One of the really interesting things about the prose poem is that it becomes like a little haunted house, this small container, this little box, a kind of snapshot. The prose poem gives way to a content that felt very haunted at its center, which is what I wanted. I wanted the sense of the uncanny, and I feel like the prose poem offers that because it is a form that should not be but is. I think it’s Charles Simic who says that the prose poem should not exist, but it does, that it’s the coming together of two contradictory impulses: prose and poetry. So it’s a kind of marvel already because of its form. It gives way to a subject that is a subject of marvel — hatched at its center is a kind of marvel.
– Sabrina Orah Mark, from an interview up on BWR’s website
I actually transcribed this interview, back when I was a research assistant for BWR. You can read the whole thing on BWR’s website, if you are so inclined. I transcribed a bunch of interviews that year, and this was the only one that I lingered on, the only one that was formative and beautiful. I wanted to go back in time and shove the interviewer aside so that I could do it myself.
I’m reading it again right now, and suddenly I’m all What am I thinking? SOM took 5 years to write each of her books. What makes me think that I could have the best possible version of this manuscript in only 2 years?
But also, I’m excited that Sabrina Orah Mark is judging BWR’s poetry contest this year (!!!).
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