Craig Morgan Teicher | September 2020

Craig Morgan Teicher

In MFA programs, we go to great lengths to delineate a clear split between the genres: we choose a track—fiction, poetry, nonfiction—and then cease to associate with writers in the other tracks, and shun the books on their reading lists. Well, maybe it’s not quite that dramatic, but I can’t tell you how many of my fiction writing friends profess never to read—even never to have read—poetry, claiming not to understand or relate to it, as if it’s some weird foreign thing with no connection to the kind of writing they practice. It is a sad state of affairs, and one that much writing education does little to meaningfully address and much to exacerbate.

Literary writers used to be writers—people who wrote writing—not novelists or poets or memoirists. Thomas Hardy wrote some of the major novels of his age, became disgusted with the public reception to his novels, and devoted his last three decades to writing some of the most miserable—and sometimes sublime—poetry the world has ever known. D.H. Lawrence wrote every kind of imaginable book, from poetry collections to novels to journalism and travel literature. Joyce and Hemingway both wrote poems. William Carlos Williams has half a shelf’s worth of fiction, memoir, and criticism to his name. The poet Lucille Clifton wrote children’s picture books. Dennis Johnson was a legendary poet—dig up The Incognito Lounge—before he turned his attention to fiction.

I say this not to send you rushing home to try on another genre, but to point out that we are missing something our forebears weren’t by not attending to the forms of writing in which we are not the most comfortable. The poet’s musical and associative tools are equally available—and essential—to the novelist, and the capacity to build narrative tension and conflict are equally useful to the poet. And what about the nonfiction writer’s supposed fidelity to the truth? Don’t we sometimes feel tempted to hold the poet to a similar standard? And the process for writing all three genres is, at base, the same: tiny steps, putting one word in front of the other.

The lines dividing the genres are more porous than we are often willing to admit, and the tools of one are also the tools of the others. We can get more out of a novel if we read it—or write it—the way we would a poem, sometimes, and can find things in a poem that we otherwise might not when we go looking for narrative and conflict.

But, let’s first think about what prose is and what poetry is, what the supposed differences are, and how we tell them apart. The poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard, my graduate school mentor and friend, has a wonderfully useful and accurate maxim for describing the difference between poetry and prose: “verse reverses, prose proceeds.”

This concise and musical phrase summarizes what I believe to be one of the central truths about the nature of these two forms of writing: though made of the same basic stuff—letters, words, punctuation—once they take their shapes, they are actually different substances, like water and oil (though they do mix), or, perhaps, more like water and wood. They are composed of the same elements, but those elements are deployed so differently that the results can seem like distant cousins at best.

But what are they? First, a simple definition of “prose”: it’s the word on the street; the writing people talk in; the words on signs; and the stuff, beside images, that the Internet is made of. If prose hit you over the head, you’d know it. In itself, it’s not scary (though lots of it piled up, say in a big, fat book, might be). Reading prose, you might not even realize you’re reading it.

Poetry, on the other hand, is always in the midst of defining itself, always justifying its existence, always trying to convince you it’s there, not a ghost, and that you believe in it. Poetry isn’t the lyrics to the song, but the words and music taken together. It’s not the words on signs, but it’s why signs work, because of icons, because you know what the sign means without quite understanding it. You read poetry because you read poetry; it never lets you forget, because you’re meant to be aware, the whole time, that you are reading a text about awareness—of words, sentences, lines, images, and the shifting meanings encoded in each.

What do we do when our eyes reach the end of a poem? When we get to the final line, to the stunning and surprising last word, the one that sends a lightning bolt back up through the body of the poem, changing the meaning, however subtly, of every word that’s come before? We reread, of course. We go back up to the top and start climbing back down, gingerly or with wild abandon. Though, on this second descent, the poem is now relit by its conclusion; it means something new. Every word is redefined in this altered light. Verse reverses, meaning it points backward, ever remaking itself from end to beginning and then from beginning again to end.

Prose, meanwhile, proceeds—it points forward, its compass needle ever trained on what happens next: the coming scene, the next event, the next paragraph, the sentence after this one. This is why prose has paragraphs, formless blocks of sentences in which it’s irrelevant where the line breaks; we’re typically meant to get on with it. Prose paragraphs are designed to draw our eye onward and downward, in a procession toward the end, that momentous (or precious, curious, cautious, mysterious, obvious) final sentence that lets us out of the piece of writing and back into the boring old world.

Of course, we often reread prose, but not usually because this sentence has changed the sense of the ones that came before, but because it’s delicious, and we want to eat again exactly what we just ate. In a poem, one never steps into the same sentence twice. In prose—fiction, memoir, even journalism—one can, but there are so many paragraphs still to read that one might as well keep walking.

