Yesterday I went to the Duluth Art Institute for the opening reception of an exhibit of paintings by Ann Jenkins. Glorious, wonderful paintings.
But I also got to talk to her husband, Louis while we stood around admiring Ann’s paintings and nibbling on Scenic Café hors d’oeuvres. He’s a poet. He should have been a workshop leader at the Great Mother Conference in 2005 at Camp Nebagoman, Wisconsin. Unfortunately, he was sick when it was his turn. So since I missed the opportunity to be in the workshop, the next time I saw him, I asked him what made a prose poem (he is a master of the prose poem) – he said, “It’s like a novel only shorter.” Oh, this man of few words! I did, however, find an interview that Rip Saw News published in September 2000. I found a few more clues as to what makes a prose poem in his answer to the interviewed in All Work and Some Plays Interview with Louis Jenkins by Gina Temple, RipSaw News, Duluth, Minnesota, September 27, 2000:
"They don’t teach prose poems in college by and large. There is no definition for prose poem. There are no rules except that it’s in prose—so a prose poem can be anything. I write the kind of prose poem I write. I don’t see them as necessarily a model for anyone to go by any more than I have been influenced by any rules or other writers. It’s just me, writing in prose, the way I’d write it. You try to create an atmosphere—there is not necessarily any point to what you are trying to say. Usually I try to have a beginning, middle and end. A poet said to me one time "You’re into closure" That was a derogatory term. She wanted to see poem as process. It’s a poem. It’s a finished work of art. It’s not a process. Process is like reading people’s journals. I’m not interested in that—very popular, journal writing. People will read from journals. Journal means to me that it’s in process—notes, scribbling. I don’t want that. I want finished art."
This is one of my favorite Louis Jenkins’ prose poems:
At first he refused to deliver junk mail because it was stupid, all those deodorant ads, money-making ideas and contests. Then he began to doubt the importance of the other mail he carried. He began to randomly select first class mail for nondelivery. After he had finished his mail route each day he would return home with his handful of letters and put them in the attic. He didn't open them and never even looked at them again. It was as if he were an agent of Fate, capricious and blind. In the several years before he was caught, friends vanished, marriages failed, business deals fell through. Toward the end he became more and more bold, deleting houses, then whole blocks from his route. He began to feel he'd been born in the wrong era. If only he could have been a Pony Express rider galloping into some prairie town with an empty bag, or the runner from Marathon collapsing in the streets of Athens, gasping, "No news."
The Duluth Art Institute exhibit of Ann's paintings in the George Morrison Gallery at the Depot continues through August 5.
Louis' new book "North of the Cities" is available at Northern Lights Books and Gifts in Duluth's Canal Park.
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Comments: 3
An instructional guidance piece on going for the gold with pen to paper ! I assure all at first in this career, it is not the immediate income I am after; rather the immediate gratification I get when someone reads a piece of mine and smiles, laughs, sighs or cries. It also is an opportunity for me to absorb constructive criticism which . . .
Click to see where criticism takes this writer