Customer Reviews

The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre

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Deville's book is an excellent history of the prose poem from Baudelaire to Stein to as well as a close study of important figures in the prose poem such as Russel Edson, Robert Bly, and Charles Simic. It started out a little slow, perhaps because it's been a few months since I've read a critical text, but then it became very readable. I was using this book to prepare for a prose poem panel discussion at a writing conference and found it extremely useful. It seems like the prose poem is finally well on its way to becoming a more accepted form. Recent collections such as Tony Tost's "The Invisible Bride" and Mary Koncel's "You Can Tell The Horse Anything" further this point. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested on prose poems, but don't expect an easy definition.

This book has been invaluable in terms of both my studies and work. So much of the prose poem has to do with with the ways in which it makes itself known, and Delville does an exquisite job explaining the means of making. As a history of the American Prose poem, as a text that explains possibilities of language use, applicable to all writing seeking to explore itself, I can't recommend it highly enough. If you're serious about writing, about critical reading, you need this book.

Where is the six-star option?

Michel Delville argues that the twentieth-century American prose poem ought not to be regarded as merely a piece of ornamented, poeticized prose but rather as a negotiation of the boundaries of lyric, narrative, expository, and speculative genres. In recent years the prose poem has been informed and ruptured by both poststructuralism and Marxism. In the hands of "the Language poets," the New Prose Poem insists on its scriptural illegibility rather than a speech-based comprehensibility. It may oppose the social and economic status quo, not through direct reference--which would only mirror the language of the dominant ideology--but by subverting the linguistic assumptions that undergird the status quo. Delville's interpretations are especially powerful when they focus on Gertrude Stein, Russell Edson, Charles Simic, and such "Language Poets" as Lyn Hejinian, Madeline Gins, and Kit Robinson. Delville astutely questions how politically subversive such writers can be when they make little contact with the social and political world. He refrains from asking what seems to me an equally salient question: What if the language of hegemonic discourse (e.g. TV and the internet) is now not necessarily transparent and speech-based but often discontinuous and nonreferential--that is, not fundamentally different from the language of the New Prose Poem? Perhaps one of the strengths of contemporary prose poems, and of Delville's valuable analysis of them, is that they encourage us to rethink and to refeel our relationship to the postindustrial overflow of signs.