Tracing the verse novel back to C. J. Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1909–15), the chapter argues that the form has been particularly vibrant and popular in Australia, including among children and young adults. It then examines prose poetry, including microliterature, arguing for its significance in addressing the quotidian, questions of identity, and feminism. The chapter considers how prose poetry accommodates engagements with other forms and systems of knowledge, such as art, music, science, and mathematics, and its capacity for defamiliarisation and the uncanny. Lastly, the chapter considers poetic or verse biography, from the explorer narratives of the mid twentieth century to experimentation with life-writing more recently. It foregrounds intersections with documentary poetry and creative engagements with the archive, including scope to critique and resist colonial histories.

The introduction reads Yeats’ record of his meeting with Joyce in 1902 and uncovers in Joyce’s declaration of his intention to write prose poetry an unacknowledged echoing of Baudelaire’s idea for prose poétique. It explores the Parisian context of Baudelaire’s ambition to develop a new kind of materially displaced thinking and considers it in relation to New Materialism: While neo-materialist approaches would shift emphasis and agency from a Cartesian subject to the world of matter, Baudelaire’s “things think through me, or I through them” retains a vital openness. It is here that I introduce the concept of Joyce’s sentient thinking, an undoing of the sovereign and dominating subject that offers new possibilities of cooperative co-being. The introduction theorizes Joyce’s exploration of a lived aesthetic practice with reference to accounts of subjectivity such as Judith Butler’s Senses of the Subject (2016) and works on reason under capitalism such as Martin Jay’s Reason After Its Eclipse (2016).