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Ginger Knowlton lives north of Boulder, Colorado. Recent work
has appeared in Segue, 5_trope, and The
Evansville Review. More
work is forthcoming in The Chimera Review and Poetry
Midwest. She
has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and Rocky
Mountain Women's Institute. A few of her paintings are held in
private collections across the country. She teaches at the University
of Colorado, Boulder.
Question #3: Regarding differentiation between
flash fiction and prose poetry, Tony Leuzzi wrote, “If the
writing contains a compressed plot, with character and motive,
then I am inclined to think, ‘flash fiction.’ If the
reading experience forces me into unexpected directions, where
a loss of control is expected, then I am probably in the realm
of a prose poem.” Peter Johnson also noted, “ I agree
with Todorov when he says that all genres come from previous genres,
but that doesn’t mean Schlegel was wrong when he said, “ Every
poem is a genre in itself.” What criteria do you use to distinguish
between prose poems and flash fictions? Is Schlegel correct in
his assessment? If so, is there any point in designating genre?
As a rather “genre-less” writer, I take great comfort
from a comment that I heard one afternoon (from Bin Ramke, who
will, I hope, forgive me if I botch this paraphrase) that a poem
teaches us how it wants to be read. Bin may have said how it could
be read or would be read, but I remember “wants to be read, ” probably
because the poem, in this sense, has agency and life. I’m
rather wary of searching too long for a classification for things;
the beauty of classification, to me, is most easily evidenced in
fields like ecology or contemporary physics, where the classifications
themselves are always full of potential and change, as I believe
they should be in literature. There may be value in debating whether
a passage of writing qualifies as a prose poem or a flash fiction,
but the real fun lies in the odd, peculiar, and graceful movements
of the writing itself.
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