Writing Prompt: Prose Poem

Now it’s your turn. For writers who have been struggling to find the form that breathes their stories to life, prose poetry has a growing literary tradition we can learn from. The prose poem can slant lyric, as it does in Saba Keramati’s poem “My Aquarius moon won’t let me rest,” in which the speaker reflects associatively on the nature of her inner monologue. It can also slant narrative, as it does in Sonya Lara’s poem “America at 3am,” which details a scene the speaker imagines her father enacting. Some prose poems use traditional punctuation, like “I do not know how to write pretty poems” by Adele Elise Williams, whereas others establish their cadence through anaphora and repetition, as in Summer Farah’s “Portrait of Each Moon that Has Seen Link Live.” 

Prose poems need not be brief. Hope Wabuke’s prose poem “How to Protect Yourself from White Men with Guns in America,” for example, is a long list of contradictory rules (“Don’t walk too fast. Don’t walk too slow,” it begins) that are impossible to follow. Visually overwhelming, the poem underscores the racism Black victims of police brutality face in the American criminal legal system. Excerpts from Sister Tongue by Farnaz Fatemi, “Winter Solstice, 2020” by Sarah Hansen, and “A Study through Homes” by Ae Hee Lee also push against the prose poem’s classic shape as a short block of text. The white space between sections in these prose poems function as a heavier caesura than a typical stanza break. Readers searching for a primer might consider borrowing from their local library the anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present edited by David Lehman.

If you need a prompt to get started on your own prose poem, consider how your family has created their own mythologies. What is a story you heard over and over again during your childhood? What is a story that requires a deep-dive backstory to tell—the type of exposition that resists lineation? Consider the image’s associative potential in the prose poem as well as how repetition of words or sentence structure might provide opportunities for sound play. Adapt this prompt as necessary to your own life circumstances. Write your own “failed essay.” Call it a prose poem instead.