Jeremy Noel-Tod on the prose poem

by Simon Collings

Fortnightly Review has just published an interview I did with Jeremy Noel-Tod about The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem. The book was published in late 2018 in hardback, with the paperback edition appearing in November 2019.  I asked Jeremy about reactions to the anthology when it came out, about the challenges of representing 170 years of history in 200 poems, and about some of the poets he would have liked to have included but didn’t have room for.

One of the things which impresses me about the book (which I read soon after its publication) is the variety of material included, both in terms of style and in terms of diversity of the authors (gender, ethnicity, geography etc.) Jeremy says in the interview that he: ‘wanted to show how the English-language tradition wasn’t just confined to the US and the UK, but had a history in other modern literatures written at least partly in English: in India, Africa, the Caribbean.’ This anthology is a must read for anyone interested in prose poetry.