Poetry as non-fiction

After seeing this in library collections all my life it finally occurs to me to ask the question. Why is poetry cataloged as non-fiction? Is there a special reason?

Essays are also cataloged as non-fiction. I don't know why, either.

Well, for me, essays are written on a specific subject as the exposition of an idea. That is, you write an essay about Shakespeare's The Tempest. You set down a set of facts and an opinion or observation about those facts. Essays don't seem to fall into the category of fiction.

A poem, on the other hand, is an expression of feeling about something. That's not a full definition of a poem but it still seems to point it toward fiction. It is not that simple, of course. A poem may be about an actual event for instance. But still it is more about the poet's reaction to the event than about the event itself. The poet approves or disapproves the event, likes it or dislikes it. It still appears to me to point more toward fiction than non-fiction.

Also, poetry is an art, an act of creativity. Is creativity about fact? That would seem to be reason enough to make categorize poetry as fiction. The categorization is not cut-and-dried but even so I don't really see what would have put poetry into the non-fiction category.

Hi Xenchu
Yes, essays can be based on facts. But aren't they more related to opinions? Lewis Thomas's Late night thoughts on listening to Mahler's symphony is closer to poetry than any recital of facts. Other essayists like Noel Perrin, John Hay or David Quammen who write about the world of nature also approach poetry. They may include facts, but some poets include facts in their poetry. To me, the essance of an essay is the essayist's imagination.
BTW, the Dewey Decimal classification of both poetry & essays is very close together, in the 810's.
Maybe poetry isn't classified as fiction because it doesn't tell a story, but some poems - ballads- do. And a lot of fiction is based on facts. Maybe it's just for the convenience of the person looking for poetry rather than fiction -- so libraries & booksellers can keep them separate.
Maybe someone who knows can explain this.

Poetry is neither fiction, nor non-fiction. It is poetry. I would posit that it comes from an entirely different set of mechanisms within the overall language facility. Poetry is quite literally, the language of the heart, not the head.

MarianV: But the opinions in essays are reactions to facts of some sort. You are probably correct that it is a classification for convenience, but that doesn't convince me that it should have been done that way.

geneg: If poetry is neither fiction nor non-fiction then what tips it into the non-fiction category?

That's my point. It belongs in its own category. Three phyla, if you will: Prose (fiction,nonfiction), Poetry (epic, lyric, etc.) and drama (tragedy, comedy, etc.) All of these fall under the kingdom language. I do not believe prose and poetry are created in the same region of the language facility in the brain. Thus, while they share some tools of language: alphabets, pronunciation, syntax, they are actually different functions.

Much poetry, especially in English, play more fast and loose with some of the elements of language than prose.

xenchu, I asked our librarian at the university, and this is what she said:

Hello Theresa -

Unfortunately, I don't have a "pretty" answer for you, but this may help. Under the Dewey Decimal System, poetry is classified as non-fiction in the 800s, but I am unsure the original rationale without contacting a cataloger (there are catalogers in the library, if you would like an in-depth answer, just go to the library home page and click on the Phone Numbers link on the left hand side for Cataloging).
is that the 813s are the only place for fiction under the Dewey classification system.

However, most libraries, including the Main Collection at BGSU's Jerome Library use the Library of Congress (or LC) classification system. Under this system, poetry is classifed with the rest of the fiction material in the "P"s.

Thank you for contacting the Research & Information Desk. Feel free to
contact us again with any further questions.

Julie Robinson
Research & Information Desk
419-372-6943 or 1-866-LIB-BGSU

To answer this question, I think first it might be pertinent to question the authority of Melvil Dewey.

Secondly, I think we need a working definition of fiction. Is fiction a prose story? Well, Woolf and Joyce often tell as little of a story as a Thomas Hardy lyric, much less of a story than a Robert Penn Warren or a James Dickey or a Dave Smith poem, to say nothing of the traditional ballads.

Is fiction anything that is separate from or contrary to the facts? In that case, most poetry is fiction, in that it deals with truth, which is metaphysical and therefore lies beyond the facts. If a poem contains facts, it transforms them, gives them shape, and, in doing so, makes them something other than facts. If a poem is filled with facts, such as 2+2=4, and doesn't transform that in some way to transcend its abstract factuality, that poem is, sadly, not a poem. A poem makes everything that enters it, fact or no, magic. A really good poem knows how to cast a spell.

