Poetry: Truth or Fiction?
“The events in this story are true. They just never happened.” — Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
Genres in prose are slippery and contentious. Genres in poetry are even more so.
You can get an idea of the boundaries of prose genres by browsing the shelves at a bookstore, or Amazon’s books page, with its sidebar categories and subcategories. These are genres as marketing devices, and if they strike you as arbitrary and restrictive at times, I agree. But the commercial genre system does make it easier to browse, when you know the Westerns are all shelved together and not mixed with the noir fiction. (“And what about Western noir?” someone shouts out. Take it up with your store manager.)
But you may have noticed in your bookstore crawl that poetry is a single category. If that. Poetry doesn’t make it up to the Amazon books main page: it’s buried under Literature & Fiction.
So, without an externally imposed genre structure, poets and critics of poetry are free to create their own ideas of genre. Great, right? Have I mentioned that poets are a contentious lot? It’s very hard to have a discussion about poetic genres, because there’s no particular agreement on what constitutes a genre in poetry.
I’m not going to pursue the upsides and downsides to this situation in any detail. Instead I’m going to talk about what is probably the single largest division in prose, and how it plays out in poetry: namely, fiction vs. nonfiction.
I’ve written before about this distinction in terms of an implied contract between the writer and the reader/listener, in which a fiction author states that what is to follow is a “story.” This implies that it is not to be taken as literally true (although many writers would hope that their story embodies some form of “truth” about life or the world). Conversely, a nonfiction author, or one marketed to us as nonfiction, is assumed to have declared that what will follow is literally true to the best of her/his ability to convey it.
In the modern world of prose, the contract is assumed to have been signed and sealed before the book arrives at the store already stamped Fiction or Nonfiction. In poetry, the situation is much less clear-cut. As noted above, marketing structures make no distinction between poems that are fictional and those that are not; they can occur side by side on the same shelf, and indeed within the pages of a single book or magazine.
Reflect on that for a moment. If you’re mostly a prose reader, it may not have occurred to you before that when you pick up a book, you usually know ahead of time whether you expect it to be fiction or not. You have no way to know that with either a book of poetry or a single poem.
But it gets even fuzzier when you think about individual poems and whether you should consider them to be “fiction” or not. Here are a couple of fairly straightforward examples:
Seagulls Before Dawn
This is a very factual poem, an observation I made on my way to work early one morning last October.
Birth of a Super-Villain
This is almost pure fiction: the only “true” piece is that I like blues a lot. However, I don’t listen to the radio much, I’ve never heard an operetta such as the one described here (though I don’t doubt they exist!) and I’ve never considered world domination as a solution to the woes of the music industry. (So far.)
If you found these two poems in a book, would you know which one was fiction? OK, the subject matter of the second one is absurd enough that you’d probably guess it wasn’t literally true.
Do these categories even apply to poetry? As a poet, it’s sometimes difficult for me to know how non-poets approach reading poetry. Because poetry often uses highly symbolic or figurative language, it’s easy to assume that poems, if they are “true,” are “true” in some metaphorical sense rather than any literal sense.
But also– and this may be more the case within the poetry community than outside it– there’s a strong assumption about modern poetry, namely, that it reflects personal experience. (Note that I don’t support this assumption, or rather, the dogma it has spawned; I’ve posted about this earlier.) What exactly that means, is open to debate.
At a superficial level, it means poetry is assumed to be autobiographical whether written in first person or not. The narrowest interpretation of the personal-experience doctrine would not allow poetry to ever be anything we might call “fictional.” A reader operating under this assumption may feel that “Birth of a Super-Villain” violates the contract, in that it’s clearly not autobiographical. A broader interpretation would accept the poem as a valid reflection of my musical tastes and impatience with much popular fare, allowing that the bit about world domination is whimsical.
Clearly, the narrow definition of “personal” rules out huge amounts of existing poetry, both modern and older. To be honest, I’ve met no-one who really hews to this definition and can’t be argued out of it. But the danger for a poet is this: In writing a fictional poem, one has to be aware that readers may assume it is meant to be non-fictional, in the absence of strong and immediate evidence to the contrary.
If I wrote a persona poem from the point of view of an engine block, a Martian, or a fifteenth-century Chinese peasant, most readers would immediately grasp that this poem is “fictional,” is a “story.” It gets a little more difficult if I write from a contemporary view, one whose gender is either unspecified or matches mine. For instance, “Burnt Toast” could easily be taken as a narrative of neglect from my own childhood. It is no such thing.
Writing from the point of view of a torture victim or crime or disaster survivor can be a powerful way to bring forth the experience of those who are unable to voice it themselves. Yet it carries the same risk: readers may assume what’s being related is autobiographical, and feel cheated when it turns out not to be the case.
There are safe ways to do it. A poem can be accompanied by a note explaining the circumstances of the poem’s composition; a themed collection can have a brief intro. Some poets oppose the use of such supporting material on the grounds that a poem should stand on its own; I agree in general, but in this case, I think the risk of inadvertently violating the reader-contract outweighs the esthetic consideration.
I’ve often looked at my own poetry and scratched my head about categorizing it. There are comedies and romances and tragedies in the mix, some of it fiction, some of it non-fiction. As you mentioned, some of them can clearly be defined as fiction by any reader but others cannot. I don’t know if that makes it a sign of being “good” writing, since we all want the writing to be believable, or if it is simply a sign that people assume all poetry is based in the real world, on the real experiences of the author.
Interesting subject, for sure!
I feel like an entire book could be written on this subject, and you’ve sparked a good conversation among fellow writers on my end. I don’t know why, but for me, poetry has always been about the poet’s emotion first and how that connects with me. Ever since reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and understanding that the point of the writing sometimes transcends its literal authenticity of the words. I have that personal agreement with poetry and the poets, though, and I know that many readers probably want something more–some kind of disclosure like prose authors provide (and should, in my opinion). Poets, if compelled to disclose such details, can do so in an afterword note to the reader.
Thanks for writing such a thoughtful piece.