by Lee Upton

from Southwest Review, Volume 94, Number 3

The poet who turns to screenwriting. The novelist who writes poetry. The playwright who composes short stories. The critic who begins plotting a novel. Admit it. Doesn't a certain suspicion attach to each? As if to cross over from the primary genre into another genre is like cheating on one's true love. Or bigamy. Or, as if the writer, like the stuffy creep wearing a smoking jacket in a detective novel, lures the innocent maiden to his bed. The second genre is the illicit liaison. Something on the side.

Or if it's not viewed as cheating, to write in more than one genre (poetry, fiction, drama, or their variants) can be seen as grubbing about. You're a perpetual neophyte in the second genre, the scruffy forty-year-old who still sleeps on his Spider Man sheets in his mother's house. Not only announcing yourself as a start-up, but enduring condescension from long-practiced writers of the invaded genre. Because any art is hard. And until you've soaked in the genre and written far beyond your first endorphin-inspired juvenilia and beached on the rocks of frustration, who do you think you are? And won't you, upon meeting inevitable frustration in the new genre, trudge, still in your Spider Man pajamas, on to yet another genre, at best attaining only a pinch worth of competence?

What if the writer becomes the jack-of-all-trades and the master-of-none? How can any writer answer such a legitimate question? There's always recourse to Walt Whitman, who composed at least one line that could be a stock answer for those who can't resist crossing genres: "I am large, I contain multitudes." Besides which, he had the good sense to write his own reviews.

 

Even when writers have made discoveries by crossing the borders of the conventionally agreed-upon major writing genres, their reputation tends to house them most fully within one genre. Certainly Shakespeare is linked to his plays more often than to his sonnets. Thomas Hardy divided his life between fiction and poetry, returning fully to poetry in his later career, although his reputation as a poet lags, unfortunately, behind that as a novelist. The major modernists tended to write as a matter of course in multiple major genres—but are most often remembered for work in a single genre. Think of Eliot's criticism and drama; Pound's scholarship; Lawrence's polemics, poetry, and fiction (not to mention his visual art). Hilda Doolittle: a novelist as well as a poet. William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes were prolific in a dizzying number of genres. Later: Kingsley Amis, both a poet and a fiction writer. Stevie Smith, too. Consider that Doris Lessing has conducted sustained forays even into the radically estranging and critically under-appreciated subgenre of speculative fiction and is a poet, memoirist, and more. Roberto Bolaño: a poet as well as a fiction writer. Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje: poets and fiction writers. Two of our most prolific contemporary novelists (both of whom nimbly jump subgenres in fiction) are poets—John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates, although one seldom hears their poetry discussed at any length. The news that stays news with both writers remains news about their fiction.

Is it that readers want an identity that is singular for artists? Is it a matter of branding (that repulsive term)? Writing creates a sense of intimacy—it's an illusion of course, but it's powerful. We want to recognize the author, somehow, through genre. W. H. Auden addressed the issue in The Dyer's Hand: "In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them."

Failure and—or—indifference: both are possibilities for the writer working across genres. Because there are limits, aren't there? A hard question follows writers: how much originality is available, and should we worry about its scarcity if we traffic among genres? Ars longa, vita brevis. Think of the New Zealand fiction writer Janet Frame: "Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination, learning the unique functioning of Mirror City, its skies and space, its own planetary system." Even the sense of there being an originary source that may be depleted may haunt some writers. Cynthia Ozick addresses the problem: "Flaubert's comment, 'Live like a bourgeois so that you may think like a demigod,' held better when there was still a distinction between bohemianism and the bourgeois, but it still has a certain validity. It's really a question of originality. Are you thrifty with your originality, saving it for art, or do you dispose of it in daily life?" If we are to be "thrifty with... originality" then presumably spreading it across genres may also weaken it. Frame suggests something of that sort when she writes about being reluctant to name the titles of her books for a young man: "my almost primitive shyness about naming prevented me from telling him." She cites her "reluctance to reduce or drain into speech the power supply of the named."

Because, once again, art is long and life is short. And confidence, frequently, shaky. The sensation of working with a new genre: it's like being in a plane whose engine we're uncertain about. Which was the trouble with the small plane I was on recently. From my window I could view a grill hole near the wing that looked as dusty and cob-webbed as a long-neglected chicken coop. The engine never resolved into a steady hum but seemed to be gasping and making a sincere effort. Mechanical things should not appear to be trying. Planes should not engage in matters of free will. Similarly, the choice of genre probably shouldn't seem entirely the product of free will; too much has to be absorbed for us to make the more trying efforts that success, even limited success, requires.

