Why do most American graduate writing programs ghettoize poetry and fiction? Why do poets and fiction writers support this isolationism? It's obvious that poetry and fiction are different genres, but why should this lead to specialized education and aesthetic suspicion, literary territoriality akin to gang partition: Blood turf, Crip turf? Why, in my early years as a writer in New York City, did my poet-friends label fiction writers “word-creepers” (a term corrupted from Roethke) and novelists scorn poets as “word-wankers?” (Or was it the other way around?) Or did I just make up this “poetic” notion that the Word itself is split into active discourse and ecstatic meditation?

These questions are not meant to be rhetorical. There are a variety of answers. The “us and them” politics of American culture, that something in us that really does love a wall, a fence, a line drawn in the sand. Something anti-intellectual that casts a suspicious eye on the “generalist” (a term that has become a disdainful epithet in academic circles on a par with “liberal” in politics). Knowledge and expertise in many areas lead to charges of dilettantism or hybridism, as if ability in one field is diluted or compromised by accomplishment in another.

Paideuma, Pound reminds us, is a complex of ideas conditioning a people's views of themselves at a given epoch in history. Today, the conventional wisdom is that poetry is lyrical, fiction is narrative. Poetry is elliptical; fiction, linear. Poetry is hermetic; fiction, transactive. And oh, yes—fiction has an audience, poetry doesn't. Then, too, both genres take a defensive position vis-à-vis the Academy and its current posse of Muse-Busters, critical theorists who refuse to distinguish between an epic and a laundry list as “texts.” This Academy Rag is enough to push the contenders back in their corners forever.

Nobody wants to force poetry and fiction into a shotgun marriage. But there are signs that the bias against writers who “cross-voice” has diminished. (Cross-voicing is like cross-dressing, only the author usually doesn't get credit for her daring fashion sense.) Rita Dove and Sandra Cisneros, among others,¹ have published poetry and fiction, whether in opposition—or indifference—to literary purdah, I can't say. Rita Dove is among our most committed genre-benders. A few years ago, at a Vanderbilt University conference on “Poets Who Write Fiction,” she spoke with gentle incredulity about the American habit of segregating the genres, like rich and poor neighborhoods. She'd grown up reading and loving both fiction and poetry, unaware of any lurking danger of dabbling. Then she'd won a Fulbright to Germany where she matured as a writer and where “Poets write plays, novelists compose libretti, playwrights write novels—they would not understand our restrictiveness.” …

Sandra Cisneros, by contrast, travels without any compass or passport: by stowaway, bootleg, take-no-prisoners, street-smart intuition. Her forays into poetry from prose and back again seem utterly spontaneous, even volatile, a rose-in-the-teeth passion refashioned to contemporary taste. Cherri Moraga describes Cisneros' poetry as “a kind of international graffiti”—and Cisneros sometimes reads like literary “tagging” (as we say in Los Angeles) or a send-up of Creeley lost in the barrio:

my crazy
friend Pat
boasts she can chug
one bottle of Pabst
down one swig
without even touching …
everyone watching
boy that crazy
act every time gets them
bartender runs over
says lady don't
do that again

(“In a redneck bar down the street”)

The syntax here is pummeled by the line breaks. The poem lurches, elbows in and out of regular rhythm, stop-and-go like overheard snatches of conversation along a noisy bar. And check out the homegirl cadences of a Chicana facing down rednecks on their own turf, drinking “macho” and chugging it down cold, freaking out the Anglos.

“Little Clown, My Heart” (from Loose Woman, Cisneros' most recent book of poems) reads as if it could have been scrawled by e. e. cummings and Lorca on a bender together:

Little gimp-footed hurray,
Paper parasol of pleasures,
Fleshy undertongue of sorrows,
Sweet potato plant of my addictions,
Acapulco cliff-diver corazon,
Fine as an obsidian dagger,
Alley-oop and here we go
Into the froth, my life,
Into the flames!

It would be challenging—and exhausting—to explore the poetic influences on Cisneros' spirited temperament: Lorca, Neruda, Marquez, Gloria Fuertes, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Plath, and Sexton, the Nuyorican poets. Her pen is also haunted by Cantinflas and the famous Argentinian tango singer Gardel, Mary Cassatt, La Llorona, Zapata—a chorus of talking ghosts jostling for space in her work and waiting to be recast in revisions of myth and history.

