Nonfiction begins with the disadvantage of being known and described as something that it is not: If you’re looking for fiction, “don’t look here” is the not-so-subtle message of this particular medium. Nonfiction’s history has always been about the dissidence between its grand illusion of narrative order and the reality it seeks to reveal, between the apparent logic, accuracy and connectivity of its reasoning and the information, knowledge and, ultimately, wisdom it wishes to impart.

In the last fifty years the nature, sources and inspiration of nonfiction have been undergoing a sea change. Adding to the issue have been the difficulties writers of nonfiction have had in adjusting to the increasing sources of nonfiction material that have opened up through the expansion of the internet. Early on, the growing surplus of data acted only as an overwhelming and annoying increase in volume. Without context, the data often had no direction or shape, thereby limiting its range of access to its natural extensions into meaning, knowledge and wisdom. About twenty years ago, Information Anxiety by Richard Saul Wurman, first gave voice to this issue, followed recently by Information Anxiety 2, which offers new insights into navigating this explosion of data.

But all the while that volume was growing exponentially, reaching into a worldwide range and depth unlike anything before in history. True, there’s a tremendous amount of pure junk out there – data static – and we’ve had to learn how to make wise choices. The downside of the proliferation of information can be a kind of paralysis of decision-making – what some have referred to as the tyranny of choice, also echoed in the groundbreaking book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Barry Schwartz), which brilliantly describes the daily volume of choices we all face in everything from gum to cable channels. One can be overwhelmed by a virtual tidal wave of choices in data and sources, far too numerous and beyond all reasonable expectation for the individual to have the time or expertise to adequately absorb, review, check for accuracy, or set in context. But if more information was becoming available, and more confusing to sort through, more people also were able to access a wider range of choices, giving birth to the flip side of that tyranny in the form of what James Surowiecki’s book of the same title refers to as The Wisdom of Crowds.

Out of this chaotic, fragmented, electronic cloud of limitless information is emerging a new kind of nonfiction. Some would have it that what we’re witnessing has more to do with fiction absorbing/crossing-dressing with the styles and characteristics of nonfiction. But fiction has been playing these kinds of games since as early as the 1850s with novels like Moby Dick, and in the last forty years with ground-breaking efforts like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The real transformation, especially in the last twenty years, is in nonfiction, and its raison d’être comes out of a quest to carve sense out of that chaotic cloud, to make of it an art of the real that both defies the wall of data as well as embraces it as a wellspring of an entirely new creative form.

This new nonfiction is very much the predictable result of the window through which we often first enter the internet; namely, the website. Take a look at any website, and what do you see? Virtual “islands” of information – words, pictures, videos, sounds – floating on each page that we must somehow engage and piece together like a story in order to know or understand something. We don’t “read” these pages in a linear order, but rather find the links that make most sense. The designs of these sites all are studies in the engine of metaphor and the art of persuasion, but with their constituent parts floating unconnected. They aim at enticing us to actively pull together the connections between these islands, and at leading us to make individual choices of direction and understanding as we work our way through them. The experience of websites is both fluid and intuitive, structured and completely without rules or roadmaps. At their best, their architecture and structures are dynamic and nonlinear, creating new cognitive models that can actually enhance, or change our understanding. Their effect is one of gradual accumulation, a rolling up of information: a new kind of story put together, in part, by the reader.

When a poem begins in our heads, it usually does so with some kind of descriptive imagery, turn of phrase, or metaphor. It jumps out at us from nowhere, or, as is often the case, emerges directly out of something we hear or read. Contained within this initial material usually is the thought that soon will become the poem, though at this point most of us really aren’t aware of it or even where it’s taking us; the poem forms around these first seeds, gradually expanding and taking shape. We collaborate with the poem throughout, always taking turns controlling direction and losing control, adding balance and subtracting disarray to the body of thought. With each new word or phrase, the poem lurches in another direction, sending a message to the other words that new adjustments are require to the whole. The best comparison is a flock of birds constantly adjusting to unseen reasons for movement this way or that; possessing the illusion of collective wisdom, the grouping really is responding to new and subtle directions communicated from the outer edges of the flock. Similarly, the way a poem knows what it doesn’t know, and becomes what it does, comes only after it has arrived.

THE WAY A POEM KNOWS

Something about the way a poem knows,
something that keeps us reaching into it

from a place of dreaming not unlike this.
The poem calls and sets a path in the dark

and light fields of our belief. The poem sees
the truth in the telling is not revealed in what

it doesn’t know, but in finding itself
released like a stream from its knowing.

Something about the way a poem finds
its place in our hearts, something that finds

the truth of what is meant to be but harder
still to say. Something about a poem that asks

and answers, setting loose the slow riddle
of its voice, something it freely confesses

to knowing, like the clear thread of this thinking
about to discover the way a poem finds its end.

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.