How Poetry Can Animate Narrative Nonfiction
One of my favorite pastimes is reading essays that offer a glimpse into the mind of other writers and learn about their creative process—how they think, get things done, and find inspiration. It’s not only fun: In those pages I’m always hopeful that I’ll discover some magic formula to solve my own writing issues.
But the reality is that resolving writing problems is a deeply personal experience, one that transcends easy explanation. Sure, writers can share techniques—good ways to create a scene, write lively characters, or outline a story—but getting through the tangle of your own thoughts—that is best done sitting alone, reading or re-reading someone else’s work.
Overall, in the hundreds of pieces about writing that I’ve have read, most writers admit that finding the way forward happened through an encounter with a passage, with a collection of words that roused an “a-ha” moment, a sensation that they’d broken through whatever barrier had been holding them back.
When writing my book, The Black Angels, I struggled to write about tuberculosis and Sea View, the municipal TB sanatorium that in 1930 housed New York’s poorest. I was daunted by the enormity of both topics, how each one stood as a separate entity entrenched in suffering and despair, alienation and isolation. I remember staring at the screen and typing sentences that led me to some other place or more frequently into an abyss or wall. I would start and stop; erase and replace but nothing worked. I could not find my way in.
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And so, one day, I stopped writing and retreated to a curated bookshelf that housed my favorite books of poetry—I love fiction and short stories but what always inspires my writing is poetry. Poets have a way of paring down language, of using it innovatively. They can take three words and with them open worlds. In their hands, words become protean, and they bend and shape-shift in the right way.
Standing there thinking about the disease and the hospital, my eyes moved across the spines, hoping one would speak to me and help pave the way to some creative epiphany—Maya Angelou, Mary Oliver, Langston Hughes, Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, Marie Howe, Naomi Shihab Nye…or T.S. Eliot.
Eliot was the first poet I loved. It happened one afternoon when I was 11 and found my mother’s copy of his collected poems on her nightstand. Something about the book, bound in a teal cloth cover, made me pick it up and flip to the middle where a bookmark held a page for a poem called “The Waste Land.”
Lured by the title, I began reading, my eyes flitting over lines about April and lilacs, memory and desire, and an unreal city steeped in brown fog. Though at that age I couldn’t really understand the meaning of the poem, I loved how the words sat next to each other, each one leaning on the other to create another image, another impression that forged itself in my mind, and pulled me deeper into this place of loss and despair, this place of contrasts where the sacred and the profane seemed to move together in perfect harmony.
I remember wondering how this arid world, this place where the earth is cracked and parched, starved for water, could be so beautiful. By the end, I wanted to slip into the page and sit under the “decayed hole among the mountains / in the faint moonlight,” and listen to “singing grass” and “whisper music” while reading the different sections.
In a way I fulfilled that desire by spending the next year memorizing stanza after stanza until the poem seemed to live inside me, infiltrate my being, twittering and whispering in my ear. It wouldn’t leave me alone; it created a literary consciousness in me and an obsession with language and with anything having to do with existential angst.
(6 Types of Creative Nonfiction Personal Essays for Writers to Try.)
I moved toward my curated bookshelf and reached for Eliot. Opening the teal cover all frayed and faded, I began re-reading the poem that had marked me. As I moved through the stanzas, I thought about my difficulty of describing a disease that reached back thousands of years and had killed millions, one whose microbe burrowed itself deep into the lungs or bones or brain and chewed up tissues and tendons until it liquified entire organs and literally consumed people from the inside out.
And then I thought about having to set this disease in Sea View, an 1,800-bed hospital, a dismal place where life was lived in the shadow of death and many believed it was in fact a wasteland. Reading the poem with my problem in mind led me to experience it differently—I saw how Eliot condensed big historical events by placing them beside a single word that created a clear image—“Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London.”
That was the solution—describing the enormity of the disease and the hospital with simple verbs that conjured up powerful images, allowing the reader to feel and see and hear the scene being depicted. To do that, I knew Sea View had to be a whole sensory experience, one that started from the outside (how the buildings looked) and moved inward to the wards where most of the story would be set.
And so, I fashioned this internal world in the way a poet might with a kaleidoscope of sounds that would invoke this world of illness inhabited by the nurses: “wheezing chests and galloping coughs,” “rattling wheels from nurse’s carts,” “clanking silverware,” and patients whose “chatter and cries” lingered in the air along with the ever-present microbes. I layered the sounds with smells of food and bleach and other cleaning products, and of course, the litany of bodily fluids; and when describing the sick who “languished in the iron framed beds,” I paired down language, like that of verse measured and commending and able to quickly startle (“Bones jutted at sharp geometric angles,”); using words judiciously, I hoped, would keep the reader engaged.
In the end, we all want our readers to stay, to hear the story we are telling, and to come away feeling something. And so, when writing about history, we should remember that it can be recounted in a very straightforward way fact by fact, but narrative can transform it, bring it to life, by imbuing those facts with poetic fervor.
As Eliot said, “The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” The research that goes into writing about history is essential to conveying the people and events of the past. But to bring it to life, to perceive its presence, we sometimes need the grace of poetry to breathe life into the prose.