Open City – Spring/Summer 2007

Having just edited a story anthology in which four contributors were poets by trade, I was particularly interested in reading this installment of Open City, which offers “prose by poets.” It’s a bit of a departure for this venue – if only because those accustomed to its steady professionalism will find the quality here to vacillate wildly.

Having just edited a story anthology in which four contributors were poets by trade, I was particularly interested in reading this installment of Open City, which offers “prose by poets.” It’s a bit of a departure for this venue – if only because those accustomed to its steady professionalism will find the quality here to vacillate wildly.

When not provided the luxury of a line break, these poets often feel at sea: Colons and semicolons appear profusely; sentences are as often fragmented as not; focus will lurch from topic to topic. These traits are evident in not all of Open City’s contributors, but in the best of them; Joe Wenderoth, who has taken recent beatings elsewhere in the blogosphere, takes the ol’ subject-object paradigm on a hilarious trip to a local strip club, where, apparently, “God is Glad.” Similarly, Jim Harrison’s brief “Arizona II” carries the kind of fragmentary vividness that captures the eccentricity of its landscape. A short storywriter would have felt the necessity of cultivating these loose ends into a narrative duck-duck goose; Harrison casts this concern to the wind. If there’s one thing this prose is not, it’s complacent.

In some cases, the experiment goes south. While Deborah Garrison’s apologetic letter to Beller explaining her inability to write prose is funny, some others should have taken the confessional route. Hadara Bar-Nadav cleaves too tightly to the narrative strain, producing a bland, methodical story that goes nowhere. Wayne Koestenbaum’s “Welcome Tour” is too recognizable as a “prose poem” to feel, in the spirit of this particular journal, like anything other than a copout.
[http://www.opencity.org/]