“’Lights,’” Stuart Dybek’s Little Masterpiece: Prose Poem, Flash Fiction, or Creative Nonfiction?” by Peter Johnson

In this month’s essay for Plume, Peter Johnson discusses the quizzical nature of the prose genre, specifically its vulnerability to being misinterpreted by both poets and prose writers alike. For those who wonder just where the oxymoronic integrity of the prose poem lies, Johnson answers this question incisevely as one of the form’s most celebrated practitioners and proponents. For those who continue to wonder, for instance, just what the difference is between flash fiction and prose poetry, Johnson provides answers with delineations and examples, citing Stuart Dybek’s prose poem “Lights” in particular” as a memorable example of the form.  In so doing, he defends its literary integrity, while entertaining his reader with self-effacing authority at the same time.

–Chard deNiord

“’Lights,’” Stuart Dybek’s Little Masterpiece: Prose Poem, Flash Fiction, or Creative Nonfiction?”

“Lights

In summer, waiting for night, we’d pose against the afterglow on corners, watching traffic cruise through the neighborhood. Sometimes, a car would go by without its headlights on and we’d all yell, “Lights!”
“Lights!” we’d keep yelling until the beams flashed on. It was usually immediate—the driver honking back thanks, or flinching embarrassed behind the steering wheel, or gunning past, and we’d see his red taillights blink on.
But there were times—who knows why?—when drunk or high, stubborn, or simply lost in that glide to somewhere else, the driver just kept driving in the dark, and all down the block we’d hear yelling from doorways and storefronts, front steps, and other corners, voices winking on like fireflies: “Lights! Your lights! Hey, lights!”

In simple language and with great precision, Stuart Dybek in “Lights” masterfully renders a memory of a neighborhood’s communal reaction to a reoccurring event in such a powerful way that the neighborhood’s response becomes almost ritualistic. We feel as if we are inhabiting the geography of one of Edward Hopper’s cityscapes, standing on the same corner with Dybek’s characters, sometimes amused by the drivers’ reactions; other times, outraged by those who ignore the bystanders’ pleads to put on their goddamned lights.

“Lights,” like much of Dybek’s short prose, veers toward the lyrical, with, as critic Richard Murphy writes, “its poetic use of balance, antithesis, repetition, evocation rather than statement, as well as connotative diction and imagery.” All these techniques, Murphy adds, makes a work like “Lights” different from one of Dybek’s longer short stories. What this means, I think, is that a piece like “Lights,” is just as much poetry as it is a fictional narrative, which is why I consider it a prose poem.

Certainly, “Lights” would have fit beautifully in Dybek’s earlier chapbook of short prose called The Story of Mist, which he published with State Street Press in 1993, and which was reviewed as a book of prose poetry in my now-defunct journal, The Prose Poem: An International Journal. The Story of Mist is also catalogued as “prose poetry” by booksellers who have been lucky enough to have acquired a copy.

Consider this short impressionistic piece from Mist, which could easily be a companion piece to “Lights”:

“Childhood Scenes”

Remember the night that father, strapped to giant flukes, crashed through the skylight onto the dinner table, flattening the meatloaf; or the holidays when Grandmother would insist we whip her with ostrich plumes. Mother’s implant operation before she joined the convent, performed by Uncle Arfy, both of them sitting on the edge of the bathtub while he stitched a used teabag into the pouch under her eye. Little Brother practicing hymns learned from flies on the comb and wax paper; Big Brother, in the backyard, hammering up the gibbet of a basketball hoop.

But I am most concerned with the spirit in which these two pieces were written and with how they have been published and then received by readers. I am talking about genre here, because “Lights” originally appeared in Dybek’s brilliant (I don’t use that word casually) short story sequence The Coast of Chicago. Later, it was anthologized in In Brief, an anthology of “creative nonfiction,” and yet, as I’ve said, it would have been an appropriate piece for The Story of Mist because Dybek has always had a fondness for the prose poem. All this attests to how prose genres overlap, and in Dybek’s case, as in the work of most fiction writers, an autobiographical description of an event can easily double as fiction, so publishing it as fiction and nonfiction makes sense. Unfortunately, many other writers are not so honest about their motives.

