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It's no big secret - prose
poetry is a hybrid and, therefore, partially in cognito form. Exploiting all the accessibility
of prose narrative and lucent description, combined with the 'enchanting,
deepening' effects of prosody, the prose poem is without question on to a
winner: with the prose poem, you can have your prosaic cake and
metaphorically eat it.
With its capacity for capturing other forms within its own fluid parameters -
letters, diary extracts, recipes, text messages, e-mails, overheard
conversations, instruction manuals, political speeches, historical tracts
etc., - the prose poem can't help but appear 'inventive' and 'playful'. Its
very hybridity foregrounds this feature. And, with its emphasis on the
non-narrative, it can happily set up a story, only to cut it short via the
use of ellipsis, setting the reader off at altogether new and surprising
tangents, ready to explore discontinuities, red-herrings, dead-ends and
hypertextual gardens of forking paths, all at the drop of a hat. Rhetorical
flourishes may abound; repetitions with variations are de rigeur; the LIST is, perhaps, one of the
prose poem's defining features.
Added to all of this, the prose poem admits multiple discourses - prose poems
include some/all/none of the above and blend them with the redemptive
languages of spirituality and religion; the secular languages of science; the
hermeneutic languages of literary discourse; the quotidian discourse of the
streets; the psychoanalytic languages of dream, nightmare, the subconscious,
and darkly charged erotic desires, and much more. In short, anything pretty
much goes.
Claire Bateman can do all of the above in her prose poems - with knobs
on. She's a proficient and,
sometimes, wonderful exponent of the form. This is without doubt an inventive
book. But crikey! if I have to read one more book with a LIST in every single
poem, on every single page, in virtually every single paragraph, I'll... I'll...
I'll dedicate the rest of my reading and writing time to haiku! Please don't
mistake me - there are parts of this book which are absolutely delightful;
but it is, overall, monotonous and, above all, a triumph of style over
content. For all their urbanity, playfulness and great humour I was, by the
end, just itching for a poem that didn't approach me dressed up in the
oh-so-ironic and challenging costume of a philosopher disguised as a clown.
To be frank, these are the sort of inventions that answer the creative
writing tutor's perpetual questions:
'...yes, and what IS
the most unusual and inventive way into this subject matter; why not choose
an interesting point of view; or a device: begin every stanza with the same
3 rhetorical words; use a different part of the body as a focus for each
stanza; make a list of X, Y or Z; write about your childhood dolls' house
from the point of view of the dolls; make another list; extemporize on
jewelley clasps, buttons and other items of haberdashery, one per stanza;
turn the poem into a set of instructions; or a recipe; or customer
information leaflets; how about using a telephone conversation, or those
irritation direct marketing phone calls we all get at night whilst trying to
relax with our families and friends after a hard day's work in the office;
try telling your story by focusing on what's not said, rather than what is;
give us multiple external points of view onto your main character, even from
characters who aren't in the story; why not examine the concept of 'gold' from the angles of
jewellery, sweet wrappers, childbirth, vegetables, heirlooms, photography;
or why not write some more lists?' And then some.
You can, doubtless, pick up on my irritations. About which I now feel guilty,
because I do like some of these pieces; particularly when the writer drops
all her self-conscious dressing up and just gets on with the business of
dealing with some subject matter, for example:
And the tree
that falls in a forest where no one hears -
does it not
leave a singular stain
of suffering
& birdsong?
or the little scene in the
dolls' house between,
the little
man with his spreading sideburns, his widow's peak & his
historical sense of injury, & the little woman with her diamond
teardrop earrings
& secret Swedenborgian leanings.'
How interesting to read in 'Clasps' a direct domestic/political analogy in
the accusations against these necessary items,
Don't trust
them: like heretics or fifth columnists, they could, at any
moment, turn.'
I was genuinely gripped by the long piece 'The Pale Dress' in which a pale
dress 'left for dead in an alley' is taken in by a sisterhood of nuns, only
to have their whole universe overturned by the influence of this pernicious
vestment, whose absence (after being walled up in a cubicle of the nunnery
like an anchorite herself!) plagues them and drives them to forlorn
wanderings on the highways and byways of existence. This was a brilliant
piece of micro-fiction. As brilliant were the somnolent explorations of
chronically inattentive fathers in the verse poem 'Climatology'. For me,
Bateman is at her best here, or with the other small philosophic observations
such as,
Babyhood... That state of simultaneous
humiliation & decadence from
which full recovery is not possible.'
or
I suspect
it's not falling that people fear, it's rising into a blue that
breaks open
without mercy & without anesthesia.'
The final verse poem 'To a Sky' continues and develops these existential wonderings
quite sublimely,
You couldn't
yet distinguish
[...] between
the voice crying in the wilderness
& the
wilderness wandering inside the voice.
But Bateman is at her worst when she relies on the poor pun of a character
mistaking someone's 'psychic' for their 'sidekick'; or with her incurable
desire to turn most sentences, and then everything else, into a list. When a
writer can really deliver the moving, the profound, and the witty with a
fresh ear and eye, it is a pity that they rely so heavily on the effects of
style and device rather than letting the quality of their writing carry the
weight for them. Not everything needs dressing up to make it appear in its
best light. As Dylan famously sang, 'Even the President of the United States sometimes
has to stand naked.'
© Andy Brown 2005
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