The State of Flash (and Prose Poetry) — Why We Write ‘Em!
Hi, my name’s Christopher, and I write a lot of prose poems. Why? Well, the short answer is: Russell Edson. The slightly less short answer is: Russell Edson, James Tate, Amy Gerstler, Richard Brautigan, and Charles Simic.
But that’s just me.
When other writers are sitting down in the privacy of their own little unheated garrets to dip quill into inkpot, what’s going through their heads as they decide to write prose poems or flash fiction? In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I got on the horn, cranked up the email, and bugged a few tolerant, hard-working writer friends of mine. This is a list of what I got.
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The Question:
When sitting down to write, what makes you decide to write a prose poem (as opposed to a verse poem) or flash fiction (as opposed to a short story)?
The Responses:
<Flash Fiction>
When something I write turns into a short short form, it’s a function of editing, not the initial writing. Because stories are like children—no two are alike, or follow quite the same rules — some tell themselves best with more space, more words. Others sketch themselves in a few bold strokes. I find I discover these things as I go back and shape the story. Sitting down, I don’t try to make this kind of determination, any more than I would, upon undressing to conceive a child, say, “Baby, let’s make a red-headed policewoman who loves Christmas and seagulls.”
<Prose Poems>
My default usually is to write in lines, but sometimes they might seem to be getting in the way of what is trying to happen. Either the lines are becoming too important in my head, and they’re starting to take too much precedence over other sounds, or other things that are happening, or just the feel of it feels more like it would work better without the device of the line. Sometimes it’s just as simple as feeling.
<PP>
The last time I wrote a prose poem, I was in a little village in Ohio, in an apartment over Main Street. It was cold and raining, and the Amish were riding by in their buggies, with horses’ hooves clopping. I remember looking out the window and there was a drop of rain on a telephone line with light shooting through it. It felt like an alternate reality, a dream reality, and the poem came out a kind of stream of consciousness thing. It came out as a prose poem. I didn’t make a conscious decision about it.
<FF>
I don’t often know that I’m getting into a flash fiction piece until I start writing. I’ll get working on it and suddenly I realize I’ve said everything I needed to say and that it doesn’t require fifteen more pages of development. Which can be a real relief. Then when I revise, it almost always requires me cutting out more stuff, because I was preparing to have a very long story. It’s rare that I will feel from the beginning, “Oh this is just gonna be 500 words.” I may have already begun deepening plot points that I expected to be picking up later. Realizing that I didn’t need those at all, I’ll cut them out. Then I’ll go work on language, work on sentences, etc. Once I realize that it’s a flash fiction piece, I try to aim at as much compression as possible.
<PP>
I think the prose poetry happens when I’m doing more stream of consciousness. And lineated verse happens when I’m thinking more musically. I don’t know, though, that the form reflects the content necessarily. It’s more the conditions of composition.
<PP>
What makes me decide to write a prose poem? Pure panic.
<FF>
With flash fiction I want to capture a moment, not the grand scale of the characters and far reaching plots. What I’m trying to do there is pinpoint either a specific emotion or a moment that reveals some essential part of that character’s life or of a larger subject. What do I mean by moment? A moment is essentially a scene which relates the entire problem. What did Chekhov say, that a writer’s job is to define a problem correctly, not to solve the problem. So a moment is when the problem has been defined really clearly, and in that way it stands on its own to reveal the character’s conflict, her hopes, the problem of the setting, etc.
<PP>
Sometimes I get tired of writing lineated lyrics about myself and I want to write prose narratives about other people.
<PP>
I don’t think of the prose poem as primarily a lyric genre, though it can have elements of the lyric in it. My prose poems generally tell stories—stories in which a fantastical transformation happens. In one there’s a magical kitchen, and in another this guy’s imagining hunting narwhals and by the end there’s a narwhal sitting in a chair in his kitchen eating dinner with him.
<FF>
I feel like flash fiction actually chooses me, rather than me choosing it.
<PP>
I write all my prose poems in a little notebook. They come out that way because the notebook is pretty much square. To write a verse poem on it, the page isn’t the right shape and the lines are big and fat. I started writing my series of prose poems on a balcony at night, without a light. There were street lights, but I couldn’t see the words I was writing. I would just go until I kind of felt like I knew where the end of the page was and then just start another page, so the line breaks didn’t matter. I was just getting it down. I’d get off of work at the liquor store, and I’d buy a pint of vodka and a Squirt. You pour a half pint of vodka in 20 ounces of Squirt… When you get drunk really fast like that you have a small window for your ideas, before you forget the line you wrote before. So you got to just write them down and not worry about the format.
<FF>
The flash fiction pieces that I have done almost entirely come in one burst. I’m driving, brushing my teeth, doing something in the yard… It’s sort of like a diamond drops into my hand. I take it entire, and I just sit down and push the whole thing out in one go, and then it’s done. Then I’ll go back and polish and refine it. But for longer pieces, I will get a character who’s doing something, for example, and that will be the inspiration and potential which will grow into a longer piece. But when flash fiction happens, *snap* it’s in one sitting where I sit down and the idea is there and I’m just transcribing what comes to me fully formed. It is an instantaneous virgin birth.
<PP>
Prose poetry flows uninhibited like a great waterfall, as opposed to lineated poetry which is like a faucet turned on and off by the poet—a faucet with two knobs, one for cold water and another for hot.
<PP>
When I’m working in a series of lineated lyric poems, a prose poem is a good way to interrupt the movement from poem to poem and give it a different pace, to make it less tedious for the reader. For example, in a series I’ve written about lynching, I just wanted a block of text that would be immersive to the reader the way I’d imagined being burned alive would be immersive. So that poem doesn’t have sentences or anything. It just has phrases. There’s no punctuation in it. Also, I’ve used a prose poem in my series of narrative poems set in a fantastical archive with a limitless collection, and there I think of it almost as a visual element. With both of these poems, I don’t expect a reader to sit down and read them straight through, but sort of look at each as a block of text and kind of have their eye move around inside it. It’s like an abstract element. They don’t have sentences, they have these blocks of words.
<PP>
I was just so tired of feeling like a pussy, and there’s something about a prose poem where instead of playing with lace, you’re working with wood. It’s just there, it’s a block, it’s a big manly block, instead of “Should I break after the word break and then put bread on the next line? Won’t that be clever: Break / bread?” You get that in your mind and you start questioning yourself.
<FF>
When I get an idea for a story, the idea usually comes with its genre or form already hardwired into it. So I will know the moment I sit down that this is going to be a this kind of piece, and there’s never a conscious thought on my part, “Alright, I’m going to get my pencil out and begin writing…maybe this, maybe that.” Everything I write is merely when the idea comes to me. I get an idea for a short story, it’ll be a short story. I get an idea for a flash fiction piece, it’ll be flash fiction. It’ll never try to be anything else.
<PP>
Some days you feel like you’ve been stepped on. And a poem with line breaks just doesn’t cut it, no matter how long you make them.
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Well, there you have it. Interesting variety, interesting overlaps, interesting what people didn’t talk about. I’ll leave interpreting of the data up to you, dear reader. Thank you to the poets and fiction writers consulted for this survey: Steve Castro, Elizabeth Hoover, J Keirn-Swanson, Dustin Nightingale, Michael Poore, Melissa Rhoades, Sarah Ruhlen, and Alexander Weinstein. Good sports and champs the lot of them.