THE PROSE POEM:
AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
Volume 5 | 1996
Spencer Holst’s The Zebra
Storyteller, Peter Redgrave’s The
Cyclopean Mistress, Barry
Silesky’s One Thing That Can Save
Us
John Bradley
© Providence College
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Spencer Holst. The Zebra Storyteller. Station Hill. 1993. 295 pp.
Paper: $14.95
Peter Redgrove. The Cyclopean Mistress. Bloodaxe Books. 1993.
156 pp. Paper: $7.95.
Barry Silesky. One Thing That Can Save Us. Coffee House Press.
1994. 92 pp. $10.95
"Think of the prose rectangle as a small suitcase," writes Louis
Jenkins in the forward to his Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Po-
ems. "One must pack carefully, only the essentials, too much and the
reader won't get off the ground. Too much and the poem becomes a
story, a novel, an essay, or worse," Jenkins warns. While it's extremely
dangerous to attempt a definition that would accurately describe all
prose poems, Jenkins' profile does serve to show why two of these
three prose-poem collections don't "get off the ground" and one does.
I've never heard Spencer Holst tell his stories. Reading The
Zebra Storyteller, his collected stories, I wish I had. I quickly discov-
ered that the language in these pieces-some as short as a paragraph,
one that approaches novella length-rarely holds my attention. The
voice of the storyteller, though, with its little asides-"and, you know,
goblins are a little scary"-endeared me to the tale-teller. Maybe that's
why Station Hill features fourteen photographs of the author, includ-
ing three with the author's wife, Beate Wheeler, who provides some
intriguing pen-and-ink illustrations for the book. Photographs, how-
ever, can't take the place of the spoken voice.
At his best, Holst makes a quirky, wistful, and charming story-
teller. The title piece, my favorite in this collection, illustrates his
quirkiness: "Once upon a time there was a Siamese cat who pretended
to be a lion and spoke inappropriate Zebraic." And his whimsy. He
takes the cliché "fit to be tied" and has the Siamese cat literally tie the
Zebra who uttered the cliché (and thus surely deserves such a fate). As
for charm, well, while I won't tell you how the author arrives at the
closing line, I will deliver the punchline, as Holst's reference to his
craft occurs quite often in these pieces: "That is the function of the
storyteller." Another tale, "Bullfinch & Goblin," which opens in the
same time-honored way-"Once upon a time"-also captivates. Holst
manages to pull me through the slow point in the tale, two boys imitat-
ing various bird calls, because of my interest in his character, an inse-
cure bullfinch.
Yet this passage reveals the weakness I find with most of these
pieces-imitating bird calls, for example, might work well when per-
formed, but on the page, these conceits feel wooden, flat. I felt the
same way with the closing of "The Getaway Car." "Ah-GOO-gah!
Ah-GOO-gah!" might work as a performance piece, but not on the
page. Only in those few pieces in the book which are separated by
asterisks does Holst seem to craft the language. In fact, in "Prose for
Dancing," composed of thirty separate entries, he reminds us several
times he's sitting at a typewriter: "Beauty mused, as if to herself,
'When I agreed to be in this piece it was understood that there was to
be a fresh typewriter ribbon.'" I find myself wishing he brought this
chisel to the larger blocks of prose.
Perhaps I'm making demands on Holst's work mat shouldn't
be placed on it. I approach The Zebra Storyteller as written text, whether
"stories" or "prose poems," and thus expect to be engaged by the lan-
guage. I don't bring this to oral tales as a listener, where the voice of
the storyteller itself can carry me into other worlds. I find myself
transfixed by the tales of Bailey White, on NPR's All Things Consid-
ered, for example, and when Garrison Keillor is at his best, I've sat in
the car with the engine running to hear the news from Lake Wobegone.
Perhaps Holst should have released a collection of his tales on CD.
That format would be best suited to capture the real strength of Spen-
cer Holst-his gift for storytelling.
Holst's book opens with a quotation from Poe: "even now in
the present darkness and madness...it is not impossible that man, the
individual, under certain unusual and highly fortuitous conditions, may
be happy," and Poe, alas, casts a large shadow over Peter Redgrave's
The Cyclopean Mistress. Poe can be found in the title "Dance the
Putrefact: Scenario for Masque," in the line, "As for myself, I am no
madman," ("My Shirt of Small Checks"); and in the fantastic imaginings
of "An Army of Mice," one of my favorite pieces in this collection.
