Preferring prose poems
the weather app
We stepped foot in a pool last fall with our masks on. bodies trying to remember what the water felt like outside of a shower. there is no normal when the sun is beaming down with a vengeance. the summer months have changed. used to run barefoot between water slides held up by old wet wooden beams. a walk during the day didn’t mean imminent doom at night unable to sleep. measure stability by how long it takes the tank top to stick to your skin. this was supposed to be a poem about summertime but it’s too hot.
Lately my posts are inspired by submission calls I come across online and maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it shows that my subconscious is trying to get me to submit. Anyways, I came across a prompt for essays and I automatically started writing a prose poem. Maybe I’ve always thought in poems and that’s why I had to revise research papers so often. Why be concrete when you can be murky, not quite abstract. But it didn’t dawn on me that I misinterpreted the genre until I was already three lines into a poem that will now get buried in saved documents.
Then I started thinking about a prose poem and short story class I took during undergrad. Poems can feel like short stories or snippets so it almost felt intentionally confusing when the class was divided into those two sections. Just when I got used to identifying narrators in a short story then we would flip to speaker’s use of pauses in a prose poem.
The block format has always felt to me like it forces you to somehow get to “the point” quicker. I have a tendency to overexplain or add additional extended sentences in an effort to illuminate which often results in something like this sentence: not saying much. That contained nature doesn’t allow you to linger or meander with line breaks. As someone who loves a good unexpected break, the lines in this way help me remain focused in a different way. You also get the cool unexpected change if you shift from left justified only after the poem is written out.
This is less of a forms lesson and more of a rumination on something that feels less stressful than an essay’s introductory paragraph. Maybe a prose poem is always just the beginning. Everyone feels their own limitations or lack of in various forms and I can feel trapped in a singular sentence. The prose poem somehow separates that for me.
It is also the closest visually to a school format. Like seeing back to school advertisements without a tinge of nervousness in sight because that part of life is behind you. It ends just when you feel like the lines can go on forever.