Word: poem
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Robert Bly has said that the prose poem is a symptom of a disintegrating society. For Wright, it may indicate he sees his world dissolving; more likely, he uses the prose poem to stretch she limits of his poetry. By dodging conventional line breaks and assuming a super-charged prosaic style, the poet legitimately, and often successfully, experiments with his work's content and form...
...example, Wright often places a prose poem's main subject in its title, a technique which allows the first lines to focus on an action rather than a noun. Hence the line "laying the foundations of a community, she labors all alone" carries an immediate impetus in a poem called "Regret for a Spider...
Most of the worries of the woman in this poem stem from her attempts to learn a second language, a tongue of stale, curtained windows. She is imprisoned not by the street but by her aversion to her sole option--going down to the street and speaking the street language of the men she will find there. The lines she repeats--"thinks of going down into the street"--are the antithesis of her images of Alaska, the source of "williwas wind," volcanoes, spruces, birds, and the Bering...
...fact, Harris risks avoiding her own voice in some of the poems. Some of these works use a man's voice to tell a tale through his letters, with almost no interjections from the poet herself. Harris's interpretations of the man and his letters lie in how she strings together the images, what images she chooses to have him describe, and in the creation of this male character. The end result is a near-complete adoption of another voice which threatens to imprison the poet, who is reduced to reading and retelling letters. Nevertheless, the experiment works when Harris...
DIRECT EXPERIENCE seems a more exciting source of images in the poems. When talking in her own voice. Harris tends to adopt interesting word combinations and compound words: "broomhandle-killing/that squirrel, carstunned and lost" she writes in "Manhattan As A Second Language." Asides in poetry are always dangerous, but when Harris writes in the first person she deals successfully with complex, convoluted images without losing the thread of her poetry. In "The Coddling Moth," she successfully creates a complicated, sensual comparison between a man and a moth, follows the moth into an apple grove, and leaps to agricultural science...