Poetry and Creative Nonfiction: Similarities in the Two Genres
		© 2005, John Medeiros   As a poet, I am intrigued by language and syntax.  As a reader of nonfiction, I appreciate a good narrative.  As a writer, I find most excitement walking the thin line that separates the two.  In Judith Ortiz Cofer’s essay But Tell It Slant: From Poetry to Prose and Back Again, she does exactly what I strive to do in my own writing.  She makes the leap from poetry – which she uses to identify her subject –  to prose – which she uses to elaborate on it.  She admits that she writes poetry as the first step in writing creative nonfiction, that the journey from poetry to prose continues the emphasis on control of language and craft from one form to the other.  She starts her process by writing a poem because in doing so, she makes the connection to a deeply felt “memory-generated emotion,” and only when she is connected to that emotion does she know that she has identified the subject of her prose.  As she states,   ...the process of creation begins with the identification of the Subject.  The Subject is that which is worth writing about.  Once the writer attempts to put her thoughts in the demanding form of the poem, she will soon discover that if there is no diamond embedded in the carbon, she will not be able to fake it.   I’ve thought about Ortiz Cofer’s essay for quite some time, and must admit that she challenges the poet in me to view poetry and prose not as two completely separate genres (contrary to what I’ve been taught), but as extensions of each other.  Though I realize that poetry shares many elements with prose (Shakespeare’s plays and Homer’s narratives are just two examples), I’ve always considered poetry to be unique in that it is more concentrated – that is, it says more with fewer words.  This concentration often forces me to select language and imagery details with greater precision and to be much more intentional as I carefully construct the poem’s overall form.  Because each word, sound and image of a poem lends itself to the poem’s overall effect, I’ve often considered poetry to demand more of a complete unity than other literary genres.  But Ortiz Cofer has me asking why can’t creative nonfiction demand the same attention?  As a poet for over twenty years, I’ve been reluctant to write nonfiction.  I’ve grown fond of poetry’s succinctness and musicality.  I’ve become attracted to the poem because it somehow makes me feel like I’m being heard, or, to use the words of Molly Peacock, that the voice of the poem allows me to hear myself.  For me, the notion of writing creative nonfiction has always frightened me, perhaps because I was afraid of not being heard.  But Ortiz Cofer calls me to look at the genre in another light, and in doing so, I discover just how similar poetry and creative nonfiction can be.   Like many poets, when I read poetry, I look for four primary elements: form, metaphor, sound and rhythm – elements which adapt themselves successfully, and creatively, to nonfiction.   Form   When I say form, I am referring to the actual structure of the poem.  Unlike prose, poetry is not limited to the paragraph.  Poets have the opportunity to skillfully twist and shape sentences after careful and skillful management of the line-break.  Poets have the freedom to write long sentences.  Short sentences.  Incomplete sentences.  Poets also have the liberties to leave plenty of white space on the page and to use lines (as opposed to sentences) of irregular length, breaking anywhere the poet sees fit.  Some poets may argue that this is what is meant by the term poetic license, in that it serves as a permission to break the rules of writing.   But this same liberty has found a home in creative nonfiction, as well, and is exactly what allows Nancy Willard to set her text, and her images, apart in her personal essay The Friendship Tarot.  Notice how Willard structures the essay’s opening:                                                                       The Child                                                                                                   The Journey                          The Garden                                      The Gift           Food          The Story                                     The Bird           Death          The Moon                                                        The Book   I lay out the cards of our friendship.   This is just one example of how Willard skillfully, and quite intentionally, structures the form of her personal essay.  In doing so she breaks structural barriers in her prose, something poets tend to do more than prose writers.  And she continues to take such liberties throughout the essay by fragmenting it into ten smaller sections, each corresponding to the “card” introduced at the beginning of the piece.  By deliberately choosing this structure, Willard shows us that the essay, like the poem, can allow the liberty of using structure for effect.  Willard is not a poet, but rather a writer of creative nonfiction, yet like a poet, she has given herself the poetic license to experiment structurally within her genre.   Metaphor   Though metaphor appears in many literary genres, its origins lie in poetry, and is perhaps the most common of poetic devices.  A metaphor is a compression of two unlike things.  It extends the meaning of a word beyond its literal meaning.  It comes from the Greek word, metapherein, meaning "to transport."  When a poet uses metaphor, she transports, or carries over, a meaning from one realm to another.  