Word: wrighting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...poem's structural twists are made in their content rather than in their syntax: Wright moves much more quickly from localized scenes to global concepts in the prose poems than elsewhere. In "On Having My Pocket Picked In Rome," he writes...
...starting with the small scene set up in the title and relaxing the poetic structure. Wright successfully moves to and captures the complicated concept of one person's relation to a crowd of strangers. Other prose poems similarly sneak as if unintentionally from the simple to the complex. Free of the poetic structure that would hold the ideas and images to a central thread. Wright can hop from one to the next on the strength of association...
WHICH IS NOT TO SAY the prose poems lack structure. The adjectives are often extravagant--"hilarious and hellish little boys," he writes in "Old Bud"--but they serve to inject the poet's perspective into what is initially a third-person description. And while some of Wright's speech-like rhetorical devices might water down a poem, they add vigor to the paragraph forms. The packing together of lyrical sounds--as well as the repetition of words--creates a strong sense of unity in poems like "In Gallipoli...