Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem

Mary Ann Caws works on the relations between literature and art, and is the co-editor, with Hermine Riffaterre, of The Prose Poem in France.Theory and Practice (1983). Her recent publications include Pierre Reverdy (2013), the Modern Art Cookbook (2014), Surprised in Translation (2006), Surrealism (2004), and Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason (2017). She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita and Resident Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the past president of the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association, the editor of the Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry and the translator of André Breton, René Char, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Ghérasim Luca, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Tristan Tzara. Michel Delville teaches English and American literatures, as well as comparative literature, at the University of Liège. He is the author or co-author of The American Prose Poem, J.G. Ballard, Hamlet & Co, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism, Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde and Crossroads Poetics: Text, Image, Music, Film & Beyond. He has also co-edited several volumes of essays on contemporary poetics.

No longer to be understood as just another genre, the prose poem emerges here as a form of writing that unsettles our very notions of what poetry is or should be. From Novalis and Baudelaire, to such multinational writers as the Polish-Danish Grzegorz Wróblewski, from Rimbaud’s Illuminations to the Japanese sanbunshi and the Surrealist prose poems of post-Saddam Iraq, these essayists give us a heady new sense of what "postgeneric writing," as Steven Fredman calls it, can look like. There is something for everybody in this groundbreaking and truly global anthology.

• Notes on contributorsPreface, Rosemary LloydIntroduction, Mary Ann Caws and Michel DelvillePart I: Origins and Beginnings 1. The Birth of the Prose Poem in Nineteenth-Century France, Joseph Acquisto2. Impressionism and the Prose Poem: Rimbaud’s Artful Authenticity, Aimée Israel-Pelletier3. Novalis’ Hymnen an die Nacht and the Prose Poem avant la lettre, Jonathan Monroe4. Thyrsus & Palimpsest: De Quincey’s influence on Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, Nikki Santilli5. A Dangerous Hybridity: The Prose Poem at the fin de siècle, Margueritte MurphyPart II: Visual Mediations6. Cubism and the Prose Poem, Mary Ann Caws7. The Modern French Prose Poem and Visual Art, Emma Wagstaff8. The Homeless Heart: Abstraction and the Prose Poem, Richard DemingPart III: Genres and Discourses 9. The Prose Poem, Flash Fiction, Lyrical Essays and Other Micro-Genres, Michel Delville10. The Prose Poem and the Anti-Novel: Unsettling Form in Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropismes, Jane Monson11. Bishop, Lowell, and the Confessional Prose Poem, Lizzy LeRud12. Trans-verse: Prose Poetry, Translation and Border Crossing in Baudelaire and Emerson, Adam Ross RosenthalPart IV: Issues and Contexts13. An Interruption of Boundaries: On Gender and the Prose Poem, Alyson Miller14. Pastoral and Ecocritical Voices in Modern Prose Poetry, Lynn Domina15. Grzegorz Wróblewski’s Kopenhaga and the Process of Inscription, Piotr Gwiazda16. The Chinese Prose Poem: Generic Metaphor and the Multiple Origins of Sanwenshi, Nick Admussen17. The sanbunshi (Prose Poem) in Japan, Scott Mehl18. The Arabic Prose Poem in Iraq, Sinan Antoon19. After Poet’s Prose: Postgeneric Writing in the Ongoing Crisis of Verse, Stephen Fredman20. Prose in Prose in Contemporary French Poetic Practice: Appropriation, Repurposing and Pornography, Jeff BardaIndex