Prose poetry had a slow start in Australia. Long after 19th-century French poets, such as Aloysius Bertrand, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, wrote groundbreaking works of prose poetry, including Gaspard de la nuit (1842), Le Spleen de Paris (1869) and Illuminations (1886), Australian poets remained suspicious of the form.
Prose poetry departs from contemporary free verse chiefly in its refusal of lineation and stanzas, making use instead of sentences and paragraphs. These are hardly radical moves in a 21st-century literary culture that has seen the flourishing of numerous, often complex hybrid works.
Yet the suspicion of prose poetry permeated Anglophone countries throughout the 20th century. As poet and critic David Wheatley observed in 2019, The Oxford Book of English Verse contained no prose poems. It was almost as if the longstanding rivalry between the French and the British, painfully expressed through various conflicts over many centuries, continued to be played out in the field of poetry.
Autobiography of a Marguerite – Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle (Giramondo)
Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama – Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle (Giramondo)
Flight – Shady Cosgrove (Gazebo Books)
American poets were quicker than those in Australia and the UK to seize on prose poetry as a significant literary mode. Important 20th-century American volumes include Mark Strand’s acclaimed The Monument (1978) and Charles Simic’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The World Doesn’t End (1989).
In Australia, books composed mainly of prose poetry were published as early as the mid-1970s – notably Rudi Krausmann’s From Another Shore (1975), with drawings by Brett Whiteley, and Andrew Taylor’s Parabolas (1976).
In recent decades, prose poetry has established a secure place in Australian literature. Significant volumes by Vicki Viidikas, Gary Catalano, Joanne Burns, Ania Walwicz and others enlivened the form from the 1980s onwards. This solid antipodean bedrock is evident in the proliferation and breadth of work in the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (2020).
Australian prose poetry has finally burgeoned on the 21st century. In the last few years, there have been significant additions to this tradition, which now include two volumes by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, a New Zealand-born poet living in Melbourne, and one by Shady Cosgrove, who lives in the Illawarra.
Pat Kraus/Giramondo
These collections use hybrid forms to explore disaffection, fractured identities and illness – often in ways related to domestic environments and the home. Indeed, homesickness in these works is nuanced and uncanny; narrators yearn for, but are simultaneously sickened by, home.
Butcher-McGunnigle begins Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama with the idea of home as a negative, albeit a photographic negative, where “snow is black, teeth are black, the place where she was born”. In Autobiography of a Marguerite, she says she “spent a lot of time at the sick bay at school, waiting for my mother to arrive”.
In Reckoning, from Cosgrove’s Flight, the poem’s speaker states: “It’s a struggle for footing – powder, ice, and beneath that: home”. In another poem, set during COVID lockdown, Cosgrove writes: “I’ve worn through three pairs of shoes walking the 5km perimeter of what is possible.”
The prose poem, which most often appears as a fully justified block of text, here becomes claustrophobic and – reflecting COVID-era restrictions on movement – even agoraphobic.
Autobiography of a Marguerite
Although newly published in Australia, Butcher-McGunnigle’s work in these volumes is more than a decade old. Autobiography of a Marguerite was first published in 2014 by New Zealand’s Hue & Cry Press. The new collection Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama contains poems written in 2011. “In a way it feels like a posthumous publication,” Butcher-McGunnigle has said.
Autobiography of a Marguerite is a series of ruminations, presented as a long fractured sequence, on troubled family relations and illness.
Butcher-McGunnigle has revealed that her mother’s name is Marguerite, but many other Marguerites haunt this book, including the student her mother was named after, the writers Marguerite Duras and Marguerite Yourcenar, and possibly Renaissance poet Marguerite de Navarre.
A coloured photograph of a baby in a cot and an accompanying prose poem serve, in combination, as an epigraph. “It is not even a story,” the book begins.
Butcher-McGunnigle stays true to this eschewal. She provides no clear sense of a conventional linear narrative – although narrative tropes are teased throughout. Instead, she focuses on interlacings of language, including a good deal of wordplay.
This creates a sense of the constraining and pressing nature of chronic illness and pain, along with a sense of family dysfunction. Facets of experience, not always presented chronologically, combine in a way that suggests conventional storytelling cannot do justice to a life in which much is unrecognised or unspoken, and traditional explanations of illness and crises do not work.
“The happening is still happening,” the final poem states: closure is the last thing on this poet’s mind.
In these challenges to narrative convention and endings, Butcher-McGunnigle aligns herself with the avant-garde L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, who emerged in the late 1970s in America – specifically Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman.
The first half of Autobiography of a Marguerite includes many sentence fragments and missing words, which appear as long underscored spaces. This focus on in-betweenness is reminiscent of poet Rosmarie Waldrop’s use of “gap gardening”: an attention to spaces between words, which Waldrop discusses in the prologue to her collection Reluctant Gravities (1999).
The second section of Autobiography of a Marguerite breaks the prose poem apart, exploding it into small groups of sentences and footnotes. These highly suggestive and inconclusive footnotes are described as “found poems”. Drawn from works by Duras and Yourcenar, they lead the reader into a kind of vertical rather than horizontal reading.
At the end of the volume, there are a series of apparently ekphrastic gestures: prose poems are paired, caption-like, with photographs that look like family snapshots. Yet the texts and images are in constant tension, as if what is shown cannot register the underlying truths the images the connote.
