Heritage and the Prose Poem -- Ishmael's Reading Response .1

I write prose poetry. People ask why. I answer: because it's the way I think. It feels natural. Writing in conventional forms feels like prison. A foreign prison. A dirty foreign prison. A dank, dirty foreign prison with shaved heads---and so I blocked the question from my mind until reading the interview with M. Scott Momoday in Creators on Creating.

On page 157, the interviewer asks M. Scott Momaday if working in another country affected Momaday’s writing. Momaday answered that it did, that he began to think about his isolation and the distance from his homeland. When I taught English in Japan, the distance from my homeland and the feeling of being othered (for different reasons than in the States) affected me. So, I began to write poems about things I saw and felt there. As Momaday says on page 159, “…much of my writing has been concerned with the question of man’s relationship to the earth, for one thing. Another theme that has interested me is man’s relationship to himself, his past and his heritage.”

I am mixed (Cherokee, Seminole, West Indian, Scottish-Irish), so being away from the U.S. allowed me to see myself through another lens and reflect on my experience from a distance. My writing became more global but, at the same time, more personal. I did not write about being “American” as I felt a deeper connection to my ancestries and my land, not to a country. If I were to write about nationality, it would be in relation to Indigenous nations.

Further into the interview, Momaday is asked if he differentiates between poetry and prose in a strict sense. Momaday says he does because poetry is “composed in verse,” to which the interviewer brings up the point that many American Indian writers blur the distinction, pass back and forth, “rather freely, between verse and prose.”

Momaday’s reply is this:

That’s a large question, and I’ve thought about it before. The prose pieces in The Way to Rainy Mountain are illustrations of the very thing that I was talking about before, the prose poem. The oral tradition of the American Indian is intrinsically poetic in certain, obvious ways. I believe that a good many Indian writers rely upon a kind of poetic expression out of necessity, a necessary homage to the native tradition, and they have every write and reason to do so…

Before coming to Mills, I had never heard of a prose poem. I wrote narrative poetry in high school, but I always considered it long poetry, not a hybrid of two genres.

In the introduction to volume one of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, editor Peter Johnson writes, “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.” As an artistic form, the prose poem is said to be the “literary genre with an oxymoron for a name,” and continues to elude a universal definition or singular description.

And while the genre is subversive by nature, my primary affinity for it stems from my heritage and the traditions that go along with it.

Momaday continues in the interview to talk about the magic of words and how intrinsically powerful they are. He says “We do not know what we can do with words, but as long as there are those among us who try to find out, literature will be secure.” In prose poetry, I try to evoke thought by way of literary magic where the narrative language speaks of dreams. I don’t know exactly what dreams are or how they work, but I listen to them. I’ve dreamt of meeting someone before I met them or of situations occurring before they happened. Momaday says mystery is “a necessary condition of dreams.” And,like dreams, I feel the power of prose poetry is in mystery.

Many readers (of the Western hemisphere) today do not like mystery. I don’t mean mystery novels, as I imagine those are still quite popular, but in the sense of including into literature things people don’t fully understand or are able to explain. In the real world, it’s okay to say, “I don’t know how that works.” If that sentiment is translated into a novel, no matter how well, the author will be confronted for an explanation. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?! It’s not okay for readers to know enough, to know something exists but not to know “what exactly” it is or how exactly it works or where exactly it is. So, even if it means making up a reason, the Western reader must know.

My prose poetry sets the reader up to find out for herself. Although seemingly more logical than actual dreams, I construct narratives like literary mathematics in that most questions asked of the text can be answered by piecing together bits of information. Those that are not pieced together are in a separate group, left to the imagination or interpretation, as are numerous things in the natural world.

Thought. Creativity. Flow. Balance.