After Poet’S Prose: Postgeneric Writing In the Ongoing Crisis Of Verse

Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (1983, 1990) ended by observing that Language poetry had begun to take for granted the once-surprising notion that prose could be made to infiltrate poetry in order to produce new poetic forms. Newer work may be as self-reflexive and theoretically aware, but philosophical questions about language as the ground of reality have given way to a wide-ranging dialogue between poetry and narrative. For writers at the new meeting ground of poetry and prose, the blurring of borders can be a means for transgressing social boundaries and for claiming efficacy for literary writing in a world governed by multimedia storytelling. This essay investigates how experiments undertaken by poets in fiction, autobiography, performance, verse, documentary, and mixed genres derive from and expand dramatically earlier poet’s prose.