Dramatic monologue
 

I've decided to try to tackle a subject by means of dramatic monologue, and I'm running into a problem. So this thread is my attempt--selfish, but perhaps educational for others as well--to seek advice.

All the dramatic monologues I can think of this morning are spiced with extra color: Browning's use historical detail ("My Last Duchess" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister") and Hecht's use an exotic setting ("See Naples and Die") or the extra tension of illness ("The Invisible Man").

What examples can you point to, or what techniques can you suggest, that grab and keep the reader's interest in an IP monologue set in the now, in absolutely contemporary conversational language?

Maryann,

Not my thing, clearly, and yet there are lots of these. The usual candidates like Tintern Abbey and Dover Beach, but don't forget the outliers, like Hymn to Prosepine. Not in IP, of course, but a monologue nonetheless. I think the speaker is meant to be Julian. Oh, and, the blessed damozel (also not in IP) ...

More as I think of them,

Thanks,

Bill
(editing in, after having reread your question: you may wish to look at some of the poems in James Wright's Shall We Gather at the River. I wouldn't exactly call them DMs, but many are in IP, in contemporary speech, and they are certainly monologues...

Hmmm... may have gotten the book wrong. Try this: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch....html?id=16968
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=173010
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=171354
This one's fun: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=237188

Maryann, this is not as much pointers as it's research points. You can check the universally accessible anthology of dramatic monologues (177 claimed) here at Poetry Foundation.

This one from Ai is as riveting as it is strange -- or rather, employs strange devices -- and is in the present (though IP is missing ... as I'm sure it will be with most in that collection).

Cheers,
...Alex

Thanks, Bill and Alex--I'd forgotten about that category at the Poetry Foundation archive. The James Wright examples seem especially helpful. In an odd coincidence, the idea I'm grappling with features a piece of Hazel Atlas glassware.

Check out Frost's dramatic poems, mostly in blank verse. Also Black Ice and Rain, by Michael Donaghy. Hecht has a lot of them too, The Venetian Vespers and The Grapes being a couple more examples. Andrea del Sarto is another great one of Browning's. Not sure why a poem should be less interesting to you if it is historical or about illness...

Thanks, Chris. Those are all good examples, some of which I eventually remembered.

What I was trying to get at was the limitation I see in working without certain colorful elements. "Duchess" gets some of its interest from historical detail. "Invisible Man" gets it from the drama inherent in disease and the threat of death. I have a relatively undramatic contemporary subject and I'm looking for help in drawing the reader and holding interest in people who might seem boring--and also in creating a psychologically believable narrator. But all examples help.

Dana Gioia has written some dramatic monologues set in the present, and read a good one at West Chester last spring, about an encounter with a ghost. Unfortunately I don't remember the title - maybe someone else will.

Also, if you have some money to invest (or inter-library loan) you might want to look at DRAMATIC MONOLOGUES
A Contemporary Anthology, from U. of Evansville Press. This collection includes monologue lyrics and sonnets, as well
as the standard blank-verse format (and several spherians, too).

Maryann, I do a lot of dramatic monologues, some contemporary, some mythic. If you handle the IP in a conversational way, most readers will not even notice that you are writing blank verse. I'd say that the ways to grab interest include creating a striking voice, characterizing the speaker through what he or she says, describing surprising or moving events, suggesting that the speaker is unreliable, using intriguing metaphors, irony, vivid images--much as you would do in any poem. It can help if you have some idea of whom the speaker is addressing and why. Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology added some interest by having the speakers all be dead, addressing the reader from beyond the grave.

Susan

Maryann,

Finding the level of formality is important. The more conversational the tone, the more we may warm up to the character, but the more difficult it becomes to sustain IP--at least, I've found it to be more difficult. Also, how self-aware is the character? This question leads to the more complex one of psychic distance. John Gardner has a fine analysis of this in his Art of Fiction.

Distant : "Thanksgiving Thursday I destroyed the car."

Close: "Turkey stuffed. Snow. Skidding. Limbs slice my cheek."

Hope this helps. Most of Judah Benjamin is dramatic monologue so I sympathize.

At the risk of showing my ignorance, let me ask a basic question or two. What is the difference between a "dramatic monologue" and any poem in which the speaker is not necessarily the poet? Can a reader always know that he is reading a dramatic monologue rather than a poem that is true to the poet's life and experience? We've all read poems which seemed to be personal utterances of the poet, but it turned out that the details and the situations were made up. Are these poems dramatic monologues, or is the term reserved for a narrower class of poem?

Roger, I can't speak for everybody else who's replying (and thank you, Chris and Gail and Susan and Lance), but I'm reserving the term "dramatic monologue" for a pretty specific situation. A dramatic monologue is a persona poem--a character who's not the poet is being created or borrowed--and in general it's also that character's half of a two-person exchange.

In some cases the speaker is speaking to himself (and us) only, and those are soliloquies, strictly speaking, rather than monologues. But maybe that's a needlessly picky distinction.

