heretical thoughts

Today I made a connection between the poetry manuscript I’m working on and Bridget Jones’s Diary. I’m not kidding.

So I express myself a little differently. I mix up the man with the divine. I sprinkle a few Sanskrit words around, dabble in philosophy, babble incoherently at times.

It’s still the same basic idea. Why shouldn’t it appeal to the same audience?

Not that I think it should or it will. It’s just interesting to wonder what it is that draws people toward conventional “lite” styles. There’s a curse or a miasma of some kind settled around poetry. A poison mist. “I, too, dislike it.”*

I don’t want to blame this on anything or even to figure it out. I’d like to come up with some far fetched explanation. I’d like to trace some course of evolution toward a future of new forms. Disappearance of the diary, emergence of illustrated poetry, convergence of hysterical prose poems and romantic fiction, explosive mixtures of the sacred and profane in liturgy, who knows what else.

Part of what I like about prose poems is the removal of the barrier of line breaks. The poem becomes more accessible to the non-reader of poetry. WHY why why should line breaks be threatening. I don’t know, but they are. I’m telling you, they are!

I think it was Lehman’s introduction to Great American Prose Poems that discussed this, talking about the non-threatening quality of the innocuous paragraph. Unfortunately, I’ve brought that book back to the library, so I can’t look it up to quote the exact statement.

I guess I really ought to own that book. But I’m not in love with it. Forget it!

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*Marianne Moore, “Poetry”