Let’s think about the poetic line alongside of the “vertical impulse” of prose poetry. Respond here to Rebecca Hazelton’s craft essay “Learning the Poetic Line,” my Google slides on prose poetry, and Sesshu Foster’s prose poems from his collection City Terrace: Field Manual. First, respond to the Hazelton piece and the prose poem slides by distilling what you see as the main points, and identifying the strategies you find most useful. Then look to the poems Hazelton cites and to Foster’s poems in City Terrace to explore how you see these approaches at work in the poems you’re examining. Spend some time applying all of this to YOUR work. Which strategies are you drawn to? What can you implement in your poetic experiments?
