Currently, poetry collections are tagged as fiction/nonfiction in addition to poetry. Fiction and nonfiction are prose genres, distinct from poetry; poetry is neither fiction nor nonfiction.
Personally, this means I don't really track my poetry on the app, as it messes up my stats for fiction and nonfiction.
This also means that works of literary criticism have their genre marked as poetry. In other words, both a collection of poems and a work of prose literary criticism can be marked as nonfiction poetry.
The same also applies for drama pieces. Shakespeare was not a fiction writer; he was a playwright: he wrote neither short stories nor novels; he wrote plays/drama. That should be reflected by the genre when you have read a play.
This would also make for deeper accuracy in the stats and allow better tracking.
Respectfully, I disagree. Poetry, prose and drama are categories pertaining to form, whereas fiction and nonfiction are categories of content. A poem can either be fictional ("sleeping beauty" by Lucille Clifton) or nonfictional ("the lost baby poem" also by Clifton). Similarly, a fictional story can be told in the form of a drama (Hamlet), as can a nonfictional story (like The Vagina Monologues, as an example). One could debate/disagree about whether a specific poem or play is better classified as fiction or nonfiction and those considerations certainly add complexity to the conversation. But they don't change the fact that "play"/"poem" and "fiction"/"nonfiction" are not mutually exclusive categories.
I do agree with you on the academic works marked under poetry, but otherwise, the marking of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama as distinct categories without overlap is a marketing thing created by booksellers and has little to nothing to do with the actual text itself. And I highly appreciate SG's sensitivity to those nuances.
The stats and categorization on SG may not be perfect. Decades of archive theory tells us they cannot be. But this is one of those things they have gotten right and I hope they don't change. Just because it wouldn't be accurate.
saoirse_edits yes I would agree 100 percent!
There is an issue with poetry collections often containing poems with fictional as well as non fiction content but that aside restricting the definitions of fiction and non fiction exclusively to prose would be a big step backwards in my view. If a user finds the current definition too broad it may be a case for custom genre tags I would think.
Literary criticisms of poetry being tagged poetry should probably be reported whenever found with a book ticket for librarians to remove that tag and add something like Education or Essays to it instead. There may also be a case for Criticism to be a genre perhaps but I don't track enough academic works to have a strong view on that.
saoirse_edits I would counter this point with the fact that, were you to take a fiction course at a college, you would not find poetry in it. Nor, if you were to take a poetry course, would you expect to find fiction. If you go to a bookstore, you won't find poetry intermixed with the nonfiction section, nor will you find fiction interspersed with the poems.
I also think there are pretty significant ethical issue with labeling poems as 'nonfiction' or 'fiction.' Who is going to determine what is fiction and what is nonfiction? They're not published under that label.
I would say that play/poem/fiction/nonfiction are mutually exclusive terms: they refer to distinct genres with their own distinct conventions. The fact that we have hybrid genres (lyric essay, autofiction, novel in verse, etc.) is only possible based on the distinctions of these boundaries.
Additionally, as someone who has published a considerable amount of poetry and has been active in the poetry world, no poet would refer to themself as a fiction writer or nonfiction writer. Poets refer to themselves as poets, and playwrights as playwrights. No one would say "I'm a fiction writer" as that immediately brings to mind short stories and novels.
sonnetson As someone who just taught a poetics course at a college that did include a novel, short stories, and a memoir, I can definitively say that's simply not how college classes function. Especially not once you look internationally.
As for bookstores, you're absolutely right. That's why I explicitly said those categories being considered mutually exclusive is a marketing thing created by booksellers. It has little to nothing to do with the text itself.
You're right that it's not always easy to determine the fictionality of every poem but that's an ethical issue with prose works as well. "In Cold Blood" is published and marketed as nonfiction but that doesn't change the fact that its a novel that is interested in telling a compelling story over reporting the facts and thus, includes several fictional sections. Many would consider it fiction. And your ethical issue about categorizing poems belongs to that novel as well. Like I already said, one could debate at length about specific texts and their relationship to fictionality. But that debate belongs to texts in poetry as well as prose.
And since SG categorization is about books/texts, not people, how authors identify is beside the point. I'm active in the poetry world as well, as a poet, an editor, and as a translator. People identify all sorts of ways. I once reviewed a book of Lovecraftian poetry by a poet who self-identifies as a horror-SciFi poet. Poets understand how form and content need to operate in relationality without collapsing into each other. But like I said, it doesn't matter because this categorization is about texts.
saoirse_edits I also teach collegiately; at no university I have attended or taught at would works of fiction or nonfiction be included in a class on poetry—unless it were a hybrid genre piece in which the hybridity of the text were a topic of discussion. Look at any MFA program: most will divide speciality into creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry; those that don't have the additional categories or playwriting or screenwriting.
It's beyond bookselling. A poet does not have the expertise to teach a class on fiction writing, nor does a poet have the expertise to teach a course on nonfiction. At their very level of construction they are meaningfully distinct. It goes beyond merely formal distinctions—each genre has its own distinct forms, but also distinct relationships with truth. There is also, of course, the fact that poetry is a traditionally oral form in a distinct way from fiction: poetry is written for the ear and the voice.
Furthermore, how does one square lyric with fiction and nonfiction? In many cases it is simply a speech act—neither a work of nonfiction or fiction. It is invented, but all writing, fiction or nonfiction or anything else, is invented. This is similarly important for plays which are scripts for performance, a totally distinct category from fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.