Ok. So is fiction that writing which deals with truth but lacks a regular metric? Well, a lot of Gravity's Rainbow, if you chop up the paragraphs, is pretty strict iambic pentameter. You find the pentameter line as a transition in Carson McCullers. So prose fiction too can have, at least for periods, a regular metric.

What, then, is fiction? Before we can determine why poetry is separate from fiction in library ordering, we need to have a definition of what each is. We also need to question the authority of library organization.

While it is certainly more fun to debate the definitions of each category, such debates are not so simple as to allow certainty. And, in all likelihood, the answer to this question isn't to be found through this type of debate.

What an interesting thread! I was astonished to realize that Dewey classified poetry under nonfiction. This must be a result of the tyrrany of the idea that classification systems should all be binary. I ran into this idea reading Aristotle in college, and it seemed profoundly mistaken to me. Look at colors, for example: there are 3 primary colors. I'm with geneg - poetry is a different category from either fiction or nonfiction.

Essays, I think, do fit into the nonfiction category, however many opinions are inserted into them. Generally, the essay form makes it clear that the author's opinion is an opinion, and any halfway good essay argues from the basis of facts. So while it is a different category of nonfiction from, say, a history book or a biography, its roots are still pretty firmly planted in the nonfiction category. Also, I defy anyone to find a history book or biography in which the author succeeded in completely eliminating any vestige of his or her opinions. The best do adhere as closely as possible to pure fact - but the world being what it is and humans being what they are, we can't ever know anything absolutely for certain. We have to study the evidence and then take our best, most educated guess at the underlying truth. Inevitably, a certain amount of opinion slips in. That's why one can't become educated in any subject by reading only one author's works on the subject.

I think what defines fiction is that the author (in the best case) adheres closely to psychological and metaphysical truths, inventing characters, details, events, etc., as necessary to convey the author's vision of these deeper than merely factual truths, even when the fiction is based on actual events. When a writer publishes a work as fiction, the writer is essentially telling readers to look for the emotional and metaphysical heart of the work and not to assume every detail is literally factual. Yes, there is most often a story, but some experimental novels manage to do without plot. (I don't care for these myself but recognize some have been quite successful and influential for a significant swath of the reading public.)

It seems to me that poetry is a third creature. The content can be and often is drawn from the same well that memoir (or even essay, or scientific fact) comes from but, as JMathews points out so well in some of his posts, if the person who inspired the poem was picking oranges but it works better in the symbolic context of the poem for him to be picking apples, only an inferior poet would stick to the literal truth and say he was picking oranges. And yet, unlike fiction, the form of poetry is crucial. It's not a poem unless the rhythm and sound and often even the physical appearance of the words is, in at least some ways, as important as the content.

Of course, the categories sometimes blur - perhaps most notably in recent years with memoirs that have included elements of fiction.

yes this is an interesting discussion

david

#10
A Devil's Advocate argument:

While I do make an argument about the apple and the orange and poetic unity, I'm not sure that only an "inferior poet" would choose to privilege the world over the world of the poem.

I think a great many bad poets do make such a choice, but there are also poets like Frank O'Hara, who I think is occasionally rather good, who make the same choice. The distinction, I think, largely lies in the poet's understanding what he/she is doing.

O'Hara's style is based on including the recalcitrant stuff of experience. He wants to pull the world into the poem, so he's got milkshakes, jai alai, construction workers and Gaulois cigarettes in his poems. Why not Camels?

Well, at a certain point, if we don't concern our poems with the world that is the world, if we only concern our poems with shutting like Yeats' chinese box, we start writing the poem of the mausoleum. There's a vitality missing at the core when we've separated our art from unruly experience.

This is what Whitman shows us. While Dickinson was crafting her exquisite little stanzas, Whitman was tromping across the page in buckskins, and there's something energetic, magnetic even, in Whitman's boisterousness. He's like a whirlwind, picking up whatever happens to be in his path and bringing it into himself so he continues to get bigger and bigger, whirling outward from being a writer toward being a myth.

There's an elemental power in Whitman, and in the later Warren and the later C.K. Williams and some of O'Hara, that is missing from the pristine stanzas of Yeats, Frost, or Wilbur. While I'm not saying there aren't massive problems with including the orange, I'm saying there are also problems with including the apple, and, personally, while I don't include the orange, I admire the bravery and the vitality of a lot of poets who do.

If we box ourselves inside the flawless stanza, we box out the world, and we nail the coffin door shut on poetry's relevance.

