More Than a Failed Essay: On the Prose Poem

My mother’s bed was always a site of storytelling for my family. There, my mother transported my brother and me from our lives in America to her own childhood in sixties Iran: cousins climbing trees in orchards, uncles smoking opium and playing cards, nannies telling bedtime stories about the imams, and disco parties by the Caspian. These were stories she told and retold until I knew them by heart.

When I was fourteen, my ninth-grade English teacher instructed our class to interview a family member and from our notes write a short memoir—five pages, double-spaced. My mother was my obvious choice. The first draft I wrote was twenty pages, single-spaced. In one form or another, I continued writing and revising this homework assignment—what I thought of as the bedtime stories—for the next ten years.

As a graduate student pursuing my MFA at Virginia Tech, I took a workshop on form and theory in poetry with the multi-genre writer Lucinda Roy. We studied several forms, including the sestina, the ballad, the sonnet—and, of course, the prose poem. The prose poem defies easy characterization because it exists at the borderlands of two always-evolving genres—prose and poetry—neither of which are easy to define in the first place. (As an undergraduate, I encountered Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” for example, in both a flash fiction anthology and a poetry anthology.) Like traditional prose, the prose poem often leans into narrative components and is typically formatted in paragraphs rather than stanzas. And like traditional poetry, prose poetry generally distinguishes itself through sound play with a strong emphasis on repetition and parallelism. It is also frequently characterized by its brevity and attention to heightened imagery. In a literary culture with a long tradition of teaching strict, if sometimes contradictory and counterintuitive, divisions between genres, it is no wonder that the prose poem lends itself to political discourse. Prose poetry’s hybridity exposes and disrupts a genre binary (poetry versus prose) that we sometimes still forget is, after all, a construct—not unlike race, gender, and class.

When Roy summed up the prose poem as “basically a failed essay,” she was telling a joke—we all laughed—but, as I neared graduation and revised my thesis, that supplementary definition really clicked for me. It felt like a challenge—or at least a prompt. After that workshop, I opened the folder on my laptop that I had tenderly labeled “fodder.” It’s the digital folder where all my embryonic scribbles go. The folder included ten years’ worth of off-and-on attempts at the bedtime stories in different forms: sometimes lineated poems, often fragmented essays. That day, I wrote “Bedtime Story (2)” from the ashes of a “failed essay” in fifteen or so minutes. And in the ten days that followed, I wrote eleven other prose poems, all entitled “Bedtime Story.” Even if the subject matter was challenging, drafting this incarnation of the stories was fast and easy.

In retrospect, it makes sense to me why the prose poem was suited for the bedtime stories and, conversely, why the other forms I had tried were not. The oral stories I was trying to recreate on the page had been short in delivery, told in clips over several years, and in a somewhat call-and-response style. As long-form essays, the bedtime stories lost these features. As prose poems, however, the stories were able to mimic oral storytelling.

I now also understand why lineated poetry was a mismatch as well. What I find so irresistible about lineation is its possibility for enjambment, which I see as an opportunity for meaningful musicality, defamiliarization, and juxtaposition. In my attempts to craft the bedtime stories as lineated poems, I struggled to provide the historical and cultural context that I thought some readers would need while also lineating these poems meaningfully. To show you what I mean, here is an early lineated draft of “Bedtime Story (9),” originally titled “Operator”:

Teheran, Iran, Nov. 4—Moslem students stormed the United States Embassy in Teheran today, seized about 90 Americans and vowed to stay there until the deposed Shah was sent back from New York to face trial in Iran.
—New York Times, 1979

Tomorrow, the front page of the New
York Times will mark the start of the Hostage Crisis:
the woman to become my mother will watch day [ ]
tick upward, reverse Advent Calendar, on  American Held Hostage
above Frank Reynolds’s head each night in the condo
she shares with Daash Ali or at the university with Arash
or Azin, and soon the American government will freeze
their bank accounts, and they still will not have work
permission or rent money while they listen to classmates request
Vince Vance & the Valiants on the radio—

but tomorrow’s fragility is still hours away.

Today my fledgling mother dials 0 for operator
outside a Vendy’s where she licks her bottom lip
before ordering chili, the request a string of vocabulary
words from English class. She misses her parents’ language.
Neither she nor the operator have seen American Held Hostage
yet. When my mother tells the country
code, the operator requests
one moment before connecting here                 to there.
 

Below is the prose poem revision, which became “Bedtime Story (9)” and was published in Narrative:

Iranian students in America watch Frank Reynolds every night on American Held Hostage and then Nightline. The woman to become my mama watches Day [ ] tick upward, reverse Advent Calendar, in the flat she shares with her brother. The U.S. government freezes the Iranian students’ bank accounts. Their classmates listen to Vince Vance & the Valiants on the radio. No one has work permission or rent money. One day before the crisis began, my mama dialed 0 for operator outside a Wendy’s where she had ordered chili. The request was a string of vocabulary words she memorized in class when she most missed her parents’ language, the smell of saffron. When she listed the country code to the operator, it was no confession: she didn’t slump against the pay phone. Neither had seen the front page of tomorrow. The operator did not hang up or disconnect her call. She did not suggest she go back home to closed borders. There was just one request before connecting here to there. Please hold.

