Prose poems thin the medium toward unmediated flow, undoing genre

Evidence

While the movement is notable for the conventional prose it is producing, we can take the lead from Byrd’s reference to “the poem in a box” to also appraise prosaic poetry destined to be consumed on smartphone screens. Prose is quick reading, rapid uptake; prose is the illusion of the unfigured; prose is the run-on continuity of quotidian temporality—while poetry is extraordinary rhythm, arresting images, opaque swerves. Prose poems conduce to immediatism because the pieces strive for integration rather than break, for flow rather than disruption, for continuous consumption rather than punctuated production, for metonymy rather than metaphor. Jerome McGann long ago observed that, in general, “the object of the poetical text is to thicken the medium a much as possible” but the current vogue for prose poems suggests something else entirely: a thinning of the medium, a reduction of mediation toward tingling unformed speech-like continuous current. This thinning undermines genre. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 173

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines prosaicism/prose-poetry as a signature aesthetic device of immediacy: thinning the medium toward continuous speech-like flow.
• XREF: McGann’s ‘thicken the medium’ contrast with prose poems’ thinning tracks her core thesis that immediacy = collapse of mediation; connects to her ‘Imaginary’ and ‘Antitheory’ chapters and to Jameson’s reading of postmodernism as the waning of the dialectical detour. — connects to: Free verse expresses what communication cannot, through alien classical ruins