“Everything is a painting if you look long enough,” writes Butcher-McGunnigle.
Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama
Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama might be read as a late-published preface to Autobiography of a Marguerite. Its poems were written earlier than those in Autobiography and they are more opaque, but their themes are closely related: “already she has begun to prepare for the tasks of disease and dependency,” Butcher-McGunnigle writes. “The number of faces and the number of vertices.”
There are also striking moments where metaphors take on a life of their own:
A group of chairs structured around a bruise, even plus even is even, odd plus odd is even. Even though we do not mean to, we continue to feed the fish in the bruised pond.
As the idea of a bruise ramifies into the wider world, connecting the visual
appearance of a pond to the speaker’s sense of personal damage, everything is implicated in a broader sense of crisis.
Despite this sense of crisis, and sometimes of angst, most of the volume’s poems have a matter-of-fact tone, and many convey a sense of the comical and absurd.
Some of this derives from situations they present; some of it comes from the wordplay that is a feature of Butcher-McGunnigle’s writing. She frequently foregrounds the importance of language and its intimate, discombobulating inflections:
A lifetime of sentences which at first glance seem superfluous, but whose value is later understood. One thing leads to a mother. Soon enough, a flock of children came running and tapped on the glass. When I reached the bottom of the stares, I looked up.
Flight
Shady Cosgrove’s Flight begins with an experience of COVID and ends with the idea of flight – or, more precisely, the idea of living a number of simultaneous lives. The collection focuses on an intense set of subjectivities, domestic surrealities and quotidian experiences. Among its many references to flying, and travel in general, there are ruminations on the idiosyncrasies of human relationships and small narratives about improbable domestic situations and escapades.
Language is closely implicated in these poetic excursions, especially in Your Poem is a Plane Flight, in which Cosgrove writes: “One stanza, less than a page, and I’m running through the terminal, boarding slip and passport ready.”
Thus, in this collection, flight is more often a metaphor than an actual event.
Round Trip is a characteristic work, gently subversive in its depiction of a protagonist, who takes a lonely flight that returns her to the airport she left from, and finds that, in her house, “everyone was still sleeping”.
The narrative suggests that imaginative transport is stronger than conventional ideas of reality. Like so many poems in this collection, it also suggests that he quotidian and the fantastical inhabit one another. This is a book about
approaching and crossing imaginative thresholds, and about different ways of understanding the nature of such essaying-forth.
In making such crossings, Cosgrove employs metaphor in lively and sometimes unexpected ways. In one poem, she writes: “you skip stones across the lake of my chest”. In another: “There’s a woman sitting in a rocking chair, gazing out of my left eye.” Another begins: “His girlfriend lives underwater. He was hoping for a mermaid but squids aren’t bad.”
In the hands of a less accomplished writer, such lateral departures from the real might be problematic. But Cosgrove develops her poetic conceits systematically, and often with a light touch. This allows the reader to follow her shifting figurations, even when the ideas are surreal.
Indeed, Cosgrove is one of the foremost practitioners of neo-surrealism in Australia. In Mother(land), the narrator “woke early to write this morning and discovered zebras in the living room – they were chewing on the couch and scratching against the coffee table”.
This quality connects Cosgrove to neo-surrealist American prose poets, including Russell Edson, Charles Simic, James Tate and Peter Johnson, who began experimenting with surrealist techniques in the 1970s.
Shirley Jancetic/shadycosgrove.com
But Cosgrove’s prose poems differ in being pointed, even searing feminist exposés of domesticity. They are “pressure cookers”, where the quotidian – often expressed through domestic imagery – is parodied.
In this way, Cosgrove shares various preoccupations with Holly Iglesias’s Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry (2004). Iglesias argues that “women articulate the constraints of gender in prose poems, battling against confinement, boxing inside the box”.
In Domesticity, the poet is on an eternal treadmill of never-ending washing and drying:
My Samsung front loader is a hamster wheel. I climb inside, running and running. But even so, the laundry is never finished.
The poem critiques the idea that the narrator has an instinctive need to do domestic chores. Its referencing of kitchen appliances and white goods is one of Cosgrove’s trademark gestures.
In Sanctuary, she anthropomorphises a refrigerator:
The fridge followed her home and sat on the doorstep. It was a vintage model with rounded edges and one door, the freezer set inside. Her husband said it would have to go or be put to use.
The reader is reminded that, in a patriarchy, domestic duties are presented as a constant fixture of women’s lives. Cosgrove’s wit is biting, and she ends with a proliferation of ominous appliances:
she woke one morning, neck sore. A blender and vacuum cleaner had appeared, propped against the fridge. And beyond, the lawn was packed with dryers and deep freezers, ovens and dishwashers, all of them perched like giant metal birds.
Prose poetry is an excellent form for exploring the constraints of grief, illness, the domestic and the quotidian because its block of text functions as a kind of container, holding its emotions and ideas in its cramped space. It squeezes the text, so that it threatens to explode into the space around it.
As additions to an Australian poetic tradition, in which a wide variety of new and innovative works are refreshing old conventions, these three collections are notable additions to the burgeoning Australian prose poetry scene.
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