Poetry of the Southwestern United States, Number Five
David Meischen & Scott Wiggerman, Editors
$19.95 — 146 pages
Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose showcases the work of eighty poets—120 works that demonstrate how prose can become poetry—prose poems, flash fictions and nonfictions, haibun, tanka prose, and cheribun. The arrangement is seasonal, opening with a focus on spring and closing with the winter months. These pages feature skilled poets demonstrating the magic in words that are both poetry and prose.
From the Foreword
At some point in our part of the world, horses slipped away from the Spanish invaders and adapted to the harsh terrain. No one to rein them in—to train them, feed them, groom them—they evolved into creatures of the wild. Mustangs—part horse, part something else entirely.
What happens when a poem escapes from the stricture of the line? When syntax spools across the page, margin to margin, sentence spilling into sentence? Is there a spark of some kind that transforms a paragraph into a prose poem? Does the prose poem actually exist—as tangibly as the mustang? Or is it a mythical beast, literature’s unicorn?
We take the mustang point of view. We’re not sure exactly how to define the prose poem. But we know one when we read one. And it’s been here all along, camouflaged among pages of prose, as in Willa Cather’s glorious evocation of a Southwestern sky, quoted below. Read Cather’s passage on its own terms. Forget who wrote it. Forget the narrative it embellishes. You’re reading a prose poem.
from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
The ride back to Santa Fé was something under four hundred miles. The weather alternated between blinding sandstorms and brilliant sunlight. The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere anthills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.