Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Prose Poetry: The Playful and Daring Edge

by Mary Bast

We eagerly await submissions of prose poems to Bacopa Literary Review 2021.
As stated in our 2021 Prose Poetry guidelines:  
"Think playful, eccentric, inspiring, surprising, suggestive, rule-breaking.”
Prose poems are modern, nontraditional, and often misunderstood. Instead of the line breaks of traditional poetry, prose poems may take any form, but they share the major element of all poetry in the quality of the language. Here's an example from our 2018 Bacopa Literary Review, one of three prose poems by Darren Demaree in "bone requires bone":
#58
traditionally i would have already been stoned for knowing the witch for loving the witch for paying the witch for asking the witch to curse my father for taking all of the oxygen in every room he walked in when i was a child traditionally this would be considered a confession of sorts but now we know we know we know that he owes me a deep breath that i am entitled to walk up to him his mouth and leave him behind me panting until his grandchildren grow up to the age i quit drilling holes in the walls of the house on concord street

Another post describes Prose Poetry Prize Winner Cynthia Roby's "U-Turn." See also Prose Poetry Editor Kaye Linden's "The Prose Poem: An Eccentric Genre."

Submissions open May 1-May 31, 2021
Prose Poetry, Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction
$300 1st Prize, $100 2nd Prize in each genre!