What Is a Prose Poem?
Quick answer: What is a prose poem? A poem written in sentences and paragraphs instead of lines, keeping poetry's compression, imagery and music without any line breaks.
A prose poem is a poem written without line breaks, in sentences and paragraphs that run margin to margin like ordinary prose. What makes it a poem is everything else: compressed language, charged imagery, rhythm, repetition and an intensity of attention that a news report or short story does not attempt. The paragraph becomes the unit of composition instead of the line.
The form has a proper pedigree. Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen (1869) established it, Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations pushed it toward the visionary, and modern practitioners include Gertrude Stein, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis at the border of fiction, and Claudia Rankine, whose book Citizen carries enormous force in prose blocks. It is not prose that failed to become poetry; it is poetry that chose a different container.
So what stops it being just prose?
Density and design. A prose poem tends to be short, usually under a page, and every sentence earns its place the way every line does in verse. Sound patterning still operates: assonance, repetition, sentence rhythms that speed and slow deliberately. Most of all, the prose poem usually refuses prose's obligations. It does not have to explain, transition or resolve. It can follow an image the way a dream does.
A worked micro-example: 'The removal van came on a Tuesday, which is the day of the week least likely to forgive you. My mother wrapped the good plates in my school reports. Somewhere between the old house and the new one, the word home changed its address and did not tell us.' No line breaks, but the logic is a poem's logic: association, image, turn.
Why choose the form
Some material resists lineation. Obsessive, breathless or claustrophobic subjects often work better without the relief that line breaks provide; the unbroken block enacts the feeling. Fable-like and surreal narratives suit it too, which is why Russell Edson's strange little domestic parables live there. And poets who over-polish line breaks sometimes find prose poems liberating: with lineation off the table, the sentences themselves must carry the music.
The form also disarms readers. A block of prose looks harmless, so the poem can smuggle in strangeness before anyone's guard goes up. Rankine uses that effect deliberately: the calm paragraph delivering an uncalm truth.
Writing one that works
Start with a single image or incident, not a topic. Write it as one paragraph, keeping sentences varied in length, and cut every phrase that merely connects or explains. Read it aloud: the rhythm should feel composed, not conversational. If the piece starts developing characters, scenes and a plot arc, it is drifting toward flash fiction, which is fine, but a different animal; the prose poem stays loyal to image and voice over story.
Prose poems are welcome in most competitions, including Writory's monthly contest, and judges scoring structure look for the same thing editors do: evidence that the absence of line breaks is a choice the poem profits from, not a shrug.
What poets can take from this
- Keep it short; most successful prose poems run between fifty and three hundred words.
- Cut connective tissue: 'because', 'and then', 'which meant that' are usually the first words to go.
- Vary sentence length dramatically; a three-word sentence after a forty-word one is your version of a line break.
- Anchor the piece in one concrete image and let association, not plot, move it forward.
- Read Baudelaire's Paris Spleen and one Russell Edson piece before your first attempt.
- Test the form by lineating your draft; if line breaks improve it, it wanted to be verse.
Try it yourself
Write a prose poem of under 150 words that describes a familiar household object as if you were explaining it to someone who has just returned from fifty years away.
Questions
How is a prose poem different from flash fiction?
Flash fiction serves story: character, event, consequence. A prose poem serves image, rhythm and voice, and can end without anything having happened. The border is blurry, and some pieces genuinely live on it.
Can a prose poem have paragraphs?
Yes. Many prose poems use two or more paragraphs, and the paragraph break functions like a stanza break, a breath or a turn. Single-block poems are simply the most common shape.
Do prose poems count as poetry in competitions?
Almost always, unless the rules say otherwise. Check each contest's guidelines; most, including Writory's, accept prose poems and judge them by the same criteria as lineated work.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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