The Prose Poem as a Long Line to a Faith Rock Concert Featuring the Devil as the Opening Act

Lesson 7 - Opening Lines + Closing Lines, Common Pitfalls in Writing Surreal Prose and How to Avoid Them

Mariam Chagelishvili

Intensive #7 from Karan Kapoor’s Surrealist's Toolkit: Creating Beautiful Prose Poems from Everyday Madness

Hello, friends! Welcome to our penultimate lesson. We've come a long way since our first foray into the world of surreal prose poetry. Have you learned to tap into your unconscious already?

In your poems, you’re clearly blending reality with dreams, creating some really fantastic and surprising images. Having practiced salsa with prose poems these last few lessons, I hope it’s safe to assume that you’ve a couple of drafts ready for fine-tuning.

Today, we’ll focus on crafting killer openings and closings, avoiding common pitfalls, and polishing our surreal gems to a brilliant shine to ensure your surreal verses are not just wild flights of fancy, but polished coherent poems that will captivate readers and editors alike.

Use Logic to Make Your Insane Prose Poems Make Sense

Now, I know what you're thinking: “But isn't surrealism all about nonsense?” Not quite, my friends. Even the wildest surreal prose poems have their own internal logic. It's like dream logic — it might not make sense in the waking world, but within the poem, it’s gospel truth. I’ve mentioned Bob Hicok multiple times through this workshop, and for good reason — he’s a master of this logic. Do you remember these following lines from his poem, “The Order of Things:” ”Then I buried the phone / then the ground rang” — isn’t the event of the second line most logical after the first? Here’s another poem of Bob’s I hold in high regard:

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More than whispers, less than rumors

by Bob Hicok

The river is high. I'd love to smoke pot 

with the river. I'd love it if rain 

sat at my table and told me what it's like 

to lick Edith Piaf's grave. I go along thinking 

I'm separate from trash day 

and the weird hairdo my cat wakes up with 

but I am of the avalanche 

as much as I am its tambourine. 

The river is crashing against my sleep 

like it took applause apart and put it back together 

as a riot of wet mouths 

adoring my ears, is over my head

when it explains string theory 

and affection to me, 

when it tells me to be the code breaker, 

not the code. What does that mean? 

Why does lyric poetry exist?

When will water open its mouth 

and tell us how to be clouds, how to rise

and morph and die and flourish and be reborn

all at the same time, all without caring

if we have food in our teeth or teeth in our eyes

or hair in our soup or a piano in our pockets,

just play the damned tune. The river is bipolar 

but has flushed its meds, I'm dead 

but someone has to finish all the cheese 

in the fridge, we're a failed species

if suction cups are important, if intelligence

isn't graded on a curve, 

but if desperation counts, if thunderstorms 

are the noise in our heads given a hall pass 

and rivers swell because orchestras 

aren't always there when we need them, well then, 

I still don't know a thing.

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Alright, let’s take a deep dive into this magnificent river. This poem is a perfect example of what I’m talking about when I say surreal poems have their own internal logic. Bob’s brain is a pinball machine, and each line is the ball pinging from one wild idea to the next, but somehow it all makes sense. He starts with wanting to smoke pot with a river (because the river is “high” and also because why wouldn’t you?), and before you know it, we’re talking about cheese in a dead man’s fridge and pianos in pockets.

But here’s the kicker — it all flows, doesn’t it? Each image leads to the next like musical notes. The river is high, so let’s get high with it. Rain licks graves, so let’s question it about Edith Piaf. We’re part of an avalanche, but also its tambourine (and don’t tell me you haven’t felt like that on a Monday morning).

Bob, in his poems, is playing jazz with reality, riffing on ideas of connection, existence, and the sheer weirdness of being alive. And just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, he pulls the rug out from under you with that last line: “I still don't know a thing.” It’s like he’s winking at us, saying, “Yeah, this is crazy, but isn’t life just as nuts?” That’s the beauty of surrealist logic — it doesn't make sense, except when it totally does.

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Crafting Powerful Openings and Closings

I often indulge myself and waste quite a bit of time thinking what matters more: an opening line or a closing line. Both have to kick ass and they deserve to be given a lot of thought. Your opening line is your hook — it needs to grab the reader by the eyeballs and not let go. Your closing line is the aftershock that keeps the poem reverberating in the reader’s mind long after they’ve finished.

For openings, beginning in medias res is usually a good idea — don’t set up by giving exposition and throw us right into the surreal action. Look at the first poem here by Jose Hernandez Diaz. For closings, aim for something that circles back to the beginning while pushing forward into new territory. Look at the same poem by Jose and see how he hasn’t tried too hard at all to end the poem in a serious grand way with any wise bits. Don’t try too hard to be a poet at all times, but especially when you’re ending a poem. You want the fact that a poem is an artifact to be as hidden as possible.

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Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

1. Circular reasoning short-circuit: Don’t let your poem chase its own tail. Even in surrealism, progression is key.

2. Flashy vs flash: Prioritize substance over style. A string of cool images without connection or meaning is just word salad. Nobody likes those. and as humans, we all love a good story.

3. Pacing: Vary your sentence length and structure. A good surreal prose poem should have rhythm, like a strange but catchy song. Read your poems aloud as you draft them to catch any irregularities in the rhythm.

4. Voltas for Voltage: Create turning points in your poem that surprise and delight. These are the moments that make readers sit up and pay attention. Poems, especially surrealist poems, must move and surprise.

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Alright, let’s talk voltas, folks! 

You might know this term from its fancy-pants use in sonnets, where it’s that pivotal moment when the poem does a 180 faster than a cat spotting a cucumber. There are poets who argue that every poem has a volta no matter how long or short and I agree with that. It’s a turn, a twist, a mind-bending pivot that makes your reader’s brain do backflips. In a sonnet, the volta might shift the argument or tone, but in a surreal prose poem? All bets are off. Your volta could be a perspective swap (hello, I'm a sentient dust bunny now), a mood flip (from giggly to apocalyptic in 0.2 seconds), or a revelation that somehow makes perfect nonsense (turns out the moon was just a giant lightbulb all along, who knew?). The key is to make it surprising yet somehow inevitable. It’s the moment that’ll keep your readers coming back for more, trying to unravel the poem.

In your editing stages, always make it a point to identify the volta of your poems. Tell us what changes before and after this point.

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Editing Your Surreal Prose Poem

Editing surreal prose is like trimming a bonsai tree — it requires precision, creativity, a willingness to embrace the bizarre, and some ruthlessness. Here are a couple of tips:

1. Cut more ruthlessly than ever before: If an image or phrase doesn't contribute to the overall effect, let it go.

2. Read aloud: Your ear will catch awkward phrasings your eye might miss. (I know I’m repeating myself but it’s crucial you do this for all your poems.)

3. Get feedback: Fresh eyes can spot connections or issues you might have overlooked.

Remember, it’s a delicate balance between preserving the raw, wild energy of your initial draft and crafting a polished piece. Think of it as the spoon-egg race — you want to run fast with your wild ideas (the egg) but not so fast that you lose control (and drop the egg off the spoon).

Vibing with this lesson?

Recommended Reading

The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky 

The Other Side, Alfred Kubin

Selected Poems of René Char, Ed. Mary Ann Caws

The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors, Carston René Nielsen, Tr. by David Keplinger