In 2016, when my first book came out, I wrote an essay for the Story Prize blog titled “Why I Am Not a Poet”. It concluded: “Go out of bounds. If your true interests are those of poetry, it doesn’t matter if you’re not a poet.”
That essay is something of a failure, because I could never quite answer the central question of the title: Why am I not a poet? I’m still not sure.
The other night, a friend and I were chatting about poetry and writing. (He’s a writer, a better one than me.) I said I’d been reading more poetry than fiction in recent years, and he said it was the same for him. I was thinking for myself it was a (long) hangover from writing a PhD dissertation about novels, but there’s more to it than that. I still enjoy reading novels now and then — Joel Lane’s The Blue Mask most recently — but I would be surprised if novels become my primary reading material ever again. They’re so inefficient, so obnoxiously demanding of time and attention.
My friend noted his attraction to poetry’s brevity and concision, its ability to convey in a limited number of words whole scenes and possibilities that we prose writers require hundreds and thousands of words for. I agreed (my favorite poetry is that of ancient China, or Japanese haiku, or the poetry of Paul Celan) and added that for me the attractions of the short story as a form are similar to the attractions of poetry. I read short fiction in some ways the way I read poetry, and I write short fiction to be read as one would read poetry.
(Actually, that’s not entirely true. While I aspire to write short fiction of that sort, I think in fact more often than not I write short fiction that is closer to a one-act play than to a poem. A playwright friend once said that of my story “Killing Fairies” in Last Vanishing Man. “This is a story written by a playwright,” he said, and added that he meant it as a compliment, and I took it as such.)
I’ve been revisiting the stories of Carol Emshwiller recently, and am impressed once again with her off-kilter language and the confidence with which she gestures toward entire worlds in single sentences. Stories like “Mrs. Jones”, “Grandma“, and “The Circular Library of Stones” evoke whole networks of relationships between characters and worlds in very few words. Partly, this is the effect of science fiction and fantasy, and is one of the reasons why I expect Emshwiller, who published plenty of stories in literary magazines, especially in the 1970s, felt most at home in the realm of science fiction and fantasy — because those genres thrive on the specific narrative effect Samuel Delany has so well described in his nonfiction (see Starboard Wine for the fullest elaboration), whereby single phrases imply whole imagined structures. His favorite example is Heinlein’s sentence “The door dilated,” which suggests all sorts of social and technological changes from our own world. If we accept Delany’s proposal that this is a unique quality of SF — and I don’t quite, but I do think it is more commonly foregrounded as a reading strategy in SF — then SF may be closer to poetry than other genres are.
Carol Emshwiller rarely wrote stories longer than 6,000 words; many are 3,000-4,000 words. That length has become quite common in the last decade or so, as you will find far more markets for stories under 5,000 words than for over. (As someone who tends to write 6,000-10,000-word stories, this is an ongoing struggle for me.) But since that length now dominates, especially online, it also shows how few writers have Emshwiller’s ability to create richness at that length. So much of the short fiction I read, especially in genre publications that have an upper word limit around 5,000 words, feels trivial, superficial, trifling. Emshwiller’s stories weren’t always masterpieces, but they never felt trivial.
If you want to see how the poetic inclinations of the short story can condense a novel’s worth of material into a small space, check out “Desert Child” in Report to the Men’s Club. This is one of my own favorites of her work, a story that mixes some of the virtues of her lovely western novels Ledoyt and Leaping Man Hill with science fiction. The characters are drawn with sharp, specific qualities. A whole social environment is implied. The language is simple but also often strange. Many details go unexplained, but they aren’t randomly ambiguous, they are evocative, and that’s something of a magic trick. Many writers aim for a kind of implication via ambiguity but just end up writing vaguely. (I’ve done it myself!) Nothing feels vague about “Desert Child”, and yet much is hard to pin down. This fractal effect, or narrative anamorphism, allows Emshwiller to write a story that has enough within it that other writers would have been inclined to write it as a novel. They might have, but their hundreds of pages wouldn’t have achieved more than Emshwiller’s 20.
Some poetry has almost a novelistic effect, especially across various poems. I think of Jos Charles’s astonishing feeld, which creates its own language, a language inspired by Chaucer and Gerard Manly Hopkins and much more. That this is a book of transgender experience and vision is no coincidence: it transes words and forms, thereby freeing them. You can see the effect in this video of Charles reading one of the poems. Each word contains worlds.
