Pp/Ff: An Anthology

Once again feisty little Starcherone Press runs in and scoops the field, ensuring PP/FF a long life in bookstores, in classroom use and for course adoption at programs sympathetic to the daring and experimental. Peter Conners, one of the most noted US prose poets, here takes on a gigantic challenge, as he struggles to produce a solid critical mass of what he considers the exciting "flash fictions" and "prose poems" of today. Wearing the heroic flippers of the editor, Conners has waded through the dregs of this material and pulled out a whole variety of plums of different sorts. His biggest challenge, of course, is in re-defining "flash fictions" and "prose poems" so that the different, some would say diametrically opposed, genres seem to meet in a place where boundaries dissolve. For example, Ed Taylor's cunning monologue, is it a prose poem or a flash fiction? I would answer, both. No wonder Conners has created a title (PP/FF) in which only a slash mark separates the two acronyms he's trying to shake up like a bottle of root beer in one hand, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in the other. Now, shake! As Conners points out, "strict adherence to given definitions of form and genre (prefabricated marketing boxes) are debilitating to a writer's creativity and do a disservice to readers." Look at the way the DA VINCI Code became a publishing sensation. It isn't only that readers like an exciting mystery, but in Dan Brown's novel they felt they were transgressing genres and actually finding out something about Christ's real life too, thus creating a dual appeal that torques up the action both at the cash registers and within the reader's brains. From Stuart Dybek's spooky "Fedora," with its strange images of an assassin's face revealed in blue flare, to Kenneth Bernard's grotesque tale of a nun whose antiquated sense of good and evil warped generations of child charges, you get a wide range of human emotions, -- and these are only the two first stories in the collection, and not even the best ones at that. Some of the pieces are more clearly prose poems than flash fictions, such as Noah Eli Gordon's poem in which ampersands dot every line like Christmas ornaments on a tree of blue spruce. Daryl Scroggins invents the "flash novel" in his ambitious, Lawrentian salute to the bildungsroman modernism perfected. Lists and quotes dominate Harold Jaffe's "Clown" piece, which verges on the homophobic, its multiple murderers linked in sexuality as straight society views all gay men as clowns. Again and again I go back to Ed Taylor's exceedingly brief "Pilgrim," which resonates long after the book has been closed and life goes on, in the vein of Kerouac, Celine, Haldor Laxness. "Which way to live? While angels meringue on some pin's head I wade out to wait for the light, & Bob and Bing now swing my way, got up in blue. They help me off the sawhorse I copped & say, don't block the limos of justice."