Chelko:
“December Songs” is a series of 100 word prose poems. They came out of
a vague frustration I
have had for some time now with the lack of music in prose poems. They
are wintry attempts at / explorations in prose music.
Transom:
What do you think characterizes prose music?
Chelko:
Well, let me begin by saying that, of course, not all prose
poems lack music. “December Songs” came out of a frustration I had/have
with the prose poems I have encountered recently—in journals, etc.
Moreover, I do not claim to have read all the prose poems out there—nor
do I dislike all the prose poems out there. It's just I can't help but
ask myself, upon reading one of the linebreakless bastards,
Why this
form? Admittedly, prose poems have always been a bit mysterious
to me.
Perhaps because what I love most about poetry, on a technical level, is
the tension between sentence and line—the suspense, sonic play, and
torque it affords language. This tension, on a fundamental level,
distinguishes poetry from prose, right? So, what happens when the line
is removed, but the poem remains? The prose poem? I feel like that's
what I've been encountering too often lately, but the prose poem can't
be that simple. It can't be that boring! While writing “December Songs”
I was interested in what technical maneuvers I could employ as, for
lack of a better term, 'stand-ins' for the tension between sentence and
line. The result is perhaps, simply, an overly fragmented, repetitious,
and often inverted prose. But I like. Prose music. The way it sounds.