Poetic Realism in fiction can be described as a form of prosodic disclosure that uses techniques of poetic construction to emphasize the multidimensionality of the perception of realistic dramatic works.

                But to phrase it a little more simply, Poetic Realism uses poetic effects within a strictly realistic fictional situation. High Fantasy has used poetic descriptors to emphasize the ethereal quality of that literary form for centuries. One of my favorite writers, Joseph Conrad, used evocative and poetic descriptions and metaphors to bring multidimensionality to his fiction. By ‘multidimensionality’ I mean the layering of perceptual effects on the reader, effects that create a complexity of meaning and appearance within the intellectual frame of a given work. This is the stuff that academics endlessly parse in scholarly journals and secret diaries (and, unfortunately, over-interpret to an embarrassing degree). But in the best written works this multidimensionality is essential.

                An example of this effect can be seen in the following two sentences taken from my short story, “Visions of the Bridge” in my collection Ghosts of the American Dream:

                “At the water’s edge the wreckage rose like the crushed vertebrae of a huge ancient animal. Behind the wreckage the remains of the bridge held up the sky like long and twisted fingers.”

                At first glance this seems nothing more than two metaphors describing a wrecked bridge. Ernest Hemingway, of course, abhorred metaphors and crusaded against their use in fiction (at least, his own; perhaps because he wasn’t very good at creating apt metaphors, but that is only speculation – I’m certain he was sincere in his philosophy, though his contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was a master at creating apt metaphors, which simply means that two conscientious writers can prosper in two divergent philosophies of composition). But the metaphor is the life’s blood of poetry, and so the effect cannot be dismissed in fiction.

                The metaphoric comparison of the bridge to an ancient animal and to a hand give an ordinarily neutral subject a personification that suggests more than a lot of bent steel. The protagonist of the story, a nameless insurance investigator who has seen numerous similar tragedies, brings a human conception of his experience to those real objects around him – he must, in order to find some meaning in an objectively meaningless tragedy. And so the bridge is a creature, not an inanimate object, subject to the experience of all things living; but it is also a creature with purpose as it holds up the sky ‘like long and twisted fingers’. Throughout the story, and the thematic engine behind the work, a human mind creates various visions of the bridge in order to find meaning and coherency in the train derailment; but it is the protagonist’s impressions that create his own representative philosophy of his life and occupation, leading him to reflect:

                “The bridge is beautiful in the ethereal gloom, like an ancient ruin standing fast against time, beautiful, like the stone ghosts of Sumer and Babylon, beautiful, like the skeleton of the Roman Coliseum, beautiful, like the last days of a noble civilization—”

                Now the protagonist (and the writer) has taken the comparison to an exalted level, comparing, in elevated language, a wrecked bridge and the tragic deaths of countless people, to the magnificence of dead civilizations and cultures. And in so doing he has avoided the need to assess a very real and contemporaneous event by assigning it the same identity as bodiless ancient artifacts. The technique of using a disconnected narrative voice reinforces the protagonist’s need to detach from the pain of his living reality. These are the poetic effects that give multidimensionality to a work of fiction. Consciously (or unconsciously) applied, they provide a means of communicating a representative fictional world that possesses a depth not found in stories expressed in more conventional forms.

                Joseph Conrad was a master of this technique, as well as Tennessee Williams. That Williams was predominantly a playwright is of no consequence - the effect is the same, and he was brilliant at infusing these kinds of poetic descriptors in his dialogue.

                Poetic Realism, however, requires a certain restraint on the writer’s part in retaining the sense of the real – hence the second word in the term. An overuse of poetic effect can destroy the sense of realistic representation, that is, the sense that this fictional scenario could very well happen in real life and leave the reader with the prosodic equivalent of eating way too much chocolate. The writer’s artistic sensibility must be sharp, his sense of proportion acute, and his ability to properly revise his work dispassionately dispensed. Poetic descriptors applied without restraint usually produce the dreaded ‘purple prose’, or, in comparative terms, the ‘terminal disease of the tyro’.

                In my story, “More Light”, also in Ghosts of the American Dream, the protagonist is an elderly man dying of cancer in a nursing home. Though he is incapacitated, and suffering the effects of powerful palliative drugs, he begins to examine the only representative life that seems within his power to assess – his dreaming life, and this provides him with a meaningful umbilical to life even as he is dying. In such a story the poetic quality can easily be taken to the extreme (after all, I am combining the sensibility of a drugged man with the examination of that man’s dream-state).

                The opening paragraph reads:

                “James Robley woke from a dream of a decaying whale.”

                The following paragraph reads:

                “The room was the same as always—a window with blinds turned to let in the sun, a dresser containing his few clothes, a table adorned with a book in which he had no interest—and the bed on which his body lay.”

                The first paragraph immediately discloses the objective thread of the story, while the second paragraph describes the protagonist’s realistic circumstances in unadorned prose.

                The following sentence of the second paragraph begins to build on the poetic effect:

                “His body had no interest in the world, either, nor in maintaining its own civility; his body accepted the cancer gracefully, inviting the disease into his tissue, his organs, his soul.”

