James Rother and the “Prose of Poetry”
by Ernie on 13/08/07 at 12:38 pm
In this month’s issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review, the inimitable poetry critic James Rother, heir to the tradition of Hugh Kenner, brings us the third part of the first installment of his three-part series on the Prose of Poetry, the Poetry of Prose, and the Prose Poem (try saying that quickly five times).
Rother writes: Even the spaciest prose can occasionally appear to successfully superintend the spasms of its own over-active brain activity, but poetry, however pixilated it might be made to seem by the intoxicants it itself secretes, most certainly cannot.
Nor with equivalent feasibility can one assert that the overleaping of normal continuity by pressing language to its outermost rim of suggestiveness, whether through bypassing “ordinary usage” (whose spectral presence the “ghosts in the machine” of grammar and syntax can easily be coaxed to project) or by emotive “bangings-on-a-can,” is within verse’s generally accepted range of options.
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