P.S. I suddenly remembered O'Hara's has several really good poems involving oranges. Fitting.

Poetry opens the door to the ecstatic, prose opens the door to the life narrative.

Now, obviously not all poetry leads to the ecstatic, But the ecstatic proceeds from poetry. Ecstatic poetry relies on rhythm, cadence, rhyme, repetition to entrain brain activity to perceive the inner self and world through trance states, which may be a form of pre-conscious understanding, a world filled with gods and demons, with talking animals and wine dark seas.

Poetry is an organic form of communication that predates prose and narrative by thousands of years. I would venture to say that as consciousness evolved in humans, only then did narrative arise which led to writing because the mind was tuned to poetry, and all the strategies for memorization associated with poetry were antithetical to prose and prose narrative.

"Speak boldly, my heart, our ignorance to display."

#13
I think I'm going to play devil's advocate again: I don't believe there's anything organic in poetry. I think emotions and inner states we often perceive as being intrinsically "poetic" may well be organic; however, I don't believe there is anything intrinsically poetic because to believe so reduces poems to clothes-lines upon which we hang the stuff of poetry.

I'd argue, in fact, that poetry is all artifice, though it is artifice that, as Yeats says in "Adam's Curse," must "seem a moment's thought" to be any good. The art lies in making the extraordinarily crafted work appear organic. This is to say: authenticity is a trope.

I'm also not sure I understand your argument about poetry and narrative. What poetry predates narrative by thousands of years? The earliest poems I know of are narratives: The Iliad and The Odyssey.

I'd also say that epopee in general leads me to consider the "life narrative" much more than "the ecstatic." Long poems about journeys with picaresque structures seem to me representations of lives led, not epiphanic moments, so the original poetry defies the idea of poetry as leading to "the ecstatic."

Of course, there is ecstatic poetry: Romantics like Blake, Keats and Shelley, and of course Dickinson, are great examples. More recently Plath is a great example. But I think the dialectic set up here is greatly reductive. I don't find Eliot ecstatic, nor Frost, nor Browning, nor Byron, nor Pope, Dryden, nor Herrick, nor Horace. While there is a tradition what could be called "ecstatic poetry", to claim that "poetry opens the door to the ecstatic" is to lop off the body-parts of poetry until all that's left is a beating heart.

Your sentence: "...as consciousness evolved in humans, only then did narrative arise which led to writing because the mind was tuned to poetry, and all the strategies for memorization associated with poetry were antithetical to prose and prose narrative" confuses me. Are you saying that after an evolution of consciousness, people started writing because the part of their brains that memorized poems had been lost?

You also seem to be suggesting that when people began writing it was prose and prose narrative. What about Horace? Virgil? Dante? Chaucer? Shakespeare? These were writers.

Is it, then, that the particular type of narrative that came about after men could write is antithetical to poetry? Dante's voyage into hell? The Canterbury Tales? Shakespeare's plays? The Aeneid?

I'm just not sure what it is that's being said: what type of narrative and writing, anti-thetical to poetry, came into being after "consciousness evolved"? Are you referring to novels? It seems you might be, but then you'd have to discount the aforementioned poets to make the point.

Sorry to be contrary: I've got a bit of the devil in me.

Actually, to get into serious Devil's Advocacy, I think the first writings may have dealt with mercantile accounts.

The issue with mercantile accounts makes my point about poetry and its memorization structures not requiring writing, and non-poetic communications without handles for memorization, and indeed so chaotic that memory would be nearly useless for the level of accuracy required, responsible for the development of writing.

I myself have no doubt that it was the advent of non-poetic communications that drove the development of writing. The only question I have is were these events caused by a human genetic response to the evolving complexity of social life and did logical narrative thinking and non-poetic communications develop apace. We have no real examples of everyday communications prior to writing. But thanks to writing we have any number of cultural foundation stories and myths in both poetic form and non-poetic narrative form extending into the pre-literate past presenting worlds of magic and chaos. Does this reflect the mechanisms of human thought prior to literacy? Were humans in some way less human fifteen to twenty thousand years ago than we are today? Keep in mind these myths as best we can tell were not originally narratives, but individual stories (probably related in poetic forms) of individual events presenting archetypes of humanity, cobbled together by literate editors into narratives.

To my way of thinking writing is the last great evolutionary step in the history of human beings. I tend to think we are in the midst of another that has been developing for a few thousand years, altruism and it is this that is causing so much turmoil in the world. Liberalism, or at least what I think of as liberalism often stems from altruism, while conservatism is mostly opposed to altruism as a sign of weakness and since altruism requires a certain amount of selflessness by the individual, it is easy for the self consumed to override it.

