PROSE POETRY TODAY
by contemplativeinquiry
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
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Contemplative Inquiry 