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Poetic Excellence in AGNI 91

Embarking on my tenure as Poetry Editor at AGNI, I had the privilege of collaborating with Jennifer Kwon Dobbs for our inaugural endeavor, Issue 91. Together, we composed a diverse and dynamic group of contributors. This project stands as a testament to our shared dedication. Editing poetry demands a nuanced understanding of the intricate interplay between writers, necessitating a substantial investment of time and effort in its creation.

Throughout our discussions, Jennifer and I engaged in a fluid exchange of ideas and perspectives, invariably concluding our discourses with a heightened appreciation for the subtleties of our respective visions. This iterative process, which I invite you to participate in, facilitated the creation of a cohesive issue that celebrated contemporary poetic expression.

I recommend William Pierce's "Editor's Note" to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the editorial process and the overarching vision that guided the issue.

Read the exceptional pieces in AGNI 91. A few stood out for their unique qualities. Whether one is a poet or a reader, AGNI 91 will captivate and inspire.

I invite you to the musicality and crafted lines of Gina Franco, Will Cordeiro, and Cynthia Manick. 

Share your favorite lines or passages from the issue with us.

Blurred Lines

Between Prose and Verse

The combination of prose's approachable block structure with poetry's vivid imagery and emotional impact creates an intriguing form known as prose poetry. At a recent craft presentation I gave to the brilliant MFA students at Rutgers University–Camden, we discussed the merits and limitations of prose poetry and its distinctive qualities.

Prose poetry's structure—the sentence—makes it popular among both authors and readers. While retaining the poetic spirit, it enables writers to liberate themselves from conventional lineated structures. The sentence offers a more imaginative use of language. A reader’s familiarity with reading prose provides a longer imaginative breath as the eye moves from left to right. A lineated poem offers limited imaginative use of language due to its dynamic range from left to right. The block-like structure of prose poetry is recognizable to readers and makes it more accessible.

Take, for example, the opening lines from Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End:

My mother was a braid of black smoke. She bore me swaddled over the burning cities. The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play.

Simic's imagery is striking, and his use of short, punctuated sentences creates a distinct rhythm that propels the reader forward.

During my craft talk at Rutgers, we delved into elements of prose poetry. We traced its roots from 19th-century French poets like Charles Baudelaire to contemporary masters like Gary Young and Kimiko Hahn. The MFA students were engaged and asked thought-provoking questions about this form. We discussed the importance of finding the right balance; we went over the main components that make prose poetry. Rhythm is a crucial component—deliberate use of repetition, sentence structure, and so much more.

Prose poetry is becoming increasingly well-known and popular as more authors see its potential. A new wave of poets has emerged in recent years, challenging the conventions of prose poetry. Claudia Rankine is only one of many contemporary poets whose work combines prose poetry with visual art, cultural criticism, and other forms to create innovative works.

Prose poetry is dynamic. Poetry in prose provides poets with a unique form from which to reach their audiences. By blurring the lines between prose and poetry, writers make both accessible and deeply impactful work. I encourage everyone to explore prose poetry and discover its many possibilities.

Alina Stefanescu’s site has a fantastic list to get you started.

Additional Resources:

- The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry edited by Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek

- Prose Poetry: An Introduction, edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Heatherington

- The Academy of American Poets' Prose Poetry Resources

If you have any thoughts or experiences with prose poetry, I'd love to hear about them in the comments below!

TINSTAAFS

There's No Such Thing as a Free Sentence

As a poet, I have an obsession with language. In economics, there’s a phrase that I learned long ago. There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch; it describes the concept of Opportunity Costs. Opportunity Costs state that for every choice made, there is an alternative not chosen, which would also have produced some utility. This could be a maxim on revision. Revision requires trade-offs and assumes that there are alternatives to the current draft. For poetry and prose, revision, among other things, is a focus on syntax, which is itself a form of meaning.

I have been thinking about sonorant consonants in prose poetry. Let’s call it the music of language. One of the most exciting examinations on the confluence of structure and music is by Adam Bradley. If you’re not familiar with Bradley's scholarship, his book, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, was a turning point for me. I first learned about Bradley when I was in grad school, where I continued writing prose poems and spent more time thinking about sentences and lines, with appreciation to William Wenthe for his essay “The Sentence in Contemporary Poetry,” published in The Kenyon Review.

“My goal is not to dignify or defend pop lyrics; they are their own best defense.” -Adam Bradley, The Poetry of Pop.

Gregory Orr’s essay “The Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry” is published in the American Poetry Review. In it, Orr argues that poets are born with certain innate form-giving talents of varied measures that allow them to forge language into poems. This talent manifests in four temperaments: story, structure, music, and imagination. I like to translate these into the elements of narrative, form, sound, and beauty.

