Genre [Boundaries]

"Down the rabbit hole we go..."
(source) 

I read Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay" in a nonfiction workshop. I found it in a nonfiction anthology. Then I looked up a copy to link for you fine people and found it labeled, very clearly, as a poem.


Carson has been deeply resistant to calling her work what we'd call it.



Poetry–truth in prose
Essays–color, space, silence
Images–billowing swells of music
An opera–enjambment



One of my professors said, "Essays have become the hot new thing now in the poetry world. All the poetry collections are including these prose works."







But why not
shift change modify bleed Write
what you want to write
and fuck the [] of genre, DO NOT
check any boxes
dot any i's cross any t's
pass GO collect two hundred dollars


In fiction, there's the supposed boundary of truth, though I once heard, "If you change the names, it's fiction." Essays are supposed to be truthful. Poetry is supposed to take into account sound and punctuation and, sometimes, visual appearance.


VOICE 1: I can't read "The Glass Essay" as an essay. I just can't do it. It looks like a poem, the dream sequences fit too perfectly, it just isn't an essay.
VOICE 2: So what is an essay?
VOICE 1: An essay is prose. It's sentences, with proper punctuation.
VOICE 2: So then, what's fiction?
VOICE 1: It's that... plus it isn't true.
VOICE 2: So essays have to be truthful?
VOICE 1: Yes. How truthful is up for debate.
VOICE 2: You don't think "The Glass Essay" is truthful?
VOICE 1: I mean, clearly this event happened. Anne Carson was dumped, she had a really hard time dealing with it, she read a lot of Bronte, she visited her mother. Great. But the dream stuff, the fluidity of when she's Bronte and when she's not, it just fits too perfectly.
VOICE 2: So you never construct and modify to make your essays neat?
VOICE 1: I mean, I do, but I don't go and make them look like poetry!
VOICE 2: So it's the look that's the problem?
VOICE 1: It's not just the look! It's the look and the dream stuff and the imagery and the... everything combined. If she'd just done a few of those things, it'd have been fine, but she just writes a true story as a poem and calls it an essay!
VOICE 2: The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

My thoughts are spiralling
down down
down
into an endless loop
of a congealing soup
of sticky genre signs
of sound and look &
of truth and untruth
of

I really don't know what nice conclusion to leave you with, what words of wisdom I can impart about genre. I don't want to tell you to blow up all the boundaries, because I'm an advocate of the "know the rules before you break them" adage, but there are problems with that too.


Go read some Anne Carson, read some Jackie Wang and do something you'd never dream of doing in your writing. I'm going to sit in a corner, rock back and forth, and try to forget the mental trauma of trying to figure out genre.

Read more posts by Rukmini.