A poet friend of mine recently said to me, “All poetry is political. It’s one guy saying, this is what I think. Or, this is what I think you think.” Both of which are fundamentally political acts. Poets have a lot in common with politicians themselves – they employ rhetoric and logic to convey meaning via language, they are obsessed with symbols, and they, in many cases, spend a great deal of time lying to people.

I chose to make my first article about poetry instead of politics, on the surface at least, because I think that when a poet lies to you, he really does have your best interest in mind. Also, I can no longer write or read anything about politics without (involuntarily) hearing a certain Vice-Presidential candidate’s voice just chattering away in my head, which is tantamount to self-torture. Let us talk about poems, then, and leave the politics to lurk beneath the surface.

In part, I’m writing this article so maybe a few less people out there will say, “I don’t get poetry,” or, “Poetry? They still write that?” In our culture, these are perfectly valid stances for a person to take. We have come to value the immediate, the sensational, and above all, the visual, so there is little room left in the public space for a medium as ponderous and defiantly literary as poetry. This is a mistake, for there remains a poetry (no typo) for everyone, no matter their interests, background, or place in the world. If you think, if you love, if you live and breathe and will one day die like the rest of us, then there is a poem for you somewhere on my shelf. So I’m going to share a few poems with you, mostly the work of other (greater) poets than myself, in the hopes that a reader may hear something he hasn’t heard before and discover the power of a few well-chosen words to speak to the otherwise ineffable mystery of our lives.

I chose my poem below for several reasons. First, some readers have told me they read a political subtext into the piece. That’s fine by me, although I think it can be read in a number of ways. Second, if my project is to reach people who don’t have a lot of contact with the art form and may be a bit resistant, it’s only fair that I put my money where my mouth is and hold up a work of my own to start the conversation. Finally, along those same lines, I think prose poetry is a good place to begin that conversation.

Prose poems are a great medium for comedy, for dramatic monologues, for the bizarre and the surreal. Many prose poems employ a narrative voice that is deranged or stream-of-consciousness, that tells a riddle or a weird little parable. The big blocks of text somehow open up the poet to a wide-range of possibilities he or she might shy away from in lyric verse.

But what is a prose poem, exactly? It’s a poem without all those scary, hard-to-interpret line breaks. It’s a poem hiding in the thick brush of prose, waiting to ambush the reader with the moment of poetic resonance. It’s a short piece of fiction with an aesthetic so abstract that it demands to be considered “poetic.” It doesn’t really matter. It is a small piece of literary art. Call it whatever you please.

Prose poetry has played an iconoclastic role in literature. When the great French poet Baudelaire’s volume of prose poems, Petits Poemes en Prose, (also known as Paris Spleen,) was published posthumously in 1869, it was a signal to the literary world that the new era was fully and finally upon them. Another French Romantic, Victor Hugo, had already taken a wrecking ball to the conventions of diction in formal verse; now Baudelaire was freeing French poetry from the strictures of Alexandrine meter and, more viscerally, how a poem is allowed to look on the page.

Baudelaire’s poems took the realities of urban Parisian life head-on, in all their beauty and banality. It was a breathtaking moment in the history of literature, and thanks in no small part to his brave little book, Modernism roared to life, giving us a whole new way of writing, of reading, of being in the world. And yes, it opened up fresh new ways for us to get all political in our poems. You can view some of Baudelaire’s great poems online here.
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In the next post, I’ll look at some other watershed moments in poetry, and maybe even talk a little straight-up politics. Finally, let me say that I am in no way suggesting my own poem is a worthy descendant of Baudelaire’s masterpiece – I merely offer it as a starting point for discussion and to show how prose poems both resemble and differ from some readers’ idea of what a poem is or ought to be.

Here is the poem.

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Knees Descending a Staircase, No. 12

Before I come down the stairs I demand a guarantee that this time, you mean it. This time, hand-to-God, there will be no more of that. I will come down the stairs under this condition only, which is that you vow upon the glorious corpse of your mother not to shoot me in the knees again. Shooting me in the knees has become anathema to the code of ethics I’ve established. I, as a serious man of firm principles, can no longer abide your doing so. In a gesture of good faith, to show that I haven’t a trace of the tyrant in me, I hereby grant you clemency for the previous eleven times you’ve shot me in the knees; I hadn’t properly explained the code of ethics in all its nuance; we will look upon those times as an age of ignorance, a savage epoch in which you shot me in the knees with impunity. But that was the hellish past, this the utter present. I have codified our ethics now and that code will be enforced by my not coming down the stairs until you’ve given me your word. I’m not asking you to relinquish that locked and loaded Colt revolver, I’m only asking this: no more shooting me in the knees.

I realize you have your own primitive code of ethics, but these kinds of codes stop at the borders of the self, whereas my code of ethics is immutable, universal. It governs all within this universe, namely you and me. And you would violate that code by sending your .45 caliber bullets across the room and into one or both of my knees, depending on your aim. The No Shooting Me In The Knees prohibition must be respected, or anarchy prevails. I will not descend into the anarchy at the bottom of these stairs, I will remain here at the top, where there is still a kind of peace.

I question whether I’ve explained this well enough. When you flick the safety off and cock the hammer back it makes me question whether I’ve explained this well enough. These actions do not indicate, to me, that you’ve understood the code of ethics. The code of ethics provides that, should you shoot me in the knees while I’m descending this staircase, you are a terrorist with bonafides, you are an agent of nihilism. I am civilization. History will judge that a better justice was upon my side. I’m coming down the stairs now. I’m coming down the stairs to explain this to you better.

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