 

Again: The art so long, the life so short for moving across genres. And the examples so dispiriting. Think of Henry James and his play Guy Domville in 1895. Visualize him standing onstage to take his author's bow and enduring shrieks of contempt from the gallery. Philip Hensher did, and in The Guardian went on to call a revival of James Joyce's play Exiles "like most plays written by novelists,... a notoriously plonking effort," noting in turn the failures of Graham Greene, William Golding, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch to write successful dramas. On the other hand, candidates for playwrights attempting novels may fail just as often. Hensher includes Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard as exemplars.

Or we might consider Picasso trying to be a poet, for which Gertrude Stein derided him, no doubt with territorial pique and that resounding self-certainty of hers (not that Picasso didn't have his own resounding self-certainty). Marianne Moore wrote literary criticism but, as Randall Jarrell (himself a poet, critic, and novelist) pointed out, it was the sort of thing made more of quotations than of commentary. She attempted without success to write a novel. Jean Garrigue also tried and failed to write a full-length novel—about an oculist. Sylvia Plath didn't fail in taking on a novel as well as poetry; she only thought she had, denigrating The Bell Jar nearly every chance she got. Her pot-boiler, she called it, preempting criticism. Hemingway wrote poems, but they're bitter pills, meant to be swallowed by rivals—the most memorable aimed at Dorothy Parker whose suicide attempts he judged unworthy of comparison to the brutal suffering he had witnessed.

 

Where is the letter B?

What a strange business it is, crossing over to another genre—and not likely to be understood well. Any genre has enough challenge for infinite lifetimes, so why engage in more than one? To engage in a genre seriously means that investments in reading and listening and practicing must accrue until, if we're fortunate and passionately disciplined (or disciplined by passion), a template is established, an internal organizing system, largely beyond awareness, by which we capture sensations and intuitions in language. A very simple example: many of us, particularly those of us who have had bad secretarial jobs, are quick typists. But if asked to draw the keypad we would be at an utter loss. Where is the letter B? The template for writing within a genre is like that—a way of implicitly organizing a response. Ultimately, a template exists not only to allow us to deploy convention but to withstand convention.

So much, however, depends on the territory one decides to experiment upon. An old argument exists that there is no sense in naming genres, given the permeability of language and given that genres are dependent on readers' expectations and thus are in flux. Admittedly, some genres are more multiply implicated in other genres. Especially if you happen to be a novelist, you are already often a multi-genre worker; for if the novel is still a "loose baggy monster," as Henry James complained of the nineteenth century novel, the baggy pants contain so many sewn together fragments from other language fields that to write a novel is to engage in practices that are anything but genre-tight. The novel stuffs into its pockets all it can: letters, poetry, ledgers, emoticons.

In some cases a writer may be working in his or her primary genre, but the writer recognizes the work as spanning yet another genre. Muriel Spark always considered herself a poet and her novels a species of poetry. Elizabeth Bishop's remarkable letters were posthumously gathered in a volume titled One Art, as if the genres of poetry and letter writing are not separable. Marianne Moore was never entirely comfortable calling what she made poems, and it is doubtful that she was the only writer questioning how to categorize aesthetic efforts. Perhaps many of us bear a sensibility akin to that of the carpenter in V. S. Naipaul's story, who is happiest when making, and failing to finish, what he called (and what Naipaul's story is called) "The Thing Without a Name." Yet all writing depends on generating conventions that are dominant in some genres more than in others and on satisfying or subverting or reorienting readers' expectations. Genres make different demands on writers—which is one of the reasons why one genre may be so supremely attractive to some writers and so off-putting to others.

 

Signature Beers Can't Sign Their Own Names

Why consider genres at all? Categories, after all, are bundled conventions that may shift or expand or retract. And something always escapes categorization. Yet outliers may exert magnetic force and grow up to inspire genres of their own. For my part, I've found that arguments against registering distinctions among writing genres are likely to come from people who can specify the precise attributes of a bewildering number of signature beers. Why resist cataloguing the features of genres? Generally what goes unacknowledged by those who resist acknowledging the power of major genres is how resistant the imagination can be to manipulation, how conventions can more readily be parodied than they can be sincerely deployed and sustained in a piece of writing, how choosing to write in a genre presents a series of affronts to technique, conviction, and morale—and a stand-in-the-wind repudiation of the threat of meaninglessness. Or that for some writers to write is like being occupied by a viral agent. Something in a genre, including a newly emergent genre or sub genre, is contagious; we are inhabited. Writing in any genre is a matter of exposure to that genre and the ability to integrate that genre's conventions—especially if one wishes to claim distinctiveness in the genre, even through subversion. Genres, after all, are embedded with remarkably complex techniques primed by assumptions that have developed over historical periods. As such, genres bear within them accumulated tensions that school their practitioners and that create both predictable and unpredictable effects, given different contexts and different audiences. The pleasure of breaking style or breaking out of genre or blending or warping generic conventions lies in the realization of the events that transpire through the act of summoning the genre's leading features—as an opportunity. Genres and subgenres create conditions for writing, and we find ourselves responding to them and, sometimes, experiencing a mysterious affinity.

