Thoughts on genre

I'm curious about why some things come to me as essay ideas and some as poems. What is the distinction? Maybe that the poems are a way to talk about things I want to discuss without getting into the thing itself. They're a way to look sideways at something, to edge at it, and they have a distinct ending point. They're contained. Poems are a way for me to talk about some of the deepest, hardest truths in metaphor. There has to be truth in a poem, of course, but it's more possible in a poem to talk around something.

The essays are what I write when I want to go straight into the heart of something, put it out on paper in the barest and rawest way. Essays demand truth. Maybe not absolute truth — there are ways to hide in essays, to distract with one confession in order to keep another — but the narrator in an essay must be a trustworthy one. There's not the same kind of room in an essay for doubts of narrative authenticity, for fiction. Essays are for when I'm trying to work something out, and there is an itching bit of truth buried somewhere that wants to be dug out. It's still a process of discovery, and of metaphor, but I cannot begin an essay with a topic that I know I'm afraid of. For me, essays are a bit of a confessional. Whatever I carry into them will, I know, weigh on me until I set it down in ink. It will show in the writing that I'm holding back and keeping secrets.

This is, of course, the interpretation of a prose writer who dabbles in poems sometimes. My education is in prose, and I don't have the same hours logged in poetry workshops, debating the narrative integrity of fourteen lines. For some, I'm sure that poetry is where all of the blood and guts come out, and I don't want to give short shrift to the possibilities of poetic honesty. From what I know, though, in a poem you can mean blood and guts but say wine and curry, and it's often better if you let the vehicle stand and the tenor fade away, a watermark behind the flash of the metaphor. In an essay, you can say wine and curry but if you don't get into the messy stuff, the literal, you will have a revolt from your readers.

Now that I think of it like that, it's that very blending of bald, literal baring and literary weaving that fascinates me about essays. They can be about the language, the intricacy of sustained metaphor. The most beautiful moments of them, though, are often the ones in which the thing is stated as plainly as possible. It's a balance of different kinds of honesty, but it is, at the bottom of it, about honesty. It's reporting the world as it occurs in the essayist's eye. The interest is not in the thing itself, usually, but in the unique interpretation. The essay is a test of character, and of humility.