Prose Poetry Lab Editor Profile: Felicia Zamora
Our Prose Poetry Lab, an MFA-style asynchronous course on writing prose poetry, closes at the end of this month! You can submit and find more info here. Let us introduce you to the first of three editors who will be providing personal feedback to the participants of the program: Felicia Zamora.
Professional Bio
Felicia Zamora is the author of six poetry books including, I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021), Quotient (forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions, 2021), Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner. A CantoMundo and Ragdale Foundation fellow, she won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry and the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Guernica, Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Orion, POETRY, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
Short List of Favorite Prose Poetry Books
- Field Study – Chet’la Sebree
- Tracing the Horse – Diana Marie Delgado
- Invasive Species – Marwa Helal
- DMZ Colony – Don Mee Choi
- Beast Meridian – Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
- Imagine Us, The Swarm – Muriel Leung
- Citizen: An American Lyric – Claudia Rankine
- Obit – Victoria Chang
- House A – Jennifer S. Cheng
- Whereas – Layli Long Soldier
Short List of Favorite Literary Journals/Magazines
- Colorado Review (Biased, as I am an editor there.)
- Cincinnati Review (Also biased because I work at the University of Cincinnati)
- Guernica
- Prairie Schooner
- Crazyhorse
- Witness
- Normal School
- Orion
- West Branch
- POETRY
What do you feel defines prose poetry? What features must be present for it to remain poetry and not just prose?
Felicia Zamora: The eluding of definition. Prose poetry is a form that honors its own limitations and ask us to break both the rules of poetry and prose in the name of creating something elusive, rawer, more authentically human, authentically instinctual. We are storytellers and we are poets; prose poetry reminds us these two acts are simultaneous, not opposing forces. I often write in prose, or prose-ish poetry form. Prose-ish poetry considers the delineations of limit. It’s about the page as landscape, where the page edges become the only limits of the form and the line is deciphered where the limit lives. However, prose-ish poetry lets the artist decide on what the limit of holding the poem is defined by. Another way of thinking: What does the container of the poem look like? The weaving of the sentence and the line is a necessary definition for me. The line is never truly forgotten for me in prose or prose-ish poetry, but this depends on the boundaries of limit. Prose poetry is creative nonfiction, and fiction and…and…and… No need for the differentiation of boundaries. Therefore, the language in a prose poem must be the fire but also the burn, from first word to last word, unrelenting.
Why do you write in prose poetry as a form?
Prose poetry lives in the hybrid, the undefinable, the limitless, the innovative at all times. This is what draws me to prose poetry: straddling of worlds. Rules begin thrown out, so to speak, in prose poetry. The form welcomes that-which-cannot-be-contained. (Which is rather hilarious, due to the edges of the page or the justification settings as limits.) As cellular beings, as walking synapses, our very existence lives in the magical, the defiance of expectations. Prose poetry feels inherent to me, as a place where our language, our imagination, our experience, our lyric, and our human complexities permeate each other.
What do you see as the future of the form?
Prose poetry lives in the hybrid, the undefinable, the limitless, the innovative at all times. This is what draws me to prose poetry: straddling of worlds. Rules begin thrown out, so to speak, in prose poetry. The form welcomes that-which-cannot-be-contained. (Which is rather hilarious, due to the edges of the page or the justification settings as limits.) As cellular beings, as walking synapses, our very existence lives in the magical, the defiance of expectations. Prose poetry feels inherent to me, as a place where our language, our imagination, our experience, our lyric, and our human complexities permeate each other.
What do you see as the future of the form?
A continued pressurizing of expansion, hybridity, and diluting with other modalities of the written word, media, other art, the everyday ephemera, and experimental texts. Prose poetry is a form where we can test and test and test and push and push and push, and never be satisfied with where the form fails. Leaning into the failings is part of the wonder and why this form lulls our humanity. The form is meant to be broken, sutured, broken, sutured, until we find the art that must be call forth; the form replicates a life in constant duality, constant pluralness. This is my jam, for sure.
Who are your favorite prose poetry writers from the 20th century?
In the 20th Century, look not only to the poets but also the leaders in prose, poetry, and social change—C.D. Wright, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Édouard Glissant, Sandra Cisneros, Rita Dove, James Baldwin, Claudia Rankine, Francis Ponge, Federico García Lorca, Joy Harjo—where the prose and poetry of the artist live doing a magical kind of work. Those leading human rights movements and arts movements were also giving insight to our prose and poetry.
Join the Lab before 7/31!