That is, immersion in a genre is more like love than we may be ready to admit.

 

Hoping Cynthia Ozick is Wrong

My sense of the boundaries of genres comes from my experience of the sheer difficulty of moving between major genres, the way genres seem to come with a rind or a negative charge, repulsing a advances. Poets in particular may face a heated challenge when writing prose, particularly fiction. The transition means not only reversing many habits and setting up a new relationship with both time and space on the page, as it would for fiction writers turning to poetry, but acknowledging that poetry tends to be the province of a jealous muse. Poetry still has a reputation as a capricious art—an art over which there is little control. That is, in its many incarnations, not only through indebtedness to the Romantics, poetry tends to rely on compression and thus on intense concentration on both the reader and the writer's part. In The Poem's Heartbeat Alfred Corn advises writers to recognize if they are poets or prose writers by asking: "’Am I interested in conveying a truth that is broad and seamless as a mural tapestry or am I interested in conveying a vision that is really a series of intuitive and technical lightning flashes?' If the latter description of the writer's task is the one that most attracts you, then poetry is the better fit."

A truth? Or a vision? Or both? Or could the terms be reversed? The prose writer is more interested in the vision, the poet in the truth? What seems to hold up best in Corn's inspired analogy, however, is the way the creation is apprehended. The broad versus the flashing. We associate poetry with a certain receptiveness, a catch-as-catch-can quality, the work of waiting for the right alignment when the boat of language (or skiff or cruise ship or tanker) beats up against imaginative experience. We are able to illuminate for a brief moment some unknown landscape, to come closer to both actuality and the irreal. To see beneath language and, possibly, to ignite some element of our instinctive nature or a new alignment of conceptions that lurks off our usual map of comprehension.

For many poets, art whittles language to a near gnomic perversity. Prose, of course, may duplicate this strategy but more usually scenic conventions apply—a surface is skated over, words aren't often caught and examined in the same way, with the same obsessive quality as in much poetry. We glide across the frozen lake of prose and under the ice see other curiosities. In other words, fiction writers tend to think in terms of scenes, whereas poets more often compose in terms of individual words or phrases.

As such, the poem can "go off" quickly. It's like playing fast and loose with a loaded gun. "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—" to quote Emily Dickinson. So had her art—that loaded gun. For a poet, working in another genre can seem like leaving the gun out on the counter, unattended.

Cynthia Ozick goes so far as to suggest that poets who call themselves fiction writers aren't really fiction writers—and that the gift of poetry, for poets, cannot translate into another genre, although she argues that serious writers always have done field work in poetry: "Writers who are artists either write poetry or have written poetry, but I don't think poets can be fiction writers. The novels written by poets are often not true novels; they are long, long poems."

I hope Ozick is wrong. I can't be alone in this, can I? Writing fiction seriously, regularly, with increasing ambition, however, creates two particular problems for poets. Movement, first. Which is ironic, given that, as we're told repeatedly in virtually any context where the term appears, verse itself means "to turn"—so that the basis of the art is movement, the mind cavorting in a way that allows us to double-back upon language. And yet, if you're a poet with my tendencies, try getting a fictional character to dislodge herself from a table and step over to a window. There are so many ways to do it—and each seems like a revelation. You can even refuse (often the best choice) to show the character in transit. Just write, "In Cincinnati" and go on from there. But here's the trouble, at least the trouble that used to emerge for me: in poetry I'm propelled by a rhythm that is so dominant that new combinations appear dictated by the aural. The turn of the line guides me too. In fiction a rhythmic charge is at work, of course, but if it is too dominant for too long (and here is the strangest irony yet) prose turns boring. As many reviewers are sure to note, fiction that's too full of rhythmic acrobatics for any duration is not very readable, although it may be excruciatingly enjoyable in the short run. Fiction is a rather sneaky art—at least the kind that I want to write. Even Nabokov's Lolita, for all its lush wordplay, becomes devastating gradually. It is poetic prose, but it is still prose. Moving then, from poetry to prose, sets up a new relation to language for poets; we learn how we have been guided by sound effects. Our sense of sound must change—and our reliance on the line as a resource.

