Over thirty years ago, Porcupine’s Quill accepted for publication my first book of poetry, Scenes. In that period, I was publishing quite regularly in several literary periodicals, and was working on my doctorate. By the late 70s I began work as a junior editor in book publishing, eventually rising to the role of publisher. I was fortunate to be able to work closely with dozens of new and established authors, including Carol Shields, Dennis Lee, Marilyn Bowering, John Irving, D.G. Jones, Keith Maillard, Julian Barnes, John Ralston Saul, Barry Lopez, Robert Kroetsch, Eli Mandel, and Janice Kulyk Keefer. I learned a lot about writing from them. They kept me sane.

But for over 25 years I found myself unable to write. Then, suddenly in 2006, my block lifted and I’ve been writing ever since. I completed a new poetry book of linked poems, Taking Shape, which Porcupine’s Quill once again accepted for publication in Spring 2008. And another book, Birds Flock Fish School, has just been submitted to my publisher.

The structure of Taking Shape as a poem cycle is based in part upon the five parts of rhetoric, and includes five sections made up of five poems each. The rhetorical five-part/five-poem structure also has its counterpoint in the dialectic of the two-line stanzas. The use of the two-line stanza within a poem enacts an intellectual and emotional debate or dialectic whose purpose is to test the words, juxtapose and force them together in ways that will give birth to new shades and shapes of meaning and understanding, not unlike the enticing, alchemic process that occurs in metaphor. The poems grow out of a series of internal repetitions that simultaneously tangle and untangle themselves, each time trying to recognize things that suddenly change again in the second you think you know them.

I believe that at the heart of poetry is a philosophical discourse, enacted and ignited by both author and reader alike, that is both a flow and an act of persuasion. Flow is like the engine or momentum of a poem that can be simultaneously ordered and organic, rational and intuitive. Persuasion is like the poem’s GPS – that which is being described, given context or demonstrated, but which also is something of a two-way mirror that constantly reflects, as in memory, or sees through itself to another side. Together, these elements conspire to create an ongoing reality or sense of being, an organic process of becoming that is never quite complete, and that changes everything with the experience of every poem.

Ten years ago I wrote an article describing how the internet was gradually re-shaping and transforming nonfiction writing (not such a leap considering Marshall McLuhan’s work from the 60s and 70s). “The New Future of Nonfiction (What Fiction Doesn’t Know)” examined how everyday use of the personal computer, search engines, and a growing access to an ever-widening web of information through the internet revolution, were re-shaping the nature and methodologies of research, and that these were in turn having a profound and far-reaching effect on the form, content, style and function of nonfiction writing as a whole.

If search engines were like endless mazes, websites, on the other hand, seemed to act more like labyrinths, having various paths to follow that lead us through the centres of their subject matter, and then back out again. In tandem with the effects of search engines and access to the internet’s broadening scope, the ways in which we read, research, and write nonfiction also were being subtly changed and shaped through the design and metaphoric learning experience of websites.

A decade ago, nonfiction had a more traditional shape and content that was only just beginning to be challenged by a refreshing and potent mix of genres coupled with strong, literate storytelling. The content range of nonfiction was expanding in exciting new directions with books like Henry Petroski’s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance; the digital culture musings of Neil Postman’s Technopoly; the curious Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit; and the brilliant London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

What ten years ago was a somewhat modest, forward thinking article is today manifestly obvious to anyone who cares to look. We’ve even progressed into a range of like-minded books describing the effects of this digital revolution, such as David Shield’s Reality Hunger, Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough or Jaron Lanier’s You are Not a Gadget, all three of which also harken back to Jonathan Lethem’s 2007 essay “The Ecstasy of Influence”.

More and more these digital tools of the computer-internet revolution, and the limitless information to which they give us access, are bringing us to think and imagine and create in very different ways. Through them, we are being immersed in the very art and structural engines of metaphor.

The expanding topology of the internet, in search engines, on websites, now is moving so close to the very functioning essence of creativity that we can envision a day when we will hardly be able to tell them apart. But we will see these effects at their best and most engaging in the new nonfiction writing responding to the expanding horizons, reach and experiences offered by and changed through the internet.

Hard at work transforming the more traditional content and limits of writing, nonfiction writers are a new leading edge pushing against the very boundaries of form and function.

Today, the shape of nonfiction turns out to have no shape at all. Nonfiction now is an art more premeditated than fiction.