“How To Catch A Fly In A Dark Room”

From The Master: Alan Ziegler’s Short: An International Anthology

Short prose is the written expatriate.  The cousin who you haven’t seen in ten years who comes to dinner with a food allergy. It is the small afterglow a band aid leaves as you tear it from the skin.  It is the list of things to do in life which you always meant to write amongst the living but are just now forced to say in the last minutes before you enter the great thereafter. 

Minimalism has often been falsely accused of loving sparingly, of being artistically effete. The idea that the fragment is a constructed vision of reality, an artistic reduction akin to signing one’s initials, overlooks the value of drafting, the value of the draft itself.  Drafts are previous for their very humility. The prose poem, or the short short, is the living draft. When I look back on my notes from Alan’s Ziegler’s class, in the margin there is a line which reads: “Is there not a wealth of humanity in exposing a naked foot?” 

To borrow from Zeigler himself, editor of the rambunctious new anthology Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays and Other Short Prose Forms and much-celebrated teacher at Columbia School of the Arts, short prose is the place where the impulses of prose and poetry collide. In its simplest sense then, prose poetry or short shorts are written in prose, rather than verse.  They abandon the line break altogether and work from the sentence rather than the line as the “unit” of language with which to wrestle, to untie. Charles Simic once said of this collision, the “prose poem is the literary equivalent of paella and gumbo, which bring together a great variety of ingredients and flavors and which, thanks to the cook, in the end somehow blend.”

Short prose has been on the receiving end of many a label—spare, chilling, lusty, emphatic, humorous, incongruous, adversarial, an enigma, inclusive, hybrid, “in short distance to the unconscious,” the rebel against tradition, a member of the “working class discourse,” subversive, compressed, an ambiguous ways of achieving resolution, “the work of a single hack,” and ultimately a means of seduction. This is perhaps the best definition of short prose that I know of—it leaves you wanting more. There is a synergy, a felicity, an almost human charge between sentences. As the Russian formalists say, “it is an orientation toward the neighboring word.”

As Ziegler wittily attests in his anthology, writers and critics—to varying degrees of creativity and in various languages—have long tried to categorize short prose under many zany if amorphous labels: “prose poems, shorts, footnotes, prose sonnets, short lyric...