French literary critic Michael Riffaterre called prose poetry a "genre with an oxymoron for a name." The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson, edited by British critic Jeremy Noel-Tod, creates "an alternative history of modern poetry" with the prose poem at its center, beginning some 150 years ago with Charles Baudelaire, Emma Lazarus, Oscar Wilde and Ivan Turgenev. The form has since been used by writers as varied as Margaret Atwood, Allen Ginsberg, Gertrude Stein, Jorge Luis Borges, Adrienne Rich, Lu Xun, Czeslaw Milosz and Eileen Myles. Serbian American poet Charles Simic won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his prose poem collection The World Doesn't End, was a finalist for two other Pulitzer Prizes, and in 2007 was appointed the fifteenth U.S. Poet Laureate.
"A prose poem is a poem without line breaks. Beyond that, both its manner and its matter resist generalization," writes Jeremy Noel-Tod. "What strikes me is the prose poem's wayward relationship to its own form--and it is this, I believe, that makes it the defining poetic invention of modernity. In an age of mass literacy, our lives are enmeshed in networks of sentences and paragraphs as extensive as any urban grid. The prose poem drives the reading mind beyond the city limits." The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem is available from Penguin Classics ($18). --Tobias Mutter