Cisneros' zigzags between poetry and fiction mark her profound disregard for the conventional literary career. They also raise other questions: Which genre does she favor? Which is the stronger impulse? Unlike Dove, whose lyric narratives sing, Cisneros fervently spins dramatic narratives. In both poetry and fiction, she creates personae: speakers of verse or prose monologues.

The stories read like long soliloquies, dense and startlingly musical. The poems are anecdotes, fragments, billets-doux, bold cabaret, like the following “Preface” to My Wicked Wicked Ways:

Gentlemen, ladies. If you please—these
are my wicked poems from when,
the girl grief decade. My wicked nun
years, so to speak. I sinned.
My first felony—I took up with poetry,
Wife? A woman like me
whose choice was rolling pin or factory.
An absurd vice, this wicked wanton
writer's life.

The “wicked poems” accent the hard choice that becoming a writer represents for a good Chicana daughter. Becoming a writer feels like the sin of pride—striking out alone, independent, ignoring the past and the preordained future. The community's expectation that she will marry or work makes her sin even graver: She is “sentencing” herself to solitary confinement and a life of misunderstanding. The strutting of this Writer's Manifesto is the stylistic prototype for nearly all of Cisneros' poems: sassy, self-pitying, plangent, syncopated, and, as in the following, repetitive:

It's always the same.
No liquor in the house.
The last cigar stuffed in its ashes.
And a heavy dose of poems.

(from “After Everything”)

The stray lovers
have gone home.
The house is cold.
There is nothing on TV.
She must write poems.

(from “The Poet Reflects on Her Solitary Fate”)

While her poems glitter with pastiche, flip pensées, crackerjacks, and churros, her prose fiction is stylistically more seductive. Bitter pathos and longing run through the words of Esperanza Cordero:

She says, I am the great great grand cousin of the queen of France. She lives upstairs, over there, next door to Joe the babygrabber. Keep away from him, she says. He is full of danger. Benny and Bianca own the corner store. They're okay except don't lean on the candy counter. Two girls raggedy as rats live across the street. You don't want to know them. Edna is the lady who owns the building next to you. She used to own a building big as a whale, but her brother sold it. Their mother said, no, no, don't ever sell it. I won't. And then she closed her eyes and he sold it. Alicia is stuck-up ever since she went to college. She used to like me but now she doesn't.

(from The House on Mango Street)

Cisneros' “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Chicana” is a poignant biography of a young writer. The gamble that Cisneros takes with the form (brief voice vignettes) pays off. Like a haiku, each vignette distills an emotion and sets it in a season of the young girl's development. I've seen Mango Street performed as a play and what the performance confirmed was how perfectly pitched these voices are; they resonate long after we look up from the page. There's no doubt in my mind that Cisneros is a playwright and these voices are dramatic personae.

From The House on Mango Street, Cisneros moves confidently into Woman Hollering Creek, her most mature work, which is connected to the tale of La Llorana, the Weeping Woman. There are many variations on this myth in Central American and Latino/a folklore, grafted onto an Aztec legend of a goddess who cries at night. She is a witchlike apparition who has lost her children (perhaps drowning them in response to her husband's philandering), and seeks them in wailing distress. Children fear her, as do men, especially drunkards, whom she seeks to harm. Haunting streams and creeks and city rivers at night, she paralyzes her victims with fear. Cisneros' version, however, turns La Llorana into a big loud woman—a shouter, a hollerer, an assertive voice. Her wailing becomes a feminist bellow, reversing the image of predatory loss.

In the title story, Cleófilas Enriqueta DeLeón Hernández is given in marriage by her father, Don Serafín, to Juan Pedro Martínez Sánchez. Her father tells her on her wedding day that although her new husband will take her to a town en el otro lado (across the border), she will always be welcome to come home. “I am your father, I will never abandon you,” he says. This semi-ominous beginning sets the tone, and Cleófilas soon finds herself the prisoner of a brutish husband. Pregnant with her second child, the terrified Cleófilas decides to escape. She puts herself in the hands of a sympathetic nurse and pals, who appear shockingly independent to the sheltered Cleófilas:

But when they drove across the arroyo, the driver opened her mouth and let out a yell as loud as any mariachi. Which startled not only Cleófilas, but Juan Pedrito as well.

