Like writing poetry

Ever since I started reading and later writing poetry, there it was – this feeling, no, this suspicion that all language fundamentally always fails, that it reaches for truth, grabs at it, slips, falls, stands up, repeats the whole process. Or in other words: I slowly became aware of the existence of small fractures in meaning, words that lie parallel to what they supposedly want to signify, and out of this awareness came my love for language, and by extension for poetry – it spoke to me exactly through those cracks, those loaded silences, and tried to convey something singular, only to fall apart, stumble in a completely new way and implode into a communal experience that has always been just out of reach of my understanding.

Poetry, I learnt early on, does not resolve any of these fractures, it doesn’t fix failure in language, doesn’t pretend it isn’t there. Instead, lingering inside the hollowed word, it accepts that whatever we perceive is always mediated through our perception, through language itself, and will lie on the page distorted, incomplete, making the act of writing a process similar to looking through a refraction lens, or zooming in and out of the picture to draw attention to parts of lived experience.

Years later, my attention shifted to prose. Not out of neglect of poetry, but out of a growing sense of urgency, a need for a story. It seemed a logical step to make, and even if the ‘poet’s novel’ had by then calcified into something of a cliché, I became obsessed with the possibilities of a page inked end to end. Many of the writers who mattered most to me had arrived at fiction from poetry and never truly left it behind. Their prose did not abandon poetic uncertainty, but carried it forward, stretched it across longer forms, allowed it to build up.

Such movement between poetry and prose is hardly new, the boundaries were never there, and if so, were more like a membrane allowing for osmosis. Long before the novel usurped the status of the dominant literary form, most of our stories were carried by poetry, by song. Even some of the oldest recorded stories, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad and The Odyssey. They all place a singular figure at their centre, not as a neutral observer, but as a lens through which the world is filtered, distorted and shaped. These texts do not pretend to objectivity. They understand the self as a mediator, a prism through which experience reaches out to you from the page.

Any sharper distinction we begin to draw between poetry and prose blurs. Writers like Sylvia Plath did not turn to prose to escape the self, but to test how far it could stretch without breaking. The Bell Jar is not a retreat from poetry, but its continuation by other means. The same could be said of writers who move freely across forms without feeling the need to announce the transition: Anne Carson, William Carlos Williams refused to settle comfortably.

What connects these works is neither confession nor a naive belief in personal truth, but an understanding that the self is unavoidable. Not as an object of fascination, but as a medium. Life doesn’t enter literature directly; it seeps in through the self and its limitations, through memory, language. The ‘I’ is not a declaration of importance, but an admission of position.

Still, it appears as if the contemporary critical discourse is haunted by a spectre, a word. At least in my country, Czechia, critics claim to be tired of writers who have renounced fiction, lies, stories, or the triumph of the ego. But what does a mode of writing that erases the boundary between the self and the world look like?

What started as a search for literary honesty is arguably often a very tedious genre that settled well in a world of social networks and constant self-presentation. Yet, autofiction became a medium capable of capturing, and perhaps reflecting, part of the contemporary self. Something similar was described recently by the American writer Ben Lerner in an interview for Louisiana Channel, when he admitted that ‘it made complete sense to me that in a society obsessed with the curated self, my books would become another tool through which I could observe how this self actually comes into being.’

About you

When they asked the British poet Philip Larkin in an interview what he thought the difference between prose and poetry was, he replied: ‘A very crude difference between the novel and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself.’

Novels, even the ones outside genre fiction, are expected to play with plot and characters, to render them in various ways so that they feel precise and realistic. That is the critical consensus, that is what we want out of them. With poems, we have no such expectations. What they offer is something new: a voice, a language through which we try and always fail to perceive the world. Not many expect entertainment from them, nor an imitation of reality.

What we have instead is the vague sense that poems come from their authors but are not purely about them. To say ‘poetry is about yourself’ does not mean that they speak only to those who wrote them. Poems are strangely warped mirrors, chunks of glass to see the world through, just carefully enough not to cut your eyes. That is what makes them personal, even painful to read.

