The Homeless Heart: Abstraction and the Prose Poem

This essay will trace thought and abstraction and its place in prose poetry. Some practitioners of prose poetry (for example Robert Bly, Robert Hass, and James Tate) tend to think of this particular literary mode as either 1) being short, compressed narratives, often surrealist in nature, with a heavy foregrounding of a central trope around which the sentences form a constellation, or 2) being a lyrical engagement of a single image in the form of a lexical still life (e.g., Francis Ponge). There is of course another line that stretches from contemporary figures such as Lyn Hejinian and Claudia Rankine, to William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and even Charles Baudelaire, writers whose work is guided by word, phrase, and thought rather than by story or representation. This essay does not intend to offer a definitive representation of all the possibilities for abstraction present in the prose-poetic landscape. Instead it focuses on the prose poetry of John Ashbery, in particular his long work, Three Poems as a case study of abstraction. I will indicate Ashbery’s conscious inheritance of Stein’s “democratic prose” as the necessary condition for his establishing the experience of multifarious thought within the context of the prose poem.