Beckian fritz goldberg biography of michael jackson

Gregory Donovan: You mentioned when you originally submitted your poems to Blackbird that you had been experimenting lately with the form of the prose poem. Any notion of what led you to explore that form?

Beckian Fritz Goldberg: A few years ago I decided to teach a course in the prose poem both as a way of exploring the increasing interest in it on the part of students and its increasing visibility in journals.

I had only questions about it and no answers—so it was an adventure of sorts, reading Baudelaire, Ponge, Calvino, Edson and trying to figure out what made a prose poem tick. I had only made one or two attempts at writing one—and came up against the problem of "how do I know if it is a successful prose poem?" I had worked long enough in free verse to have come to some sort of aesthetic about the poem and what I demanded from a poem.

I didn't have that when it came to the prose poem. Yet, it seemed to me there was a space there, a point of possibili