Poetry vs. Memoir: "Forcing a Genre"

By “forcing a genre,” I mean insisting on writing a piece in a certain form, even if that form is not right for that specific work. I see this on a regular basis as a contributing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader. A writer will submit a poem that is divided into lines, the way a poem usually is, but the line breaks feel artificial. The language has the warp and woof of prose. It doesn’t have any of the compression or music that marks strong poetry.

Often when I see this happen, the author is writing very autobiographically. The story might be extremely compelling. So compelling, the writer feels such urgency to tell the story that he or she doesn't have the time to enrich the language with metaphor, imagery, and the sounds of words. It may not seem to that writer as if he or she has the luxury of using all those literary tools, since the message is so immediate. 

So why not write that piece as prose memoir? Memoir and poetry can be extremely close. Some writing that may feel thin when written as poetry can make wonderful memoir. 

Poets often recount particularly intense moments from their lives, as do memoirists. But for writing to be poetry, it requires a different approach, an approach where the writer is determined to wrestle the experience into art, rather than simply to recount part of a life. Poetry also often focuses on a small moment of large significance, whereas memoir usually tells a story over a longer period of time.

A book that's useful to look at in this context is Linda McCarriston’s Eva-Mary, a collection of poetry that is deeply rooted in the poet’s family history.

Linda McCarriston

Eva-Mary is partly focused on the abuse that McCarriston and other family members experienced when the author was growing up. There is nothing prosy about the writing in this book. The experiences that McCarriston recounts are memoir, in the sense that she is testifying that she witnessed them, but they are also poetry in every sense of the word. The music of the language and McCarriston’s deft use of metaphor all contribute to make this book pure poetry:

                               her heart

the bursting heart of someone

snagged among rocks deep

in a sharkpool

(from “To Judge Faolain, Dead Long Enough: A Summons”)

McCarriston's book also tells the story of a family, but focused on particular, highly charged moments.

I don’t think that all autobiographical writing should be poetry, or that it should all be memoir. But it’s important to recognize when a piece of your writing wants to be a different genre from the one you are forcing it into. Often this happens when a poem should really be memoir.

This can also happen in reverse. A piece of prose can be so dense, so tangled with metaphor and imagery that it demands the breathing room of line breaks to be assimilated and appreciated. Or a memoir that is fixed on particular moments in time could work better as a series of poems.

One caution about switching a work to another genre. Once you switch, there are alterations you have to make. The demands of prose are different from the demands of poetry. A prose version of exactly the same story may require more elaboration, more development of certain details or characters. Some poetic diction may have to be purged in the interest of maintaining authenticity. 

Conversely, a verse version of a story may require focusing more on a particular moment. Poetry also requires more figurative language and more focus on the rhythms and sounds of the words, so even the most poetic prose will need heightening to make it sing when it is broken into lines.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer

Liliana Heker: A Writer We Should All Know

Scanning the shelves of the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library one day, hungry for good fiction, I ran across Liliana Heker’s The Stolen Party. The book is a collection of short stories translated from Spanish by Alberto Manguel. Rarely does it happen that I make a selection almost at random in a library and end up dazzled. But dazzled I was.

                                                           Liliana Heker

Several of the stories in that book were among the most memorable I’ve ever read. Heker is a master of magical realism, but she has her own take on it. The first story in the book, “Georgina Requini: or the Chosen One,” telescopes the entire life of a wannabe actress into 30 pages. It’s breathtaking, zooming from one phase of the main character’s life to the next, in and out of her fantasies, so we rarely know where and when the action takes place until we get our bearings a couple of sentences into each episode. That puzzle is one of the most fun aspects of the story. But this disorientation also mirrors the main character’s bewilderment about how her fate plays out. The story is a technical tour de force, warping the space/time continuum, but it’s also deeply moving and knowing, a combination that magical realism doesn’t always deliver.

The title story of The Stolen Party is also amazing. More in the vein of naturalist fiction, it tells the tale of a nine-year-old girl who is the daughter of a maid, but gets invited to the birthday party of the girl whose family employs her mother. I won’t give away the shocking ending.

Julio Cortázar, like Heker, an Argentine master of fiction, said about her writing, “Liliana Heker is a magician. She turns little daily objects and trivial events into pieces of gold. She is wise, she is frightening. She must be read, she must be read.”

