Please Justify Your Paragraphs
by Jennifer Weigel
Please justify your paragraphs. Prose poetry is by its very nature almost too freeform; its chaos must be contained and confined. A smattering of letters forming words across the page appears as a heap of unregulated emotional baggage, raw and unkempt, and makes for difficult reading without clean and concise borders fencing in the forms and reining in the rhythms. A prose poem shouldn’t be allowed to stumble drunkenly out the back door of a dive bar to take a piss in the street before falling into that seedy worn out sofa in the back alley, reeking of spilt beer and vomit and stale pretzels. Like all poetry, it should be a much more dignified creation, sipping expensive craft coffee (or wine, if it’s one of those highbrow events) and standing at attention at the open mic night, clapping with cupped hands as the other more traditional poems mold their heartsick hyperbole into metered verse, stiff yet eloquent. For poetry should never be stale or sloppy, with its matted hair tangled in a rat’s nest and slept-in mascara streaking from its crusted-over eyes and down its leathery cheeks. A poem should maintain enough structure to provoke tears but not itself bear them, sigh in sensuous whispers without becoming too easy or too erotic, cast a harsh hit with a backhanded glove in a gentlemanly gesture… It should elicit feeling without succumbing to its own anguish, always retaining as much posture and decorum as it can muster. It should push up against the constraints of propriety but only insomuch as it will not break them. It should know well its own boundaries.
Multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist Jennifer Weigel lives in Kansas, USA. Weigel is an avid art collector and enjoys playing board and role-playing games, junk store thrifting, and mail art. Weigel was previously a staff writer for Haunted MTL and is now involved with Nat 1 Publishing. Author of Witch Hayzelle’s Recipes for Disaster trilogy and a myriad of short stories, poems, art discourse, and more drifting around the Interwebs. Learn more on her website here. https://jenniferweigelart.com/