(Before I go much further, let me pause again to make the usual disclaimer: there are exceptions to all of the above, and often great writing—in poetry or prose—is great specifically because it breaks these rules. However, without stating the rules, and if writers didn’t know them and to some extent agree on their virtue, they wouldn’t be there to break. Prose is prose, until it’s poetry, and vice versa.)

There has always, of course, been verse that proceeds—think of The Odyssey—and prose that reverses—Aesop and Grimm, for example. But lately, prose that reverses has been flowing into the mainstream of literary writing, as writers are searching for ways to counter the endless scroll of the Internet, where prose goes to live forever as it dies, archived even as it’s forgotten in the wake of the next post and the post after that. Fiction and nonfiction writers are desperate for poetry’s staying power, for its demand that it be reborn as soon as it’s been read.

To see verse reversing, look at this famous poem by Emily Dickinson, by no means always an easy poet to understand, and a master of reversals:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell. They’d banish us—you know!
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell your name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!

We can almost ignore Dickinson’s eccentricities—her weird capitalization, and the dashes, which are punctuation marks of her own invention. They work as something between a superpowered comma and a line break, a pause intended not for verbal purposes, but to allow the mind a moment to slow down and consider the phrase at hand. Actually, Dickinson’s signature dash is her most obvious tool of reversal, like a stone in a river around which the water (which in this case is our attention) eddies.

But, for us, the important reversal happens at the end. We read down the page, making sense of the poem—one “Nobody” finds another, and they become friends, “a pair,” which the exclamation mark at the end of the third lines indicates is a good thing. We might begin to surmise that a Nobody is a kind of nonconformist, an individual. The fact that “They”—the Somebodies—would “banish us” reinforces this old idea: those who are different are a threat.

But something surprising happens in the second stanza—the poem becomes fully comic, and the effect is really clinched with the last word, “Bog.” The Somebodies are like frogs, croaking to one another, to a kind of anonymous crowd of themselves, having banished all the Nobodies. Bogs aren’t places people like, but frogs love them. That last word is powerful. Once we read it, we need to read the whole poem again to figure out who’s in the bog and who’s out. So, back up to the top go our eyes, and suddenly an important and distinguishing virtue is bestowed upon “Nobody”—absence from the bog, a kind of cleanness, which may be moral, spiritual, emotional. Whereas the Somebodies are dirty, mucky, thick with a kind of sludge that makes them all alike. The last word in the poem—“Bog”—has altered the meaning of the first words—the phrase

“I’m Nobody,” is cleaned, purified, elevated.

Now, onto prose. I’m not talking about the quality, but about the functionality of prose, what it’s meant to do and what a particular example actually does. Here is some prose proceeding from In the Distance, the entrancing debut novel by Hernan Diaz:

The river, a brown line of slow, muddy waters, was a mere two days away. Although the vegetation on the riverbank showed the sternness the desert demanded of all living beings Håkan [the novel’s protagonist] found it refreshingly green—and the burro even discovered some bunchgrass to bring back to [Håkan’s sick horse] Pingo. Hidden in the low, entangled treetops, the only haven for miles around, several bird nests brimmed with eggs, most of them a pale orange marbled with ochre streaks. Håkan ate a few and wrapped about two dozen more of different sizes and colors in a piece of cloth.

While this is undeniably lovely writing, the many virtues of which—complex, lilting sentences; deliberate and musical word choices (“marbled with ochre streaks”); a slightly arch tone—we are plainly invited to admire, the goal of the passage is to move the story along. We are meant to understand what is happening—Håkan goes through the desert to a river with his donkey, finds some food for himself and his sick horse, and prepares to head back to his camp—and leave these sentences behind. The prose is proceeding here, moving our eye along and down the page. When we get to the end of this passage, we are mostly meant to be curious about what will happen next, when Håkan gets back to camp.

But now let’s take a look at an example of poetry behaving in a way it isn’t supposed to, like prose. Or perhaps it’s prose behaving like poetry. The qualities of poetry and prose begin to blend together in this delightful piece by Russell Edson, who published almost nothing but prose poems throughout his career, which spanned the 1960s though the first decade of the new millennium:

LARGE THING

A large thing comes in.
Go out, Large Thing, says someone.
The Large Thing goes out, and comes in again.
Go out, Large Thing, and stay out, says someone.
The Large Thing goes out, and stays out.
Then that same someone who has been ordering the Large
Thing out
begins to be lonely, and says, come in, Large Thing.
But when the Large Thing is in, that same someone decides it
would be
better if the Large Thing would go out.
Go out, Large Thing, says this same someone.
The Large Thing goes out.
Oh, why did I say that? says the someone, who begins to be
lonely again.
But meanwhile the Large Thing has come back in anyway.
Good, I was just about to call you back, says the same someone
to the Large Thing.

I love this little piece of writing, not least because I find the Large Thing adorable and pitiable, and because I rather love to hate the fickle Someone, certainly a descendant of Dickinson’s Somebodies. From a pedagogical standpoint, I love how this piece works as a kind of short story in miniature, utilizing the structural tools of rising and falling action, and a clearly delineated conflict, to create palatable tension. Of course, it is also a poem, using archetypal characters and imagery, as well as wordplay to accomplish its little task.

In the first two lines—or are they paragraphs?—we have the inciting action (“A large thing comes in“) and the introduction of the central conflict (“Go out, Large Thing, says someone“). We are also introduced to our two main characters and learn immediately about their natures: the Large Thing is, we suspect, friendly, if imposing, and Someone is grouchy and contrary. All of these aspects of the piece are ones we tend to associate with fiction, and were this piece not to have appeared in a book with the word “poems“ on the cover, I would be perfectly comfortable saying we were wading into a tiny little story. But these characters are also archetypes, icons, and their personalities are encoded in their names. That is a poetic quality, the stuff the Ancient Mariner is made of.

So then what happens? A conflict plays out until meaning is communicated. The large thing comes back in because it is in his nature, his character, to do so. This someone orders him out because that is his nature, though, like all good characters, he is ambivalent, wants two things at once: he “begins to be lonely,” even though he seems to prize his privacy. Though perhaps what he prizes most of all is his ability to exert control over his companion. When I teach this piece, I always ask my students who they like more, and how they really feel about Someone. He strikes me as the kind of person who would kick his dog and then apologize and give him a treat, and then kick him again later. I find him somewhat despicable. And the Large Thing is a glutton for punishment, but also a deeply empathic friend, someone who understands Someone better than Someone understands himself.

At this point I realize that I am judging these characters as characters, that I’ve become aware of the fact that I am not reading a poem, but something else, something that plays on my sympathies, something that makes me view a world outside of myself, as I do in much fiction, not one into which I project my consciousness, as I would in many poems.

The climax of this little story occurs when Someone “begins to be lonely again,” which is both an archetypal statement of emotion—the word lonely is meant to stand in here for a wide swath of sad and isolated personal feelings—and the apex of the story’s conflict, the moment in which Someone comes to understand his own ambivalence, the moment of wisdom and insight for the reader. That realization is why, in the last line or paragraph, Someone says, “I was just about to call you back.” This is the ironic dénouement, the moment in which we realize that, despite Someone’s newfound insight, he is likely to repeat the pattern that the story illustrates.

This piece is an example of a deeply organic blending of the tools of poetry and prose, forward narrative motion mixed with iconographic hitching back. The piece wouldn’t work without the confluence of both. But things get really exciting when the tools of poetry and prose are mixed consciously in nonfiction, where we traditionally expect straightforward truth telling, neither narrative manipulation nor poetic archetypes.

To get into prose that reverses, let’s begin with an aphorism. Aphorism is one of the oldest forms of reversing prose, a tiny nugget of essay, a pocket-sized piece of wisdom concentrate. Like a haiku, it is meant to make your mind skip a beat, to trip up your thinking a little so that you make a leap and arrive at a conclusion you couldn’t have gotten to otherwise. Aphorism does this both through argument and through lyrical language, meaning it works by logic, but also, like a joke, by messing with the associations you have around words. This one happens to be written by one of the great exemplars of the current trend toward reversing prose, Sarah Manguso. It comes from her book, 300 Arguments:

You aren’t the same person after a good night’s sleep as you are after a sleepless night. But which person is you?

If we paraphrase, we begin to miss the point—good writing can’t be said any other way—but let’s do so for the sake of analysis. One wakes up in a good mood after sleeping well, and a bad one after hardly sleeping. But our moods, which, as Emerson says, “do not believe in each other,” define our actions, how we treat other people, how we treat ourselves. So, Manguso posits, we are different people depending on the mood in which we wake up. But, she asks, which of those people—the friendly one or the grouch—is our true self?

The point here is not to offer an answer but to leave us thinking about the question. And for a question to stick in our heads, like a song, it needs not only to be a worthy one, it also needs to have something sticky about how it’s said, something that our mind can’t let go of. That’s where lyrical language comes in. Notice that the aphorism begins and ends with the same word: “you.”

That repetition—which, it turns out, as I’ll explain in a moment, isn’t a repetition at all—is what makes the reversal happen in this little piece. The “you” at the top is a known quantity, the obvious and biographical person referred to when anyone verbally points to yourself. But the one at the end is a big metaphysical unknown, perhaps an unknowable: who is “you?” Which of the two people does sleep leave you with? The second “you” sends a bolt back up through the piece, changing the meaning of the first “you,” destabilizing it, making it, too, into an unknown. Just like in a poem, the ending alters the beginning, so when you reread, which aphorism all but demands that you do, you’re stepping into a new piece of prose.