Or consider how much Garth Greenwell finds in a single short poem by Frank Bidart. The struggle to explain how the poem means (to use John Ciardi’s useful phrase) indicates some things I think more short story writers ought to consider:
I’ve taught this poem many times—including earlier this week; I still don’t know how to talk about it. Where to begin? With paraphrasable content? It’s true that subject matter was probably one of the things that impressed me when I first encountered it, and it’s paraphrasable enough: a guy is in the center of a crowd of other guys, getting thoroughly fucked. He chases consummation; consummation arrives, or seems to; then the cycle begins again. But that doesn’t tell us much of anything at all about how the poem works; certainly it doesn’t bring us close to the effect of the poem, the power of it.
We can’t get to the powerful effect of great short stories via paraphrase any more than we can get to great poems. Telling you about a Carol Emshwiller story gives you nothing of the actual experience of reading her work word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.
Emshwiller said her favorite writer was Kafka, and Kafka is something of a perfect model for the writer whose best work hovers between short story and poem. Teju Cole identifies this when discussing Louise Glück’s late poetry:
Kafka’s stories, which originate in parable, tend toward meaning. Even when the meaning is a frustrated search for meaning, or the impossibility of closing the gap between a story and its real meaning, a credible meaning is accessible. The prose poems of Faithful and Virtuous Night are not so directly soluble. This, I think, is because in addition to being stories, they are poems. They cannot be pure parables or fables; at best they are parabolic, fabular; and this is not a failure on their part.
At the same time, I am moved by Ernst Pawel’s biography of Kafka, The Nightmare of Reason, in which he speaks of the Talmudists and Kabbalists of Prague. Kafka, he writes, “was their child, last in a long line of disbelieving believers, wild visionaries with split vision who found two answers to every question and four new questions to every answer in seeking to probe the ultimate riddle of God.”
Well, he couldn’t have been the last. Louise Glück is of that lineage, too.
Pawel’s biography of Kafka is the first I read, and while it is not as comprehensive as others, it still remains close to my heart, and I’m not surprised Cole relied on it for this insight, because Pawel had a particularly insightful sense of Kafka’s visionary work.
I don’t think there is a clear separation between stories and poems in being “parabolic, fabular” — indeed, even as Cole wants to keep the separation, I think it describes a lot of Kafka’s work just fine, and in fact work inspired by Kafka that limits itself to being “pure parables or fables” fails to feel truly Kafkaesque. Kafka’s stories remain vital even today because their resonances are always irresolveable, always impossible to sum up.
While the poet’s close attention to diction and syntax has much to offer short story writers, I am at least as interested in how poets think about line breaks and how prose writers think about paragraph breaks.
I will confess that as a reader of poetry, I prefer shorter lines to longer ones. I am decidedly in the camp of Emily Dickinson over Walt Whitman. In prose, though, I tend to like mid-sized paragraphs. (Really long ones get tedious.) I know this is just a matter of comfort for me as a reader, and as much a matter of page design as writing. Something about a 5-10 line paragraph feels manageable and satisfying. I don’t know how this post will display on every screen, but as I write it right now, only a few paragraphs here are shorter than 5 lines, and none of them by much.
Carol Emshwiller favored short paragraphs, but not exclusively. She also used space breaks in thoughtful ways. (Some of this gets lost in the Collected Stories volumes; wonderful as it is to have all her stories collected, some typographical features got lost in the transcription.) Take a look at “The Circular Library of Stones” — the paragraphs are on average longer than those in many Emshwiller stories, but the use of space breaks is quite interesting. I especially love the single sentence set apart: “I told my daughters that if I should be found awkwardly banging stones together on some moonlit night, it would be neither out of senility nor sentimentality, but a scientific test.” There is no narrative reason to give that sentence its own space. But there is a rhythmic reason. Emshwiller was a highly intuitive writer, she let her unconscious mind and her body’s sense of rhythm help shape the forms of her words, sentences, paragraphs. You can’t explain why that sentence needs to be set apart, but you can feel it.
This makes me think of a couple things Suzan-Lori Parks wrote in the “Elements of Style” essay in The America Play and Other Works: “If you’re one who writes sitting down, one before you die try dancing around as you write. It’s the old world way of getting to the deep shit.” And:
Language is a physical act — something that involves yr whole bod
Write with yr whole bod.
Read with yr whole bod.
Wake up.
This is something great playwrights, poets, short story writers, and probably even novelists have in common, that embodied sense of creation. For playwrights, it’s because their words are written to literally be embodied: the words go to actors to perform. For poets, it’s at least partly a consequence of the long history of poetry being something sung, spoken, acted out. Same with stories. As much as I love and cherish the written word, I can’t deny that the history of humanity is not a history of written stories but of stories shared via speech and body. If the writer feels no bodily element to the writing, the writing is likely dead on the page.
Perhaps, then, all I really want to say here is that short stories and poems are both forms of dance.
Let the words dance.
—–
images of Alvin Ailey Dance Company members by Dario Calmese via BKReader
