Prose Poem : Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre Delville, Michel University Press of Florida Jonathan Monroe defines the literary and historical significance of the prose poem as “above all that of a critical, self-critical, Utopian genre, a genre that tests the limits of genre” (16). The prose poem, he adds, “aspires to be poetic/literary language’s own coming to self-consciousness, the place where poet and reader alike become critically aware of the writer’s language” (3536). By putting the accent on the genre’s status as a self-consciously deviant form, Monroe raises the issue of the possibility of a mise en abyme of genericness by an individual literary work. The question, according to Jacques Derrida, becomes whether a writer is actually practicing a genre, so to speak, “from within” or “from without”: 4fb8e4bc1a2561e386aea5b4f32ce39c.gif 4fb8e4bc1a2561e386aea5b4f32ce39c.gif What are we doing when, to practice a “genre,” we quote a g...