Lesson 2 - The Prose Poem as an Exquisite Corpse

Prose Poetry vs Flash Fiction, Surreal vs Absurd vs Experimental vs Camp, and a few Surrealist techniques

Aug 09, 2024

This is Lesson 2 of 8 from Karan Kapoor’s Surrealist's Toolkit: Creating Beautiful Prose Poems from Everyday Madness. If you missed lesson 1, it’s right here.

In our first class, we delved into the origins and defining characteristics of surrealism and explored how the prose poem serves as a perfect medium for this literary movement.

Now, let's take our understanding a step further by defining and fine-tuning the concepts of prose poetry and surrealism. We'll examine the distinctions between prose poetry and flash fiction and explore how surrealism intersects with absurdism, experimental writing, and camp.

Additionally, we'll dive into some surrealist techniques that can enrich your writing. By the end of this lesson, you'll have a deeper grasp of the various forms and approaches that can inspire your own surreal prose poems.

Flash Fiction vs. Prose Poetry

Before we continue with our lessons, let’s end the debate for once and for all. Most people agree that flash fiction and prose poetry often share a similar brevity and intensity, but they serve different purposes.

Flash fiction tells a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end, even within its limited word count. It focuses on narrative structure, plot development, and character arcs.

Prose poetry, on the other hand, blends poetic language with prose form, prioritising lyrical expression and imagery over traditional narrative. Though this is more or less true, I urge you to not think about these boxes. An editor recently took a prose poem of mine as a Flash CNF piece and I couldn’t care less. If someone wants to read your poem as fiction and fiction as a poem, they should have all the right to. I often am guilty of saying things like: Hybrid is the future, baby!

This Denise Duhamel piece from The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry does a fantastic job of ending this debate too:

Difference between Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction?
Prose poetry and flash fiction are kissing cousins. They are kissing on Jerry Springer, knowing they're cousins, and screaming "So what?" as the audience hisses. They're kissing on One Life to Live, unaware one's aunt is the other's mother. A prose poem has amnesia, and when her friends tell her about her past, nothing they describe produces in her even a icker. In a flash, she thinks: they are wrong-something tells me I was once a short short. Flash fiction looks into the mirror and sees a prose poem. A prose poem parts his hair on the left instead of the middle, and his barber tells him he's flash fiction. A prose poem walks into a bar, and the bartender says, "What'll you have? The usual paragraph?" A flash fiction walks into the doctor's office and the doctor says, "How's that stanza feeling?" There may be a difference between flash fiction and prose poems, but I believe the researchers still haven't found the genes that differentiate them.

Surreal v Absurd v Experimental v Camp

While surrealism embraces the illogical and dream-like, Absurdism focuses on the inherent meaninglessness of human existence. Experimental prose challenges traditional narrative and structural conventions. If you think about it, prose poetry was once experimental and is still considered so by some. How would you further experiment with the form? We’ll speak about this in lesson 4. And finally, Camp celebrates exaggerated, humorous, and theatrical aesthetics.

Explore how these movements overlap and influence each other. These elements are very closely related and you’d find Absurdist elements are often present in surrealist works, and are often experimental.

Okay, let’s get to the fun stuff now. The Surrealists were big on writing techniques. Remember I mentioned earlier how Dalí would sleep holding a spoon in his hand and a steel plate directly underneath it so he could wake up and use his dreamstate to explore his unconscious? They all had a bunch of other stuff that helped them tap into the unconscious.

Techniques to Explore

Automatic Writing

Automatic writing, hailed by André Breton in his manifestoes, is a surrealist technique where the writer writes continuously without conscious control or deliberate thought. The goal is to bypass the rational mind and tap into the unconscious, allowing spontaneous and uninhibited expression. This method can produce unexpected and imaginative content, often revealing hidden thoughts, emotions, or ideas that the writer might not have consciously articulated. It involves writing rapidly and freely, without worrying about grammar, structure, or coherence, letting the flow of words come naturally from the subconscious.

