Chad Prevost



Artistic Expectations


          I recently gave a reading at Larry’s Bar in Columbus, Ohio, and, having to read for two 20 minute segments (at a bar no less), I thought I’d open with a few prose poems.

          “I don’t mean to be offensive, but can I ask you a question?” A man with a Walt Whitmanesque beard asked.

          “Sure,” I said, bracing myself.

          “What is a prose poem?”

          I gave my best brief answer, something about subject matter and no line breaks.

          “Hard to find the poetry there.”

          He stated it as a question, but it wasn’t. I assured him I wasn’t offended, but shortly afterwards, I realized I was a tad deflated that whatever it was he’d experienced, didn’t seem to be of the artistry he had hoped for. I thought later of the long and profound tradition of poetry, and how the many practitioners of its variant forms over centuries have established a strongly ingrained “metrical contract” between poet and reader. That is, there is an expectation—even among those who don’t read much poetry—about what a poem actually is.

          The prose poem simply tries to do what any poem does—only in prose—and that is to convey something memorable, intense or instructive in a short space. I like this definition, at least, because of its simplicity. The prose poem’s strengths function very much like those of another hybrid form, the short short (a.k.a. microfiction and sudden fiction). That is, the advantages of the form lie in the brevity—the piece has to get down to the essence of what is most important, and is memorable as a result of the very intensity it produces. The boundaries do, no doubt, blur when one writes a prose poem with a strong narrative. How is it not a short short, especially if the piece is not autobiographical at all? In fact, as a case in point, Sherwood Anderson did write what many have called prose poems, but he always insisted were short fictions. So much for simple definitions.

          I do think the prose poem will always lend itself to wild subject matter for the very absence of its lineation. But the hybrid quality of the prose poem also offers opportunities for narrative, associational, descriptive strategies that will surely continue to excite both readers and writers of the form’s possibilities.

          The truth of the matter is that any innovation in art has been met, at least at first with scorn, fear and/or rage because it often goes directly against our preconceived notions of what a given piece of art should be. Reactions to art of any kind that resist definitional category have far more to do with the cultural and aesthetic presuppositions of the audience than with the piece of art itself.




From the Book of Masters


Dear order and meaning,

I’ve lined up the dominoes of consent upon your doorstep. I’ve mowed the lawn and trimmed the rose of sharon. I’m singing on the shores of your carbon-dated desert that once was a sea. The genius in this is that it already was an ocean bottom. Already I can breathe here under the tutelage of its white sands, the sun beaming down like an icon of mystery, and me, on an ordinary Sunday like this, can sip at the mirage of my Cocteau supreme fiction. Quit your peacock preening—nothing is so exacting as your colorful illusions. Even the sea knew when to stop its ceaseless chatter.



Notes from the Banished Book (318)


Dear I am the valley of the mountain smoke,

There will always be another. There will always be a place to hold your nostalgia’s smoky tears. Tomorrow waits like a lost thumb to forcep the past into its wounded limb. The missing limb remembers where it used to extend, itches against the knotted tissue that will never remember how to fully heal. No one will disremember you because they never had a hand in raising you. When I vaporize I want to go on like a scar stamped across the ever-present sky that never does fully recover. Is this what you have in mind when you cleave between peaks?





Chad Prevost was born in Marin General Hospital in Fairfax, California with a potato-shaped head. This wasn’t the technical name the doctors gave it, but it looked like a potato all the same—oblong and bumpy. At first, Prevost’s parents were mildly concerned about their potato-shaped baby’s head: was it unduly forced through the birth canal? Would it ever resemble a normal head? Soon, however, their fears were replaced by more urgent concerns: Prevost had a hernia. There is no clear explanation as to how an infant of fewer than 16 weeks of life to his name experienced a hernia, but the doctors assured the young parents that this, too, fell under the relatively normal. The surgery was a success but there was little anyone could do about Prevost’s head. The family soon moved from California to Illinois. Downtown Chicago to be precise. In a small apartment flat on the corner of Roosevelt and 19th South Side, to be more precise. Prevost’s father had matriculated into the Chicago School of Divinity. During the coldest winter the young family had ever experienced, Prevost contracted pneumonia, his mother became severely depressed, and Prevost’s father soon believed the theoretical world was no world for him. The family moved to Phoenix. The sun beat down on the lava rocks that lined the cactus garden of their two-bedroom rancher. Prevost became addicted to riding his bouncy horse, Trigger while singing the theme song from the Mickey Mouse club at the top of his lungs, and his mother became addicted to tranquilizers washed down with one of a various number of concoctions all involving vodka. Prevost’s father was hard at work on a Doctorate of Ministry on Death and Dying, and served to support the family by loading and unloading furniture. “This will be the death of me,” he’d quip when he came home and found his son in a frenzy on the horse and his wife slumped across the brown vinyl couch in front of the fuzzy television. The same year that the first Star Wars film hit Hollywood, the family moved to West Virginia. “The Lord moves in mysterious ways,” Prevost’s father said. Soon, Prevost’s father was preaching and teaching the Word and with the Music Minister made up words about the Almighty to the theme song of Star Wars. It was a hit. The congregation swelled. Prevost was five and already beginning to have his doubts about this Lord of the Universe. Prevost had witnessed lightning strike the crabapple tree in his backyard hill, and fall directly at him toward the house. Prevost said that he hated God. His mother, who at first tried to placate the agitated child, ended up agreeing there was plenty of reason to have issues with God. Prevost’s mother put on the John Denver LP that she said always made her feel better. “Almost Heaven, West Virginia”...the song was nice but Prevost’s mother soon broke down in tears, ran out of the house and tore off down the street. At first, Prevost was as mystified as any child would be. Then he saw it: their dog, his mother’s old dog that had been with them everywhere, Lucky Lady, crushed beneath the tree. Prevost could see only the front of her snout, the pink tongue lolling out of the mouth on the wet patio. Prevost’s mother never returned though she never missed sending the annual Christmas card postmarked mysteriously from a different address each year. Chad and his father moved back to California a few years later. "Following the Lord’s call," his father said. Prevost reconciled with the Lord through his practice of obsessive journaling through his early teen years, and, finally, when the time was right, when he wrote a coming-of-age novel with the central image of a fallen crabapple tree.