Redgrave animates a nightmare where everything the waking sleeper
touches-"My feet touched a carpet. It wriggled and clasped me with
its teeth."-turns into mice.
Unlike Poe, though, Redgrave doesn't usually provide dark
and drear settings to evoke horror and fear. He can take the mundane
and orchestrate it into something strange and threatening. Take "Riding
Crocodiles in Falmouth": "The hail-shower, clicking along the tiles,
dragging its leash, scratching itself, makes all the restless dog-noises
of a hail-shower." In the same piece, Redgrave likewise transforms
trees: "The trees lash their tales, tugging at the earth. They are green as
crocodiles diving upwards with something in their teeth." His poetic
prose, however, often becomes Redgrove's worst enemy. When he
relies solely on it to propel the pieces, they bog down in the richness of
his imagination. Take, for example, this section (XII) from "Excur-
sions":
The comets which blacked the ice-cream; all production
had to cease during the transit of the comet. The vast stain-
less Helmholtz lantern. The dumb-show of the production-
line, the mudras and the asanas everlastingly repeated,
the necessary attitudes of packing schemata, the whole-
cloud figures in white rubber boots, the visible breath, the
array of cold piping, the vast stainless benches, the metal-
doored hardening-room. The frosty path from the
pasteuriser to the homogeniser. The snowmaiden ice cream-
makers. The damned great cold stores.
Placed in the context of the other fourteen sections, this passage unfor-
tunately is rendered no more readable. In fact, it's less comprehen-
sible.
Redgrove's wild imagery-comets blackening ice cream, ani-
mals "blessing us in Egyptian"-and the author's ability to stretch lan-
guage-the series of sentence fragments in the excerpt above-can charm
and beguile. But Redgrove's love for "uncommon sense unleashed,"
as he calls it in "Science," too often turns into baroqueness for the sake
of being baroque. Will readers stay with fifteen sections of "Excur-
sions" merely for the privilege of experiencing "uncommon sense un-
leashed"? Or make it through the thirteen-line opening sentence of a
prose poem entitled "The Electrical Man," closing with "-in short,
provocative, and always wearing the same thalamic smile"?
The publisher, Bloodaxe, offers this explanation as to the den-
sity of such writing: "Redgrove begins with short fictions, but gradu-
ally withdraws the narrative scaffolding, asking the reader to respond
instead to an alternative and possibly more dramatic pattern of imag-
ery, where a narrative exists but is unspoken." So "unspoken" is that
narrative scaffolding or direction of any sort that I'm often lost in "the
holy rauch and the divine schmack," to quote from "A Crystal of In-
dustrial Time." Where Holst employs the flatness of everyday lan-
guage, Redgrove dives in the opposite direction, plunging us into a sea
of swirling language. While I admire his poetic imaginings and his
bold experimentation, much of the writing would benefit from some of
that "scaffolding" he has shed.
Barry Silesky, in his One Thing That Can Save Us, manages
to have it both ways. He combines-collides would be a better way to
describe it—the techniques of Holst and Redgrave into something new
and intriguing. Rosellen Brown describes that collision in this way:
"Barry Silesky has taken our selves, our times, our country, and bro-
ken them into shards...and then he's shaken the whole thing." Yeats
warned us in "The Second Coming" that "the centre cannot hold."
Silesky operates not from the given of a centerless world, but from a
world reduced to fragments. His prose poems do more, though, than
merely recreate a world of shards, and this is where his genius lies.
Into that fragmented world of fragmented language, he gives us a Woody
Allen-like twentieth century everyman, one with recognizable human
worries and preoccupations.
Here's a small, short sampling of the way Silesky recombines
those shards for us (from the opening of "Thanksgiving"):
The restaurant's empty, coffee black and fresh. The leaky
gas valve on the heater outside the kids' bedroom's fixed,
and no fire. The check didn't bounce. As the plane took
off the kids stared out the window, dumb at the vanishing
lights. The pay for the last job wasn't enough, but it fi-
nally came in the mail. In the car by the frozen lake, my
first girlfriend let me touch her breast while my mother
and sister cooked at home. The children played with the
toy garage Grandma bought them, and we could read the
paper, talk about the news.
