The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre

"Excellent . . . the only critical book on prose poetry that not only provides a historical background for the prose poem in English, but also focuses on contemporary American prose poets."--Peter Johnson, Providence College
 
The American prose poem has a rich history marked by important contributions from major writers. Michel Delville's book is the first full-length work to provide a critical and historical survey of the American prose poem from the early years of the 20th century to the 1990s.
 Delville reassesses the work of established prose poets in relation to the history of modern poetry and introduces writings by some whose work in the form has so far escaped mainstream critical attention (Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Patchen, Russell Edson). He describes the genre's European origins and the work of several early representatives of a modern tradition of the prose lyric (Charles Baudelaire, Max Jacob, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce).
 By applying a broad range of theory to the history of the prose poem, Delville adds evidence to its reputation as a norm-breaking form by writing within, against, and across existing genres and traditions. He shows that the history of the contemporary prose poem is, in many respects, the record of its efforts to question both the nature of the "poetic" or "lyric" mode and the aesthetic and ideological foundations of a variety of other genres and subgenres.

Michel Delville teaches at the University of Liège, Belgium, and is a senior research assistant at the National Fund for Scientific Research in Brussels. He is author of a study of J. G. Ballard and of articles on contemporary English and American literature.

• An Introduction to the Prose Poem
• The Government Lake: Last Poems
• Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (Second Edition)
• Headwaters: Poems
• The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice
• Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present
• The World Doesn't End
• Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms
• Models of the Universe : An Anthology of the Prose Poem
• 35 Tips for Writing Powerful Prose Poems (35 Tips series for Writers) (Volume 2)