By Ian Macartney

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In Super Mario Odyssey, the titular guy goes posthuman. This title was released in 2018, as part of Nintendo’s ‘3D Mario’ games, open-world exploration simulators wherein the red-capped plumber could jump around various candy-bright worlds in whatever meandering direction he (and the player) wanted to, this following on from the baroque stylings of Super Mario Galaxy.

Super Mario Odyssey signalled a shift back to a world, of sorts, or rather instead of a congregation of ‘kingdoms’ (grassland, ice, lava, desert . . .) a globe, continents connected. Globalised. The shiny veneer of money, even, pixel-capital – unlike previous iterations, health was not signified with hearts, but coins.

Said red cap, it should be mentioned, is sentient, because plot. ‘Cappy’ has the ability to possess a multitude of things. You, as Mario, are electricity, a plant, a dinosaur, the enemy (Goomba, Koopa . . .), a  lamppost, a dollop of lava. ’Possess’, for sure, but also think of a flattened network of objects, a horizontal plain, interchangeable, porous, brightly coloured . . . fun, obviously.

In Being Ecological, Timothy Morton summarises a philosophy Graham Harman labels ‘object-oriented ontology’, “which holds that, in many ways, everything is like a black hole – a rubber ball, an emotion, a sentence about an emotion, an idea about a sentence [. . .] ocean waves, salt crystals, whales, jellyfish [. . .] OOO argues that nothing can be accessed all at once in its entirety.”¹ Instead of a finite galaxy, we have instead “a marvellous world of shadows and hidden corners”.²

What if, in this crossing and networking of agencies, manifestations towards inanimate objects, resided a modality for understanding the prose-poem? Maybe that would be a dumb proposal. But then again, on its surface, the notion of a prose-poem also appears dumb. A poem . . . doing prose? Its opposite?!

Ever since Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, the prose-poem, or prose-poetic, has occupied or thought of this sort of  de-familiarisation. It’s rendered the everyday weird, made them unfamiliar, that much eerier. Tender Buttons, for Juliana Spahr, appears to be “a possible description of a domestic space” through three sections (Objects, Food, Rooms), vignettes in the form of prose that describe a “bourgeois interior, full of objects such as seltzer bottles, dresses, hats, umbrellas, tables, books, with a kitchen full of the proteins and the luxuries”.³ Take “A BOX” (you know, an object which contains other objects):

Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and it is disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.⁴

This paragraph does not ask questions, but rather states answers to questions we cannot grasp. It has the slackness of candid gossip, but the grammar makes the English just out of reach, insensible. And this is all about an object, remember – “a white way of being round” suggests “a pin”, and although a “green point” could be as the conclusion to an argument, it could be a vertex. And because there is “a point again”, something has been repeated, made symmetrical.

In this obsession over objects, Stein fastened form to subject. Without a clear narrator, in Tender Buttons we jump from countless consciousnesses, or states, sometimes in the same description of an object or foodstuff or room. A cartwheel into a red coin, say, or a power-up mushroom, the buttons of our controller made tender. So all becomes object, which is to say prose-poetic, which is to say on the awkward boundary between what was classically seen as to never mix. The ‘object-ive’, as found in any game, becomes less and less clear.

Is the prose-poem itself an object? It feels there is a heft, or weight, placed on it. The distinction comes down to an awareness of form. Prose is prose, but the prose-poem is a poem in the form of prose, the way a poet could take the sonnet, the sestina, villanelles, the poem becoming synonymous with form, to go wherever it needs to go.

There’s another way to get away from this grand narratorial perspective in certain poetics, a way to get g-OOO-ey. It’s deferral, from subjecthood or narration, verticality nor descent. Maybe even the context of ‘deferral’, the language we use to defer, gets in on the action (e.g. deferred). John Ashbery’s work contains endless deferral – for him, the red cap is always thrown sideways. “The light drinks the dark and sinks down”, he writes in “The System”, “not on top of us as we had expected but far, far from us in some other, unrelated sphere”.⁵ One could expect objects to shore up, apart or away from us, the stakes lessened through absurd statement. Objectifying – you remove the personhood. We’re not meant to feel alright with this flatness, but it happens:

You discovered that there was a fork in the road, so first you followed what seemed to be the less promising, or at any rate, the more obvious, of the two branches until you felt you had a good idea of where it led. Then you returned to investigate the more tangled way, and for a time its intricacies seemed to promise a more complex and therefore a more practical goal for you, one that could be picked up in any number of ways so that all its faces or applications could be thoroughly scrutinised. And in doing so you began to realise that the two branches were joined together again, further ahead, that this place of joining was indeed the end⁶

Here, then, in systemising itself, is an indication of when the prose-poem goes playful. Ludic. Exploratory – ‘you’ go down one path, then come back to explore another. But now it’s linked. Where are we going, in this open-world environment? If in Stein there was the familiar made un-, here that is reversed. The Goomba has become the protagonist, so to speak.

