What makes a prose poem? How would you go about writing one? How do you tell a successful prose poem from a mere chunk of prose? Learn all about this paradoxical verse form and write some prose poems ...

American prose poetry—a tradition extending from Robert Bly to Lyn Hejinian—has finally come into its own. Although prose poems defy easy classification—they are, as the name indicates, neither ...

“The prose poem has achieved an unprecedented level of popularity among American poets,” writes David Lehman, a poet and the series editor of the Best American Poetry series, published by Scribner. He ...

The critic William Hazlitt (1778–1830), known best in his lifetime for his writing on Shakespeare, was a jack of all trades and a master of none too few, trying his deft hand at painting, philosophy, ...

Book One was my very first work. I was a fiction writer and had graduated some years ago with an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I did not yet see myself as a poet. After attempts at ...

Perhaps since Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, poets have been using prose to understand how poems and poetry work. Something about the procedures of prose, its civilities and solidity, ...

Prose poetry is a literary form that combines elements of prose and poetry to create a unique narrative voice and style. It appears as standard prose, without line breaks, but utilizes poetic devices ...

The Idea of Perfection: The Prose and Poetry of Paul Valéry, translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (image courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux) In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” ...