Because the prose poem structurally thrives on concise language and patterning (and the break thereof), the repetition of historical facts in short, declarative sentences becomes rhythmic. Later in the poem, the parallel repetition of time markers (“when”) also becomes a patterning device that both associatively and chronologically threads the poem. What’s more, breaking the earlier syntactical pattern of short, declarative clauses builds tension and speeds the pacing in a similar way to how a strategically enjambed line (or a rhetorically aware oral storyteller) might.

One of the greatest assets of the prose poem is that its form provides breathing room for expansive characterization, scene, setting, dialogue, plot, and tension alongside sound play. Although plot, too, is at work in these poems, the character sketches of my mother’s family (and me, the recipient of these stories and the next-generation storyteller) are the most defining structural elements in the series. “Bedtime Story (4),” for example, is a somewhat self-aware character sketch of both the nanny and my mother’s family.

What I have not said yet is that the prose poem forced me to reckon with one of the big questions of my life: who am I really writing for? Writing this series as prose poems challenged an orientalist framework of “accessibility” that I was writing toward; it pushed against my notions of exposition, audience expectations, and othering. Like a lot of people of color in the US, I waded through the American school system without seeing myself represented in the books we read and, in my first year of college, I quickly learned that “people like me”—a queer woman of color and second-generation immigrant from the “axis of evil”—were not part of the canon. Many of my (white) peers in writing workshops found my autobiographical work “inaccessible”—a critique I read over and over again when my workshopped poems were handed back to me after class. Why did I insist on writing “Nowruz” instead of “Persian New Year”? And shouldn’t I italicize it and include a translation at the bottom? Why start with plot or characterization or dialogue when I could open with a history lesson of the 1979 revolution instead? Why choose to “confuse” my (white) readers again and again?

What I did not realize was that my peers’ mandate to translate my work linguistically and culturally was not a mandate I had to fulfill; my readers could use context clues and Google in order to become richer, more informed readers. (And, a few years later, when I took another poetry workshop during my MFA, this is exactly what I openly asked of my peers once I learned the terms primary and secondary audience.) At eighteen, though, when I first tried turning the bedtime stories into lineated poems, I was a very young writer studying English at Johns Hopkins University alongside those I saw as smarter, more authoritative, and certainly wealthier than me. I was not well-read enough outside of the standard American literary canon to know that I was joining a rich community of contemporary and sometimes queer writers of color who also negotiate the question of audience and the blurry lines between what is too explicit and too implicit in their work. Imposter syndrome was in full swing, and my writing became both hesitant and increasingly impersonal. My poems resisted the lyric “I”—what Carmen Giménez calls self-implication in her workshops—and tried to solve the “problem” of my otherness by either framing my family’s experiences through a deeply metaphorical lens or by erasing my brownness altogether during the space between writing a first draft and then handing it in for workshop. After all, I did not want to be “inaccessible.”

In his 1978 book Orientalism, the Palestinian-American scholar and activist Edward Said conceptualizes orientalism as the West’s political strategy of framing a superior Western “us” against an inferior Eastern “them” through caricature, cliché, and stereotype in order to justify the violence of imperialism. When I encountered Said’s seminal text during the second semester of my MFA program, I was already exhausted, frustrated, and disillusioned about writing autobiographical poetry for a white American audience. Providing explicit historical and cultural context in my writing felt like an act of defeat—as if it made me a traitor to my “real” audience, whom, I felt, would somehow either come to my writing 100% equipped with the exact personal knowledge they needed to understand the poem or would be 100% willing (and able) to research their own gaps in information. I did not consider that I was essentializing my own imagined primary audience: Iranian Americans are a heterogenous group of people with diverse backgrounds. What began as an adverse response to early workshop experiences where I felt othered and inadequate eventually became a rigid anti-exposition stance that compromised my writing’s coherence.

In the months before I wrote the final iterations of the bedtime stories, I was grappling with how to integrate the needs of my potential readers while also honoring my commitment to writing about my own experience from an anti-orientalist lens. The act of writing about the experience of first learning about my identity and history as a young person, particularly in the form of the prose poem, gave me permission to include contextual exposition. Of course a bedtime story—an instructional form—should include exposition. One of its defining features is narrative. The prose poem leveled my childhood knowledge of Iranian-American history with that of many secondary readers without cheating the communities I consider to be my primary readers. For them both, I hope these stories in their new form feel rhythmic and resonant—resoundingly alive.