My prose poem is not just a musical paragraph or poetry in prosaic packaging. My prose poem embraces all metric variations, all potential metaphorical and lingual connections. A prose poem is sometimes dismissed by poets, accused of being merely some titillated tourist in the valley of verse. A prose poem gets side-eye from some wary prosaists, who perceive a strange hybrid experimenting with itself, bound to flake off into rhyme.
A prose poem may exult in alliterative allegory and luscious lyric hiding warm grotto mysteries yet is as likely to respond to sturdy strong-gripped declaratives, workmanlike, wood in hand. And, damn, those poems that do it all, words kaleidoscopic falling themselves into new mandala blossoms geometric gardens with each turn of my head or hand. Undefined unfettered unrelenting.
A prose poem is all about the alchemy. Less about the genre than the syllables and the song. My pansexual prose poem is a labyrinth. A sextillion-faceted emerald. A wishing well, a scrying stone. An eddy. A salt marsh estuarine river mouth, best of salt and sweet and every taste in between. Not either/or but everything, not neither/nor but its own thing. Rejoicing in the chemistry the lyric all the language all the metaphor the structure and mechanics all the syntax smooth or rough Voice and Volta and the clarifying diction the sliding misdirection all the metrics all mellifluous or convoluted-messy and most of all the startle moment, the arrival the shudder of transmuted connection and the honey of the phonemes on lips and tongue and teeth.
Wren Donovan’s writing appears or is upcoming in The Dillydoun Review, Cauldron Anthology, Hecate Magazine, Survivor Lit, Tattie Zine, Luna Luna Magazine, and elsewhere. She studied literature, Classics, folklore, and psychology. Wren reads Tarot, talks to cats, and lives in Tennessee. She lurks on twitter @WrenDonovan.