                This is a minor effect, allowing the protagonist to personify his own body, and to give it motivations beyond the objective consciousness contained within it. In fact, his observation suggests that his body, of which he feels he no longer has significant control, actually determined on its own to allow the cancer killing it to freely reign. This also suggests that the protagonist has surrendered to the process, feeling that his conscious will has no say in the argument of whether or not it’s wise to entertain a potentially deadly disease. His conscious connection to his dying body has became tenuous at best, and so he begins an examination of the only world that a bed-ridden and dying man can entertain – his own dream-world.

                But even within the protagonist’s analysis of his dreams the realistic component must be maintained. The writer is not given license to vary from the realistic component, even in a dream sequence.

                The following paragraph takes place after the protagonist has fallen asleep:

                “Robley stood on the shore listening to the cries of the sea birds. He was alone, and didn’t know why he’d come to the sea, or why the rush of the water was muted; all he heard was the call of the gulls as they pinioned invisibly overhead—the waves swept over the sand without concussion. He thought that the silent movement of the ocean was beautiful, but without the explosive sounds there seemed to be some missing element in the natural composition. He looked up to see the birds, but the sunlight blinded him. He turned his head away from the sun.”

                The substance of the dream is kept within the confines of realistic reference points, even though it takes place in the sleeping imagination. Now, I’m not advocating that all expressions need to be strictly linked to realistic reference points – imaginary reference points also serve their purpose – what I am suggesting is that the writer needs to be able to assess when the prose must be modulated to keep a perceptual balance in the work. Shakespeare was masterful in modulating his expression: his use of metaphors linked to character analysis was often penned as a composer orchestrates a musical composition. Read any of his famous soliloquies to see this for yourself. The burden of the writer is to labor to understand how to balance prosodic effects in his or her work. This is the ‘craft’ aspect of the term ‘art and craft’. It is a step above the ability to eschew unnecessary modifiers (those brutal adjectives and adverbs that ruin good work) and comparable to the work an engineer puts into constructing a complex mechanical device. It is the difference between the ancient Egyptians who constructed the first lopsided pyramids and the ones who built the magnificent and perfectly symmetrical pyramids that are among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

                The effects of Poetic Realism are greatly enhanced by an ability to create an elegant turn of phrase – and by ‘turn of phrase’ I mean simply the eloquence with which a writer can say something. A good writer has a refined sense for the musical concordance of words and language, and his ability to say something cleverly, insightfully or rhythmically enhances his subject matter greatly. Again, Shakespeare was a master at the turn of phrase: “The play’s the thing by which I’ll catch the conscience of the king”, “What a piece of work is man”, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death”, “The quality of mercy is not strain'd, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”

                Here is a paragraph from my story, “The Boxer”:

                “Heath lived in a small apartment; time had slowed within its walls to the point where the dust refused to settle on any of the furniture, but only hovered in the air and attached itself to anything moving through the room. Time moved through the air and became weighed down by the dust, and Heath was weighed down by the dust until all that he could do in the mornings was drink coffee and stare through the living room window.”

                Without the way in which the effects of time were modulated within the perception of a man living an isolated existence this paragraph would contain far less emotional energy. Not only is a theoretical construct – time – given affective qualities, but the protagonist’s psychological state is also described by this seemingly objective representation. Again, the effect was produced by the way in which the effects of time were described: the dust hovering in the room was a symptom of arrested time, and so the dust transferred this static effect from itself to anyone moving within its influence. It is these small considerations, unadorned by intrusive modifiers that create a multidimensional effect in fiction. Consider carefully how many modifiers (adjectives or adverbs) can be found in the above paragraph. The effect of the turn of phrase is enhanced by the purity of the expression. The sentence beginning, “Time moved through the air and became weighed down by the dust,” could easily have been written, “Time moved determinedly through the air and became horrendously weighed down by the uncompromising dust”. In order to insure the effectiveness of the realistic aspects of Poetic Realism a good rule of thumb to observe is that excessive modifiers (and even one too many) numb, poison and then kill the impression of reality, and thus creating a comic effect that can only be useful when actually writing comedic prose.

                But why do I advocate using Poetic Realism as a prosodic model for writing genuine American literature, let alone the Great American Novel?

                Because I believe that the immense cultural base of American society needs to be defined in such terms that best describe the layers of human motivation that we embrace in so many incarnations of individual reality. We, as Americans, are constantly reinventing our culture, and so our cultural identity rises like waves across the continent. The nuances of American culture and the individual philosophical beliefs of Americans requires an insightful fictional examination to use a means of expression flexbile enough to describe these nuances without falling prey to the cosmetic effects of popular culture.

                 That is the reason that I began writing fiction with this prosodic philosophy as my guide. Poetic Realism allows me to truthfully examine the motivations of characters in uniquely American circumstances that I would not otherwise be able to illustrate. It is a means by which permutations of the American psyche may be represented in the very real circumstances of our lives.

                I am also a strong believer in ‘story’; that is, the traditionally structured dramatic work that presents a protagonist trying to find some resolution to an intrusive dilemma. Who am I to argue with literary masters who presented their work in this way? Homer, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, all put their faith in this process and the result was the production of masterful work. I have nothing against more experimental work: but, as a reader, I am more likely to experience an emotional or intellectual revelation through an art form with which I can humanly identify.

                A writer doesn’t need an advanced degree to understand this basic concept: he or she only needs to be a little more conscientious about what they are doing, and, above all, to remove the ego from the process of artistic creation.