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Jamey Dunham is a prose poet and an Assistant Professor of English
at Sinclair Community College, where he edits the journal Flights.
His poems have appeared in Sentence, Paragraph, Key
Satch (el),
Fence, Boston Review, and ACM among other journals
and his poem “An
American Story” was included in the anthology Great American
Prose Poems: Poe to the Present. He lives in Cincinnati with his
wife and son.
Question #4: Susan Maxwell writes, “The
poem furrows a way out of the white by running over it, while still
white underneath ink.” Brian Kitely composes “postcard
stories” that are, quite literally, started on the back of
postcards that are then mailed to friends and family, after which
the stories are rewritten and revised. And Bin Ramke finds that, “the
necessity to make the tiny announcements that are line-ends in ‘standard’ verse
becomes sometimes, often, annoying, arbitrary, and ultimately misleading.” Why
do you write pp/ffs? How are your stories and poems brought into
the world?
I blame my poems on some hell-bent rodent that emerges from my
ear after late-night writing sessions and wreaks havoc on what
might otherwise have been perfect iambic pentameter. Instead, I
awake to find myself straddling two no-no's of contemporary poetry:
surrealism and prose poetry.
I remember reading an essay by Dana Gioia entitled “James
Tate and American
Surrealism” where he talked of America's artistic introduction to surrealism
through the medium of the cartoon. This rang especially true for me. I think
my own artistic tendencies toward surrealism arose in no small part from the
cartoons I was raised with/by. Such “cartoon logic” serves as a fantastic
segue way into what poets like Jacob, Michaux and Queneau were up to and later
Americans like Patchen, Edson and Tate. It also serves as a useful tool when
looking at predecessors to the prose poem, like the Native American “Trickster” tales
and old children’s fables. I have always been struck by the reader's willingness
to go along with even the most horrific depictions of violence if the writer
simply replaces the word “orphan” or “nun” with a word
like “hedgehog”.
I suppose I also agree with Bin Ramke when he said
of verse, “the necessity
to make the tiny announcements that are line-ends in ‘standard’ verse
becomes sometimes, often, annoying, arbitrary, and ultimately misleading.” I
write prose poems because I believe the form of prose instinctively lends itself
to the techniques that most interest me in poetry. If one is to pull off what
Bly refers to as “leaping” in a poem, I think it is best to do
so in a form that doesn’t accentuate the penultimate step or point toward
where it will land. Of course even this ambiguity, as with so much else in regards
to the prose poem, is ultimately an illusion.
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