Stephen Fredman ends his excellent book 'Poet’s Prose' (1983), which concentrates on poets Williams, Creeley, and Ashbery who he claims alter the possibilities of their poetry by introducing decidedly prose elements, by examining the practice of poets emerging in the last decades of the twentieth century often associated with language poetry. He concludes that their work engages the breakdown of distinctions between poetry and prose. For these writers, he claims, the preceding exploration of the relations and differences between poetry and prose is no longer of interest.
In this symposium, we ask what is to be gained by investigating the inherent tensions between prose and poetry as these emerge in a diverse body of work which, borrowing from Fredman, might usefully be called poet’s prose. In what ways do the tensions between poetry and prose provide a rich and troubling vein of exploration and possibility from the early twentieth century through the first two decades of the twenty-first century. What is to be gained by examining this tension rather than obviating it? How does our multi-media age amplified by the internet alter this binary? Passages from texts rich in their articulations of prose and poetry will be examined.
All welcome.
