The Art of Listening

A guest post by Frank Mundo. You can follow Frank on Twitter.

I used to think prose poetry was a scam, the literary equivalent of madly dripping or wildly flinging paint onto a canvas as art. Prose poetry, it seemed to me, was at best the product of the creative intellectual exercises of people way smarter than me (way smarter than I? Whatever.)

People too smart for their and my own good. For me, it was nothing like the Big Boys of poetry from school which I loved, the more formal old-school stuff that was not only beautiful but carefully structured and metered, and made perfect sense to me – even if at times some of it required a patient professor’s handheld tour throughout the more difficult nuances of the texts.

Prose poetry, however, professors’ help or not, was almost always an esoteric wasteland of scrupulously excavated fossil-words mixed with ancient allusions and slapped down on the page in a silly

willy-nilly

pattern-less
pattern.

With complicated hidden meanings

And messages

And with Strange… Punctuation…to boot

Yikes.

Even as an alleged English major I was baffled by what seemed the random personal thoughts, un-translated foreign languages, and obscure allusions to ancient-dudes in these so-called modern prose poetry texts; texts which required the Golden Bough, the OED or Edith Hamilton’s Mythology just to get through the darn things – let alone to understand or appreciate them in the same constructive manner in which some of my classmates pretended to have.

Well, maybe that’s not being fair. Maybe they did like it. Maybe they understood everything and actually loved it. Who knows? Hell, maybe I’m just a moron and Bob’s your uncle.

Either way, it doesn’t matter, because all that changed once I started going to live poetry readings. Quickly I discovered that prose poetry was much better in person than on paper. Suddenly, as the poets performed their own work aloud, I was able to hear finally what I couldn’t seem before to see and interpret on the page.

Suddenly I could even hear a tone in some of these voices, a music that skillfully organized, defined, and translated the words clearly into complete and structured thoughts that I could actually understand and appreciate.

Wow. Suddenly an entire range of emotion began revealing to my ears what before my eyes couldn’t seem to truly see: irony, humor, anger, passion; a singsong wordplay, powerful and thoughtful, with often edgy, rhythmical messages and meanings.

Oh, and lots of hand jive and whatnot too added to the experience. I saw heavy-hitters like Alice Walker and Wanda Coleman, the Big Girls we never read in school, and I was blown away, intrigued enough to go and seek out paper versions of their work — just to look of course, not to buy.

It was there in the bookstore, I discovered that Wanda Coleman, “the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles,” had written over a dozen books, won just about every scholarly award there is, and was renowned for her inspiring public readings. Aha! I wasn’t the only moron after all, the only victim. There were others who were dazzled by her readings! “The daughter of earthquakes,” she had exploited a tiny crack in my thinking and left a permanent fault behind, forever gaping and grinding like the San Andreas.

She spoke directly to me it seemed from somewhere deep in Sylvia Plath’s oven, cooked a musical dish of my own personal despair (“a moist and forgiving noise”) into a satisfying meal of ashes and sugar and “primal stink,” always reminding me, despite it all, to “strive because I must “and to “love out of spite.”

And let the war–all wars
Be fought on soft mattresses
Between legs and lovers

Coleman “was born in the Los Angeles community of Watts and raised in South Central,” I read, chagrined. This was a scholar’s trick to marginalize her talent as an African-American poet or a woman poet. A conspiracy! Her poetry, however, simultaneously “slam” and literary, is not straight outta Compton like they wanted me to think, but “Straight Out of Autumn”.

For Coleman “aesthetics is the science of vulnerability“ and “freedom is a blurred state of vision/frozen between frames”. Her lyrical Los Angeles transcends race and gender stereotypes, natural and unnatural boundaries, incorporating both the fringe and the elite, comedy and tragedy, erotic and the sexually explicit, with truthful slurs and painful observations off “from the shadow” with all the “colors of autumn” and a “music beyond jazz“. It’s not just her Los Angeles, it’s our Los Angeles, my Los Angeles, bold and breathtaking, urban and suburban, utopia and hell, and far “too painful to contain sentiment”.

There’s no conspiracy in that kind of truth. I bought the book.

However, if you’re still on the fence about prose poetry like I was, reading Ostinato Vamps by Wanda Coleman is the second best bet to change your mind – second only to experiencing her reading her extravagant work in person. Coleman is a true veteran of letters, armed to the teeth with a fierce arsenal of truth in her poetry, an undeniable weapon of mass persuasion which will likely solve for you, one way or the other, the matter of prose poetry’s validity for good.

If, however, this is not quite enough and you need an extra push over the edge, check out Chicana Falsa by Michele Serros of Oxnard, California, 60 miles north of L.A.

Written while she attended Santa Monica College and published in 1993 when Serros was an undergrad at UCLA, this edition of Chicana Falsa was republished in 1998 as a trade paperback. Also known for her exuberant readings, Serros is extremely conscious of her audience, even on paper.

Her “purpose” as a writer is to “make someone happy, inspired. Maybe make someone who hated to read actually enjoy a book”. She’s a former Bruin. She took the same classes I did. And I imagine she knows what that’s all about.

But there’s no conspiracy here either. Serros marginalizes herself, right from the getgo. In “La Letty” Serros is informed of her falseness. She’s a “Homogenized Hispanic,” a “Chicana falsa”: a fake or false Hispanic. Ironically it’s her fakeness which allows her to step outside of her culture to create an honest, funny and witty look at the world around her.

In English classes, Serros would be known as limnal character, a tweener character, free to roam, who can pop in and out of boundaries which normally limit others. Serros, unlike Coleman, is careful to hold the reader’s hand throughout the freedom of this tour. Serros cannot afford to leave the reader behind in
the spaces between. “My sincerity isn’t good enough,” she says.

Serros introduces us to her friend Letitica or La Letty, “only two weeks into junior high” and already a real Chicana, offering Serro‘s “sloppy Spanish“ as proof of her fakeness. Serros introduces us to her Aunt Annie next who questions whether Serros can ever be a writer, offering her poor English as pessimistic proof of her thesis: “You got a D on your last book report,” Annie says. “You gotta be able to write English good.”

Serros again is willingly marginalized, actually stuck somewhere between two languages now. But it’s in the next lines that her humor emerges, demonstrating her loyalty to the middle and to the pure freedom such “limnality” affords.

No mi’ja,
Nobody will ever buy your books,
So put your pencil down
And change the channel for me,
It’s time for As The World Turns.

We meet her father and mother next, learn about their dreams. Serros takes us shopping and exposes the racism in the frozen food section after that. She takes us to school, to detention, the gym, to work, to the street corner, to “the gate” to meet great-aunt Linda.

Almost everywhere Serros goes she is “intrusive” and raises eyebrows. Serros is no fake. Chicana Falsa is a magnificent collection of prose poems and short stories, a map of an American adolescence, rich with charm, humor, pride, determination, insight, and heart.

Funny, I used to think prose poetry was a scam.

–

Frank Mundo is a writer and book reviewer from Los Angeles. You can read his reviews and author interviews at Examiner.com or follow him on Twitter @LABooksExaminer.

Tagged as: Book Reviews, Frank Mundo, Poetry, Writing