Everyone who has ever attended a poetry workshop must recall the moment when the poet-teacher seeks to loosen up his class of poet-aspirants by telling them to bring to the next session a poem in which they compare a lover to a lawn mower. This is not an outrageous pedagogic stunt. Established poets are forever setting themselves similar problems. One remembers Robert Frost’s sonnet comparing his beloved to a silken tent. Or, harking farther back, one recalls George Herbert’s notorious fitting of a religious sentiment into a pair of ten-line stanzas shaped like “Easter Wings.” There is no limit to this kind of ingenuity. John Peale Bishop levied on an—entire play Othello—to define poetry: “The ceremony must be found / That will wed Desdemona to the huge Moor.” The real trick is not in the intricate design itself but rather in using that design to sustain and even heighten the passion that prompted the poem in the first place.
Prose fictionists are just as capable of displaying powerful feelings by means of exquisitely ingenious expression. The short story, especially, lends itself to this compounding of powerful feeling and intricate design. If, at the same time, the writer is employing her art as the vehicle not only to express but also to order her feelings, to compose herself as well as her story (because she is giving us a fictional account of some harrowing experience of her own), we may find ourselves confronting one of those disturbing and fascinating juxtapositions of fact and fiction that can only be described by the oxymoron painful pleasure.
Already have an account? Log in
Join KR for even more to read.