Protean Manifestations and Diverse Shapes: Defining and Understanding Strategies of the Contemporary Prose Poem

As new prose poetry anthologies are published and as critical work about the form proliferates, prose poets increasingly find themselves approaching the poetic mainstream. Yet, a century and a half after the publication of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, the question remains: what constitutes a prose poem? Is there such a thing and, if so, how might it be defined and understood? While many different kinds of prose poems have been identified over recent decades, a range of innovations – including free-line prose poems, hybridisation, and dense poetic prose – challenge and appear to subvert the boundaries of the prose poem form. In addressing these developments, and exploring what remains fundamental to prose poetry, this chapter asks what the form is becoming and what recent criticism says about its growing significance and identity.