"Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid:

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don't walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters inn very hot sweet; soak your little clothes right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice louse, be sure that it doesn't have gum on it, because that way it won't hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday School?; always eat your food in such a way that it won't turn someone else's stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don't sing benna in Sunday School; you mustn't speak to warf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don't eat fruits on the street--flies will follow you; but I don't sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday School; this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is how you iron your father's khaki shirt so that it doesn't have a crease; this is how to iron your father's khaki pants so they don't have a crease; this is how you grow okra--far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants; when you are growing dasheen, make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating it; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don't like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don't like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming; be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don't squat down to play marbles-- you are not a boy, you know; don't pick people's flowers--you might catch something; don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don't like, that that way something bad don't fall on you ; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man, and if this doesn't work there are other ways, and if they don't work don't feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn't fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it's fresh; but what if the baker won't let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?

"The Colonel"

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of the wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

Caroline Forche reads the poem on You Tube.

The prose poem's definition is easier to provide than the genre is to explain:

PROSE POEM - as defined in The Glossary of Poetic Terms, is a genre in the poetic spectrum between free verse and prose. It is distinguished by the poetic characteristics of rhythmic, aural, and syntactic repetition, compression of thought, sustained intensity, and patterned structure, but is set on the page in a continuous sequence of sentences as in prose, without line breaks.

As you can see, the preceding piece might not qualify completely--but nor does Charles Fort's work in our anthology!

This prose poem by Michael Benedict offers another look at the protean genre:

"The windows are the eyes of the house." The moment I read that illuminating statement, I dropped the interior-design magazine subscribed to by my wife which I 'd been reading all afternoon on our living-room sofa onto the floor, leaped to my feet, and rushed out of the room to the bathroom. In the medicine-cabinet I found a bottle of Visine and an eyedropper, then ran back into the living- room where, employing the eyedropper, I squirted Visine all over our two front picture windows, to help them see better... Then, with a bottle of Windex spray from the kitchen, and my polishing rag from the corner cabinet, I made haste to polish up those living-room windows until they shone still more brightly than any eyes! But clearly, something was wrong there-- obviously, a suitably appropriate finishing touch was still necessary. So, after rushing into our bedroom I grabbed one of the spare mascara-trays from my wife's dressing-table, returned to the living-room and flipped mascara all over all the curtains--concentrating of course on their fringes. Then, coughing and choking, I ran outside to catch my breath. While standing out there, recovering, I thought of the finishing touch which logic clearly dictated was both necessary and proper. After rummaging around in the garage, I found a single rather large sheet of window-glass left over from when our happy abode was initially constructed, and to give our happy home additional focus, carried the windowpane out to the front lawn and propped it up with a stick at one side of it, to function out there as a monocle. It looked affected yet effective. But then I stopped to think for a moment: Albeit in the interest of household beauty and decorum, was I perhaps making some mistake? What would my wife think? Mascara, monocle? She already knows full well that I'm the last man in the world to object to gay people socially--but after all, who wants a homosexual as a house?

Using these works and Charles Fort's as points of departure, we will use one of this week's two Discussion Threads to talk about the Prose Poem and the very hazy lines between the different genres, for as you will discover over the next four weeks of the course, the lines among the genres we discuss this term--Poetry, Creative-Non Fiction, and Fiction--are hardly obvious. And, indeed, the prose poem has much in common both with the memoir and with flash fiction.

As you can see, each of these pieces offers a distinctive focus and utilizes devices not emphasized in strict prose rendering of a journalistic kind, to be sure.

However, each of these short pieces is complete.

Feel free to experiment with this interesting poetic form. Read some of the other pieces on the web and share links with the class.

Given the diverse nature of the material, you should all have interesting things to say on the discussion thread.

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http://www.hpcnet.org/peru/schoolartsandsciences/language/clemente/fall2006/creative/4/prosepoems

Last Modified: 09/13/2009