Choice Review
Murphy argues for a functional rather than a taxonomic definition of the prose poem. Because it rejects the customary prosody and lineation as well as the label of prose, it must "subvert" conventions in order to establish itself as authentically something else. Unlike Richard Terdiman's Discourse/Counter-Discourse (CH, Oct'85), and Jonathan Monroe's A Poverty Of Objects (1987), which also examine the prose poem, Murphy's approach is not Marxist; her politics is restricted to textual battles and the claim that the genre is "androgynous." She begins her survey with the introduction to the English and American reading public of the French prose poem, which in the 1890s appeared tantalizingly foreign and deliciously anticanonical. The combination of homophobia, scandal, and francophobia shadowing Wilde's famous prose poem letter to Sir Alfred Douglas stigmatized the fledgling genre. It resurfaced, however, in the 1920s and again in the 1960s in the US, despite the rejection of the very label "prose poem" by such practitioners as William Carlos Williams and John Ashbery. In her survey Murphy scrutinizes works by Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Bly as well as Williams and Ashbery; yet she passes over Anne Sexton, Kenneth Patchen, and James Wright, also distinguished for their prose poems. The discussions of the individual works will be of more interest than the polemicizing about definition and ideology. Graduate; faculty. J. Shreve; Allegany Community College
