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March 14, 2025
“Ice”
by Maureen Seaton
in Little Ice Age
“That’s how prose poems come to me, the sound of the words arriving first, no interruptions, no restraints, the rhythm kicking in.”—Maureen Seaton
Maureen Seaton was at first anxious about her move from linear poetry to the prose poem. “Poem lovers expect air on the page, gulps of negative space after lines, between stanzas, allowing for breath,” she writes. “And there I was creating claustrophobia.” One of her students called her prose poems “stubby creatures” and she herself worried about her “ungainly chunks of text.” Eventually she embraced the form—"all horizon and velocity”—and rarely looked back. Prose poems she discovered could contain anything: “boxes on boxes filled with jetsam and doubloons.” Writing them felt like strapping herself in a roller coaster and “riding it all the way down.” Like “opening a vein” or “baffling the radar” or “balancing mid-air” at the top of a ferris wheel.
Seaton, an American lesbian poet, memoirist, and professor of creative writing, authored fifteen solo books of poetry, co-authored an additional thirteen, and wrote one memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, which won the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography. I found her prose poem “Ice” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry. It is a wild and beautiful ride. Her commentary about the prose poem comes from the essay that accompanied the poem in that collection called “Moving Violations: The Prose Poem as Fast Car.”
The Paragraph of the Week
Ice
We were driving down the Kennedy having a great time guessing old groups Spinners Commodores La Belle maybe I was driving fast we'd been cold for a month not regular cold scary the kind that wears you down twenty forty below dark so cold you know hell is scratchy wool and miles of hard ice forget heat and everything suddenly stopped the Lincoln which was not our Lincoln but my sister's boyfriend's Lincoln not even his but the leased whim of a fired employee crashed into the back of a steel-gray Mercedes Benz you could feel the ice eat your bones your bumpers the plastic grill curling up the back of the Mercedes Jesus that Lincoln imploded good old American the Mercedes owner said as we shook in the ridiculous cold cars whizzing down the frozen highway and Lori's arm shot across my chest like a mother's we'd been spoons sleeping on the sunny couch earlier while the temperature reached a record low in Chicago my ex-husband used to say stop breathing on my back Maureen the only thing I remember about the crash is the way Lori's left arm reached out and saved me from ice crystals on the windshield she said whenever I breathe on her back she melts.
—Maureen Seaton
Commentary
I once unconsciously chose and now consciously choose process over product or artifice. For me, the prose poem provides the perfect container—like any favorite form might—and then it dispenses with the container as well. I spend precious time fitting the text I’ve streamed to the music I hear. It’s still metered, but it’s internal. I hear sounds for particular words too, that's why streaming works well for me—the poem feeds me the sound and sometimes I get it right the first time and sometimes I have to think about the sound and then the sense that's bubbling up and find the sound—like the way the person typing subtitles on live TV goes back and retypes a word or phrase when the meaning catches up. That’s how prose poems come to me, the sound of the words arriving first, no interruptions, no restraints, the rhythm kicking in—my twin turbo six-cylinder cutting through wind—all horizon and velocity.
—Maureen Seaton
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PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
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