Three Prose Poems
Jacob L.
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As a prose and poetry-writer, I often pursue experimentation. My inspiration from these prose poems came first from Harryette Mullen and Russell Edson, but it was also influenced by a paper I read on abstraction in fairy tales (by Kate Bernheimer, I believe), the almost intriguing flatness and intuitive logic that gives way to the production of the written arts - a resemblance I saw most keenly in prose poems and fairy tales. In my prose poems, I attempted to synthesize the tenets of fairy-tale-writing with the linguistic fun of contemporary prose poets. For example, I used my own 'bent' on normalized magic, a sort of wordplay-ing magical realism, so as to heighten the language that accepts the absurd bits of the human. I parsed together weirdness in a collective so it becomes accepted, natural, even reasonable, moving too; I attempted to allow for a reader (and writer) to reflect on my poetry as a snippet of the human experience, however strange it may seem. Ultimately, us humans are weird - sometimes it's the weird that feels the most familiar.
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Language is a centerpiece of the human experience. Whether it be with others or oneself, language has given us room to make sense of culture, life, the world - and whether we ever do or not, I will produce language. I will write, and express that inner-human.