Also available in English is Heker’s novel about the period of the dictatorship and the Dirty War in Argentina, The End of the Story, translated by Andrea Labinger. The novel caused a stir both on the left and the right, because one of the revolutionary characters is subjected to torture, turns informant, and then becomes the lover of her torturer.

Heker was born in Buenos Aires in 1943 to a family that emigrated from Europe. In response to a question about her roots, Heker responded: “My maternal grandparents arrived as children in 1889 on the Weser, a mythical ship that brought the first Jewish immigrants to Argentina” from Eastern Europe. Her ancestors settled in Entre Ríos province, home of the Jewish gauchos.

Interestingly, Heker began her academic career as a student of physics. That might explain her comfort in playing with the rules of time and space in her fiction. She was also a literary prodigy, publishing her first stories at the age of 17. She’s well known in Argentina for cofounding two important literary journals: El Escarabajo de Oro (The Golden Beetle), and El Ornitorrinco (The Platypus). Her work has been translated into numerous languages, and fortunately for us, English is one of them.

My next blog will be an exclusive interview with Liliana Heker, featuring information not available elsewhere in English.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Part 4, Part 5
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

How Do You Get Good Creative Ideas?

Creative ideas originate from the natural siftings of thoughts that take place in our minds. We’re all constantly sorting through random phrases and images that cycle through our brains. It’s a bit like the process of leafing through your photos on a personal computer, or on a smartphone. One thought leads to another in a somewhat arbitrary series of links and responses to external stimuli. The trick in coming up with a creative idea you can use in your writing is to differentiate from your other random thoughts, and then seize on that good idea when it occurs. Immediately begin to identify and/or develop it. If you can’t, write it down electronically or in a notebook, so it doesn’t dissolve back into the bubbling brew of your mind.

Here’s an example. The other day I was driving to pick up my son from school, listening to radio station KCSM, the jazz station in the San Francisco Bay Area. I don’t even remember what I was listening to, but it made me think of the way that your intelligence is supposed to improve when you listen to music. The original study of this, I remembered, had to do with children listening to Mozart. Then I started remembering a story I’d read in the magazine Catamaran Literary Reader about endangered California condors and how large their eggs were, almost like dinosaur eggs. That led to a thought about the movie Jurassic Park and cloning dinosaurs, and before I knew it was thinking about the possibility that scientists could actually clone humans who had lived in the past from a lock of their hair, and that took me to the idea of cloning Mozart.

I realized that small thought was different from just repetitions of what I’d previously read or seen. That's key in recognizing a creative idea. That thought took me to an idea of a short story about cloning Mozart. Getting an idea like that is like trying to peel off a clear plastic sticker from its adhesive back. It’s incredibly difficult to get the edge of the sticker to separate. You finally get just a tiny corner to come free, and you have to stick your fingernail in as fast as you can before that sticker flops onto the back again. Once you’ve got your fingernail under it, you have to keep disengaging the thought from the background of shifting thoughts that it appears on.

So my thought about cloning Mozart immediately took me to the question of who would raise him? Wouldn’t they choose a musical family in Austria who could cultivate him to become a classical musician? But what about siblings? Maybe the siblings might already be musical and grow jealous of young Mozart II. That and the parents over-bearing insistence that he be again the prodigy he was capable of becoming might cause him to rebel, to become an unsuccessful bebop saxophonist trying in vain to imitate Charlie Parker, and then maybe to renounce music altogether and settle in Flagstaff, Arizona, to become a dry wall specialist.

When I got home, before I started writing the story, I Googled “cloning Mozart,” and discovered that a writer named Jonathan Rausch had already had this idea and developed it far more thoroughly that I could’ve, as “In 2003, They Secretly Cloned Mozart.” Rausch added many wrinkles I wouldn’t have thought of, such as a Czech billionaire who undertook this project in secret in order to get Mozart to finish his never-completed Requiem. OK, so it wasn’t the most original idea, but the point is, to get a creative idea, you have to stand just a bit outside your own thoughts and casually pay meticulous attention to them, so you know when you’ve got a fish on the line, an idea you've never heard of before, and one that readily lends itself to development. When you feel that nibble, don’t walk away, make sure you reel it in.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka