About Prose Poetry
“For me, it is a kind of writing determined to prove that there’s poetry beyond verse and its rules. Most often it has an informal, playful air, like the rapid, unfinished caricatures left behind on café napkins. Prose poetry depends on a collision of two impulses, those for poetry and those for prose, and it can either have a quiet meditative air or feel like a performance in a three-ring circus. It is savvy about the poetry of the past, but it thumbs its nose at verse that is too willed and too self-consciously significant. It mocks poetry by calling attention to the foolishness of its earnestness. Here in the United States, where poets speak with reverence of authentic experience and write poems about their dads taking them fishing when they were little, telling the reader even the name of the river and the kind of car they drove that day to make it sound more believable, one longs for poems in which imagination runs free and where tragedy and comedy can be shuffled as if they belonged in the same pack of cards.” — Charles Simic “Essay on the Prose Poem,” Plume.
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The America Academy of Poets says of the prose poem:
Though the name of the form may appear to be a contradiction, the prose poem essentially appears as prose, but reads like poetry. In the first issue of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, editor Peter Johnson explained, “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.”
While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects. https://poets.org/glossary/prose-poem
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“What is a Prose Poem? Understanding Prose Poetry,” Sean Glatch | February 21, 2025
Summing Up: What is a Prose Poem?
In short, there’s no singular prose poetry definition, and many theorists disagree on the exact confines of the genres. However, most definitions agree on the following features of prose poetry:
Prose poetry is:
- Short—generally no longer than 4 pages, and sometimes only 1-3 brief paragraphs.
- Unconfined—prose poetry has no line breaks and is unaffected by the margins of the page.
- Sonic—a prose poem may rely on rhythm and internal rhyme, and often has a certain musicality (or, even, cacophony).
- Concise—every word matters and builds tension.
- Experimental—the writer must rely completely on word choice, since prose poetry eschews the bounds of poetry forms and traditions.
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