Form And Narrative - Online Poetry Symposium | Poetry at Able Muse | Symposium Issue

POETRY SYMPOSIUM

Form And Narrative

Panelists:
R. S. Gwynn, Rachel Hadas, Mark Jarman,
A. E. Stallings and Diane Thiel

Moderator: Alex Pepple

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Form and Narrative

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Closing Thoughts

Panelist	Topic Discussions
A. E. Stallings	I'd like to address a question to Mark Jarman. I was intrigued with your comments about the recognition of the narrative element at West Chester. As you rightfully point out, narrative poetry need not be metrical; though you suggest that in previous years at West Chester, this seemed to be a factor in recognizing narrative poets. I'm interested to hear more of your thoughts on this issue, and if you might address what you feel is to be gained by a conference that addresses both. Is there any intrinsic connection between form and narrative? How might the conference better serve its dual mission? I'd love to hear the thoughts of others about this too. I found the issue a bit confusing. OK, that is about four questions, actually. Apologies.
Mark Jarman	In answer to A. E. Stallings' question, I certainly don't want to be confusing. But consider the title of the conference. Why is form a separate entity from narrative? I was simply pointing out, though apparently not clearly, that in the those older poets the conference has chosen to honor, the emphasis, until Louis Simpson, has been on poets who wrote in form, i.e. metrical verse. We all know that Simpson is a master of metrical verse, but for the past 25 or 30 years, he has written his particular brand of free verse and focused on telling stories in that form. He has written narrative poetry. I was very happy to see Simpson the conference's honored poet, and wanted to express the hope that the conference would continue to expand its notion of form. But I can see how narrative as a form might be confusing. So, I want to shift gears, because of a recent book by Ellen Bryant Voigt called The Flexible Lyric in which she argues that narrative like lyric should be considered a structural rather than a formal matter. This interests me very much, because it points to what may happen inside a sonnet or a ballad, for example. That is to say, a sonnet may be narrative and a ballad may be lyric, not because the form is inherently one way or the other, but because of other considerations. I would like to see the West Chester Conference recognize these deeper, structural potentials. Otherwise, the conference is simply going to recycle the same issues over and over again.
A. E. Stallings	Mark (if I may), I'd like to pose another question (unrelated to the first). I wonder if you'd address the special concerns and issues (if any) of successful religious poetry. And maybe address why you chose the sonnet, and how that choice affected your explorations? (Alicia)
Mark Jarman	I imagine what makes a successful religious poem, Alicia, is closely related to what makes any poem successful. It makes language fresh and memorable. The problem, I guess, for a religious poem is that a particular kind of language is associated with religious feeling and thought. In the European tradition, which I will assume is our tradition, it is the language of the Bible, specifically the early 17th century English of the King James Version. But it is also liturgical language, from both Protestant and Catholic faiths. All of it highly charged and very difficult to alter. The poets of faith that I admire, Donne and Herbert, for example, prize invention and original metaphor, so that their poems, which express orthodox belief, succeed because a reader need not share that belief to read and be moved by them. To me, that is the key thing, especially in our time. When I set out to write the poems in Questions for Ecclesiastes and Unholy Sonnets, I wanted to write a devotional poetry without assuming the reader would share my beliefs. So I tried to write against the grain of orthodoxy and to struggle with the connotations of religious language. That's what I tried to do, and I do not know if I have succeeded at all. A poet like R. S. Thomas, writing out of the experience of 60 years as an Anglican priest in Wales, can write about the human condition of his parishioners as if to inform God of their suffering. His religious poetry succeeds for other reasons, partly because of its plain spoken authority. The sonnet form occurred to me because I was reading Donne's Holy Sonnets, and I tried writing versions or responses to them. Actually that exercise didn't last very long. What I discovered was that the sonnet form itself provided an intensity of focus like prayer or daily devotion. Though I wrote the sonnets in Questions for Ecclesiastes and Unholy Sonnets over the past 10 years, always in the writing of them, there was a kind of dailiness, true of writing any poem of course, in which the focus was both some kind of religious feeling I hoped to address and the execution of the form itself, in which I did try for novelty and surprise, invention and originality. In the end the sonnets are a record, of sorts, a kind of journal. I know this is a long-winded reply, but actually I have tried to be brief!

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