In the early 1980s, I realized I had collections of related imagery, and I began to write about them. The images were charged in various ways. They related to uncontrollable natural forces such as hurricanes or passionate responses such as fainting. Still others focused on food (chocolate, citrus and fish) or iconic objects associated with childhood or femininity (balloons, veils, lipstick and fans). The images frequently appeared to me in scenic or filmic episodes. Invariably, I found I had a mosaic of images, conceptually rather than narratively connected. The finished work was unresolved yet complete. The set formed a satisfying whole.

Most of the work in my first book Only the Nude Can Redeem the Landscape contains experiments with interlaced or juxtaposed texts. Hurricane! Alex!, features concurrent texts. It joins a love story with meteorological material and thus runs hot and cool. In Dreams of Snakes, Chocolate and Men, the work appears layered because there are three foci. The images move from singular to plural and are cumulative.

Fusion and Image
The Romance of Citrus was seminal in that it led to a change of direction in my work. I felt an aesthetic attraction to the piece, which I was reluctant to call poetry, and began to systematically explore what it involved and to define its significance. From this effort, many related works were spawned.

The Citrus piece was submitted to over thirty literary magazines. In the interim, the content was revised but never the form. Suddenly three publications wanted it. (To date, it has been published in The Exquisite Corpse, American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late, The Stiffest of the Corpse, Slipstream on taped edition, Only the Nude Can Redeem the Landscape and Aires in French translation.).

In The Romance of Citrus, the conceptual scheme hangs suspended on the left-hand margin of the page, and to its right are stories that feature fruit and cities. The framework contributes to the cohesion of the piece. It also gives the objects integrity and a degree of humor. The place names have two roles. They function poetically as names and fictionally as signs that move the action forward, from city to city. I didn’t know how important this was to me until one space- conscious editor integrated the frame into the text, which destroyed the balance. The form keeps the relevant variables prominent.

It took years to articulate what was transpiring in the work and why I felt it was aesthetically satisfying. Some with a superficially similar form to my own were really using topical tropes derived from the content of their stanza or paragraph. I was doing the opposite. The content of my work came from the conceptual ideas.

Stein’s Importance in Defining Genres
After writing a series of formally related pieces (for example, Traveling Through Ports that Begin with 'M' Indigo Love Affair, and The Romance of Reptiles I read Gertrude Stein’s essay Poetry and Grammar in Lectures in America. In this essay, Ms. Stein discusses poetry’s intimate association with the noun and with naming.

   Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. .... Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns.

Ms. Stein related prose to the verb.

Really great written prose is bound to be made up more of verbs adverbs prepositions prepositional clauses and conjunctions than nouns .... the vocabulary in respect to prose is less important than the parts of speech, and the internal balance and the movement within a given space.

In fiction, characters move from place to place and events happen over time. To the degree that the weight (or sense of importance) rests with the noun, the work is poetry; to the extent that weight is placed on time-related/ scenic shifts, the work is fiction. If the weight is fairly evenly distributed, a sense of genre fusion results.

I’ve encountered a marked preference for either-or thinking. Most prefer to avoid this fuzzy area, in which weight must be aesthetically felt. It disturbs a pre-existing conceptual category. Fuzzy thinking, a Boolean algebra term coined in the 1960s by Dr. Lotfi Zadeh at the University of California, Berkeley, has similarities to the yen-yang mode of cognition. It deals with values that are neither completely true nor completely false. Here, I’m presenting a product with attributes of fiction and poetry.

Integration is an interesting concept. I’ve woven pieces with disparate elements. I’ve intentionally separated them and placed them side by side. I’ve also alternated texts. There are many ways to join concepts. Synthesizing and homogenizing have less appeal. In fusion, parts retain their integrity, their separate identity.

Genre Fusion and Essence
It seemed to me that if you could find the essence of fiction and poetry and combine them, you would have a powerful new form. In the first half of this century, there was a current that ran through all the arts-- to abstract out the essential elements of each art form. One might argue: what was painting except color, line, form, space and texture. Likewise what was literature? Parts of speech and other grammatical issues. I’m summarizing; the variety and depth of exploration was quite committed.

Gone was the sweetness of impressionism, the fire of expressionism, the zany political bent of DaDa and the dreamy, imaginative surrealism. In sway, there was a cooler, more intellectual approach. One must search for pure formal elements. Due to the beats and to a rising social consciousness in the country, abstraction proved insufficient. Concurrently, scattered language, visual and sound poets felt there was much to do in terms of space- time and language.

Some artists prefer to take things apart; I prefer to build. Nevertheless, with the work of purists to offer a base, ’m much clearer about what I'm joining. In summary, I realized, in regard to genre fusion in literature, that naming and moving are aesthetically complementary and exciting to unite. Conceptual and kinetic fusion provides a satisfying experience. Ultimately, I think this leads to the development of new genres, radically different from traditional epic poetry and the more linear types of fiction. The Web, which I refer to again at the end of this article, seems the ideal new medium for such change.

Fusion and Time
Whereas pieces in the Only the Nude collection originated from the direction of poetry and moved to include fiction, works in the subsequent book The Kiss came from the direction of fiction. Although several earlier pieces contained temporal variables, time-- a date or season-- became more significant in the second collection. Certain nouns can be used in evocation but also in context to denote motion. For example, place names, seasons and months can function this way. Looking at Paris and the Moon in 1922 illustrates this.

Carole Maso in one extended experimental novel, Ava , separates out sentences and phrases that might ordinarily form a paragraph. Taking individual phrases and sentences out of the traditional form and placing them each on one line, redistributes the weight. Here is an excerpt from Ava:

They were speaking loudly and in German.

They were instructing her on where to stand.

Move your hand slowly like this. A little faster.

Right there.

She sees the last corner of sky vanishing forever.

Right there.

Lines enjoy their own space and thus become more important. Presenting phrases with the equivalent of line breaks gives a dramatic, if not operatic, quality to the flow of narrative. The forced slowing of narrative also creates a sense of poetry. Yet the book is classified as fiction. The use of graphic space in work by Maso, Scalapino and myself is essential. Creating space or airaround text or textual passages, tends to create a meditative climate and focal intensity. The awareness of weight is essential in genre definition and in breaking form.

Genre Fusion and the Web
Now, I am pursuing the question of how to fuse text and image without losing the integrity of either. An obvious pitfall is to simply use images to illustrate what is being said. Are the image and text resonating at the same pitch? The balance rests, in part, on emotional resonance. The overwhelming power of inclusiveness, of trying to address everything is what keeps me going. I'm interested in imagery and text-- each holding its own. Divergent, tangential and oblique relationships are also relevant. I want the viewer- reader not to know if he/she is looking at something that is predominantly visual or textual. The weight must be equal. I seek the consternation of category.

Christy Sheffield Sanford delivered parts of this Talk-Show at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh.