Louis Jenkins
writes a sentence
and then another. No heartaches
about line-breaks.
One way I think about poems is as generalised jokes. Reductionist, for sure — but if a joke is a short text that amuses, then a poem is a short text that evokes or provokes some (any) emotional response, or a complex of emotional responses (which might include amusement).
This description of a poem says nothing about form or ‘music’, nothing about the relations between sentences and lines, or between meanings and sounds. I absolutely love all that stuff, but perhaps poems don’t actually need any of it to be successful poems. Perhaps this is a claim that ‘prose poems’ test?
Louis Jenkins’s prose poems are, for me, confirmations of this line of thought. None of his poems use any device beyond the flexibility of prose for expressing tone and content. They’re funny and moving at the same time; they seem to me to be wise as well as charming. Here are links to online versions of four good ones, which show his wit, his insight and his knack.
Of course, there’s a lot written about prose poems, what they’re at. I suppose each prose poet has their own ideas, their own motives for doing without line-breaks. In Jeremy Noel-Tod’s scholarly introduction to ‘The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem’ (recommended!), he notes that, among various approaches, “The freedom of the prose poem…can also take it…towards a plainer style, imitative of speech.” This is Jenkins’s approach, along with story-telling focus on small absurdities, a kind of reined-in surrealism.
A note on formatting. These websites present the poems with a ragged right edge, whereas in Jenkins’s books they are fully justified, as is more often the case with prose poems. The key point, I think, is that the line-ending doesn’t matter, it’s an accident of publication formatting, not part of the poem’s design or essence.
Football
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53694/football
(The Poetry Foundation site only has this one poem, but it also has a brief bio.)
Diner
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2004%252F11%252F11.html
(The Writer’s Almanac has several poems.)
Fish out of Water
https://robinchapmanspoemaday.blogspot.com/2005/05/by-louis-jenkins-fish-out-of-water.html
The Prose Poem
https://blogs.mprnews.org/state-of-the-arts/2010/05/minnesota-poetry-louis-jenkins-the-prose-poem
Louis Jenkins died in 2019.
Stephen Payne 