James Rother returns with Part Three of the Prose of Poetry
by Ernie on 25/09/07 at 8:59 am
In the current issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review, the infamous critic James Rother continues his series on the Prose of Poetry: “Where poetry can but clutch and cling, prose is free to root about, its snout on the alert always for any scent of a truffle. Poetry might put down roots where only rhizomes flourish, but the only bark of the Tree of Life poets ever get to scratch-and-sniff derives from simulacra of the rumors of Yggdrasil that they themselves have planted. At the risk of prematurely trespassing on the concerns of the next segment (‘The Poetry of Prose’) of the triptych whose first panel is the present essay, we might call as a witness Henry James, a writer who, so far as anyone knows, never authored a line of verse, to testify, not for the prosecution, or even for that matter the defense, but as an amicus curiae, able to throw light on a debate now of long-standing as to just where the ineffable becomes vulnerable to the ministrations of language most
—to invoke one of James’s favorite adverbials—tellingly. To that purpose quotations from appropriate lessons of the master might best be restricted to non-fictional works—or those of merely marginal fictionality—such as A Small Boy and Others and The American Scene, in which elements of fabrication meld imperceptibly with those of stock-taking facticity, and where glitches in successfully moving the actual along appear to have been fixed quite artfully ‘in the mix’ of a reality scrupulously synthesized out of brother William’s brute facts and his own ‘fully blown flower of high fancy.’”
You can read the whole article for free over at the Contemporary Poetry Review.