Larkin’s answer is interesting in that it hides most of its meaning just under the seams. Good poems never speak in a singular voice; they form a link between the reader and the author and speak both about those who wrote them and about you, the people who read them. It is this poetic intimacy transfused into the novel that makes autofiction an ideal probe of the present: contemporary autofiction, much like poetry, attempts to articulate the communal through the individual. Perhaps it is not a coincidence then, that among the names most often mentioned alongside the term are accomplished poets. Ben Lerner, Patricia Lockwood, Anne Boyer or Maggie Nelson each address entirely different subjects, yet all of them rely in their own way on poetry’s indeterminacy, on its uncertainty. Lerner himself often speaks about the relationship between poetry and autofiction – for him, both forms are two ways to ‘dramatically arrange autobiographical material. (…) For me, poems are a kind of precursor to all of this. We don’t say that poems are autobiographical. They are intimate, but constructed, everyday dramas.’

A failed form

Quite like Larkin, two other poets and prominent members of the Black Mountain School, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, also understood poetry as ‘an energy transfer from the poet to the reader through the poem’. Creeley is famous for his statement that ‘form is never more than an extension of content.’ He uttered this sentence early in his career and was thinking mainly of line breaks, diction, the rhythm of individual poems. He best demonstrated this idea in his famous poem For Love, where he attempts not exactly to write a love poem but rather to capture the necessary failure that comes after attempting to write one.

‘Yesterday I wanted to speak of it’, starts Creeley, as he leaves his poem full of unfinished, incomplete sentences. There are no answers in it, only questions, gasping for understanding, and it is in those gasps where the poem finds its strength. Those of us who are privy to writing poetry will certainly know that failure to capture something, and the inability to find the right words for things, can, at the end of the day, convey more than any overused metaphor. Silence speaks, friction too. This poetic awareness of one’s own imperfection can be seen as an older sibling to autofiction.

Unlike the realist novel or the postmodern narrative experiment, both forms are perhaps too painfully aware of the discrepancy between artifice and authenticity. Aware of their ability to encompass only a fragment of what they would like, and of their inevitable failure even within that fragment, as if responding to the real world the forms change. The impossibility to articulate the universal in an increasingly complex reality is not a problem faced by literature alone. Identity itself becomes something that needs to be always shattered and reassembled.

American literary critic and historian Anahid Nersessian traces a similar, though earlier, turn in thinking about form and content. In her work The Calamity Form, she describes fragmentation of modern society and its impact on poetry as well as other forms of artistic expression. Nersessian traces the origin of this fragmentation back to the Great Industrial Revolution and focuses primarily on its influence on British Romantic poets. She describes a few strategies they used to thematise their inability to capture the world around them realistically. And although quite a lot has changed since their time, the world still makes little sense, and authors have no choice but to search for new ways of grasping this truth.

Alone yet together

The media theorist Hannah Zeavin, in her book The Distance Cure, writes about the history of teletherapy and, among other things, mentions a phenomenon she calls ‘distant intimacy’. According to Zeavin, all human communication and intimacy arise from an idea of togetherness. Yet this togetherness often fails to materialise even when both parties physically share the same space. Zeavin argues that there is no way to be truly together. Intimacy is only an illusion, and communication between ‘me’ and ‘you’ will always involve a third party. This is nothing more than technology itself, nothing more than language, with all the various forms of interpersonal mediation it enables.

Books, too, are a technology in a way. Reading helps us, according to Zeavin, to be together even when we are alone. Like poetry, autofiction makes use of this fact. On the one hand, it is an acknowledgement that this third factor exists. Neither poetry nor autofiction pretends to offer an objective view of the world, and both often thematise their own subjectivity. The legendary novel Sleepless Nights by the American writer Elizabeth Hardwick, which many consider a predecessor of today’s autofictions, is built precisely on a subjective and fragmentary capture of the world, on the failure of memory and on the inability to name things precisely for what they are.

Like autofiction, poetry is assembled from fragments of writers’ lives, and it sings distorted songs about all of us, of our lives that are at once mirror-flat and immensely complex. Neither one aims to invent, to lie, or speak only about itself, but it is necessary to take a detour, to bend light in a way that allows one to see better. Both are also keenly aware that memory is subjective, that it has its limits, refusing to hide behind constructed selves and the idea of the ‘objective’, and to some extent also reject the game of believability that the literary critic so often initiates. Larkin himself noticed this. While the writer was struggling to respond to a critique phrased ‘life’s not like that’, he saw the poet as only needing to reply: ‘No. But I am’. Perhaps we forgot to read autofiction in the same way as we read poetry – as dramatised and highly focalised word-matter, as a way of saying that the novel is not reality. But in a way, this is.