Michael Clune argues that, in contrast to “the value of making the known thing unfamiliar”, as we see in Stein, “Ashbery’s poetic career consists of a rigorous and sustained effort to take something you have never seen before and show you what it would look like if you had seen it every day of your life”.

In other words, a poem like “The System” aims “to familiarize the unfamiliar object”.⁷ It’s also very long. It calls upon prose’s greatest tendency – length, against an ‘economic’ use of language. Expansiveness, unto characterisation, thereupon consciousness. “Perhaps the closest analogue for an Ashbery line”, then, “is a sentence drawn from the middle of a science fiction novel, from the space cleared for the novelistic”.⁸

Objects as systems. Hmm. One expects something monolithic in the block of the prose-poem or the system, contained and unified, but when there are objects within an object – hyperring itself, like highlighting to render it linkable online – something distinctly twenty-first century happens. I think of Dana Ward and his poems in the ‘form’ of blog, like this bit from The Crisis of Infinite Worlds:

I needed this absurd love, total & complete, free of all finesse & delectation. I made some coffee, paced for a while, played piano, sang, & read Rimbaud aloud to myself –⁹

Then he quotes the entirety of “What Does It Matter”. That heralds a system, right? The inclusion of something total in something else more-than-total, i.e. networked, trying to do the work of something online.

Perhaps in the prose poem is the overload, as we expect in a system, be it Ashbery’s or the internet. Is it maximalist, the maximum line? One line that can only be visually expressed as hundreds and hundreds? When one comes to a poem there are expected ways to read it, it can be skimmed or analysed. But to reverse-engineer a more familiar kind of writing into poetry, like the prose of a pulpy science-fiction novel, conjures something novelistic. The mechanics are taken for granted – one line succumbs to the next. The effect is heightened because the mechanics are not present. The prose-poem is prose, bro, there is no cheatcode here.

The Glaswegian poet and avant-jester Frank Kuppner wrote A Concussed History of Scotland at the end of the twentieth century. It is ostensibly his strangest book which, considering he has titles like The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women and Arioflotga, is saying something. We could also call this book novelistic, but we could also call it 500 prose-poems – some a sentence, most longer. None cross the threshold of two pages. But then his Wikipedia page (as of August 2023), states that the book is non-fiction. So maybe this is all a game, one without video?  This is how it starts:

Go away – I wish to have nothing to do with you. I insist on it. Go away! After all, I am in a position to be able to insist. I intend simply to wait here quietly until my equal (who you might call the entire universe) comes. […] How could you possibly not go away, given that nothing except me exists anyway? As for the Universe – the Universe is merely something which I created as an illustration of my own non-existence. Call it a metaphor, if you like.¹⁰

The universe is an object, not a question. We are not allowed to know what is going on. From this abstract beginning. – what Robert Crawford deems “trivial-cosmic”¹¹ – the prose-poems become personal, potentially autobiographical. “After all”, we are told, “if childhood is a tomato on a chair, old age is merely the chair”.¹² Other “soft objects” abound through this book. They “are walking through the sunlight everywhere”, though we should remember that “Nature [. . .] produces philosophers and cucumbers without parti pres”.¹³

Is the prose-poem a list, a list of objects it could become, it it weren’t for the text that binds it? “Extinct sunrises, sudden growth in children, a sense of security, a small flame burning where it ought not to be”. The prose poem insists we “move! Move again! But not towards the window”.¹⁴

We don’t get to see what is outside of its own system, its own process – the glass looks back, but we don’t get a chance to offer the opposite. Maybe it’s a screen. Maybe we play on the projections we’re offered, make do with virtual worlds. Unlike the examples from Stein or Ashbery, which tend to something faux-aphoristic, Kuppner feels conversational. Though said conversation is, of course, actually a monologue, and a hostile one at that:

493

Eh? What do you think – yes, you.

[. . .] After all, if carbon cannot achieve greatness, then what can?

Since the Universe is not a question, what answer should we give?

499

You would not deny that certainty is almost certainly the opposite of wisdom, I hope.

500 Well, would you?¹⁵

And then it ends. This book is, for the record, an exhausting read – it exhausts ‘wisdom’, ‘nature’ and readerly patience. I think it would be worth, therefore, to see what happens when novels transit into the prose-poetic, loosening their novelistic elements, their plot and narration. Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva comes to mind. Namely, the ludic rotor at its heart. Because the speaker of that book is constantly seeking the Now, the present, which slips from any grasp language could hope to tighten, over the current moment. She wishes to be one of those “objects that screams”,¹⁶ to chuck the cap into a rock and see what it hits.

