Sampson Starkweather's 2010 chapbook, "Self Help Poems," consists of small prose blocks that are extremely Handeyesque, both in their first-person anecdotal structure and their overt refusal to say something cheaply "deep," while going instead for something weirder and arguably superior: It's true, I live in the woods alone.
There are the exquisite transformations of the small prose piece "Winter Festival" that swerves and switches as if everything were always happening at one and the same time: "Trails of skyrockets lengthen, in orchards and garden paths along the Meander – the greens and reds of the setting sun.
It is the 65th volume - large or small, poetry or prose - to be published by Aragon, now in his 68th-year.
Hugely varied in subject matter and approach, these small pieces of prose were unlike anything I had read before and by halfway through I was rationing myself to one a day to relish their strangeness.
I read a very small book of prose by him that struck me as an enchanting thing, i.e., that seemed to me very capriciously and stylishly composed, I mean written.
Another small sampling of sparkling prose from recent editions.
Along the way, Nevai delivers pleasures both large and small in sly, lively prose.
Although the writing is in prose, the small interventions made by an omniscient bard make us feel the presence of an unshakeable poetry at each line.
This is a rich Melvillean image, nested within 600 relentlessly intelligent pages of erudite, acerbic, witty and combative prose: a small child on a wild Pacific beach, cheering on the waves, recognising in their sheer destructive power something grandly commensurate with her own inner turbulence.
Each small section of the prose winds itself a little further, then breaks off, and then begins again on a new page with the same sentence it ended on before, like a little jagged stairwell of ideas.
The complete letter suggests that the "small writing" was a prose piece, although Sunstein, the former owner of the letter (which is now held by The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle), argues that the wording is open to interpretation.
