Section Description: We will investigate the amphibious experiment called the poem in prose, a creature that Baudelaire says "has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail. . . ." What are its structural advantages and liberties, its elasticity and limitations? Our study will include bridges, transitions, and hybrids of poetry/prose/short fiction, and the extended prose poem. How does the poem in prose absorb speech and historically excluded "content?" In what ways do the sentence and the paragraph dismantle distinctions between traditional genres? If genres are essentially literary institutions, does the strategy democratize poetry? What connections emerge between the poem in prose and the visual arts? Readings will be keyed to illuminate the technique as it has been used historically by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Max Jacob, Stein, Michaux, Ponge, Cortazar, Williams, Etel Adnan, Ashbery. Projects will focus on modernist and contemporary practitioners of the hybrid by such writers as Kazim Ali, Lyn Hejinian, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Harryette Mullen, Leslie Scalapino, Lisa Robertson, Edwin Torres, Fernando Pessoa, and many more.

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