Forum Q&A: Cassandra Atherton responds

With more questions than there was time to answer them, our inaugural ‘What’s Poetry Got To Do With It… Got To Do With It?’ forum in July concluded before our panellists could respond to many of provoking queries raised by our attendees. In this post-Forum Q&A, poet Cassandra Atherton generously replies to a series of audience questions elicited by her discussion on the possibilities offered by the prose poetry form.

—I found your intro interesting regarding fighting confinement through prose poetry, I agree that comedic poems are valuable, especially when they sneak up on you with their focus. I really enjoyed your reading! How does the prose of prose poetry sneak up on you if it is in a book of prose poetry?
ANDREW

—I'm interested in hearing more about your ideas re: the relationship between prose poetry as a form and the quotidian and women's experiences. (The immediate example of a lineated poem that covers both themes is something like Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer)
ELENA

—Talking about prose poetry and the confinement in lineated poetry/ its subtextual voices, I'd be curious to hear how it might relate to trans and non-binary womanhood possibly?
JOCELYN

I'm wondering if there could be a little commentary on multisensorial approach to poetry. Yes, writing on the page, like a train it is a contained space (thanks Michel de Certeau), but how can the performatives take us into more interesting spaces that can disrupt gendered language, disenfranchised groups etc.
KLARE

You use an epigraph to begin your suite of poems that appears in the anthology ‘The Six Senses’ from 2019. It is from Plato, and it reads ‘At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet’. My first question is, was Plato right—does love create poets? My second question is interested in the kind of love that appears in your ‘Touch’ poems and it relates to the humour, irony, the ‘I’ persona within these poems, and the twinned relationship between the beautiful and the abject. What kind of love appears in your ‘Touch’ poems? Whose love is it, and how are you dealing with power relations through these poems?

CASSANDRA ATHERTON

Thanks so much for your question, Andrew. I’d actually say that many books of prose poetry don’t identify themselves as prose poetry —or sometimes even as poetry. When I was doing research for a prose poetry book, recently, it was really difficult to find books of prose poems without having the physical text to look through (or pages in Google books to scan) and there are surprisingly few books that are composed entirely of prose poems. There are even writers like Maggie Nelson and Lydia Davis who write prose poems but resist categorisation of their works. Additionally, I think that, more generally, we are trained to see and read sentences and paragraphs in different ways to lines of poetry, so even if we recognise a prose poem on the page, we are to some extent wrestling against learned convention to read them as poems. Finally, the works in anthologies of prose poetry can still be surprising, even when the word ‘prose poetry’ is part of the title. This is because poets tackle sentences and paragraphs in unusual ways which often undo our expectations about what pieces of prose will be. Peter Johnson’s A Cast Iron Aeroplane That Can Really Fly is a great example of this.

Hi Elena, I love your mention of Bernadette Mayer. As I’m sure you know, she also wrote some amazing prose poetry, for example: The Desire of Mothers to Please Others in Letters. The prose poem box can often represent the mundane spaces of domesticity; a box of entrapment for women. Furthermore, Joy Fehr in her article, ‘Female Desire and Prose Poetry’ discusses the prose poem’s use of gaps and spaces, and its fragmentation as rupturing patriarchal linearity and closure. Holly Iglesias in her brilliant Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry politicizes the prose poem box reclaiming the derogatory slang term “box,” used for women’s genitalia:

‘It speaks from inside a box of text of the confinement of gender construction. It uses the box as a pressure cooker, sand box, sanctuary, laboratory, dungeon, treasure chest, fleshing out a sensibility of grief and mischief, terror and outrage, menace and joy, sabotage and restoration.’

Some of Nin Andrew’s books are fabulous in this area of investigation, including The Book of Orgasms.

Thanks Jocelyn and Klare, these are great questions and as they traverse some of the same ground, I’ll answer them together. Prose poetry is flexible and frequently transgressive, it disrupts categories and ruptures expectation. It lends itself to different gender expressions and frees the poet from the convention of lineation in poetry. Importantly, prose poetry is as much about what is outside the box as inside and many younger poets in the US are combining fully justified boxes of prose poetry with what has been called the free-line (single sentences that run all the way to the right margin and wrap onto the next line, set apart from the prose poem box) to demonstrate a tension between freedom and constraint. Donna Stonecipher is probably even more useful than de Certeau in her discussion of prose poetry’s space and she discusses its city rhythms. These rhythms reverberate both inside and outside the prose poem box and coupled with (as stated in an earlier question) the prose poem’s disruption of linearity and closure, means it’s a form that is always in the process of becoming; it is always rejecting the scripts of hegemonic and social convention.

 I love these questions!  Plato was probably having a go at Homer. As a philosopher his quarrel with poetry, among other things, seems to have been its misleading explorations of nature and the divine. I thought it was a great epigraph for my Touch sequence as these poems have got some tongue-in-cheek moments about love, poetry and philosophy but they also, as a sequence, seriously explore the stereotyping of women and concepts of female sexuality. So, the first person narrator in these poem’s isn’t me. I think there is still some desire to read first person “I” poems as confessional or autobiographical. The only reason I like to make this clear is because I think it’s more effective if the protagonist represents more than just my own experiences. In this sequence I confer agency on women who are largely silent in the traditional literary and cultural record, giving them vigorous internal lives. Each prose poem which contains an element of dark humour provides an opportunity to critique dominant culture by disrupting and asserting authority and it often provides a means by which women poets discuss social and sexual mores.