prose

Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s__ll of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics__n practice__ven if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas__hey remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other__ grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don__ Ask, 'giving prizes to friends.

What did Saturday's used to taste like? Like eggs and fried ham and the bitter smell of hair in heavy rollers. Like long quiet hours and making up after a fight. Like ointment and bruising. Like waiting, especially, for something - anything - to happen.

The joyous clamor in my mind drowned out the strange sound outside the car: a humming noise that was gathering speed and growing louder, a roar that was not the waves curling up the beach.

In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer.

As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, __hcorpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by theheels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania forbattle and for love, when seen from the place where your staringeyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It__ thatI think of, oh corpse, it__ that you make me think of: but does anythingchange? Nothing. No other days exist but these of oursbefore the tomb, both for us the living and for you the dead. Mayit be granted me not to waste them, not to waste anything of whatI am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause:to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope youspent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in thebox. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.

I wouldn't give ten gallons of my own piss for clear sentence that gives the sense of a tree as a tree, when I revel in the nonsense of its being my own Grandfather, a letter from yesterday, or a masturbating fist.

why be bothered with other people's set-ups? it only leads to torture.

You couldn't make up something that looked so right.

There were these things and the flames ate these things, and since fire doesn't distinguish between the word of God and the word of the Soviet Communications Registry Bureau, both Qur'an and telephone directory returned to His mouth in the same inhalation of smoke.

And I howled at that swarm and the crops and the sky, and the stars should have quit because there weren't no reason to be shining.

Once he got bitten, and they all wept bitterly, expecting to see a spectacular death-agony; but he just went off into the bush and probably ate something, for he came back in a few days quite cock-a-hoop and as ready to eat snakes as ever.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

The itchy reality of these places is that they are no place at all, they are nowhere. There__ a sleeping monster in nowhere, and it is older and bigger than you, it is island-sized, and it has never known happiness. If you__e ever nowhere at all, and you do think about it, and you can hardly think about anything else, and you can hardly breathe, and oh, God, it is awake, it is that grand realisation which nobody can speak. Don__ speak it! What would you say?But all is not lost, because in our language we have this phrase. We never have to be nowhere at all, we only ever have to be in the middle of nowhere, which is a softer, funnier place to be. Do you see? The phrase makes nowhere a place, with boundaries and a centre, and if there are boundaries then you can leave this place, you can travel in any direction and __owhere_ will cease to be, and this whole experience will be something you can laugh about.

There__ a big default notion that __pare,_ or __recise_ prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it__ in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective __recise,_ for example, needs unpicking. If a __inimalist_ writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They__e just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it.

He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or happy, which was not often in these difficult days, into a smile of amused friendliness and pleasure which aroused feelings of warmth, and something more, in many women.

Victor was the first to speak, and when he did, it was with an eloquence and composure perfectly befitting the situation

Mirabelle sat down, dropping into the cushions like a ball being caught in a large leather glove._

Gennia is eating and talking to Ruiz on the phone. Each time he takes a mouthful, he catches a whiff of his shirt, which stinks of failure and yesterday.