Roger, I would venture that a lyrical or descriptive poem in the first person is not really a dramatic monologue, whether the speaker is the poet or a persona. On the other hand, I think that if the dramatic and narrative elements are there, a poem can be labeled a dramatic monologue, whether the speaker is the poet or a persona.

Susan

My understanding is that one of key points of a dramatic monologue (My Last Duchess is a classic example) is that the poem operates on multiple levels, that speaker unknowingly reveals more of himself/herself or the story than intended.

So the poet is winking at the reader about the character who is speaking in the poem? Which means that if even a careful reader conflates the speaker with the poet, the poem is a failure (at least to the extent it wants to be a dramatic monologue), because a "character" is created and not just a "persona," which can exist even if perfectly disguised as the poet.

Every now and then someone here posts a poem in which the speaker tells of a terrible personal tragedy, like the death of a child or a fatal diagnosis, and generally the poet discloses "don't worry, I made it up," so people can react without inhibition. I suppose such a disclosure wouldn't be necessary for a "dramatic monologue," because everyone is supposed to be able to figure out that there is an invented character speaking.

That's certainly one of the challenges I'm fighting with. If the poet uses a known set of characters, identified in the title (as Susan does with "Emilia to Desdemona"), the problem's licked. Known characters can also be introduced in epigraphs or in early text. Making it obvious that the setting is historical (Browning's usual method) is another sort of useful hint. Having the speaker be, say, female if the poet's male also helps.

But if the setting is contemporary, and the speaker is nobody in particular, and the same sex as the poet, then almost the only available hint that the speaker is not the poet is the situation of dialogue--something to indicate the presence of a second speaker whom we don't hear. Or at least that's the way it feels as I work! And that's why I'm hunting for additional ideas. I could just spell it all out in the title, but I'd like not to have to.

(I've certainly created made-up characters and un-self-aware speakers before--but, well, all of them were remarkably similar to myself.)

I wouldn't say Michael's point is one of definition so much as valuation. That is, the genre isn't defined by multiple levels and the authorial wink, though such are often present in excellent examples. I think Maryann is right that technically there needs to be an addressee and a dramatic situation--witness "My Last Duchess." I tend to extend the term to a poem with narrative elements in which the speaker is clearly a character; e.g., "Porphyria's Lover" doesn't really have an addressee, unless it's Porphyria's dead body, but I would still teach it as a dramatic monologue. I would say the dramatic monologue consists of the speech of a single character from within a story, usually to another character, which serves both to tell the story and illuminate the character.

I would say that the essence of a dramatic monologue is that the narrator must have a dramatic story to tell. This eliminates the personal experience of most of us, as well as all first-person accounts of generalized experiences, such as falling in love, being disappointed in love, and wandering lonely as a cloud.

Also, I think it's ALWAYS a mistake, unless you are dealing with a known "confessional" poet, to assume that a first-person poem is an account of first-person experience. I once wrote a poem in which the speaker laments her infertility. Unfortunately, several friends thought I was venting my soul on a personal tragedy,and I was obliged to explain that I was childless by choice.

Gail, I don't disagree, but I notice that people have great difficulty avoiding this mistake. We see it all the time on poetry boards. (Part of our excuse in that situation is that we all probably know too much about each other and have experience with each other's body of work.) Because it's a likely mistake, it seems like a good idea to help readers avoid it if we can.

In looking again at Donaghy's "Black Ice and Rain," (thanks for that suggestion, Chris) I find I have trouble being absolutely certain that the speaker depicted there is a creation. Part of my trouble is that the early part of the poem, before the story proper begins, is in language that strikes me as too poetic for conversation over hors d'oeuvres, which is what it's supposed to be. It's much more like thought than talk. It's far more interesting as a poem that way, but to my mind it leaves the situation less clear.

I can accept that, maybe, there is no one couple like the couple in the poem, no couple who were friends of the real Donaghy and who had all that kitschy art on their walls. But any first-person narrator's thoughts exist only because the poet has thought them first, so I'm quite sure there's a lot of genuine Donaghy and of his experiences in the poem.

Editing back to add: By now, others have probably found this page at poets.org with an additional list of examples, some new to me.

Finally resorting to the textbooks on my shelves (duh), I find that the Kennedy/Gioia "Introduction to Poetry" has this definition: "A poem written as a speech made by a character at some decisive moment. The speaker is usually addressing a silent listener as in T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' or Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess.' "

A number of people have written to me about my poem 'Little' whose subject is the death of a disabled child. I feel a bit of a fraud when I cannot, as it were, produce the child out of my own life. I feel as if I have pulled wool over the eyes of a number of good and worthy people. The child, Archie, is a conflation of three children my daughters knew at a care home where they worked. Only one of them died. Or has died up to now.

I hope, when my poem 'Tobacco and Boies' appears in Quadrant... Dammit, I haven't smoked for years. Oh well!

