Baudelaire is, without a doubt, a father of the prose poem form in contemporary writing. Yes, prose poems existed long, long before, notably in the Bible’s “Psalms Of David.” There are other historical examples as well. But for all practical purposes, one thinks of Baudelaire who made prose poems an accepted style with the publication of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) in 1857.
Recently, I read one of Baudelaire’s prose poems, “The Old Woman’s Despair,” in which an aging woman tries, unsuccessfully, to admire a newborn baby boy. As the woman approaches the baby, she is shocked that the baby sees her and begins to wail, as though frightened or repulsed by the old woman. The result is that the woman suddenly has a sad epiphany about being old and decrepit, and of no longer being able to please.…
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I forget when I first came across William Saroyan. I was young, maybe seven or eight years old, and he had just died. His writing by that time had fallen completely out of favor and all his best work was decades in the past. He no longer wrote much fiction and instead had taken to writing short autobiographical pieces, but I was interested in his fiction.
I didn’t read much by him, maybe a story or six, but that was enough for me to go around telling people that William Saroyan was my favorite writer. This was odd for a kid from Jersey City in 1981. It was unlikely any of my friends had ever heard of him.
Despite Saroyan being my favorite writer, I wouldn’t read his stories in earnest until I was enlisted in the army.…
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We convene to read from a book that can’t even settle upon its own name. We arrive as realists to a place and time where reality eludes us. I summon you to try and make sense of the nonsensical, to impose structure on that which flows like water through our hands, to explain the unexplainable.
Bruno Schulz, an art teacher and painter in Drogobych, Poland, scribed three literary works of art and then was shot dead by a Gestapo officer – because he was another officer’s tame Jewish painter. Even his death is rendered ambiguous, since he had a revolutionary nest of Poles that wanted to smuggle him to freedom. He chose what he had known all his life: a claustrophobic death in a provincial town that had claimed him and brutalized him in its cloistered grasp.…
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Every struggling new writer who has just earned a B.A. in English needs a dose of the career advice E. B. White once gave me. He had very definite views on how to write—what to write about and then—how to get it in print.
Since Andy really didn’t like his first name, Elwyn, he always asked his friends to use his nickname “Andy” although the byline on all of his stories, articles, essays, poems and books listed him as E. B. White.
Today, children may be the only readers who truly appreciate E.B. White for his excellent stories. E.B. White’s children’s books have lived on past his death in 1985. Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan, are still very popular.
Some students currently in college probably know that E.…
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The Scent of Style
We all write with the same words available in dictionaries but what makes writing styles so different, the words put together in sentences go through sea change used by different writers? Cooks work with often the same recipes but we have no trouble identifying the food as Aunt Mary’s.
One of the reasons style is so unique could be related to what John Galsworthy noted in his preface to one of his novels, Fraternity: “A novelist, however observant of type and sensitive to the shades of character, does little but describe and dissect that which lies within himself.” Octavio Paz, on poetry: “Poetry is not what words say but what is said between them, that which appears fleetingly in pauses and silences.”…
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Life as an English major isn’t as easy as people might think. Sure, we read books and
discuss them while math majors slave away at finding the derivatives of multi-variable
equations, but just because one sounds easier than the other doesn’t make it necessarily
true. Four of the girls I live with are business/math majors and they are constantly on
my back for doing nothing but reading chapter four of Frankenstein for the fifth time
while they pull allnighters and skip classes to study for their next accounting class.
In fact, they take it one step further by even saying that there is no real use for reading
those books and writing pointless explanatory papers and that the only reason I have
chosen this route in college is to “take the easy way out.”…
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