Now some critics might say, “Why does any of this ass-scratching matter? All that’s important is if the work is ‘good,’” which, they imply, makes it unique, special. To be frank, that response is dumb, because “what is good” is always, to some degree, subjective. In his book, The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov takes this approach to literature head-on while also pointing out the importance of identifying genres. “We are told that it is pointless to speak of genres (tragedy, comedy, etc.),” he writes, “for the work of art is essentially unique, valuable because of what is original about it that distinguishes it from other works, and not because of whatever in it may resemble them.” In contrast, in defense of genre, Todorov maintains that “dealing with any text belonging to ‘literature’ [ . . .] we must be aware that it manifests properties that it shares with all literary texts, or with texts belonging to one of the sub-groups of literature (which we call, precisely, genres). It is inconceivable, nowadays, to defend the thesis that everything in the work is individual, a brand-new product of personal inspiration, a creation with no relation to the past.”

To me, Todorov’s observations seem obvious, though there are also other more ancillary mundane factors that affect reception of a work of art. For instance, I consider Dybek a friend, so, for all you know, I could be lying about the quality of “Lights” because I like him, or because I think he might help my career, or because he might take me out for a nice steak dinner for sucking up to him. Or perhaps Dybek, like Faulkner so often did when commenting on his work, might be lying if he said he self-consciously wrote “Lights” as a prose poem, a flash fiction, or a piece of autobiographical nonfiction.

I am joking, of course, but allow me to explain why I think genre matters in the reception of a work. If I were to self-consciously write a short prose piece, titled “Hell,” and submit it to a journal as a prose poem, I obviously want the audience to read it as such, bringing to it all their knowledge of that genre and the ones adjacent to it, like the fable, the fragment, and so on. I also would want them to bring all the psychological baggage they associate with Hell to their reading of the poem. Similarly, if I call that same work a flash fiction, I expect the reader to approach it with very different expectations. Think of a still life painting of a banana flanked by two bright red apples. If instead of calling that painting “Still Life,” I decide to name it “Freud’s Dream,” the viewer suddenly begins to look very differently at that banana and those apples. Instead of gazing at the painting as a traditional still life, the viewer now is forced to consider the phallic implications of such a title and, hopefully, laugh, since I would assume that to be the painter’s intention.

I write this at a time where writers of short prose will call their work most anything to see it in print, in a pathetic attempt to feed their egos. I find their chameleonic behavior inauthentic. Lionel Trilling wrote that being authentic means “being true to one’s values.” That is, your actions and choices should line up with your values and not be made because of internal or external superficial pressures, which only results in what the existentialists called “bad faith.”

Simply put, today, I think many poets have bad faith toward their readers, which to me is as disrespectful as cheating on your significant other. In terms of the prose poem/flash fiction controversy, it’s not unusual for certain poets to call themselves prose poets one day, then suddenly morph into “major” writers of flash fiction—all the while publishing the same piece simultaneously as both genres. Maybe that shouldn’t bother me, but it does, especially because I, and many other fine prose poets in the 1980s, got our asses kicked and were excluded from literary journals because we confessed to writing prose poetry. As one big name poet said to me when I displayed my journal at the first AWP I ever attended (which was more confusing than my first sexual experience): “Surely you must realize that prose poetry isn’t real poetry.” To which I gleefully replied, “You’re right, dummy. That’s why we call it prose poetry.”

And on that note, allow me to retire to my modest study to work on a prose poem which is really a lyrical essay disguised as the opening of an epistolary novel written in the form of fragments which themselves began as aphorisms. “Confusing,” you might say. Maybe so, but at least I’m being honest about my intent, though aware that it will be hard as hell to find a journal specializing in such a hybrid genre.

Author: Peter Johnson

Peter Johnson has published seven books of prose poems, six novels, two collections of short stories, a book of essays on the prose poem, and three anthologies of prose poetry. His poetry and fiction have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Rhode Island Council on the Arts, and his second book of prose poems was awarded the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His most recent book is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems. More information can be found at peterjohnsonauthor.com and on his Substack site at johnsonp.substack.com.

Plume: Plume Issue #166 June 2025