02 | June | 2026 | Contemplative Inquiry

Still meditating on the way I want to write prose poetry, I notice that recent work tends to have a different feel to the earlier pieces I have read and connected with. This gives me an enhanced sense of a rich tradition to work in.

In The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, (2019), [1], I find longer pieces with more story telling, adjacent to flash fiction yet not the same. The poet’s state of awareness continues to take precedence over encounters and events.

Here is an extract from Anne Ryland’s Running, I become. She is in Northumberland, England, running towards the Scottish border.

“Running, redrafting myself, I return to my primal language of sigh and puff and laugh; I become sweat and tear, the low-thud song of my lungs. I become a woman wintering; I follow the pink-footed geese crossing the hard blue sky in a great wavering W, and when it sharpens to a V, a letter of purpose, I join the formation of those who know where to go and how and why, gliding upstream in their upwash, their wingbeat. Running, I become the border.”

[1] Anne Caldwell & Oz Hardwick (eds.) The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry: Scarborough, 2019

PROSE POETRY: 1915

“In a rectangular channel of space light drops in oblique layers of polished cubes sustaining gods and fragments.

“Monstrous human heads without backs protrude lips satisfied with the taste of pride.

“Seductive goddesses, cat-faced and maiden-breasted, sit eternally stroking smooth knees.”

Jessie Dismorr (1915) Egyptian Gallery London Notes (1)

I am looking at prose poetry (2) as a new form of exploration/expression in my contemplative inquiry. My phone’s AI describes it as “a literary hybrid that uses the sentence and paragraph structure of prose but relies on the compressed, figurative language, rhythm and emotional intensity of verse”.

Now that I am reading prose poetry, I find that the use of prose structure is fairly consistent but that the use of language is more varied than the AI suggests. A liminal and rebel space in literature, this genre (if it is a genre) has morphed and changed over time and in the hands of different practitioners.

I see creative writing as an organic part of my inquiry and not as an incidental decoration. This is why I have engaged with haiku (3) and have been writing them for some time. I shall continue to write haiku, whilst also being attracted to prose poetry as another, more flexible and expansive, option. Whilst not committing myself to a date, I plan to publish my own prose poetry in this blog.

(1) Jessie Dismorr Egyptian Gallery in Jeremy Noel-Tod The Peguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson Penguin Random House UK (Kindle edition)

(2) Jessie Dismorr – Jessica Stewart Dismorr (1885-1939) is best known as a painter and illustrator. In 1913 she joined the Rebel Art Centre and signed the Vorticist Manifesto, championing the depiction of the dynamics of the machine and challenging the public’s conservative views of art. She contributed 4 works (now apparently lost) to a Vorticist exhibion in London. She was also a writer and Egyptian Gallery is part of her London Notes collection.

(3) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2026/04/26/

Contemplative Inquiry

June 2, 2026

PROSE POETRY: 2019

June 2, 2026

PROSE POETRY: 1915