The second difficulty for poets who turn to fiction, after movement, is the little matter of cause and effect. In much fiction, particularly if the poet is interested in the conventions of realism, effects have causes that are discernible. A plot is a chain of them. Insights are less often instantaneous or less often occur with the remarkable speed that a poet may be used to. Of course, cause and effect can be evaded. What else is Gertrude Stein for? —who wrote, by the way, in more than one genre. But what if you admire cause and effect as conventions? Surely the conventions demand experimental trials.

 

With Whom Do You Identify? Echo? Or Narcissus?

Given the sheer difficulty, the resistance of genres to any easy adaptation—given the suspicion, condescension, or indifference that engaging in multiple genres elicits, why do so many of us range beyond genre?

Short answer: It's a compulsion. But there are other possibilities too: To rub the nap of one's capability. To break through the wall of hardened assumptions and habits. To avoid being like a bad translator of one's one work. Think of Echo and Narcissus: with whom do you identify? Echo may be more of a familiar type. She can only repeat what she has already heard. What an agony. Similarly, we don't want to be echoes of our earlier selves. Because, as Rimbaud said and as everyone keeps quoting, "I is another"—and to translate oneself into the skin of an alien art form is a way to create the crisis of becoming something/someone else in the imagination. After all, we may have a different personality in each genre. Somewhere Czeslaw Milosz says we are all like apartment buildings—there are so many personalities in each of us. If that's the case, then there are studio apartments and suites and lobbies, and each interior personality may need another structure, another genre of being to be heard.

Other reasons to transgress genre boundaries?

To emulate what one admires, whatever the genre. My guess is there are more who write in multiple genres than acknowledge it, for fear of failure or the charge of defection. Some writers, too, never having given themselves permission to experiment, choose one genre too early. They're catching up now. Childhood is enough, Rilke said, for inspiration, but even he didn't stay there.

To cultivate the sensation of beginning again, that exciting weird rawness of starting out.

To engage in travel of an extreme sort.

To recognize difficulty as not only an obstacle but a lure.

To resist desperation after a plateau has been reached in one's principal art. Sometimes a problem that was intractable in one genre resolves itself while a writer is busy with another genre. The writer warps or rotates the conventions of the less-familiar genre; or the writer recasts the question that began the search across genres.

Another reason: To outwit perfectionism—the ideal that means we fail before we begin.

(A lovely bonus: We may write in more than one genre so that we can write for longer periods. When we're tapped out in one genre for the day we go on to another.)

Yet another reason for unfaithfulness: To cultivate a genre can be like gaining a sense faculty. We probably all have friends who are more oriented by one sense than another. I am one of those people who miss seeing things. People like me have friends who say, "Did you see that man who walked by with a nail in his head?" To which we reply, "No, no I missed that." Genres demand that we use neglected faculties and orient our attention in unfamiliar ways. Surely writing is about concentration. Genres, as such, perform as focusing agents. Even failures in reading, let alone writing, are generally due to a lack of concentrated focus. Adam Zagajewski (translated by Clare Cavanagh) writes wistfully, "If only we read poetry as carefully as menus in expensive restaurants.... "

Other possible reasons why writers cross genres? Because it is a new way to fail. We get so tired of the old ways.

 

The Writer as Metaphor

Which brings me to psychics. The movement across genres is a test of imaginative territory. It's another way to tell time. And to tell about time. According to James Wood, the novelist better known as a critic, "The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped." That dash to the unknown is part of the lure of writing. Is writing then in another genre a means of lower order time travel? The psychic medium John Edward called his television program and one of his books Crossing Over. He manages to make some people believe he is in contact with spirits. I'm reminded of what those of us who write in multiple genres face that he must encounter: a sense of trespass, of the unnatural, of being illegitimate. Spreading writing across genres can seem like over-reaching. And an admission of greed and colonizing tendencies. What's that in Napoleon's pocket? That's my pen.

