Shall I Go On and On?

Posted by Holly Pettit May 4, 2006

Should I write another article about this, or not?

My Creative Nonfiction teacher was fond of saying this, and it made it all so simple: "one lie makes it fiction."

The rules of poetry aren't the same, though. Bruce Weigl, in the interview noted discussed how the events of his poems sometimes didn't happen. Heartbreaking, given his subject matter.

Weigl mentioned, Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, in which Hugo says that once the imagination is triggered, it must be followed, and that it may lead us away from what's "true."

Most poets I know say that a determination to record events as they happened will kill poetry deader than dead. Okay, I can accept that.

But my question is this: In a genre in which even "biographic" material can be fudged, where is the line between non-fictional poetry, and the fictional?

I want to have the distinction as clear cut as it is with prose. Only then, I feel, that poetry can regain the stature it used to enjoy.