The prose poem, "the result of two contradictory
impulses, cannot exist, but it does," says
Pulitzer-prize winner Charles Simic. The genre
inherently collects tensions. Since the mid-
1800s it has been part of avant-garde
movements in Europe and the U.S. which have
sought to break from canons of formality to
express a freer, closer to the unconscious truth,
drawn in the populist sentence instead of the
line. Postmodern prose poets, though, extend
the field of tensions both forward and backward,
including the once-eschewed artificiality and the
long-loved ambiguity, recalling Gertrude Stein's
sound-density, juxtapositions, and repetitions.
Like her contemporaries Karen Volkman and
Killarney Clary, Cheryl Pallant exhibits a
particular grace in these qualities, however Into
Stillness, her second book of poetry, opens with
the plainspoken declaration "My body is sacred."
The many words that follow investigate the
truths and the scars of this statement. At the
crux of the exploration is a recovery of an
essential holiness of the human body, even as
there is a remembering of a wound, a betrayal, a
fracture which then extends into the poems as
broken thought and clipped syntax to portray it.
The spectre of rape seems to hover as a dark
energy field next to brighter energies of
sensuality, eroticism, and even rapture. As such,
a deconstruction of bodily use and carnality, in
both pleasures and pains, ensues, breaking
forward into dense, slippery, and primarily
peripatetic prose poems.
Peter Johnson, editor of the now defunct journal
The Prose Poem, once wrote that "the prose
poem plants one foot in prose, the other in
poetry, both resting precariously on banana
peels." Into Stillness embodies this slapstick
aspect of duality by shifting tonally between a
formal, high-construct diction and a vernacular
of tripped-up cliches and fractured puns and
proverbs." Now I lay these limbs down to sheep
who graze in daze," for example, mixes
metaphors, expectations, voices, and
homophonic meaning. Yet Pallant's overall
project is much broader. Here is an early piece
from Into Stillness, offered as the opening prose
poem or paragraph in a middle chapter from the
first and longest section of the book:
She reconfigured herself, added to the
biannuals to the bicentennials to arrive at
the sum. She could no longer combine. She
subtracted herself from the equation, give or
take a point or two, decimal pointing out the
window. Stronger purpose, strengthening
mission, state side issued warnings,
international malaise. Not a natural disaster,
unless mankind means subatomic bounds.
When reading an individual paragraph such as
this, one can't help but experience the texture of
vowels and consonants, the mouth-feel of
syllables as music-makers.There's a kind of
sprung-rhythm, a declarative impulse that
dances percussively below and within meanings.
For better or worse, it's relentless-there are
hundreds of such prose poems in the sequence-
which is itself part of the meaning-making here,
but also makes reading more than a few of them
at a time difficult. The ultra-lyricism of these
individual nuggets are contrasted against the
greater narrative of the body's falling and rising,
suggested by Pallant's structure of sections,
chapters, and paragraphs, all linked parts of a
whole-only the specifics of story are offstage,
underground, left to the reader's mining mind
and body to accrete and feel.
And so, Into Stillness leaps across/into another
genre: we could call this a prose-poem memoir.
a book of linked paragraphs, a garland of
anecdotes, an experimental autobiography. In
this context, the blurring of paragraph and prose
poem becomes more pronounced, and it should
be noted that Pallant's "units" are not
symmetrically right-margin-justified; instead the),
wave in jagged verse ways on the right, and the
movement throughout the book is from more
declarative prose to more lyrical, even lineated,
poetr}'. Comparisons can he made to Vikram
Seth's novel-in-sonnets, The Golden Gate, or to
contemporary essayist John D'Agata's genre-
bending work. Within the diverse prose poem
genre itself. Robert Bly’s This Body Is Made of
Camphor and Gopherwood comes to mind as a
predecessor. Pallant pays conscious or
unconscious homage to it in her repetition of
"This body," in the sheer gorgeousness of
language, and in the themed sequence format.
A more direct stylistic link can be made to Lyn
Hejinian's 1980 experimental classic My Life, in
which she uses a prose poem or poetic prose
structure to activate images from her personal
history.
When David Lehman writes, in the introduction
to his recent anthology Great American Prose
Poems. that "The American prose poem owes
much to the French but veers off decisively to
accommodate the sui generis work that
transcends catagorJ: he's referring to
sensibilities such as Pallant's. In this case. the
restless words, connotative melodies, and
kinesthetic gestures seek to transcend the page
altogether. We might Ultimately call Into Stillness
a prose-poem-memoir-opera, or a poetic-novel-
in-dance; with both feet precariously on banana
peels, it reaches a hand through the velvet
curtain of ink, becoming theatre. The reader
who enjoys such performative writing will cry
bravo.
impulses, cannot exist, but it does," says
Pulitzer-prize winner Charles Simic. The genre
inherently collects tensions. Since the mid-
1800s it has been part of avant-garde
movements in Europe and the U.S. which have
sought to break from canons of formality to
express a freer, closer to the unconscious truth,
drawn in the populist sentence instead of the
line. Postmodern prose poets, though, extend
the field of tensions both forward and backward,
including the once-eschewed artificiality and the
long-loved ambiguity, recalling Gertrude Stein's
sound-density, juxtapositions, and repetitions.