While Silesky certainly doesn't provide us with traditional
narrative, he hasn't removed all the narrative scaffolding either. In
fact, "Thanksgiving" demonstrates how Silesky can provide several
simultaneous narrative threads, seemingly jumbled together, all the
while weaving a complete whole. The first sentence of "Thanksgiv-
ing" quickly establishes the setting. Then the fragmentation starts. In
the very next sentence what I call the anxiety ritual, the perpetual wor-
rying of things breaking down, is momentarily relieved as the narrator
recites a list of things to be thankful for: "The leaky gas valve on the
heater outside the kids' bedroom's fixed, and no fire." A series of
sexual memories then enters the mix: "In the car by the frozen lake,
my first girlfriend let me touch her breast while my mother and sister
cooked at home." Here is the prose-poet at work. The line sounds like
prose, yet the polarities make it poetic-"frozen" contrasted with "cook-
ing," "girlfriend" with "mother and sister," adventure with the limited
and yet safe world of the domestic. Three sentences later, our narrator
returns to his sexual preoccupation, or perhaps it intrudes back into the
thoughts of the narrator: "At first I thought I was supposed to apolo-
gize, not touch her where she let me." Then back to the restaurant,
where Silesky undercuts the poignancy of his discovery of sexuality
with posters for a comedy act: " 'Uproarious!' " " 'Triumphant' " "
'Great Fun!' " Returning out to the sexual encounter, Silesky, in
Spencer Holst-like language, brilliantly captures the confusion and
wonder of that sexual encounter with this short phrase: "Then she let
me more." And we're only half-way through the piece! "Thanksgiv-
ing" culminates with the line: "No one knows where I am." It's not
only that no one knows he's at this restaurant, but that no one else has
had these particular experiences arranged in quite this order.
Not only do narratives appear and reappear within one piece,
but they also wend across the pieces of the book. It's clear, for ex-
ample, that the Persian Gulf War saturated the news at the time Silesky
was composing these pieces, as they continually float through One
Thing That Can Save Us: "Everyone agrees yesterday's peace offer
was a sham, the bombing must continue. Too bad about the burnt
children" ("History"); "Now the war's over & the whole city slowed
for the parade celebrating the victory. The home team won again
("Mount Pleasant"); "The war's finally over....Truth is, we haven't been
there, nobody has, all we've got are reports" ("Sacrifice"). At a time
when material of this sort is almost universally (at least in this country)
discouraged, I have to admire Silesky's vision. History and politics
affect us just as strongly as any other ingredient in our lives, his prose
poems say.
Other currents could just as easily be traced through the book-
the sense of things breaking down: "ceiling plaster falling downstairs;"
sexual preoccupations: "If I beat off every day I can forget about sex
for hours;" the parental worry and wonder over his children: "our
children are practicing words." In fact, tracing these currents points
out another way to read Silesky's book. These individual prose poems
are also chapters in one unending novel, autobiography as stream-of-
consciousness, (or is it stream-of-consciousness as autobiography?).
All three of these books show the diversity of short prose at
the end of the twentieth century. They also show the continual diffi-
culty of editors and publishers in trying to describe just what it is writ-
ers of poetic prose are doing. Station Hill calls Spencer Holst's work
"stories"; Bloodaxe calls Redgrave's work "short fiction"; Coffee House
calls Silesky's work "short-short stories." Is it a matter of enticing
readers with more familiar terms of "stories" or "short fiction" or "short-
short story" than "prose poem"? (Bloodaxe uses the term "prose poem"
only on the back of the book.) Or is length the determining factor?
Louis Jenkins notes, "The trick in writing a prose poem is discovering
how much is enough and how much is too much." Inexact and mysti-
cal as that may sound, that sense of balance is the best compass I can
find, the only way I can explain why I consider Silesky's work prose
poetry and the other two books works of short fiction.
Regardless, though, of the label used to describe what Silesky
has created, One Thing That Can Save Us gains in clarity and com-
plexity and beauty with each rereading. I don't know if it will save us,
but it offers humor and humanity in an era where both seem in short
supply.
John Bradley
