There is a movement to prose paragraphs when they appear in poetry books. Something separate from the “prose poem,” which is structured to look like a paragraph, because the materials, being part of a surreal vision or a dream, just won’t settle into regular verse. It needs to feel like the poet felt it, happening all at once. The feeling is chaos, with the poem mainly concerned with whatever the play run between nonsense and sense. But the prose paragraph, especially as it’s used in Kelly Schirmann’s book, The New World, has other methods. I would say her paragraphs are like excerpts from an ongoing lyric essay, especially in the way an ongoing sensibility moves from one paragraph to the next. A prosody focused on transition. That capitalizes on the page-turn. And takes advantage of the tension that arises from the topic-sentence expectations a reader brings, where they expect any one paragraph to sum up what it’s saying, but also the portion-of-a-whole that most readers would expect a paragraph to be part of. Like the paragraph isn’t supposed to tell the whole story, but conduct a reader carefully through one.
I would argue, the prose paragraph is a central device for Schirmann’s book. Not only because the first section is a personal essay written in straightforward prose, and the title section of the book, “The New World,” is written in prose paragraphs, with one paragraph per page. But because the sections that follow all occupy a mental space that feels similar to the space those paragraphs occupied. Where the paragraphs provide an occasional view into the poet’s ongoing life. She’s moved to California with her partner, and she’s marveling at what can be new, she’s marveling at waiting to find something new in her artistic practice, and she’s even marveling at what happens as the new settles into pattern, invigorating what she’d sensed was new, while also signaling it might not be as new anymore.
It’s these layers interconnected by a circuitous logic that I would call Schirmann’s real success. How her paragraphs don’t need to spend time establishing a world, they speak from a world that they’ve trained their reader to assume already exists in each poem. Though, for me, it begs the question about what a paragraph, which is traditionally an organizational device, is doing for a poem? I’ve long appreciated Lynn Keller’s comment in Thinking Poetry, where she explains what women have folded into American poetry since Kathleen Fraser and Lyn Hejinian. When women poets from that time pushed for a consideration of subjectivity in writing as it’s understood by women versus by the men who had dominated Language Poetry up to that point. For Keller, this position in the late 1970s, early 1980s initiates a long tradition of women’s poetry that “transgresses the limits of intelligibility.” Of course, this means something very different in the work of Fraser and Hejinian versus Schirmann’s The New World. But allowing perforation to serve as a transitional mechanism moving the reader from one paragraph to the next, and how this movement invites a consideration of the poet’s larger world concerns amid these brief glimpses into that world, this could at least be read as an overlap between Hejinian and Schirmann, or it at least places her as one of many inheritors of this tradition.
Though I would also comment that this space is well-trafficked in this current moment of American poetry. Just a few books I’ve personally been excited to read for their poetic tooling of the prose paragraph are Andrea Rexilius‘s New Organism, C. Violet Eaton’s Some Habits, Valerie Hsiung‘s To Love an Artist, Donna Stonecipher’s Transaction Histories, and Dawn Lundy Martin’s Discipline. Each carries the prose paragraph in different ways, but could be related to the others’ methods. The books most directly comparable to Schirmann’s are Yanyi’s The Year of Blue Water and Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book. In particular, both these books stage the paragraph as a unit that momentarily records something of note, which any individual poem can casually pick up, then put back down with a mild resolution that feels local to the paragraph, but still doesn’t resolve the book’s larger consideration. Importantly, this occasional method allows the poet to relate something new without needing to contextualize it with the larger work. These books feel close to a journal, but something much more satisfying then an actual journal.
With Schirmann, Yanyi, and Buffam, the book teaches the reader what each of these prose paragraphs will attempt. Or, in that Montaigne way, “try.” They will try to make the one event described in the paragraph relevant to everything that has already been said. They will try to remain coherent, but they also trust the reader to understand everything they say in the paragraph feels coherent to the composition, and the reader should appreciate that quality.
If it’s not clear, most of my reading in Schirmann is thinking about this poetic device. At least the way reading a series of sonnets makes you think less and less about the formal mechanisms of a sonnet sequence. There’s just so much content. Of course, there are differences between the sonnet and the paragraph. But the pace of reading, a uniformity in timing for each page, an inconspicuous role for the form, how the sonnet’s reiteration seems to make it less pertinent to the reading, and, finally, a sense that passion drives the series of pieces to something that’s not really resolvable, giving the sense the sequence will go on as long as the poet has the stamina to make it go on, these similarities significantly overlap the two forms. It’s this ongoing quality that leads me to read Schirmann’s “The Dreams” and “Apples” sections of The New World as extensions of that prose paragraph style, extending its influence past “The New World” section. Or at least a middle ground between the sonnet sequence and the prose paragraph.
“The New World,” an individual poem appearing in the book’s “The Dreams” section, starts differently. It should be read as a dream, for one thing. So, while “The New World arrived / when we were unconscious” might fit with that axiom about what people most desire only comes when they least expect it (when it’s like they’re “unconscious” to what they most desire), it’s also describing a situation where “The New World” could be considered a dream figure that appears while someone is sleeping. They might not be watching, but that New World is going to lay “on top of the Old World / like vellum paper.” And in this arrangement of world(s), the people, as “institutions,” will comply by signing things.
Everything is in general agreement. People, organizations as people, worlds just doing what needs to be done. The poem doesn’t explain why anyone would be signing things. They just feel “compelled” to. Which, in light of the book’s larger concerns, could be how artistic purpose feels once everything fits into place. New world, new life. At least in the sense where the poet has spent durations of time waiting for a new world to meet her where she is in this new place. The sweep of the few stanzas describing the New World on top of the Old World feels like that sweep of artistic purpose.
There were many new documents
we felt compelled to signThere was still fresh juice
though we regarded it skepticallyThe New World shined
brighter / and wasRed became a color
for the first time in decadesHeat came from humans
who were just pure energyFood grew faster
and more anonymously
What I am drawn to in the poem comes after this, though. What happens “eventually.” When “a newer world” starts appearing in images that no one had been attending to. Because it speaks to the poet’s awareness of disappointment, while also wondering aloud why she would be disappointed. What does it mean for the new world if a newer world is so soon to take its place? It’s a lingering disappointment, something that feels intrinsic to the culture, but it doesn’t seem the poet understands why it’s there. In particular, she sees how newness on its own is something people pursue, and they have many reasons to pursue it, or they don’t even know why they are chasing it, it just feels like something to do. And is that what had left the poet unsettled?
There was a feeling permeating
all of us / a sleepy memory
of having moved beyond
the moment of choice-making
The newness that she refers to later as “an adjacent performance // Long and slow / Still” is part of her new world that feels even newer than her new world. And I can’t help but read an underlying anxiety, where the poet wonders if the new world she’d perceived should really have been seen in light of the Old World she’d seen laid on top of by a New one, or if it were just a function of the world, which likes to feed newness to people all the time. And what would that do to the poet’s artistic practice. She’d been so patient throughout the book, waiting for newness to invigorate her art.
It’s part of that imposter syndrome many artists are familiar with. The tenuousness of a creative practice. The fear that what feels right and good at any moment might just be artistic delusion. Can feeling “Heat came from humans / who were just pure energy” be deflated so quickly to “how quiet it got then,” when the poet is just watching new things while she cleans?