Like her contemporaries Karen Volkman and
Killarney Clary, Cheryl Pallant exhibits a
particular grace in these qualities, however Into
Stillness, her second book of poetry, opens with
the plainspoken declaration "My body is sacred."
The many words that follow investigate the
truths and the scars of this statement. At the
crux of the exploration is a recovery of an
essential holiness of the human body, even as
there is a remembering of a wound, a betrayal, a
fracture which then extends into the poems as
broken thought and clipped syntax to portray it.
The spectre of rape seems to hover as a dark
energy field next to brighter energies of
sensuality, eroticism, and even rapture. As such,
a deconstruction of bodily use and carnality, in
both pleasures and pains, ensues, breaking
forward into dense, slippery, and primarily
peripatetic prose poems.
Peter Johnson, editor of the now defunct journal
The Prose Poem, once wrote that "the prose
poem plants one foot in prose, the other in
poetry, both resting precariously on banana
peels." Into Stillness embodies this slapstick
aspect of duality by shifting tonally between a
formal, high-construct diction and a vernacular
of tripped-up cliches and fractured puns and
proverbs." Now I lay these limbs down to sheep
who graze in daze," for example, mixes
metaphors, expectations, voices, and
homophonic meaning. Yet Pallant's overall
project is much broader. Here is an early piece
from Into Stillness, offered as the opening prose
poem or paragraph in a middle chapter from the
first and longest section of the book:
She reconfigured herself, added to the
biannuals to the bicentennials to arrive at
the sum. She could no longer combine. She
subtracted herself from the equation, give or
take a point or two, decimal pointing out the
window. Stronger purpose, strengthening
mission, state side issued warnings,
international malaise. Not a natural disaster,
unless mankind means subatomic bounds.
When reading an individual paragraph such as
this, one can't help but experience the texture of
vowels and consonants, the mouth-feel of
syllables as music-makers.There's a kind of
sprung-rhythm, a declarative impulse that
dances percussively below and within meanings.
For better or worse, it's relentless-there are
hundreds of such prose poems in the sequence-
which is itself part of the meaning-making here,
but also makes reading more than a few of them
at a time difficult. The ultra-lyricism of these
individual nuggets are contrasted against the
greater narrative of the body's falling and rising,
suggested by Pallant's structure of sections,
chapters, and paragraphs, all linked parts of a
whole-only the specifics of story are offstage,
underground, left to the reader's mining mind
and body to accrete and feel.
And so, Into Stillness leaps across/into another
genre: we could call this a prose-poem memoir.
a book of linked paragraphs, a garland of
anecdotes, an experimental autobiography. In
this context, the blurring of paragraph and prose
poem becomes more pronounced, and it should
be noted that Pallant's "units" are not
symmetrically right-margin-justified; instead the),
wave in jagged verse ways on the right, and the
movement throughout the book is from more
declarative prose to more lyrical, even lineated,
poetr}'. Comparisons can he made to Vikram
Seth's novel-in-sonnets, The Golden Gate, or to
contemporary essayist John D'Agata's genre-
bending work. Within the diverse prose poem
genre itself. Robert Bly’s This Body Is Made of
Camphor and Gopherwood comes to mind as a
predecessor. Pallant pays conscious or
unconscious homage to it in her repetition of
"This body," in the sheer gorgeousness of
language, and in the themed sequence format.
A more direct stylistic link can be made to Lyn
Hejinian's 1980 experimental classic My Life, in
which she uses a prose poem or poetic prose
structure to activate images from her personal
history.
When David Lehman writes, in the introduction
to his recent anthology Great American Prose
Poems. that "The American prose poem owes
much to the French but veers off decisively to
accommodate the sui generis work that
transcends catagorJ: he's referring to
sensibilities such as Pallant's. In this case. the
restless words, connotative melodies, and
kinesthetic gestures seek to transcend the page
altogether. We might Ultimately call Into Stillness
a prose-poem-memoir-opera, or a poetic-novel-
in-dance; with both feet precariously on banana
peels, it reaches a hand through the velvet
curtain of ink, becoming theatre. The reader
who enjoys such performative writing will cry
bravo.
writing >> into stillness >>review
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