Creative Nonfiction & Poetry
For some time now I've been wanting to write a piece about creative nonfiction and where this genre of writing meets poetry. The past two weeks I have been teaching sessions on cnf and 'truth' and my students have been reading personal essays and a poetry sequence based on a real incident. When considering our themes and discussing how to approach the techniques of cnf, I've asked them to think about how they could look directly (or directly slant) at personal truth in their own lives. As a poet, I've often bumped into discussions of creative nonfiction in an uncomfortable way--not that I am uncomfortable with these, rather that I've accidentally found myself in conversations with other writers or readers who have been adamant about poetry's fiction-only status. An example of this came a number of years ago when I sent a group of poems as-per-the-submission-guidelines to a magazine who had a call out for 'pieces of creative nonfiction'. Within a week
