Mississippi Review – Fall 2006

I selected this attractive volume for its beautiful cover—aware of literary potential, of course, as Mississippi Review is one of the better-known journals—and opened it to find a masthead identified as “Actualization” and a collection of “prose poems.”

I selected this attractive volume for its beautiful cover—aware of literary potential, of course, as Mississippi Review is one of the better-known journals—and opened it to find a masthead identified as “Actualization” and a collection of “prose poems.” Reconsidering sentences, paragraphs, pages, and whole chapters from many of my favorite writers as prose poems, I soon developed an interest in this loosely defined category. Some of the selections here seem indistinguishable from flash fiction or short-short stories, such as Mark Budman’s engaging “To My Love.” The enjoyable “The Family Tree” by Christian Popescu would surely read as well if called a memoir or essay, or simply a poem: “As if when you spell it out, the winning lottery ticket you paid ten lei for were to say, word by word: ‘Year of death, 1987; place, Bucharest.’” And “Help Your Physician Better Understand Your Pain” by Jillian Weise is interestingly evasive. This issue’s editor, Julia Johnson, traces the prose poem form to Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, and its many practitioners, both before and since—Kafka comes to mind, along with Emerson, and the King James Bible. Indeed, as Ms. Johnson writes: “[…] the prose poem as a form has almost reinvented itself. It no longer seems like a separate genre […]” Indeed; perhaps this is because other forms have become less structured.
[http://www.mississippireview.com]