Bishop, Lowell, and the Confessional Prose Poem

Were mid-century American poets simply uninterested in formal innovations, in pushing against generic norms like their modernists forebearers? Some think so: critics from Stephanie Burt to Bob Perelman argue that the major breakthroughs of mid-century poets were in poetic content, not craft. But if the prose poem does seem to vanish at mid-century, it’s not because these poets weren’t writing them. That these writers did not always use the generic term “prose poem” to describe their projects makes their work all the more significant to the history of the genre. Of course, this is a genre that has long facilitated resistance to conventional notions of genre, so it should come as no surprise that poets responsive to the prose-poetry tradition might navigate around its terminology. Thus, at times these poets gravitated toward other terms of description even as they deployed techniques associated with the prose poem. But, at other times, avoiding the term “prose poem” was strategic, a way around publication norms anchored in fixed genre expectations. Attending to the circumstances that prompt avoidance teaches us about the reception of the prose poem and other hybrid genres at mid-century.