One of the finest examples of metaphor can be found in Richard Selzer's fine essay, The Knife.  Consider the essay's opening paragraph, the language of which reads very much like a poem:       One holds the knife as one holds the bow of cello or a tulip – by the stem.  Not palmed nor gripped nor grasped, but lightly, with the tips of the fingers.  The knife is not for pressing.  It is for drawing across the field of skin.  Like a slender fish, it waits, at the ready, then, go!   Selzer goes on to extend the metaphor even further after the incision, where he writes     And if the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul.  I think that if years later I were to see the trace from an old incision of mine, I should know it at once, as one recognizes his pet expressions.   The knife is the central image in this metaphor, and Selzer uses it until the essay's gripping end, where he writes.      At last a little thread is passed into the wound and tied.  The monstrous booming fury is stilled by a tiny thread.  The tempest is silenced.  The operation is over.  On the table, the knife lies spent, on its side, the bloody meal smear-dried upon its flanks.  The knife rests.    And waits.   Selzer, using the energy of language and poetry, incorporates metaphor into his personal essay with the skill of an accomplished poet.   Sound   Another quality to be found in poetry is the use of unusual, unconventional and even mellifluous words that, when put together, create sounds and music, often shedding new meaning.  This technique is something Jeannette Winterson refers to as word bending, which poets do, not so much to break words but to accommodate them.  An excellent example of how this device is used on the creative nonfiction stage can be found in Barrie Jean Borich’s book-length memoir My Lesbian Husband.  It is both an example of metaphor, described above, and the skillful use of words and music shared by many poets.     And so I keep looking for new language, another tumbling run of metaphor, wondering if Linnea and I might be described as compound words, a different meaning alone than we have together.  Backdrop.  Limelight.  Ropedancer.  But that is not enough.  Dancer, drop, light, lime.  It's too easy to break apart any of these words into their loosely joined pieces.  So perhaps, instead, we can see ourselves as a sonnet, a trapeze act of all the precise words we love and hate.  We don't lose the singular meanings of each little utterance, but together they make a noise that we were unable to hear before.  Our repeating sounds and the music of our sentences pitch us into the big din beyond our immediate bodies.  Not the first poem.  Not the last.  Free fall achieved within a fixed form.   As another example, let us go back to Richard Selzer, who uses sounds in a very similar way in his essay Room Without Windows.  Consider the following passage:   The slightest pressure of my fingers caused him to cry out – a great primitive howl of vowel and diphthong.  This kind of pain owns no consonants.  Only later, when the pain settles in, long and solid, only then does it grow a spine to sharpen the glottals and dentals a man can grip with his teeth, his throat....Pain invents its own language.   Borich and Selzer both show us how sound, like form and metaphor, is a poetic device that adapts itself quite well to the genre of creative nonfiction.   Rhythm   Rhythm is arguably the most important of poetic devices.  Poets are required to have a keen ear for rhythm, particularly for the rhythms of natural speech.  All human speech has rhythm, and poetry serves to regulate that rhythm into recognizable patterns.  A poem’s rhythm helps to create its music, and this music provides us with an instinctive understanding of the poem.  The poem’s rhythm also gives the poem a voice with which to tell its story, not unlike the rhythm employed by many writers of creative nonfiction.  Listen to how the following piece by Jamaica Kincaid flows back and forth with a rhythm that not only moves us, but that also carries us between past and present.   But I was then (not so now) extremely particular about what I would eat, not knowing then (but I do now) of shortages and abundance, having no consciousness of the idea of rich and poor (but I know now that we were poor then)...I was powerless then (though not so now) to like or dislike this story; it was beyond me then (though not so now) to understand the span of my lifetime then, two years old, and it was beyond me then (though not so now), the span of time called almost one hundred years old; I did not know then (though I do now) that there was such a thing as an inside to anybody, and that this inside would have a color, and that if the insides were the same shade of yellow as the yellow of boiled cornmeal my mother would want me to know about it.   This mellifluous language is what poets live for.  Kincaid shows us that there is room in creative nonfiction for poetic rhythm, and that its use provides a more musical language to allow the narrative a voice that sings with the rhythm of poetry.   Today’s fine writers of prose – specifically, of creative nonfiction – remind me that the genre is not different from poetry at all, that creative nonfiction and poetry can share common elements such as those described above.  Perhaps even more.  This is something I should think about the next time I am faced with a narrative in search of a genre.
			The entire contents of this website © 2005, John Medeiros