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Fiction and Poetry

Posted March 30th, 2009 by Aaron Johnson in Reflection

 I have, for a while, been very skeptical of the difference between poetry and fiction, though now I think I may have found one.  While poetry frequently seems and exercise in linguistics, engaging primarily the linguistic line of intelligence, fiction engages, as its focus, both linguistic and narrative lines.  When I attempt to write poetry I struggle to create a cohesive narrative, a cohesive fiction, but I find that I can only do so if I embrace at least some of the conventions of fiction, even if it is only so I can turn them upside down.  Of course, both poetry and fiction use the aesthetic line of intelligence, but I think the key difference is the focus verses lack of focus on the narrative line of intelligence, and this also highlights the relationship of fiction to our daily lives within the context of the AQAL model.  Every idea we have about identity and self is essentially a narrative, and fiction examines the ways in which those narratives are constructed, showing us, essentially, the validity (or lack thereof) of our claims that we are "living" our "lives" as "human beings".  The best fictions do this within an explicit or implicit relationship with nonduality, the simple experience of being, the paradoxical condition of having no condition.  The best fictions do this because this is the only "place" to be, this is the only context within which all fictions take place.  Poetry, on the other hand, is something I find more experimental.  I think you can indeed create worlds with poetry, but I get the impression it is almost as if it is done in a lab, for the purpose of bringing it out, finally, as a product, to be used within the development of the narratives we employ as human beings.

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Mountain Lion

Posted March 30th, 2009 by David Marshall

Hi Aaron,

I often contemplate this myself.

Yes, the two forms are really not that far apart, are they? At times perhaps they are.

We might make distinctions between different types of poetry and fiction--some types of poetry perhaps look more like fiction and some types of fiction might be better described as poetry.

We might look at how time is treated in the different forms.

Like you said, the best poetry and fiction has a timeless quality to it.

Fiction, then, tends to have more surface time (this moment, then the next, then the next) and more depth time (before the first surface moment of the story)--we need at least surface time for a narrative, as far as I can see.

Some poetry has no surface or depth time at all--it just leaves us with an image or a feeling or perhaps takes our breath away and leaves us in the timeless. Other poetry has both surface time and depth time but still retains some important difference from fiction that's hard to put one's finger on.

Of course if we go back to the epic poetry of Homer we find a narrative as much as any fiction, right, or Dante or many others.

I'm just contemplating outloud! I will leave you with a beautiful story poem from D. H. Lawrence, who I think is one of the greatest poets.

One interesting thing about this poem for me is that it is in the present tense except for one line in the past tense and one in the future tense. And I think it's kind of rare to see that working in fiction, but it works beautifully here.

 

Mountain Lion

 

Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo Canyon
Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water sounds still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident

Men!
Two men!
Men! The only animal in the world to fear!

They hesitate.
We hesitate.
They have a gun.
We have no gun.

Then we all advance, to meet.

Two Mexicans, strangers, emerging our of the dark and
snow and inwardness of the Lobo valley.
What are they doing here on this vanishing trail?

What is he carrying?
Something yellow.
A deer?

Que' tiene amigo?
Leon-

He smiles foolishly as if he were caught doing wrong.
And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn't know.
He is quite gentle and dark-faced.

It is a mountain lion,
A long, long, slim cat, yellow like a lioness.
Dead.

He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.

Life up her face,
Her round, bright face, bright as frost.
Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;
And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays,
Dark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face.
Beautiful dead eyes.

Hermoso es!

They go out towards the open;
We go out into the gloom of Lobo.
And above the trees I found her lair,
A hole in the blood-orange brilliant rocks that stick up, a little cave.
And bones, and twigs, and a perilous ascent.

So, she will never leap up that way again, with the yellow flash of a mountain lion's long shoot!
And her bright striped frost-face will never watch any more, out of the shadow of the cave in the blood- orange rock,
Above the trees of the Lobo dark valley-mouth!

Instead, I look out.
And out to the dim of the desert, like a dream, never real;
To the snow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the ice of the mountains of Picoris,
And near across at the opposite steep of snow, green trees motionless standing in snow, like a Christmas toy.

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion.
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of that slim yellow mountain lion!