Commentary by Rebecca Foust, Poetry Editor
Today’s poem is an example of a “prose poem,” a form presenting text in block form that resembles prose but nevertheless considered a poem because of its intense, condensed language or other hyper-poetic qualities. Without line breaks, the rhythm of the sentence (as opposed to the rhythm of the line) must drive the poem. Here, Finney’s short sentences and sentence fragments create a matrix that holds an intricate weave of “instructions” about how to live and make art in these complicated and fraught political times. I resisted prose poems when I first encountered them in graduate school. I missed the line breaks, and the term “prose poem” seemed an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Prose was one thing and poetry another, right? I’ve since  learned to appreciate the imaginative possibilities of this form, schooled by reading contemporary writers like Ruddell Edson, Stephen Dunn, Stuart Dybeck, Robert Thomas, Roxanne Beth Johnson [featured here on February 5, 2017] and of course, Nikky Finney.
The Prose Poem is in fact a form of poetry, but one that borrows from and resembles prose in some respects. The most obvious of these is that the lines are not broken; they extend all the way to the right margin, making a blocky shape that appears at first glance to be a paragraph from an essay or story.
Poet Stephen Dobyns explains one function of line breaks, and what happens when they are omitted in prose poems:
The traditional metric poem contains two clear rhythms: the rhythm of the sentence and the rhythm of the line   .   .   . powerful effects of traditional verse are achieved by playing off the syntactical movement against the metrical movement [Best Words Best Order (Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd ed. 2003), p. 108]
The tension between the rhythm of the sentence and the rhythm of the line is like musical counterpoint, a quality absent from prose poems that must rely on alternative ratchets for tension, things like “high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition” or “sustained intensity and compactness” [Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993), p. 977]. Other ways to keep language from going slack in prose poems include vivid imagery and a quality of surprise sometimes provided by surrealism. A prose poem need not contain all these elements, but in the absence of rhythmic counterpoint, it needs at least some of them to keep the writing alive and taut.
In today’s prose poem, we see these poetic devices at work. Compression and repetition work together to hold the syntactic net taut. The poem is highly punctuated, containing 30 sentences and five sentence fragments in its two stanzas and 17 lines. Packed into these sentences and fragments are at least 34 distinct images or metaphors. The effect of so many short, punctuated sentences and fragments is compactness, density, and a slowing-down; consider that punctuation alone mandates 19 pauses and 31 full stops in just 17 lines. The sentences are highly compressed, several to just one word. Most imply “you” as (and so omit) their subject. Twenty-two are in the injunctive mode (“Be camera, black-eyed aperture.”), two are exclamatory (“Hey! Watch your language!”), and the remaining six are declarative. Because so many sentences are injunctive or exclamatory, we sense and even hear a form of syntactic repetition called parallel sentence construction following a formula of (implied) subject + verb, as in “[you,] be camera” and “[you, be] careful.”
Repetition is present also in the form of anaphora—repeating words or sounds at the beginnings of sentences or lines, here in the first four sentences that begin with the word “be.” Other forms of repetition are internal rhyme (“lay” and “stay”), assonance (the first syllables of “camera” and “animal”), and alliteration (“quilts of quietus” and “deny, dismiss”). These word and sound repetitions work with the structural repetition to lend emphasis and cadence, two more elements that help sustain tension.