Tzara
Continental
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Posts
- 7,609
Hello.
I’ve been thinking about fiction lately, short fiction, very short fiction, and how that relates to poetry.
There is a very real connection. Flash fiction anthologies, for example, often contain work by writers known mainly as poets. This could be, of course, the poet extending him- or herself into a slightly more wordy and fictive arena, but it might also mean that, once one takes the line breaks out, very short stories are very like poems.
Not always, but often.
Let me cite an example. One of my favorite poems (and I do think of it as a poem, despite it looking like flash fiction) is Robert Hass’s “A Story About the Body”:
Yet it somehow seems poetic. Hass seems to think it’s a poem, as he included it in his poetry collection Human Wishes, along with several other similar prose poems.
All of which is my roundabout way of talking about “hint fiction.”
Hint fiction, as defined by a relatively recent anthology, is a story told in twenty-five words or less. As such, it depends very much on the reader’s (mental) expansion of the story. How the reader “reads between the lines,” so to speak.
So try one. You have twenty-five words. Be descriptive and concrete in your imagery (in other words, use your poetry skills), yet be narrative.
Here’s my first try, which is not very good:
I’ve been thinking about fiction lately, short fiction, very short fiction, and how that relates to poetry.
There is a very real connection. Flash fiction anthologies, for example, often contain work by writers known mainly as poets. This could be, of course, the poet extending him- or herself into a slightly more wordy and fictive arena, but it might also mean that, once one takes the line breaks out, very short stories are very like poems.
Not always, but often.
Let me cite an example. One of my favorite poems (and I do think of it as a poem, despite it looking like flash fiction) is Robert Hass’s “A Story About the Body”:
The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music—withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl—she must have swept them from the corners of her studio—was full of dead bees.
This sure as hell looks to me like short fiction—there is dramatic development, conflict, resolution.Yet it somehow seems poetic. Hass seems to think it’s a poem, as he included it in his poetry collection Human Wishes, along with several other similar prose poems.
All of which is my roundabout way of talking about “hint fiction.”
Hint fiction, as defined by a relatively recent anthology, is a story told in twenty-five words or less. As such, it depends very much on the reader’s (mental) expansion of the story. How the reader “reads between the lines,” so to speak.
So try one. You have twenty-five words. Be descriptive and concrete in your imagery (in other words, use your poetry skills), yet be narrative.
Here’s my first try, which is not very good:
MATCH.COM
She texted her picture before we met. Open, pleasant face. A very nice body. Unclothed.
I made many errors thumbing in my response.
OK. I've publically embarrassed myself. Now you try. She texted her picture before we met. Open, pleasant face. A very nice body. Unclothed.
I made many errors thumbing in my response.