Poets who write contemporary prose poetry question the nature of poetic and outmoded lyric styles. The genre’s style is a tradition-breaking form of poetry. This is the goal of many genres and subgenres. As a literary movement, the new prose poetry is at the forefront. It is part of the exigent avant-garde. Prose poetry's European origins are found in the work of several early representatives of the prose lyric such as Charles Baudelaire, Max Jacob, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce.
If you enjoy the current and the new rather than tried and traditional ways, I hope you will advocate for prose poetry as a novel, fresh, acceptable style. I encourage you to write a poem in this genre.
--e. smith sleigh, poet and author
http://bit.ly/kEdBcp
QUOTE:
“Dozens of French writers experimented with the prose poem in the 1700s, it was not until Baudelaire's
work appeared in 1855 that the prose poem gained wide recognition. However, it was Rimbaud's
book of prose poetry Illuminations, published in 1886, that would stand as his greatest work, and among the best examples of the prose poem. Additional practitioners of the prose poem (or a close relative) include Edgar Allen Poe,
Max Jacob, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein,and T.S. Eliot.Among contemporary practitioners of the prose poem are: Russell Edson, Robert Bly, Charles Simic, and Rosemarie Waldrop.”-- Michael Benedict