Listen to poetry professor Stephen Cavitt read “Purgatory is a Greyhound Bus Across America” and discuss prose poems.
Explicit rating: mild sexual references.
Stephen’s poetry collection Noctis Terrores is available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers. Visit him on the web at stephencavitt.com.
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Read the transcript below.
Intro
Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and we talk about its key technique. In today’s episode, the second ever on the pod, you’ll hear “Purgatory is a Greyhound Bus Across America” from my book Noctis Terrores, and we’ll talk about prose poems.
Purgatory is a Greyhound Bus Across America
Kansas flat fields and then deserts sprawl sunburnt and empty until my eyes ache. Dusk hurtles toward the massive windshield again and again. If there are stars, I can’t see them past the glare of the headlights. The AC’s dripping on my hoodie, the shoulder seam heavy and wet. At night it’s always Texas: oil wells flare up in the dark like horses made of fire. Her slim body is a thorn I can’t dig out of my mind. Dark hair to her hips, she’d kick off her boots and say, Now. Her cries soft and quick like sparrows rising from sagebrush. No one’s on the bus. The steering wheel turns in slow fits. I don’t know if this is Colorado, but mountains jut against gray clouds. Loading lights spark down the dusty aisle. The Greyhound slows beside a diner, a gas station with the pumps taped shut, a gravel pullout, dull train tracks. It’s a big world, she said, the linoleum tile peeling in one corner of our tiny kitchen. If you’re so stuck with me, just go. When she cried, coal country crept into her voice, that little trailer town where her father drove drunk throwing newspapers out of the van. Cicadas twanged down the yard and into the woods. She chewed her lip but still it trembled. I was so close I could have pulled her against my shoulder and hushed her like a child. Twenty years ago and how many miles? I twist my watch around my wrist. The face appears and disappears. The minute hand beats like a heart.
Discuss:
A prose poem is simple. It’s just one big chunk, like a paragraph. There aren’t any deliberate line breaks, the way we usually think of in poetry. The line just ends whenever it hits the margin, which may be different depending on the print size of the book…or if you buy the e-book, certainly it’ll be different.
Prose poems are one of my favorite forms. There are 53 poems in Noctis Terrores, the book that I’m reading from, and 11 of those are prose poems. Another 7 or so are prose-y or almost prose poems. It’s a form that’s a delight to work in.
One of my favorite things about prose poems is that they encourage these shifts or jumps in logic without big transitions. For me at least, there’s a kind of stream of consciousness where the poem pulls me into these jumps, and the rhythm of these long lines kind of leans into the lyrical or maybe even the magical.
So let’s look at how this one plays out. The first part of the poem is logical. Kansas, deserts, headlights, the A. C. line dripping on my hoodie. And then we get to a kind of lyrical jump: “At night it’s always Texas. Oil wells flare up in the dark like horses made of fire.” It can’t always be Texas, right? That’s not like a logical thing to say. If you keep driving, eventually you will get to the other side of Texas. It doesn’t feel like it when you’re on that thirteen or ten hour run across the state, but eventually you’ll get out of it.
So, after that lyrical line, we jump right from these oil wells to the lost woman: Her slim body is a thorn I can’t dig out of my mind. Dark hair to her hips. She’d kick off her boots and say, Now. Her cry is soft and quick, like sparrows rising from sagebrush.” You notice that there’s no transition phrase here, alright, and that’s what I mean when I say that prose poems can encourage a kind of logical leap. He doesn’t go, Well, this is just like when I used to date Sarah. He just takes us right into it.
And then immediately we’re back in the Greyhound, and this time the landscape’s a little bit mythical. Mountains jut against grey clouds, there’s a diner, a gas station with the pumps taped shut, a gravel pullout, dull train tracks. It’s like an archetypal backwoods America.
And then without warning we go back to the girl again: “It’s a big world, she said, the linoleum tile peeling in one corner of our tiny kitchen. If you’re so stuck with me, just go.” Through these back and forth leaps, without any warning, the speaker has been tricking himself into this confession.
It takes us to, “when she cried, cold country crept into her voice, that little trailer town where her father drove drunk, throwing newspapers out of the van. Cicadas twanged down the yard and into the woods. She chewed her lip, but still it trembled. I was so close, I could have pulled her against my shoulder and hushed her, like a child.”
This is what our speaker’s unconscious mind really wants to talk about, right? His circling back around pain. But it gets there in these lyrical jumps and little mystical movements and these sideways steps in logic that a prose poem really just embraces. A prose poem takes us along for the ride.
So let’s hear “Purgatory is a Greyhound Bus across America” one more time, and this time listen for that intuitive logic of the poem, or those sideways steps in logic.
Purgatory is a Greyhound Bus Across America
Kansas flat fields and then deserts sprawl sunburnt and empty until my eyes ache. Dusk hurtles toward the massive windshield again and again. If there are stars, I can’t see them past the glare of the headlights. The AC’s dripping on my hoodie, the shoulder seam heavy and wet. At night it’s always Texas: oil wells flare up in the dark like horses made of fire. Her slim body is a thorn I can’t dig out of my mind. Dark hair to her hips, she’d kick off her boots and say, Now. Her cries soft and quick like sparrows rising from sagebrush. No one’s on the bus. The steering wheel turns in slow fits. I don’t know if this is Colorado, but mountains jut against gray clouds. Loading lights spark down the dusty aisle. The Greyhound slows beside a diner, a gas station with the pumps taped shut, a gravel pullout, dull train tracks. It’s a big world, she said, the linoleum tile peeling in one corner of our tiny kitchen. If you’re so stuck with me, just go. When she cried, coal country crept into her voice, that little trailer town where her father drove drunk throwing newspapers out of the van. Cicadas twanged down the yard and into the woods. She chewed her lip but still it trembled. I was so close I could have pulled her against my shoulder and hushed her like a child. Twenty years ago and how many miles? I twist my watch around my wrist. The face appears and disappears. The minute hand beats like a heart.
Prompt:
If you’re writing along with me, try a prose poem–there are no line breaks; it’s all one big chunk, like a paragraph–and see where the prose poem form pulls you. Have some fun with it.
Outro:
Thanks so much for listening to the second-ever episode of the Poetry Professor podcast with Stephen Cavitt. Today we talked about “Purgatory is a Greyhound Bus Across America” from my book Noctis Terrores.
I’ll read you the whole thing here for free, but I’d love it if you pick up a copy. It’s available on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers. The link’s in the episode description.
See you next week!