One repercussion of such ambition: a sense of heightened uncertainty for the writer. How do we make illusions speak, and in what tempo? What are the conventions that animate the unreal and take on shape, while the ghost of our primary form haunts us? Or does the foray across genres make our primary genre (if we indeed commit principally to one genre) more mysterious? As we establish distance by experimenting with other genres, does the original genre become more freshly intriguing? Is writing like working with phantoms? Marina Warner in Phantasmagoria writes of "performers and writers ... grasping the imaginary fabric that swathes and freights our consciousness today ... They can help—and they often mean to—reorientate readers' and audiences' perceptions, and shape subjectivity within a mesh of reciprocal and social relations. Those working in this vein rough-hew inherited phantasms, not only mining their undoubted pleasure and power. In a material sense, spirits are indeed channeled, and the media are here, now."

Years ago, with a close friend, I visited a fortune teller. The fortune teller predicted the age at which I would die. I wish she hadn't done that. She also gave me useful advice: Accept more invitations. Which I did. Coincidentally, my life got less lonely.

I don't come from a family of gullible people, believe me, yet when she was a young woman my mother went to a fortune teller too. Nearly everything she learned from the woman swirling tea leaves came true: the number of children she would have, the first name of the man she would marry (which must have helped my father's chances considerably). The fortune teller only made one gaffe: one of her children, she said, would be a renowned pianist. Which meant—despite the expense—all four of us children took piano lessons until all four of us revolted. Stupidly enough.

There is a seldom considered reason for writers to work in multiple genres: moving between genres is closely allied to the most essential activity of the imagination, the metaphor. That is, crossing over genres is enacting or living out metaphor. "Metaphor is analogous to fiction," James Wood writes, "because it floats a rival reality. It is the entire imaginative process in one move." In the land of metamorphoses to work in multiple genres is to "float a rival reality"—to test the primary genre, perhaps, or to bring back new conceptual possibilities while in new territory. Marilynne Robinson said something to this effect in a recent Paris Review interview when she was asked why she writes non-fiction as well as novels: "To change my own mind. I try to create a new vocabulary or terrain for myself, so that I open out—I always think of the Dutch claiming land from the sea—to open up something that would have been closed to me before." The phrase "to change my own mind" becomes a literalized metaphor. Change genres/change the mind.

But then, always, we hope, there is the return. The return to the first love, the genre that made its claims on us initially, the one by which we're imprinted so that we follow it like ducks following the duck mother or the lawn mower that was first seen in the duckling's little eye. The return.

How to manage it? One writer told me he chooses different days for different genres. Monday: fiction. Tuesday: poetry. Wednesday: fiction. Thursday: non-fiction. I'm reminded of day-of-the-week panties. Writing imaginatively needs hours, blasts of time, long sinking moments. A concentration that isn't only a matter of quality but of quantity. (I think of Jane Austen, working in the sitting room, subject to the sudden appearance of guests. She certainly found a way to capitalize on her situation. But it couldn't have been easy.)

 

The Selkie Returns to the Sea

I began writing these meditations on crossing over into other genres while working on a novella and poems. At last, I finished a first draft of the novella, which is the most difficult stage for me because I can then tell if the work is alive or not, after having invested so much energy and note-taking and fanciful worrying-into-being. In poetry, rewards emerge more reliably for me than in fiction. In fiction one writes for a long time and then everything may collapse despite years of work. The collapse occurs in poetry—but earlier. I think—I hope—that I have rescued the novella.

By working in poetry, fiction, academic criticism, and the casual essay, it's not as if I have tasted the fruit of multiple genres like Christina Rossetti among her goblins. But it is strange, that return from any other genre to my main genre, poetry. It may not be that one is unfaithful to the first, the primary genre, so much as one is a forager, anxious to bring back the news from another genre, to reinvigorate the genre that lured us to become writers in the first place.

 

In the legends about the selkie, her first shape—her seal skin—is hidden by the human who loves her. Inevitably, the selkie at last discovers the bundle containing her skin and drags it from a high shelf. She cannot help but put on her old skin and merge with the waves, abandoning the human world. Yes, that happens periodically. For there is something to the suspicion that poetry is a jealous muse, if poetry's skin fits us first. Art is a voice—one metaphor insists. And more. It is a skin. It's not that the skin snaps back into place after we work in other genres. The skin of any art changes shape for us perhaps, but we too have changed shape. Besides, it is the only skin we can take off and put back on again.

 

About the Author
Lee Upton’s poetry and fiction appear widely. Her fifth book of poetry, Undid in the Land of Undone, was published by New Issues Press. Her fourth book of literary criticism, Defensive Measures, explores how contemporary poets claim their distinctiveness.

Southwest Review
Souhern Methodist University

Editor-in-Chief: Willard Spiegelman
Senior Editor and Fiction Editor: Jennifer Cranfill