Prose Poetry | Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: Prose Poetry

PROSE POETRY 2026

I have recently been investigating and tuning into prose poetry, getting to know the genre. Now I’m thinking about my own work.

As a start, I have reworked a poem I published in September 2024 (https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2024/09/17/). I have found that the text asked for substantial alteration. It wasn’t just a matter of changing the arrangement of space. Despite the cousinship between the two, this is a different piece, written in a different way, at a different time.

“Looking out from limitation, I see a wide world, expectant.

“The beginning of sunset, a liminal moment in the wheel of the day. Facing east, I feel the sun behind me, still warm though on the brink of descent. Facing east, I see pale blue sky, pink clouds, wooded hills. I am held, fleetingly, by residues of sunlight on a majestic hornbeam whose leaves have begun to turn.

“Early evening, early autumn: a whole world in only seeming suspension between one state and another. The wheel continues to turn. Yet to hold a moment, in the moment, with clear awareness and softened heart makes that moment eternal.

“Looking out from limitation, I see a wide world, expectant.”

June 2, 2026

PROSE POETRY: 2019

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

Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: Prose Poetry

July 11, 2026

PROSE POETRY 2026

June 2, 2026

PROSE POETRY: 2019