntax), not sleeping or awake, but somewhere in between, somewhere in between motion and inertia. The best prose poems do this unlike short shorts and lined poetry. These latter always have narrative and eye movement down the page.
"Sit boy! Sit boy!" the language tells the prose poem sentence.
In flash fiction, verbs should slap the nouns around. The flash fiction piece hollers, paces both and forth, is in a short session of laughing yoga with itself. But not always. Sometimes it swallows slowly each word, spits it forward and back out onto the page. Its sentences rain. It can hop like a frog and breath like a frog, too.
In a world where contemporary religion and government conspire to destroy the Self and Language, is it possible to go beyond even Language and Cybersyntax, to God's Mantra in the Silent, Paranormal Porchlight? Is the right-justified block of the web template's type a quest for God?
To bed-leap each morning and to shower our armpits and legs with assonance, and then to walk our favorite prose poems and short shorts around town. To find the sound of the wind and snow and God in each word. At last, the word is the onomatopoeia of God, leading us beyond.
The Gettysburg Address was a Prose Poem, no doubt. Or was it flash fiction?
Doug Martin is an editor at Snowvigate. His book, Walt Whitman's Mimetic Prosody: Free-Bound and Full Circle, was published by Edwin Mellen Press in 2004