QUICK NOTES ON LYRIC PROSE

Aiming to come upon, or utter, a truth, it's important to be artless, because the artificial is inappropriate to this situation.

To be artless, however, you have to possess a crafty intelligence, a thorough sense of design. While truth is still beauty, embellishments are often like snares aimed to distract or conceal the truth.

The ideal prose would be fixed and not fiction. For instance, the essay can be a very lyrical form with its own aesthetic, but is undermined because of its non-ego-centered focus. Given the essayist's generosity in discussing a subject outside her historical self, the work sustains a moral luminosity.

A word (or set of words) which images its object lifts up that object, like the wafer, the Word of G-d, in the hands of the priest. In this way, lyric prose is, to me, tilted towards the unknown, towards an impersonal description, and this is manifest in a singleness of intention similar to that in the essay. It also acknowledges, with every line, that words are tools limited in number and in scope, so that there is a kind of sensual irritation between the writer and her materials. Not enough, not enough , the lyric says between the lines.

The prose poem seems to want to sustain an alert intelligence in a wild dream scenario, to freeze the judgment of narrative in an amoral system. But when the frantic non-sense of the unconscious is projected over this narrative, it cancels out the entire force of the work. Americans, already weak on judgment, don't write very good prose poetry. I think we panic in its chaos and become pretentious or silly.

I'm not interested in prose poetry, but here am talking about lyric prose, as you find in large portions of Moby Dick and in the prophetic sections of the Old Testament.

The kind of prose which has the factual objectivity of an essay, and is ahistorical, and is also using emotionally charged language, is my idea of a good time.

--Fanny Howe