Pues, look how cute. I scared you two, right? Sorry. Should've warned you. Every time I cross that bridge I do that. Because of the name, you know. Woman Hollering. Pues, I holler. She said this in Spanish pocked with English and laughed. Did you ever notice, Felice continued, how nothing around here is named after a woman? Really. Unless she's the Virgin. I guess you're only famous if you're a virgin. She was laughing again.

That's why I like the name of that arroyo. Makes you want to holler like Tarzan, right?

The heroines of Cisneros' books are all hollerers. An intriguing, motley blend of hard-drinking bitches who screw other women's husbands and talk nasty and various refined souls (many have solid-gold hearts and even write poetry), these women walk through walls. No boundary, no border, can contain them. Neither conventional feminists nor good citizens of any tradition, they always defy expectation. When they wrest free a gun, they shoot to kill.

The most electrifying and eloquent female narrator in Women Hollering Creek is Inés Alfaro, long-suffering wife of el gran general Emiliano Zapata at the close of the Mexican civil war. Describing the night she learns to leave her body and fly (a Marquezian touch), the language soars into prose poetry:

It was the season of rain. Plum … plum plum. All night I listened to that broken string of pearls, bead upon bead upon bead rolling across the waxy leaves of my heart.

I lived with the heartsickness inside me, Miliano, as if the days to come did not exist. And when it seemed the grief would not let me go, I wrapped one of your handkerchiefs around a dried hummingbird, went to the river, whispered, Virgencita, ayúdame, kissed it, then tossed the bundle into the waters where it disappeared for a moment before floating downstream in a dizzy swirl of foam.

(from “Eyes of Zapata”)

It's exhilarating to read prose so fiercely elegaic. The words flow effortlessly—plum, plum, plum and bead upon bead upon bead and Virgencita, ayúdame—the words reverberating like the strings of a guitar, the narrator's voice, confiding and throaty, like a fado singer's. Markedly influenced by Latin American writing—the dark vitality of the pre-Columbian, contemporary magic realism, Gongora and the Spanish Baroque, Rubén Dario and Sor Juana—Cisneros merges the secret voice of the heart, the voice of Spain, and that of the mestizo:

One night over milpas and beyond the tlacolol, over barrancas and thorny scrub forests, past the thatch roofs of the jacales and the stream where the women do the wash, beyond bright bougainvillea, high above canyons and across fields of rice and corn, I flew. The gawky stalks of banana trees swayed beneath me. I saw rivers of cold water and a river of water so bitter they say it flows from the sea. I didn't stop until I reached a grove of high laurels rustling in the center of a town square where all the whitewashed houses shone blue as abalone under the full moon. And I remember my wings were blue and soundless as the wings of a tecolote.

(from “Eyes of Zapata”)

The power of this passage can never be paraphrased: its blending of the beautiful Spanish/mestizo words—tlacolol, barranca, tecolote—with the soaring and dipping flight of the English, the ecstatic trance of the voice and its eerie blue peace, the eloquent silence of the altitude, the moving wings. This is poetry.

Cisneros speaks poetry naturally, but her prose sings. Though we build into our aesthetic consciousness a hierarchical view of language—Octavio Paz, for instance, crowns poetic utterance as the essential human expression—surely “poetic utterance” is a cross-voice. It's true that prose is often separated from rhythm by the requirements of conceptual argument. But it's also true, as Paz himself admits, that “At the heart of all prose … circulates the invisible rhythmic current.”

Rhythm undergirds both lyric and dramatic narrative; and as these two rhythmic constructs inform style, so language releases its allegiances to genre. Thus it makes sense to teach rhythmic forms as they occur in all genres, following the path of that invisible current, the primary emblem of time flowing through words. A sensibility as polymorphous, a talent as multifaceted, as Cisneros' urges us to reexamine our aesthetic biases.

It has been crucial for Dove and Cisneros to ignore borders, to crosspollinate genres. The symbolist dreams of Rubén Dario speak to what I've been saying here: “I pursue a form that my style does not find—and all I encounter is the word that flees … and the neck of the great white swan that interrogates me.” We've all been interrogated by that great white swan—in our deepest instinctual dreams as writers, somewhere far below genre.

Note

1. Others like Michael Ondaatje, Mary Karr, Kelly Cherry, Denis Johnson, Adrian C. Lewis, Stephen Dobyns, Maura Stanton, Quincy, Troupe, and—from another generation—Mark Strand come to mind—but space is limited.