John Ashbery reminded us: ‘modern poetry is a venerable institution’ when introducing his translations of Rimbaud’s Illuminations: ‘Prose poetry (Rimbaud’s own term for what he was writing in Illuminations) had already been produced by Lautréamont and Baudelaire’.

Ashbery calls Rimbaud’s Illuminations ‘a disordered collection of magic lantern slides’. Late 19C Instagram. The prose poem: ‘It looks like prose, but it reads like poetry’, wrote Ron Padgett. ‘The miracle of poetic prose’, Baudelaire called it.

One’s immediate feeling is that this is prose without narrative and without argument: ‘try leaving out the characterization and the plot’ Ron Padgett advises. ‘As simple as a musical phrase’ Rimbaud subscribes. Nevertheless, Ashbery’s book Three Poems is all in prose and it is 118 pages long and full of arguments.

At this stage prose poetry looks very modern, very French-inflected and very male. Why would that be? But, just a moment, what is Gertrude Stein writing? What is Lyn Hejinian writing in My Life? The prose poem slides towards postmodern and American and female.

Could it all be a trick? Could there be a prose poem if most poems were not a prose poem? Is that as far as one can go in terms of a definition of the prose poem? When I was at primary school in Standard 3 (Year 5) we were set an exercise to write: one paragraph, completed in five minutes, titled ‘What Happens When the Rain Comes Down?’ I simply riffed off this title: ‘What happens when the streets get wet? What happens when water falls out of the sky? etc’ My little prose poem was held up as an example of what not to do. ‘You were meant to describe, not to write a list of questions!’ Oh dear.