Nick Ripatrazone: Poetry or Prose?
Poetry or prose? How many writers actually think exclusively in one mode or genre? John Updike published both poetry and fiction but he is certainly better known for the latter. Sylvia Plath excelled in multiple genres and forms. Scan the contributor lists in contemporary literary magazines and you will notice a healthy crossover of genres. But should every writer align with one particular genre and merely dabble in a second?
That last question was meant to be ridiculous: genres are not spouses. Monogamy has no place here: the writer should–and must–be flexible to genre. Genre, mode, form: these considerations are contextual and situational. Notice the continuing evolution of creative non-fiction: writers such as Brian Doyle produce malleable texts, works that seem appropriate to two, three genres at once. What exactly is the difference between a prose poem and flash fiction? Certainly Charles Baudelaire and Bruce Holland Rogers have created works of relatively similar length and structure but the lyrical import of those texts are often markedly different.
Switch the genres of certain works and consider the potential outcomes. Could Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back” exist as a poem? “A Good Man is Hard to Find” would likely fail, though “Revelation” would make great narrative verse. Much of Frank O’Hara’s canon could become prose, though Gerard Manley Hopkins’s work appears so uniquely and perfectly poetic that any translation to prose would create a form of literary entropy. Gary Fincke, one of my teachers at Susquehanna University, publishes equally in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry: though his voice remains consistent across genres, the approach of the individual work is always modulated to the particular form. W. B. Yeats is a classic poet, yet he also wrote short fiction and, it appears, sketched his poems in prose.
Who is to blame for these titles? Perhaps blame is not the best word. Who is responsible for the delineation of literature by form and intention? The table of contents of most literary magazines includes separate sections for genres; does this mean that a potential reader will settle into the fiction section of the magazine and ignore the poetry? Does it hurt budding poets to read plot-heavy fiction? Bookstores are partitioned by genre for practical reasons, but why should writers identify a work in progress with a particular genre? For these reasons the titles of “poet” and “novelist” appear problematic: if a novelist writes a poem, is she no longer a novelist?
I give my creative writing students excerpts from Mary Oliver, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and William Faulkner. I excise the line breaks from the poets’ work and position their selections next to a lengthy sentence from Faulkner’s novella, “The Bear.” Each semester students think Oliver and Ferlinghetti have created prose while they remain adamant that Faulkner’s syntax is poetic in its layering and recursivity. The lesson appears to be a pedagogical success–I try to sell my students on the problem of arbitrary line breaks–but the exercise has an unfortunate effect on my own writing. For the next few days–today included–I will question my chosen mode of writing. This essay included. Looking back, I probably should have made this a poem.
Read Nick Ripatrazone’s poems “The Mailman” and “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” in The Los Angeles Review, Issue 6.