The prose form in Nora Claire Miller’s poem is, for me, the key to its invention, or it’s what exaggerates the invention into the form. Everything is crowded, because prose can often do that to a poem. Make it crowded. Make the images feel more like a bunch of inflatable pool toys you’re trying to store in your living room. And if they were arranged just right, so it feels like, say, a “night club,” with the lighting at that semi-passive-aggressive level, and everyone looking like that version of themselves they imagine they look like looking into a camera, that is exactly where all the THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP!!! comes from in a night club.
That’s the scene I’m walking through in Nora Claire Miller’s poem, “the night club,” published last year in FENCE 40. It’s the prose form that is risky to use. Because there was this time in the early 2000s when many poets used the prose form to write something zany. “Everything’s crowded. How zany is that!” is the feeling I got reading those poems. For instance, Joel Brouwer’s Centuries. So zany. So kind of a similar note throughout. Likely, no one else feels as anxious as I do reading prose poems. But I do! What if it just reduces to the formula? What if the surreal imagery is just mildly zany, or too zany for the poem, or zany image 1 is not sufficiently distanced from zany image 2. And it all tastes bland. Gross!
I find Miller’s poem about as fresh as peanut butter eaten at a job you’re barely grateful to have. And maybe that sounds like the color grey (especially when it’s spelled with an e). But I’ve had a job like that. I worked it sometimes on a Saturday afternoon, and no one else was there. And if I’d found some peanut butter, it would have felt like I was falling in love with peanut butter. I totally get Miller’s image.
And I totally get that crowded feeling trying to connect spoon with peanut butter, and the hazards posed by an elbow. Or any part of you arm. Get out of the way arm! It’s like being in a night club, and everyone in there is a version of you. And look at how Miller’s poem exaggerates its analogical pieces into that prose form! Prose is crowded. Miller’s poem is crowded on so many levels. I just love passing the many people who go to a club, and the poet admits they are all the same people. Maybe it’s more about different versions of “people.” Like when my daughter and I play Minecraft and we meet “traders” or “villagers” coming to the house. All of them with that same eager look on their face. Probably the same look I would have on my face when I’m at a night club, and all the versions of me were crowded into a bathroom. I’m very familiar with me. Miller’s poem is the zany feeling I have meeting all these versions of me at a night club. And familiarity like that feels like eating peanut butter. Or I didn’t realize that until I read it in Miller’s poem. And it’s pretty exciting to recognize something so well in a poem!