During my last year of poetry studies, while working toward an MFA, I began exploring the continually evolving area of prose poetry. Even though this style of creative expression has been in existence for many decades, there is still a lot of controversy over its validity. Is it, in fact, poetry or prose? It actually seems like a mute point to me, but I read countless essays from both poets and literary academics alike who posed theories on whichever side of the issue they stood upon. However, what my research did for me was to open up my own writing practice in ways I never thought my poetry could really ever go. It afforded me the ability to break through previous constraints that, perhaps, I shouldn't have put upon myself to begin with. I suppose I needed something new, a new perspective, to give myself, my writing, a new boost. A few entries back you can find my prose poem "The White Ghost and the Red Devil." Here is another prosy:
A poem to ponder
Once upon a time there was a spiteful child who got lost in the woods and was eaten by a wolf. The child is you and the woods are the world and the wolf is life. What do you want to do now? To care is to have direction. To change your direction is to have passion. To let your passions rule your life to to be romantic. To be romantic is to have imagination. How odd it all is when you stop to think about it. Everything leads and everything follows like neither either neither nor. Therefore, nothing is new and no one is normal and death is.
~Michael Staples
