Janet Lowenbach
Response & Bio
Question 1. How do you define prose poetry?My piece is both a prose poem and flash fiction. Why must we choose when the two forms have nourished this emerging mode of expression and given birth to a new way of seeing truth that is both poetry and image, rhythm and condensed meaning wound round and round like a chrysalis and not revealed until you penetrate both the writer's intent and your own experience? Prose poems expose life because they delve beneath the surface into the borderless things. They are images made, scattered about the page but merging through rhythm, mood, color, into the characters of a new idiom. The rhyme of old style poetry does not create understanding. Universality comes, I think, from knowing what the parts say.
Question 2. How do you define flash fiction?
As to flash fiction, it is to the short story, what a short story has always been to the novel, a more exquisitely felt examination of the previously unexplored territory of the human landscape. The poetic vision and language is employed to expose to its subterranean depths, the mystic layers of each man's being that hint at universal experience.
BIO
Janet Lowenbach is a journalist by trade - currently writing about US and European pharmaceutical outsourcing. She has also freelanced for the mainstream press, covering and photographing things like kidney transplant, the dairy industry, meditation, aging, men's liberation, maids unions, and camping. This is her first published piece of fiction.