Anyway, this thread is not about altruism, liberalism, or conservatism. I just used that as an example of a major evolutionary development of humans. These things occur relatively slowly and under pressure. Remember, not all of the world is literate, yet either.

Fascinating post, geneg! Yes, we do have myths and cultural foundations stories that appear to be survivals from a nonliterate cultural period. And sometimes I wonder whether we may be less human now, in some ways, than the people who developed those stories, which are so richly symbolic of the human condition.

You're really onto something, I think, about being in the midst of a great evolutionary step in human history. This unrepentent liberal suspects the average conservative would howl protest at your suggestion that conservatives are less altrustic than liberals. There may be something to this, though probably more complicated than you had space to tackle in your post. I think conservatives crave order and security. I think they can be quite personally altruistic - wasn't there a study published recently that showed conservatives donate larger amounts to charity than liberals? (Though the statistics may have been skewed by the much larger scale of giving to churches than to other nonprofit organizations.) Liberals, on the other hand, believe we have a collective responsibility to create structures in our society that (ideally, at least) assure the basic needs of every individual in it are met.

Has anyone else read Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas? He comes to much the same conclusion about the world being on the verge of a huge evolutionary step, comparable to the level of change that occurred during the period when the various great religions of the world evolved or the Enlightenment period when the scientific world view supplanted the religious. He came to these ideas through a study of astrology applied to world history, so a lot of people think his book is hogwash, but I have found astrology extremely useful in my own life, so I found it quite compelling -- though astrological prediction is a highly imprecise art and Tarnas, quite sensibly, refrains from making specific predictions.

In this particular conversation, which i've had many times. I recommend a psychiatrist who spent his career with schizophrenics named Julian Jaynes and his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind

This is one of the three books I have used most extensively to forge my worldview. the others are The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, and the Bible, which if read carefully and without preconceived notions, does not, in any way I can find, contradict the other two. (touchstones quit after Jiulian Jaynes).

Yes, I read The Origin of Consciousness when it first came out, and it made quite an impression on me. I haven't read the Tao of Physics, but it may be similar to Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which I found fascinating. There does seem to be a deep link between science and metaphysics which we have really only begun to explore.

My father was a minister, so I am rather steeped in the Bible which, agnostic though I now am, I still believe is a profound work of literature, well worth study. Lately I have been thinking of Job and God's question, "Where were you when the morning stars sang together?"

Geez, you all stepped into some deep waters: and here I thought it just had to do with fact that the 813s are the only place for fiction under the Dewey classification system! (big smiles)

Margad, The Dancing Wu Li Masters tells much the same story as The Tao of Of Physics, but Capra infuses Tao with more spiritual awe at the implications of Quantum physics. Of course, it was written nearly 30 years ago so much has changed, but once you understand the world of the quantum there is no going back.

I like spiritual awe!

In the preface to Tao Capra says he got the idea while sitting on a hillside in California overlooking the Blue Pacific whilst engaged in a personal study of the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide 25. Having also studied in similar fashion in my youth I can certainly appreciate the spiritual power of the connection with the quantum world.

I never got around to experimenting with acid. They showed us the most horrific films in school, featuring kids looking into mirrors and turning into monsters, or jumping off ten-story buildings because they decided they could fly. I thought the films were stupid. Nevertheless, aware that I am an impressionable sort, I was afraid they might have planted the seeds of self-fulfilling prophecy in my brain.

It has its ups and downs.

I just have to enter a caveat to the statement that "Poetry is..the language of the heart, not the head." Yes, it IS a matter of heart, but I am what is called {if you will excuse the expression} a neo-metaphysical poet, and I find myself wrapping the heart of expression in layer after layer of thought, reference, connotation, secrecy, openness, misdirection, und so weiter, not in order to be difficult or arcane, but simply to find the best means of rendering what lies at the center. Anyone, everyone can feel; poety is the exploration and evocation of the interface between thought and emotive openness. Poetry is an effort to pin-point, while simultaneously enlarging the reality of sensation using whatever discursive tools of thought are available to the writer. It was not, after all, "I feel, therefore I am," but "I think, therefore I am."
Ok, off the soapbox! Beauregard

Delmore Schwartz wrote a wonderful poem about the tension between Apollo and Dyonysus in our writing. I have recently been studying the movement from the romantics to the moderns to the confessionals. Interesting trip, that.