But, to be fair, aphorisms are close cousins to poems—they’re composed of distilled, pressurized language in which every word is made to matter. Prose is built of bigger chunks: phases not words; sentences not lines; paragraphs not stanzas; and not images but the things to which they refer. A typical prose writer wants you thinking of the thing first, whereas a poet wants to draw your attention to the word for the thing.

Prose that reverses is prose that rummages around in poetry’s toolbox and grabs out some of its tools. I’m talking about lyric essay, but I’m going to set that term aside for now, because I want to get into the mechanics of it, what happens when nonfiction utilizes some of the machinery of poetry. To see how it works on a somewhat larger canvas, let’s look at Jenny Boully’s “On the Voyager Golden Records” from her essay collection Betwixt and Between. Boully is one of the most avid proponents of the “new” essay, and this one is a perfect example of prose that subtly employs the techniques of poetry in order to not only convince us of the truth of its argument, but to make us empathize with it, to make us feel like it is our argument too. (Because that’s one of poetry’s goals, right? To transport to subjective, to make the reader feel, if only for a moment, like the writer.)

Ostensibly, this is an essay about the golden records sent up with the Voyager probes in1977, encoded with “a ‘Hello from the children of planet Earth.’ …ocean waves, thunder, wind, a heartbeat, Glenn Gould playing Bach…a nursing infant, snowflakes, a seashell, a musical score, children, a family, a sunset” and more, with the intent, writes Boully, “to capture the world as it existed at a particular moment. They speak to who we were as a society and what we valued.”

In fact, the essay’s real object is far more personal: to enact Boully’s clawing after the time, which is constantly slipping through her fingers, which it does by importing many of the poet’s tools into nonfiction.

The essay begins a bit like a piece of memoir: “When I was a child, seeing future dates always made death and old age seem impossible—the future was a thing that was so far away it could never arrive.” Boully locates us in her very early childhood, which, we’ll learn, took place in the late 1970s. But Boully veers away from this confessional stance almost immediately, presenting the fruits of research in the second paragraph, in which she tells us how the Voyager probes launched in 1977, carrying their golden records, and how their batteries are about to run out, meaning they “will be unable to send back information beyond 2025, at best 2030.” The essay proceeds very much as a poem might, zigzagging between sharing this kind of info and engaging in metaphysical speculation (“the future was indeed a long time coming”).

That word, future, is actually one of the big clues to the poetic nature of this essay, like Dickinson’s “Bog.” In the six-page piece, the word “future,” or a variant thereof, appears eight times. This is a poet’s gesture, like that game where you repeat a word out loud until it’s meaningless. Only here, it’s repeated so that its meaning changes a bit each time. The first mention of it, in that opening paragraph, denotes a commonly shared notion of the future, as the time ahead of now. After seven more repetitions, it’s morphed into a word of Boully’s own. Here’s how the essay ends:

Perhaps I like to think that if the records are found and deciphered, then the world of 1977 will be resurrected, that I will find myself again encapsulated in a childhood dream, my future still all before me.

This is a lyric ending, not an argumentative one, more like the singing last line of a poem than an essay’s clincher. It’s an impossible wish, to live, as an adult “encapsulated in a childhood dream.” There’s grief here, keening for an irrevocably lost “future still all before me.” And so, Boully’s essay, so packed with information, pokes holes in the borders between the realms of scholarship, memoir, and poetry. It does this not by recalling memories of the past (though there are one or two), but by using the poet’s tactic of tone, the poet’s sense of subjectivity—“I will find myself again”—to make us, the readers, share the writer’s wish. Who doesn’t, sometimes at least, want to return to that time of pure potential, when we lacked the kind of knowledge and context this essay supplies, but which it also shrugs off, as Boully frames the Voyager records as naive wishes, like hers, as instances and instruments of poetry.

Perhaps the essay sacrifices some journalistic objectivity in exchange for subjectivity, a lyric “I” with an almost instant power to draw the reader’s empathy. Boully’s expertise is one most people share: it’s her capacity to know herself, to recognize who she is by the words she chooses. Plenty of other writers are enlivening prose in this way: Hilton Als makes criticism personal; Eula Biss uses collage and juxtaposition to shape arguments; Justin Torres and Shelia Heti are blurring the lines between memoir and fiction.

I crave nonfiction like this, poetic essay, lyric memoir. It’s not poetry: it proceeds too much for that, pushes us too fast and too far through the paragraphs to its conclusion. But neither is it the prose that instruction manuals, newspapers, or even memoirs are made of. Boully and the other writers I mentioned are ever hitching back, looking over their verbal shoulders, trying to remember the future with which the essay began, not the less luminous one that has become the present.

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Craig Morgan Teicher the author of several books, including the most recent book of poems, Welcome to Sonnetville; The Trembling Answers, which won the 2018 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and We Begin In Gladness: How Poets Progress, a collection of essays. He is the Digital Director of The Paris Review.