I’ve spent much of my writing life in prose poetry, that slippery world looked upon with suspicion by both poets and prose writers alike. The first thing I wrote that I actually liked and thought could be someday good was what I’d now call a prose poem, though at the time I didn’t know what it was. But at twenty-three, in the haze and glaze and heat of my first New York City summer, I didn’t know what lots of things were, most things actually, including myself. But I knew I liked this little block of text I just wrote, and something inside me wondered, should I make it longer? It was perhaps my first real decision as a writer to say: I’ll stop here. In fact, just last night at a reading, twenty-six years later, a woman said to me, I love that character – will you write more about him? I smiled and said, I don’t think so. There’s power in leaving them wanting more.
These four poems in Hole in the Head Review’s inaugural Prose Poetry portfolio all leave you wanting more. At least they did for me. There were many strong and varied prose poem submissions in our recent call for work, and I could’ve easily chosen another four excellent poems, but these were the ones that stayed with me, that I thought about while stacking wood or on my drive to Portland. These are the poems that made me wonder (about octopi, about the mechanics of running, about genre painting, and about the circumambulatory quality of sadness). And they all left me dazzled by their subtle skill.
The main reason I accepted this position as Prose Poetry Editor, aside from the fact that I love Hole in the Head and it was just too much fun to turn down, is that I would discover something about prose poems. Despite my previously stated long-held affinity for prose poems, despite publishing three books of prose poems, and despite teaching classes on the prose poem, they remain quite a bit of a mystery to me.
Charles Simic said, “The prose poem is the result of two contradictory impulses, poetry and prose, and therefore cannot exist, but it does. This is the sole instance we have of squaring the circle.” I like this statement because it extends the mystery, as any good poem does.
One might not think of the feet as mysteries, but “Interdigital Neuroma Sounds Like a Useless Grammatical Term” by Michelle Menting makes them so. Feet create their own idiosyncratic grammar, painful and confused punctuation marks, but joyful too. And all in one mad dash (pun intended) forward without a single punctuation mark, a gesture that feels like the perfect triumphant erasure for such a mystery. If I’ve hardly ever thought about feet in this manner, I have considered the octopus even less, despite Samantha DeFlitch’s gently imperative title, “Consider This,” which implores me to do exactly that. The poem first caught my attention with its eight-legged, nine-brained examination of truth, then it picks up momentum with a surprising meditation on the flatworm, and truly enters something like geologic time by its astounding end. “Half Haunted” by Carol Bachofner explores another curious malady, the wandering sickness, which “comes and goes,” seems to enliven and empower inanimate objects, and might put the afflicted, in a gorgeously oblique phrase, “under the road.” And finally, “Minor Figures in the Big Picture” by Oz Hardwick places us back in a genre painting from the nineteenth century, a “toned zone” where brushstroke arcs create parents who carry “the weight of the sky.” By its end, we return to a kind of geologic time, relying once again, in a particularly poetic turn, on the intuition of animals to bring us home.
I hope you enjoy this selection of prose poems as much as I did.
Jefferson Navicky
Midcoast Maine
July 2025