#27

what is the title of the poem ?

david

#28

This is the poem: the line endings are not correct, though:

ONCE AND FOR ALL

Once, when I was a boy,Apollo summoned me
To be apprenticed to the endless summer of light and consciousness,
And thus to become and be what poets often have been,
A shepherd of being, a riding master of being, holding the sun-god's
horses, leading his sheep, training his eagles,
Directing the constellations to their stations, and to each grace of place.
But the goat-god, piping and dancing, speaking an unknown tongue or the language of the magician,
Sang from the darkness or rose from the underground, whence arise
Love and love's drunkenness, love and birth, love and death, death and rebirth
Which are the beginning of the phoenix festivals, the tragic plays in celebration of Dionysus,
And in mourning for his drunken and fallen princes, the singers and sinners, fallen because they are, in the end,
Drunken with pride, blinded by joy.
And I followed Dionysus, forgetting Apollo. I followed him far too long until I was wrong and chanted:
"One cannot serve both gods. One must choose to win and lose."
But I was wrong and when I knew how I was wrong I knew
What, in a way, I had known all along:
This was the new world, here I belonged, here I was wrong because
Here every tragedy has a happy ending, and any error may be
A fabulous discovery of America, of the opulence hidden in the dark depths and glittering heights of reality.

Frankly, I would much rather poems be "Fiction" rather than "Non Fiction". Non-fiction implied literal truth and that certainly isn't the case with verse. Then again, I suppose if all you write are self-absorbed verses about how lonely and sad and miserable you are and how no one understands the depth of your feelings...I guess it's "true" in a sense--or self-absorbed or navel-gazing or solipsistic twaddle. Sorry, I meant to type "memoir".

You clearly hold fiction in great esteem, Cliff (as so many of us here do). I've been having an interesting discussion in the St. John's Alumni group with a fellow alumnus who thinks it would be a good idea to eliminate fiction from the St. John's College reading list. Horrors! So I have been proselytizing for fiction (at the same time that I have been proselytizing against proselytizing in the Happy Heathens group).

Eliminate fiction! Horrors, indeed! Why is this a good idea, according to the fellow alumnus? I can't imagine my life without fiction; I would shrivel and die.

Count me among those who should be considered a "happy heathen". That's a great title for a group and sounds like one where I might fit in (and that's saying something). Happy heathens, unite!

Y'know, it's weird, but I kind of resent that "Submit" button I have to press before I post on 99% of sites on the internet. I've never "Submitted" to anything in my life (that implies, in one form, surrender). Why not have a "Send" button...or is that too obvious?

Cliff: that is so funny--I never thought of "submit" in that way. Now I will, though. Suddenly I can't stand the thought either. Oh dear, another thing to get miffed about...

That's why you keep me around, Theresa, to point out little oddities like that. I wonder who came up with the notion of a "submit" button. My wife Sherron senses some kind of shadowy political or corporate motive. Like they say, even paranoid types can be right some of the time...

I'm not sure I understand my fellow alumnus's argument. He says the St. John's seminar is for shared discovery, and implies that people read fiction in too personal a way for their discoveries to be shared with each other. This is interesting - Cliff, your question is provoking more thought than I had previously given his side of the question, because my knee-jerk reaction was simply to defend fiction. It's possible he thinks we don't really "discover" anything in fiction because it's based on an author's personal vision or interpretation rather than on fact. But people may be just as subjective in their reading of nonfiction as fiction. And certainly, I've had many, many wonderfully enlightening discussions of fiction with people who both agree and disagree with me about the meanings within various novelists' work.

Feel free to stop over at the St. John's College Alumni group if you're interested in the argument. It's not actually limited to alumni. You're also invited to check out Happy Heathens. It's a very polite group on the whole, and the perspectives are extremely varied. The most interesting topics, to me, are the ones on how and why we define ourselves as atheists or agnostics.

Ooh, I never thought of the subtle implications of the "submit" button! Doesn't it rather imply that one's submission might be rejected (as publishers so frequently do to us writers)?

Maybe that's why I like LibraryThing - my submissions are invariably accepted here!

"All submissions gratefully received..."

I had an interesting discussion on fiction and non-fiction with someone who describes himself as having Asperger's Syndrome. This person said they "never had time for fiction" and thought fiction was pointless. We went a few rounds before I looked at their profile and saw they had Asperger's. At that point It dawned on me that fiction probably does not make sense to many with Asperger's. Similes are useless, metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor, etc. all are pointless to someone who can only make sense of the literal.

