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Cluster index: Linda Black

‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem.

By LINDA BLACK. Three Postcards (on the wall behind me) ‘A Sign of the Times — Mended Stockings’, Dorothea Lange, 1934                (From a gelatin silver enlargement print.) ‘That photograph never ceases to amaze me . . . From below the knee, above obscured by darkness: calves overlocked, ankles […]

‘Interior’ and three more prose poems.

Linda Black: ‘Foreground, middle ground, background. Sail beyond the coastline one colour at a time. Mudstone, siltstone, shale. An undesirable brown.  A clime, a climb. Meadows populated with tubes of paint. (I have missed the planting season – what should I do?)’

Five poets remark on prose poetry.

Peter Riley: ‘To avoid endless problems of definition, it would help if they were called “short prose pieces”, which is one thing they undeniably are. This was Eliot’s idea (who hated them). ‘

Three prose poems.

Linda Black (from the afterword): The prose poem may stray from the point, cavort around, take in the scenery, but will continue to serve the central focus. Often non-linear, it allows for the discontinuous or compressed narrative, the associative leap, the fragmentary, the tangential. Predicated on the sentence, rather than the poetic line with its considerations of line endings, the prose poem encourages thoughts to be continuous, to twist and turn, hold themselves up short, or open out into a broader perspective, sometimes travelling at great speed.’