She announces her intention to free-write (“Now I’m going to write wherever my hand leads. I won’t fiddle with whatever it writes“)¹⁷ then lists down the output. The network of her prose, her games, streams out as if from a Nintendo Switch (though a very mystical one at that) .The level keeps loading, but does not arrive.

In Nanni Balestrini’s Tristano, meanwhile, such networking is found in the reading. Again. it’s called a novel, but the 200 prose chunks that make up its sections – split into ten chapters – can be read in any order. In fact, as of the 2014 Verso reprint, each published copy is entirely unique in its combination of these blocks. Balestrini flattens narrative to its object, its surface layer – she makes a horizontal novel, an object in one’s hands, bought and distributed and printed in our economic system, neuro-compelled to connect.

Beyond the style of the text, she makes it prose-poetic formally. The opening sentence in my edition, for example, is “the matter in hand obliges me to focus mainly on the concluding events.”¹⁸ Meanwhile, the final chunk begins as such: “first of all one must have a fairly clear idea of the content of the text”.¹⁹ There is a connection apparent, and yet this is a random order, a scattering captured.

Every paragraph becomes a start and a middle and an ending. Hence its potency, prose-poetic, each a unified system. How else to give examples of its prose-poetic nature? Why, flick through and you’ll get there. I am not sure a full reading would foster ‘accomplishment’ the usual way a novel does. Skimming, however, yields different results. Like a red cap flying over still water during Mario’s visit to the Lake Kingdom, it reaches where a human subject cannot quite.

If A Concussed History of Scotland exhausts with its singular point, then Balestrini satisfies in hers. It’s the “yeah okay” of a scroll away from something interesting. it begs for our inattention. Prose-poems used to not do this. They used to be particular and require such attention. Stein: “why is there no adjustment between the place and the separate attention”.²⁰ But does Ashbery actually live in the close-read, or open up to something more democratic, a difficulty in the openness? Is it not inaccessible because of how often it plunges into the accessible speech, the colloquium, the idiom, etcetera?

And when Kuppner gives this a Scottish flavour, perhaps the inimitable experience of growing up in this strange peace, the object of Scotland and its innumerable shady faces, relegates things further to dissolution. “Scotland small?” The blurb of A Concussed History asks. “Is it small enough?”²¹

I’m not sure, to be honest. Prose-poems won’t tell us the answer. They actively refuse – they tell us to “go away”.

In Super Mario Odyssey, the final ‘world’ is outwith the very traversed globe you have spent 30-odd hours toiling through, ‘you’ being Mario and the network of object-selves that have catapulted his body through obstacles and secrets and landscapes. You end up on the moon, or at least a version of ours represented in the black box of the programmer’s space. Prose-poems live in their own lunar orbit, like this – they sit outside. They can be visited, but lie forever-distant, opaque as a solid object. Yet despite their ineffable mystery, in their simulations – their virtual replica of a real, bizarre, poetic world – is something playful, of consciousness, trivial-cosmic. Which is worth playing with.

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About our contributor

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1. Morton, Being Ecological, p. 33 ↩︎
2. Morton, p. 34 ↩︎
3. Spahr in Tender Buttons Centennial Edition, p. 110 ↩︎
4. Stein in Tender Buttons: Centennial Edition,  p. 13 ↩︎
5. Ashbery, “The System”, accessed at (https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/4053/the-system-john-ashbery_ ↩︎
6. Ashbery, Selected Poems, p. 149   ↩︎
7. Clune, “”Whatever Charms is Alien”: John Ashbery’s Everything”, p. 448 ↩︎
8. Clune, p. 455 ↩︎
9. Dana Ward, The Crisis of Infinite Worlds, p. 27 ↩︎
10. Frank Kuppner, A Concussed History of Scotland, p. 7 ↩︎
11. Robert Crawford, Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in 20th Century Poetry, p. 137 ↩︎
12. Kuppner, p. 7 ↩︎
13. Kuppner, p. 115 ↩︎
14. Kuppner, p. 116 ↩︎
15. Kuppner, p. 120 ↩︎
16. Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva, p. 78 ↩︎
17. Lispector, p. 46 ↩︎
18. How do I footnote this kind of novel? It’s p. 3, but my edition is 13414. Do I call it “13414^th ed.”? That’s funny, so yes. ↩︎
19. Nanni Balestrini, Tristano (13414^th ed.), p. 120 ↩︎
20. Stein, Tender Buttons, accessed https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15396/15396-h/15396-h.htm ↩︎
21. A Concussed History of Scotland, blurb ↩︎