Speaking of the literal, back in the olden, golden days of computers, when I sent a tray of cards to be compiled into a program, I was "submitting" the cards for validation by the computer as input. I think we have been "submitting " input to the computer for processing ever since. After all, we are submitting our work for validation.

What would be a better name for the button than submit? Enter? No, I think it implies movement by the one entering. Click? Maybe, but click is a sound. How about Post?

...or just plain "SEND". Not "Submit"--I'd drop a note Tim's way as a gentle suggestion but after screwing up (thinking my library had been wiped), I'm too ashamed to pollute his mailbox with more silliness from that dingbat Canadian guy...

40> Discussing Kathleen Norris in a small group at church, I mentioned that I hoped someday to understand the difference between metonymy and synecdoche. When they asked, "Why?" I replied, "So that I can die happy."

Robert

Oh, go ahead, Cliff. I'm sure he doesn't think you're a dingbat. I've noticed there are many Canadian LT members of particularly distinguished literary tastes and discerning insights. Have to admit, I've thought of your point every time I hit the "Submit" button lately.

Geneg, how does Asperger's Syndrome affect a person?

Okay, I wrote to Tim & Abby on "Site Talk" and brought up the "Submit" button. If they didn't think I was a complete wanker before, I'm sure they have that impression now. If this blows back on me, I'm blaming you, Margad and you Theresa for putting me up to it. Either we hang together or...

Rdurick:

"Synedoche" sounds like the name of a robot from a bad SF film from the 1950's. I have enough trouble with terms like "onomatopoeia", thanks very much...

Uh-oh. Now we're in for it, Theresa!

Synecdoche is a form of metonymy. Metonymy is referring to something by using a word associated closely with it: like "Washington" for the U.S. government. Synecdoche is referring to something by a part of that thing, like "hands" for people who help with work, or "counting heads" instead of counting people.

I know nearly nothing about Asperger's, I have known two young boys that have it. If I said something to them like, "lend a hand here", it was like as not going to result in a discussion of the mechanism of "lending" a hand as it was in yielding work. These boys could eventually teach themselves how to respond to such a request, but the request never made sense. When I think of someone who has this approach to the world making sense of a novel, I see what an arduous and potentially pointless exercise it must be to them.

xenchu just asked a simple question about why poetry is labeled nonfiction in some card catalogues. Now look where we are, talking about everything from submit buttons to Asperger's. xenchu, look what you started!

I just wanted to say something about poetry (all art, really) that was mentioned in a recent interview with Colman Barks who translated Rumi. Barks points out that Art can be about love, too: not just romantic love or sexual love, but about a kind of divine love. When I say divine love, I don't mean any particular god, but just that estatic or "full" feeling one gets when one feels connected. Barks quotes from Mozart who said that the ability to love is a part of what makes up genius. I like this idea that love is a form of intelligence. Barks's point is that love drives a lot of Rumi's poems and, no doubt, a lot of Mozart's music.

I like this because I discovered a long time ago that part of my writing process involves connecting to my reader in a way that I can only describe as love. (I'm not saying I'm a genius, mind you! smiles! Only that love is an important part of the artistic process for me).

Since I asked about Asperger's, I was over at Books Compared where someone added a new post to an old thread comparing Flowers for Algernon with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. The thread reminded me that the protagonist of Curious Incident was a boy with Asperger's and that Asperger's is related to autism. So, yes, fiction must be very strange to them - not just the mysteries of metaphor, but also the cardinal importance of emotion in fiction.

There's a very interesting discussion of spirituality in the Happy Heathens group which I think relates to your idea, Theresa, about divine love, genius and writing. Check out the "I believe in god ..." topic.

That feeling I get when I'm writing of being connected to a higher power (I have no trouble calling it divine) is the ONE thing that keeps me going, regardless of all the frustration and rejection. It's an intimate sense of being plugged in to something far bigger than me, dipping into the well of souls, tapping into the living, collective consciousness of the universe. A force that helps me transcend my limitations as a writer and, occasionally, come up with prose that I could not have created on my own. On good writing days, the hair on the back of my neck stands up, is it because I am in close proximity to something ineffable, infinite...and eternal?

#50> Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

On the contrary, mon ami, thank you.

Just goes to show how profound and mysterious is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction!