Cubism and the Prose Poem

Cubism poses certain delightfully bizarre problems to the structure and reading of the prose poem, specifically. This chapter investigates one issue in regard to such Cubist poets (self-acknowledged and/or publicly acknowledged) as Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and Guillaume Apollinaire. It concerns the interpretation of three lines—how we attach, in our reading, the beginning of the middle line to the line above or the one below. Seemingly innocuous this decision alters the entire poem’s interpretation. As well as the examples, from the three poets mentioned, there will be an attempt at the general, and therefore thorny, issue of interpreting cubist writings and visual works. A perhaps still thornier issue is the origin of the cubist prose poem, since there are several claimers to that title. A side issue having to do with the punctuation of the poem, has always piqued my curiosity, when Apollinaire removes all punctuation from his proofs of Alcools. When can a Long Poem, like Zone, be a prose poem in poetry? Are we thinking about length often, and how?