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

Why Write Poetry, Part 3: Saying the Unsayable

When I was in college, a lot my friends were trying what could be called controlled substances. After they returned from various journeys of the imagination (sometimes jetlagged) their reactions were often, “Wow! Indescribable. Words can’t express what I experienced.”

I was always a little dubious when people reacted in that way to an ecstatic or psychedelic experience. Part of the reason I was skeptical is that I was then reading a lot of poetry by the French surrealists, who were particularly good at spinning out hallucinatory imagery. Here’s an example from the long love poem by André Breton, “The Air of the Water”:

But the earth was filled with reflections deeper than those in water

As if metal had finally shaken off its shell

And you lying on the frightening ocean of precious gems

Were turning

Naked

In a huge sun of fireworks

I saw you slowly evolving from the radiolarians

(translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow)

That’s about as trippy as it gets. If you’ve had any visions more detailed or more dynamic than those, I want to know what you were on. Breton’s imagery is not only visionary, it is also sensual in a way that breaks rules.

It’s not just in the realm of surreal imagery that poetry ventures into the unsayable. Poetry also conveys ideas, emotions, and situations that are often considered taboo or verboten. In fact, poetry seems uniquely well-suited to expressing the inexpressible. 

I’m thinking of a book such as Linda McCarriston’s Eva-Mary, where she shines the light of poetry on one some of the most difficult subjects to speak about publicly, physical and sexual abuse within a family, in this case, during her own childhood. Amazingly, McCarriston does this without any loss of the texture of language that we hope to find in poetry. Issuing a summons to the judge who refused her mother’s plea to separate from her violent husband, McCarriston writes:

…When you clamped

to her leg the chain of justice,

you ferried us back down to the law,

the black ice eye, the maw, the mako

that circles the kitchen table nightly.

("To Judge Faolain, Dead Long Enough: A Summons)

These few lines are so filled with the imagery, diction, and music of poetry, that they are almost a textbook of how a writer can shape language to express an idea powerfully in words. McCarriston also speaks about another taboo subject in her poems: class.

So, next time you think that visions, ideas, or experiences are beyond words, check out the poetry shelf of your local library. I think you’ll find that poets have come close to expressing those inexpressible truths. I hope those poems will empower you to speak your own unspeakable truths.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

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, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry