British Prose Poetry: The Poems Without Lines

by Jane Monson (Editor)

Overview

This book is the first collection of essays on the British prose poem. With essays by leading academics, critics and practitioners, the book traces the British prose poem’s unsettled history and reception in the UK as well as its recent popularity. The essays cover the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries exploring why this form is particularly suited to the modern age and yet can still be problematic for publishers, booksellers and scholars. Refreshing perspectives are given on the Romantics, Modernists and Post-Modernists, among them Woolf, Beckett and Eliot as well as more recent poets like Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Claudia Rankine, Jeremy Over and Vahni Capildeo. British Prose Poetry moves from a contextual overview of the genre’s early volatile and fluctuating status, through to crucial examples of prose poetry written by established Modernist, surrealist and contemporary writers. Key questions around boundaries are discussed more generally in terms of race, class and gender. The British prose poem’s international heritage, influences and influence are explored throughout as an intrinsic part of its current renaissance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030085582
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	01/23/2019
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

Jane Monson is a Mentor at the University of Cambridge, UK. She was previously Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She is the editor of This Line is not for Turning (2011), an anthology of contemporary British prose poetry. Her poetry collections include Speaking Without Tongues (2010) and The Shared Surface (2013).

Table of Contents

Introduction Jane Monson 1

Part I: The Story of the British Prose Poem

1 “Hidden” Form: The Prose Poem in English Poetry David Caddy

2 The British Prose Poem and “Poetry” in Early Modernism Margueritte S. Murphy

3 The Flourishing of the Prose Poem in America and Britain Robert Vas Dias

Part II: The Early Narrators

4 The Marvellous Clouds:

Reflections on the Prose Poetry of Woolf, Baudelaire and Williams Michael O’Neill

5 “I grow more & more poetic”: Virginia Woolf and Prose Poetry Jane Goldman

6 James Joyce and the Prose Poem Michel Delville
7 T.S. Eliot’s Prose (Poetry) Vidyan Ravinthiran

8 A Weakening Syntax: How It Is with Samuel Beckett’s Prose Poetry Scott Annett

Part III: By Name or by Nature?

9 Questioning the Prose Poem:

Thoughts on Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns Alan Wall

10 “I went disguised in it”: Re-Evaluating Seamus Heaney’s Stations Andy Brown

11 The Letter-Poem and its Literary Affect: Mark Ford’s

“The Death of Hart Crane” Anthony Caleshu

12 “Immeasurable as one”: Vahni Capildeo’s Prose Poetics Jeremy Noel-Tod

13 The Successful Prose Poem Leaves Behind its Name Owen Bullock

Part IV: Other Voices, Other Forms

14 “Man and Nature In and Out of Order”:

The Surrealist Prose Poetry of David Gascoyne Luke Kennard

15 Nonsense and Wonder:

An Exploration of the Prose Poems of Jeremy Over Ian Seed

16 Prose Poetry and the Spirit of Jazz Nikki Santilli

17 Roy Fisher’s Five Musicians Peter Robinson

Part V: Thinking Back, Writing Forward

18 Wrestling With Angels:

The Pedagogy of the Prose Poem Patricia Debney

19 Life, Death and the Prose Poem Michael Rosen

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“These intelligent essays and Jane Monson’s clearly-stated preface succeed in situating this sometimes gravely overlooked genre, with its attendant problems and triumphs, both historically and presently.” (Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor Emerita of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, USA)

“The prose poem, once narrowly defined as ‘a composition able to have any or all features of the lyric, except that it is put on the page as prose,’ has had an astonishing rebirth in recent decades, as the new non-linear poetries have come to play a major role in the ongoing dialogue between lyric poetry and a host of other literary and non-literary forms. This is the first collection to focus specifically on the British prose poem—its derivations, theoretical foundations, and its modernist and contemporary incarnations. In this genuinely ground-breaking study, leading scholars provide engaging discussions of prose poetry from Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett to such contemporaries as Vahni Capildeo Jeremy Over, and Mark Ford. British Prose Poetry will erode your conceptions of what a ‘poem’ is and how poetry functions in our current moment.”(Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English, Stanford University, USA)

“British Prose Poetry: The Poems Without Lines is a momentous and unparalleled book of essays that maps the elusive magnificence of the prose poem in Britain from the nineteenth century, to the present day. In a field dominated by American scholarship and anthologies, Monson reclaims the critical and creative space for British prose poetry by bringing together a stellar group of writers who are inextricably connected to the form. Challenging the notion of the prose poem as avant-garde or rebellious, this book celebrates its resurgence as a natural extension of the form’s ability to evolve and maintain its relevance. This is a landmark work – for British prose poetry and the prose poem internationally. If Russell Edson is the “godfather of the prose poem”, Monson is its fairy godmother, shining a light on its British narrative and contemporary renaissance.” (Cassandra Atherton, Associate Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University, Australia)