Really, what I'm writing about is writing as a means of creating a fictional self that you just almost believe in. Part of what pulls me to creative non-fiction is the way good pieces tie together personal experience and historical anecdotes and facts and opinions--and the knots hold. When I think, I use my experiences as a framework for thinking more generally and, Kolb's objections aside, I think that's worth doing in writing, too.
I never told her I had a blog, so I probably shouldn't invoke her as the great dissenting spirit. But, since I am, I think she holds that creative non-fiction is a way of being lazy, of not bothering to weave fiction, of letting the knots amount to enough. And it probably is.
But the Wallace Stevens quotation that sticks in my head is "These are just tentative ideas for the purpose of poetry." He's talking, I think, about "Idea of Order at Key West," but I'm not actually sure. He means all of them. And what he's arguing is that the ideas you put into a poem aren't as important as the thing you build out of them.
I have trouble with that metaphor--"the thing you build out of them"--because Wallace Stevens poems aren't really edifices: they're torrents, chimeras, finely woven rugs. And I don't disagree with him. It's utterly unimportant that he defend his philosophical ideas. But I do think ideas matter. And I think non-fiction can do things with them that a short story simply can't.
And that's probably enough of a defense against an imagined Laura Kolb.
I started this entry talking about presentation of self: the way a non-fiction writer creates a persona that is a lot like him, but very much not him. Put another way, some people are really only themselves through their words.
And one of the things I like about the Elizabethans is that they were constantly constructing themselves in this way. At the very least, most poems had two levels of artifice: that which developed a speaker for the poem out of the statements in the work and that which established the poet as a witty (or clever or compassionate or politically astute etc) writer of poems. One's political standing had very much to do with one's written production. And so coded into all the meanings of the text are a-whole-nother set of anxieties and concerns.
(How does one punctuate infixes?)
And therefore, written into these poems is a set of concerns about voice, tone, and the way metaphors, conceits, and personae work that I find incredibly compelling.