Exercise: Have a notebook and pen by your side when you go to sleep. As soon as you wake up, begin writing without any plan or preconception. Do not stop to think, correct, or analyze. Just keep your hand or fingers moving, even if you write things like “I don't know what to write” at first. Allow any words, phrases, or images that come to mind to spill out, regardless of whether they make sense. Once you stop, read what you’ve written without judgment. Look for any surprising images, themes, or phrases that stand out. Highlight or underline any parts that intrigue you or evoke a strong reaction. Choose one or two intriguing lines or images from your automatic writing. Use these as the starting point for a new prose poem. Let the initial impulse guide you, and see where it takes you. Automatic writing works best when you let go of control and allow your subconscious to take the lead. Trust the process, and you may uncover surprising and powerful insights.

Non-sequitur

Introduce elements that don’t logically follow from the previous context to create a sense of surprise and wonder.

This is one technique I love but it’s so easy to get it wrong. Remember the Leigh Chadwick poem we read last time. Look at this line again: “Shave off all your hair and learn how to play poker.” The first half of the sentence doesn’t match in any logical way whatsoever with the second half, but it still works so well in adding to the humor of the poem. It also works because both parts of the sentences are so easy to understand and yet create a complexity that’s hard to define when put together.

Here’s a poem that builds itself on non-sequiturs that come together beautifully. It’s from Bob Hicok’s Elegy Owed.

The order of things

Then I stopped hearing from you. Then I thought
I was Beethoven's cochlear implant. Then I listened
to deafness. Then I tacked a whisper
to the bulletin board. Then I liked dandelions
best in their Afro stage. Then a breeze
held their soft beauty for ransom. Then no one
throws a Molotov cocktail better
than a Buddhist monk. Then the abstractions
built a tree fort. Then I stopped hearing from you.
Then I stared at my life with the back of my head.
Then an earthquake somewhere every day.
Then I felt as foolish as a flip-flop
alone on a beach. Then as a beach
alone with a sea. Then as a sea
repeating itself to the moon. Then I stopped hearing
from the moon. Then I waved. Then I threw myself
into the work of throwing myself
as far as I can. Then I picked myself up
and wondered how many of us
get around this way. Then I carried
the infinity. Then I buried the phone.
Then the ground rang. Then I answered the ground.
Then the dial tone of dirt. Then I sat on a boulder
not hearing from you. Then I did jumping jacks
not hearing from you. Then I felt up silence.
Then silence and I went all the way.

Exercise: Write a 10 sentence prose poem where no sentence follows the one before. Try to eradicate any words like: because, as, for, and, but, etc.

Exquisite Corpse

This was one of the earliest surrealist exercises that those French dudes often did together. It’s a collaborative method where different writers contribute to a single piece without seeing the previous contributions. This technique fosters unexpected juxtapositions and a collective surrealist vision.

The name "Exquisite Corpse" comes from a line of poetry created using the technique: "The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine."

Exercise: Best done with 5 poets. Use the “Adjective, Noun, Verb, Adjective, Noun” structure. Articles and verb tenses may be added or adjusted after the poem has been written. The only rule you need to follow is that each participant is unaware of what others have written, resulting in surprising—sometimes absurd, often ridiculous—yet beautiful lines. Exquisite Corpse is a fun way to collaborate with other poets (it often results in a lot of laughter), and to free oneself from conventional thinking patterns.

Question and Answer

Use a dialogue format where questions are answered with surreal, unexpected responses.

Example:

Q: What color is the sky?

A: The color of forgotten dreams stitched with the thread of despair.

Exercise: Find a friend/spouse/child etc and ask them to write questions and you answer those questions without knowing the questions. Then switch places and repeat. This can be truly fun whether your partner is a weird-ass or a complete stuck-up. You come up with really hilarious and interesting sets of q&a’s that might help you kick start a crazy-ass poem!

Assignment 2

I strongly urge you to try each of the four exercises but for the class, share the results from one of the exercises in the comments and read and comment on each other’s work.

The Forever Workshop