English 361-001
The Development of Poetry: The International Prose Poem
Instr: Kilwein-Guevara, Maurice
Office: CRT 512; 229-4520
e-mail: maurice@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: MW; 12:30-1:45pm; MIT B14
Course Description
"And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of a ditch, in your room's gloomy solitude, your intoxication already waning and gone, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, ask everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is." --from Charles Baudelaire's Get High
The prose poem may seem like an oxymoron. It is written in paragraphs instead of lines, and it sometimes tells an elliptical story; that is, it seems happily to steal whatever it needs to from the Piggly Wiggly of fiction. However, it also giddily steals from the store of poetry as well: foregrounding hallucinatory imagery, surprising sound patterns, and the great economy of scale that we associate with a good poem.
We'll learn about the international history of the prose poem. We'll look at the prose poem's engagement with painting as a model for representing the human imagination. We'll also look at its place within French symbolism, dadaism, surrealism, as well as its contemporary relationship to the televised soundbyte. We'll read a great number of international prose poets, including Aloysius Bertrand, Charles Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein, Frida Kahlo, Jorge Luis Borges, Russell Edson, Charles Simic, and Amy Gerstler.