While a poem that seamlessly integrates all these elements may be considered exemplary, it’s crucial to acknowledge the anachronistic limitations of this framework. For instance, a purely structuralist lens might overlook the transgressive power of structure itself. Orr quotes Yeats in response to a structuralist perspective: “The correction of prose, because it has no fixed laws, is endless; a poem comes right with a click like a box.”

Significantly, in the 21st century, there has been a resurgence in the examination of form and its ability to expand our imagination. Claudia Rankine's Citizen is particularly noteworthy for its incorporation of narrative and form that challenge the constraints of conveying a story via conventional and visual means of poetics. In the current day, which is dominated by visual media, language is inevitably influenced by technological advancements. Rankine effectively employs contemporary linguistic tools to address the needs of our time.

The following is a prose poem by Heo Su-gyeong, translated by Soje from The Yale Review, Fall 2023.

The Yale Review, Fall 2023

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Request Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry from the University of New Mexico Press for your literature, writing, or cultural studies courses.

Thanks to so many who have asked their local library to order a copy. Please keep it going.

Finally, I’m working on a Poetry Reading Tour for 2025—both virtual and in-person. I’m in Chicago, and I’d like to visit you. Help me celebrate the release of Brutal Companion, Barrow Street Book Prize, Editors’ Choice.

Iceland’s first women’s strike was in October 1975, when 90% of women refused to work, clean, or look after children to voice anger at workplace discrimination. On 24 October 2023, the second all-day women's strike happened. Women across Iceland, including the prime minister, went on strike to push for an end to unequal pay and gender-based violence.

I’ve gathered a small pile of books to take with me to an artist residency. I’ll be off the grid. The Internet is in short supply, intentionally, and there is no cellular service. I’m excited. That intersection of limited communication, a gay man (me), and Wyoming may not appeal to everyone. But I’m excited to finish this collection of poetry. I’ve been thinking about these poems since 2013, when I wrote the first drafts.

The book I’m writing is about two flight attendants who met in 1975 on the day of the women’s strike in Iceland. They find themselves stranded at the airport. For the first time, all women stopped working. They picked up and walked out to march in protest. Men had to take children to work. The city was in chaos.

My research for these poems has introduced me to historical, informative, and horrific events from public records, media, and archives. The women in my poems become lifelong friends. Their lives are set against the legacy of discrimination women faced re-entering the workforce after the 1950s.

The poems began as a fundraising project for Tupelo Press; poets were tasked with writing a poem every day for 30 days, and I was running out of steam by day fifteen. Then, I wrote a poem because of a colleague—who is a Scrabble genius! She made a donation, which instructed me to write a poem with her name in it. Her name is of Baltic origin. Out of necessity, these characters came to life in my poems, and now I’m writing a book about them. I envision it on the stage. I have a playlist of my favorite Tony Awards performances.

The end of the twentieth century was unbelievable. In the same year of Matthew Shepard’s murder, I got my first email address, the first iMac was released, and the launch of the first module of the ISS (International Space Station)—all of which are still around twenty-five years later.

The residency is a short drive from Laramie, WY, and I’ve thought about visiting, but I get the chills. It’s unlikely I’ll visit. Last year, I published a poem about Matthew Shepard at the Academy of American Poets, “East of Wyoming, I Remember Matthew Shepard.” All forms of suffering must become touchstones of our humanity. It should reset us to be radical about being more compassionate and welcoming.

In 2020, in Wisconsin, an estimated 14,000 transgender people in the state lacked employment protections based on gender identity, 6,000 were unprotected in education, 21,000 lacked protections in public accommodations, and 19,000 lacked protections in housing.

By the end of the twentieth century, cities in the United States that had been places of gay liberation—Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York City. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement urged for consciousness and radical action to dismantle homophobia. The spirit of that period was long before my time, but its urgency has never gone away if you’re someone who identifies as LGBT. Years later, when I moved to Chicago, I dated a writer whose spirit and passion were infectious. Our shared value of cultural history led us to start a reading series that traveled to rural and small communities. We organized events accessible to the public and featured local poets and writers. We even streamed it on SKYPE. We called the series Stories & Queer, aka S&Q. Thanks, B!

In 2020, a recent study by the Williams Institute of UCLA found that the LGBTQ community in the United States is diverse and widespread, with certain states and areas showing higher concentrations of gay populations and households. In terms of the percentage of the population that identifies as gay, states like Oregon, Delaware, and North Carolina are among the highest. Oregon leads with 4.87%, followed closely by Delaware at 4.71% and North Carolina at 4.69%​​.

I grew up in Los Angeles in the 1990s, where it was still challenging to be a gay person of color, especially from a working-class neighborhood. Even today, many neighborhoods in the United States are populated by people with chronologies and intersectional identities impacted by systems and perceptions that have historically prevented them from living in a place that welcomes them. Others have written about this more eloquently, like José Esteban Muñoz. How do we create more welcoming communities around the country?

And yes, please, talk to me about the books I’m taking with me. Much love to you, reader.