The prose poem, they say, was invented in rebellion against the strictness and monoculture of the alexandrine. For some writers since, it’s become a way of avoiding the (perceived) vexations of all poetic lines: the ostentation, the page-strutting, the self-importance they exude from all that adjacent white space. But can the prose poem be too free? Should something restrain all those liberated sentences? Silliman tried using nothing but interrogatives; Peter Reading tried exact word-count; Jarnot keeps to the single full stop. Mark Russell’s innovative contribution is his template, which goes like this: ‘Men {rest of title}. About war, they say, there is nothing new to {phrase 1}. It is as common to {phrase 2}, as it is to {phrase 3}. It is the {phrase 4} and by equal turns, the {phrase 5} that may {phrase 6}. A man {phrase 7} may {phrase 8} or {phrase 9}. Two men {repeat phrase 7} may {phrase 10} or {phrase 11}.
For instance:
Men in Rome
About war, they say, there is nothing new to
defend. It is as common to respect a city’s
capitulation, as it is to bomb the place to hell.
It is the old jokes that never die, and by equal
turns the perennial tyrannies returning each
spring, that may fill an atheist with a soul in
which he doesn’t believe. A man who shoots
a pregnant woman in the back may have his
finger on the trigger, or the camera. Two men
who shoot a pregnant woman in the back may
do it for the glory of the fatherland, or for a
line of coke and a fur coat.
It’s not a story-template like, say, Queneau’s Exercises de Style and (unlike Mark Russell’s recent witty contributions to the magazine) these pieces aren’t narratives. This voice is expository, though it avoids being imperious since the first sentence attributes authority elsewhere (‘they say’), and the rest deploy alloisis and the potential subjunctive. Surprise and humour are created because the balanced propositions of classical rhetoric (‘as […] as’, ‘by equal turns’, ‘or’) with their poise and air of reasonableness get undercut by the actual content:
It is the bacteria
in the blankets, and by equal turns, the
remedies of the local healers, that may
cause us to wage a pitiless campaign of
abuse against the donut store management.
After all, if you’ve gone so far as to evade the pomposity of the poetic line, I guess you can’t just replace it with the bombast of the ‘straight’ declarative sentence.
The danger with any template is that over 126 pages it could become repetitive (as the book’s title warns). And so the mesarchia here gets tweaked and shaken about, just like long-form metre does. The standout touch, though, is how those repeated words ‘men’ and ‘war’ at each poem’s beginning balance (or enhance) the playful tone with some thematic seriousness. Even as the subject-matter meshes out, the complicity of war and masculinity in all its forms remains the key thread –
Two
men who live in a caravan park
may be collaborating on a manual
deriding the 16th century retention
of the longbow, or legionnaires
lying low for the winter.
– while around it is wrapped a show-and-tell of the violent pressures, moral difficulties and sheer weirdnesses of modern male lives. The template activates the multifarious blokes with possibilities and alternatives, and the subject/tone stabilisers keep it all on the knife-edge between comedy and grimness. Whew. No wonder I read it so avidly. From the recognition that the book’s already received, I’m clearly not the only man (I mean, ‘person’) impressed at its originality and verve.
Guy Russell (no relation) 6th October 2023