John, your example demonstrates how intractable a problem this is. If I remember rightly, there's only one first-person pronoun in your "Little Prince" and it's "our," so it's not as if there's a clear, individual first-person narrator. Poetry is fiction, but we're moving people to feel real feelings, and the brain just doesn't make the separation well.

an impressive model for verse monologues
 

Try Robert Lowell: 'Adam & Eve', 'Katherine's Dream', 'At The Altar' are fine examples of the mode.

Maryann,

Some of the poems in Local Men, by James Whitehead, might satisfy your criteria. Many of these are in IP or mostly IP. He used long titles to set the stage, e.g. "WHAT THE CHANCERY JUDGE TOLD THE YOUNG LAWYER AFTER A LONG DAY IN COURT" or "LONG TOUR: THE COUNTRY MUSIC STAR EXPLAINS WHY HE PUT OFF THE BUS AND FIRED A GOOD LEAD GUITAR IN WEST TEXAS." Not to say that some of the narrators couldn't have contained aspects of the author's own basic identity.

Mark

Bazza, thank you--I'm looking for those but so far can only find excerpts online. Mark, thank you too--I've found "Long Tour" and I see right away that, by contrast with Whitehead, my problem is that I'm making too much sense!

I thought of another example as well, and can't imagine how I forgot it: David Mason's "The Collector's Tale."

Hi Maryann,

I've been so slammed with teaching that I've just been a "lurker" on this board for a while now, but this is a topic near to my heart so I'm emerging from the shadows....

First off, what Susan said: use the demotic to mask the form, find the "striking voice," characterize by what the speaker says, sometime create distance (i.e. unreliable narrator), and as to the best literary examples, I would agree that Ai's early work, and the Spoon River Anthology, both volumes, are useful, along with Frost's blank verse short stories. Also, some of E.A. Robinson's Tilbury Town poems (famously, "Richard Cory," a first person plural dramatic monologue!) In researching my WWII dramatic monologues I looked to these examples, but also to other genres, such as Thornton Wilder's Our Town and to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio as models for representing the vernacular and having it be seamlessly literary.

My advice: find a phrase that really stands out as authentic speech. In Indiana, for example, they say "I shoulda went" instead of "I should have gone." A Frisian boy from the Dakotas in WWII in Studs Terkel's The Good War talks about running in fear "lickety-kite" past the empty houses of the Japanese who had been arrested and sent to internment camps--not "lickety-split" but "lickety-kite." When I read that phrase I knew I had a poem.

If you want to avoid a formal, literary feel, go heavy on the enjambment, and perhaps allow yourself some slant rhymes or rich consonance instead of true rhymes.

Don't bang the bongos with the meter, either. Look how often Frost will use the double iamb and trochaic substitutions to keep the meter from being doggerel, to keep it "natural" sounding.

I'm sure you know all this, but since you asked....

Be well, and good luck with the project.

Best, Tony

The Kennedy-Gioia definition is a little curious, it seems to me:

I can see how this applies more or less to 'My Last Duchess' but a little less to 'Prufrock'. In Browning's poem we are able to work out the precise dramatic situation: who the speaker is, who he's talking to, where they are, when they're talking. A lot of the fascination of the poem obviously derives from working out these details, and then working out what sort of relationship there was between the Duke and Duchess and then examining more puzzling questions, like why the Duke is telling this emissary all these apparently damaging facts... 'Prufrock' is equally fascinating as a poem, but for very different reasons, I would say. We're certainly not supposed to imagine Prufrock on a specific day or at a specific moment talking to a specific listener. And obviously the whole point is that there is no decisive moment for Prufrock.

I guess what I'm saying is that 'Prufrock' may be a monologue but it is certainly not (and is not intended to be) a dramatic one.

In his dramatic monologues Browniing always sets up the dramatic situation very clearly, usually in the opening lines but also in little touches throughout the monologue. Think of Fra Lippo Lippi pleading to the watch or Andrea del Sarto trying hard to keep his wife's attention.

I'd also say that a long poem like Hecht's 'See Naples and Die' is a first-person narrative rather than a DM. The suggestion is that the narrator is telling the story over a long period of time, rather than talking directly to someone at a specific moment. The same is true of David Mason's longer poems, like 'The Nightingales of Andritsena' and 'Spooning' and 'The Country I Remember'. However, the poem of his that Maryann mentions, 'the Collector's Tale', is an interesting case, because it's a first-person narrative that contains within itself a dramatic monologue.

Thanks for these further thoughts, Tony and Gregory, and apologies for my having distractedly neglected this thread in favor of working on the poem. Now that I'm back-burnering that, I'll be getting busy absorbing more of the very good suggestions you've all given me.

I agree I've never thought of Prufrock as the same sort of monologue as Browning's "Duchess," though it does open with what sounds like half a dialogue.

I love dramatic monologues so I've been enjoying this thread. A question: would Louis Simpson be another good exemplar for them? I don't have his books onhand, but reading the inaugural issue of New Walk, and Grevel Lindop's review of Simpson there, reminded me of him. Lindop mentions Simpson's fictional first-person narratives. And Simpson's language has that mix of formal and conversational that people have been mentioning here. Anyway, I thought I'd mention him in case it's a useful link.