Genre-Bending: The Lines Between Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry
Let’s keep it apolitical this week, eh? Also, fuck Ted Cruz.
Photo by @taylor08n from Unsplash.
“Creative nonfiction is just poetry without the line breaks.”
But I don’t want to talk about Ted Cruz today! Today, I wanted to take some time to go over something that sits front and center on my home page: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
If you haven’t spent much time perusing my website, I make the bold claim that I do all three. So, do I? Well, kind of.
Here’s a shock! The neatly organized bookstore shelves separating the genres and subgenres are not barriers and more a blending. Sure, writing can fit pretty neatly into a specific category. The Harry Potter series may be a good example of a series fitting square into young adult fantasy. The Twilight series fits into young adult romance.
Obviously, there’s more nuance, but there are also a lot clearer examples of genre-bending. One of my favorite examples is Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I talk about Vuong a lot, mostly because his writing is, for lack of a better word, gorgeous, and his debut novel is the perfect example of how his poetry, nonfiction, and fiction writing can have a home in one book.
“It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus— that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying with our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?”
“When they ask you where you’re from, tell them your name was fleshed from the toothless mouth of a war-woman. That you were not born but crawled, headfirst— into the hunger of dogs. My son, tell them the body is a blade that sharpens by cutting.”
Which is from his novel and which is from his poetry book? You may not know the answer just by reading. (The first quote is from his novel and the second from his poetry book) Vuong’s prose is so heavily lined with poetic language and with experiences from his own life, examining and absorbing it is taking pieces of him with you. It is fabricated enough to be called fiction, it is beautiful enough to be called poetry, and it is true enough to be considered nonfiction, at least in the heart if not on the shelves.
Toni Morrison does a lot of the same with her book, The Bluest Eye. Morrison uses the backdrop of her hometown and the experiences of childhood to mold a beautiful fiction book, filled with trauma and shattered innocence, told in a way that is painfully poetic.
“Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”
There is so much to say about Morrison and her work, about the way she effortlessly moves between advancing the plot and focusing on poetic exposition. All this while it making the writing feel effortless, allowing the reader to become completely immersed.
Ultimately, this is my goal, and we’re getting there, but not yet.
My book, probably nothing, attempts to do something similar, by blending the realms of nonfiction and poetry. The book I just finished attempts to blend all three -- though it still needs a lot of work to reach the levels of Vuong and Morrison (and it will likely never rise that high).
All this to say, I think the best works we read, and the most impactful, have some combination of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Fiction for immersion, nonfiction for relatability, and poetry for beauty.
Speaking of poetry, here’s something I wrote this month as well! Despite a pretty major setback with getting off track writing a poem every day, I’ve managed to get back on track, and have written 21 poems this month so far. See a new one below, and make sure to leave a comment letting me know what you want to read next!
A man on the mooned mouth
My wrist is carved out of a slice of
wood from my father’s workshop, in a backroom
he convinced us a devil lived, waiting
to swallow us whole. My hips are split open,
knitted yarn ripped apart from overuse,
sewn at the seams by a mother with plastic needles for
fingers, with a stopper for a mouth. My
ears are waxed shut, my eyes clouded glass marbles shaded
brown, plucked from my skull by practiced
hands, placed between lips that whisper what they
shouldn’t see, and my father lives against the
mooned curve of my lips, his fingers lifting them up
and down, twisting my tongue to shape the
language I know but don’t, until I am uncertain if
words exist to be or if I can write anything
and it would make sense as poetry.
