Today is one of those days that are a blessing in the life
of a writer. Someone has taken my responsibilities, with their poopy pants and
their appetites and their endlessly unwinding stories and their insistence on
sticking their fingers into the ear of the cat, and left me alone, with
time—time to write.
Naturally, my response to this unusual boon was to hit the
couch and fall straight to sleep, the unworried cat taking his place in close
proximity to my gentle adult hand.
But my someone’s sacrifice wasn’t all for naught.
Apparently, in the seventy minutes I was sleeping, I wrote a whole craft essay
about the distinction between poetry and fiction when the piece under review is
brief, non-lineated, and condensed.
I remember almost nothing of the dream essay—just that it
had something to do with cat-ears and some woman’s distracting snoring in my entirely
empty (except for me) house, and that my thesis had something to do with the
phrase, “If the point is the arc.”
That was the dependent clause I woke to: If the point is the
arc. I thought it over and over. If the point is the arc if the point is the
arc if the point is the arc … then, what? It was enough, though. As I began to
rouse myself, I recalled it. From the academic conference of sleep, wherein I
was the keynote speaker, let the published proceedings reflect this bit of
erudition.
As the longtime editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review, my
very favorite submissions were Fineline Competition entries. The Fineline was
(and still is) a contest that explores the “fine line” between flash fiction
and the prose poem. The work always had a special energy and a more
experimental feel than our usual submissions. With a name like “Mid-American
Review,” writers tend to think that your aesthetic is, for lack of a better
term, middling. A journal with such a stodgy name can’t possibly want risky
work, is the thinking.
But as it happened, I was hungry for experimental work, and
so were my fellow editors. I always hoped for L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E or
found poetry, for long poems, for formal work—anything to mix things up. And
the prose we printed always pushed boundaries and fought against convention.
We got the challenging stuff in the Fineline entries, in
spades. Year after year, these represented the most solid submission category;
many years we printed the winner and all ten finalists, just because they were
all so delicious.
The Fineline Competition provided a wonderful occasion to
consider distinctions among genres. While the contest was created to single out
work that was liminal—neither clearly poetry nor clearly fiction—the truth was
that it was almost always easy to tell what was what. The work that came
closest to defying categorization always made it to the finalist stage, but on
occasion none of the work offered a challenge in this way, and even the winner
was just an excellent flash fiction or an excellent prose poem—occupying a
single category, clearly an example of whatever genre it was.
I’m writing some flash fiction at the moment, and that’s
probably why the issue entered my dream life. Adding to my dream fodder, yesterday
I conducted a Q&A with a favorite writer for SmokeLong Quarterly, the flash
fiction journal that I serve as interviews editor, and his piece would make a
compelling Fineline. It is extremely brief and very lyrical, with no extraneous
language, not even a loose syllable. The story itself is subtle—more of a
character portrait than a narrative. Something happens, though—the character
changes—so I would come down on the flash fiction side (and its appearance in a
flash fiction journal certainly bolsters that analysis).
My flash of understanding, then, is this: If the point of
the piece of writing is the arc of the plot, it’s fiction. If the point is the
arc … fiction. If, on the other hand, the objective is to present a compelling
picture, and a story is secondary or missing, it’s probably a poem.
I love a story by Jim Heynen called “What Happened During
the Ice Storm,” written in 1985. It’s a double-spaced page that presents an
account of what happens when a group of boys encounter a group of half-frozen
pheasants. It actually reads like nonfiction to me—it’s just that honest—and
maybe it is; I don’t know Heynen’s life story.
In this piece, the title backs me up: the point is the arc.
“What Happened During the Ice Storm” is about what happened during the ice
storm. It’s a somewhat liminal piece, too, though, like the forthcoming SmokeLong
story I cited before. Heynen is as focused on painting a picture of the frozen
plains as he is on saying what happened—but telling “what happened” is his
announced objective.
Writing flash fiction is challenging for me, and I’ll just
say, the big challenge for someone who is primarily a poet is to find the
story. The short form allows for a simple narrative; there is no room for an
elaborate subplot or a crafty MacGuffin. Sometimes, though, I leave the plot
out altogether—and then I don’t think I have a story at all. Something has to
happen for a story to exist. Some character has to change. A simple portrait
does not a story make—but it can make a very fine poem.
A favorite Fineline winner of mine was a piece called “Fifteen Ways to Think About Italian
Opera” by Alan Michael Parker. As the title suggests, the story/poem/Fineline
was segmented, much like Wallace Stevens’ excellent poem “Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird,” and the segmentation chopped up the arc, frustrated
the narrative, so that the story got muddied in the process. Still, I saw it as
a story—the fifteen ways Parker offered sort of built in intensity and each one
heightened the drama: “I
gave up my tickets, I smashed my CD’s, I shredded my books, I hammered my toys,
I threw my clothes from the roof in a storm. Maybe now I’ll understand,” Parker
writes. He presents a character whose need to understand opera tortures and
alters him.
But I
missed the call. The piece that I would have sworn was fiction was included in
a book of poems, Long Division, released by Tupelo Press. Occasionally, you
really can’t make genre distinctions from the evidence on the page, and then, I
suppose, we do something I would never suggest otherwise: trusting the author
to make the call. Authorial intent is a laughable consideration for most
aspects of writing. I really do hold with the idea that an author only
half-creates a piece of writing, and my brain finishes the job—so I’m nearly as
much of an authority on a piece of writing I love as the author is.
When other
measures fail and it’s time to make the call, maybe the author can tell us if a
piece is poetry or fiction or something else entirely. But at the end of the
day, I’m not willing to relinquish my authority as reader. I’m getting out my
protractor. I’ll do my darnedest to detect the arc.
