Booklist #4

It was prose poem month for packet #4:

• Moments without Names: New and Selected Prose Poems, by Morton Marcus
• Selected Poems, by Mary Ruefle
• The World Doesn’t End, by Charles Simic
• Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writer, edited by Charles Simic and Mark Strand

The prose poem kind of mystifies me. I thought I’d have a better understanding of what it does and how it works as a result of reading so many and writing about one of Simic’s, but I don’t. I wrote two of my own this month, just to try something new, and they were both pretty terrible. All the decisions I made about htem felt arbitrary.

I imagine this is how writers of formal verse felt when free verse showed up…