I was just saying to Tim that I'm not sure what direction to take now with these threads. Can anyone offer me some suggestions?

Maybe a little more about structure.

In your essay in the adjacent Narrative thread, you point out that "verse is often more cinematic than prose." Have the movies greatly affected the structure of successful narrative poems written today (particularly quite long ones such as some of those you've written), as compared to narrative poems written, say, a hundred years ago? (For example, do story lines now tend to jump around more, like cutting in a movie, rather than proceeding in a linear fashion? Are successful narrative poets more likely now to use phrases or images that recur in a poem like echoes, just as images or sounds are made to echo sometimes in different parts of a movie?)

Perhaps the upcoming Story Line anthology you mentioned will show some patterns regarding what story structures are now being used most successfully in poems.

In any case, are there certain set structures for the story in a narrative poem that you've found have worked for you over and over, or is the story structure quite different each time, depending upon the story you're telling?

I have a narrative vignette entitled "Patina", previously workshopped at TDE, which has been rejected without comment 3 times. At 42 lines, it's long but not exceedingly so. How about a "live-fire" excercise? Maybe you'll see what I can't and we'll all learn something useful.

Bill

WB: Post it here and let's have a look-see.

Bruce: I've just been interested in the narrative economy verse offers, the way the exigencies of a given form, whether blank verse or ballad, offer opportunities for leaving exposition out that a prose write might reflexively put in.

The cinematic technique of montage, or juxtaposed images, is an equivalence here, I would think. Look at a ballad like "The Wife of Usher's Well," and notice certain things like how little detail is given about the family yet how much is known by the detail given. How speakers don't need to be idenfied with "he said" or "she said" but are identifiable from context.

If you look at the narratives of Sam Gwynn and Pete Fairchild, you will also see that verse offers opposing opportunities for extending or enlarging the rhetoric of a poem--building climaxes in long sentences that accumulate power as they go along. This is obviously something a prose writer can do just as well, but I'd suggest that verse increases our awareness of the process. This latter point is, of course, less a cinematic than a syntactical point.

I might return to this shortly.

PS: I actually believe that both "The Country I Remember" and "Ludlow" would make good movies because of the way the stories are "cut" or edited, but then I'm a fan of a cinematic technique that usually doesn't work in movies because it's poorly done: the voice-over narrative. In the films of Terrence Malick the voice over is a wonderful counter-narrative to the image track. In the films of Kevin Costner the voice over is a cheap, sentimental cop-out because he doesn't trust what the images convey. In Andrew Sinclair's rather wonderful film of Dylan Thomas Under Milkwood, the entire text of the play is presented, and the images on film are an enrichment of it.



[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited August 31, 2004).]

Patina

“Oh, William, look! How beautiful!” she said;
and, keen to help, I also turned my head
to see the objet d’art that she admired:
a handsome bronze our gallery acquired
from some estate – two lovers rapt in one
another’s gaze, mote-dazzled in the sun.

“Mary liked this stuff. I never did.”
He was tall but stooped. His right hand hid
his trembling left; a silver pompadour
gave him a courtly air. Her pert couture,
her simple pearls, her much-too auburn hair
contrasted with her face, long etched by care.
Yet, they had that wondrous quality of old
couples to look alike, from lives that mold
the common set of mouth, the lift of brow,
even the timbre of the voice, as now:

“See how she adores him,” she resumed,
“and how the surface of her cheek has bloomed
with a glow somehow turquoise - and yet - not quite.
Their patina seems to come from inner light.
I love the way he holds her upturned face
as though she’s all there were of time and space.”
He held a lacquered box and tried the lid.
“Mary liked this stuff. I never did.”

She took the box, returned it to the baize,
then turned about to penetrate his daze.
“I’m Mary, darling. William, concentrate.
And please don’t dawdle, dear; we’ll be too late
to see our other things before they’re sold.
I never dreamed when you and I got old
I’d be the one to manage our affairs.
I envy you your world of little cares.”

From my desk, after a moment’s pause
to take a call about a Gallé vase,
I looked again to see him hold her face –
apparently an act of practiced grace –
between his hands and smooth away a tear.
“Everything will be alright, my dear.”
The skylight showed the pair in high relief,
his burnished poise above her lustrous grief.
A band of sunlight shifted off and on
his face. He smiled once more; his light was gone.

This poem, WB, has a lot going for it, and would seem to me publishable, though I don't know exactly where. I can imagine editors raising editorish objections of the sort we writers are always hearing and dismissing because we need to get our work done. The editor in me says that this poem feels too much like Browning, not only in the couplets but also in lines like line four that could almost have been lifted from "My Last Duchess." There's also something just a tad stilted from a fiction writer's point of view in the dialogue, and since this gets going right from the first line, the editor looking for the shock of the new (whether in meter or not) might feel something a bit stiff in the joints about this poem. Phrases like "that wondrous quality" don't help in this respect, and perhaps that smoothed away tear is a bit too obvious a signal, an easy way of saying "emotion" without producing it. I'm also concerned, though here it might just be due to a shallow reading on my part, that the speaker's reason for telling us this anecdote hasn't quite come through or quite paid enough dividends dramatically. Take a look again at Sam Gwynn's great "Cleante to Elmire" and you'll see that, despite the heroic couplets and allusions to Wilbur/Moliere, the voice feels utterly contemporary, the poem a bit edgy in the story it relates. The man who tells the story is putting his own life in order, as it were, by doing so. It's a crucial moment in his mind.

I guess at the end your poem feels capable but not dynamically new, not set apart enough as an experience to make an editor snap it up. My inclination would be to see what happens if you go deeper into the material and try harder to freshen the diction without getting precious. A contemporary poet like Michael Donaghy or Glyn Maxwell might be a good one to read in this respect.

I hope these comments are helpful in some way.

Dave

I appreciate your taking a look at this. I will certainly follow up on the reading selections. Sam's poem was within easy reach. I'll check out the others.

I was concerned that the wiping away of the tear might seem a bit precious; my aim was to put old William present in the moment in a way he hadn't been earlier.

I tried to make the narrator kind of chatty and fussy about details, but I see what you mean: we don't learn much else about him. He's a device to tell the story, unlike the Duke of Ferrara. I also see that the revelation of William and Mary as the former owners of the bronze is contrived; it was a revelation to the narrator when it happened but not now in the retelling. Funny that never occurred to me before.

Your remarks have been very helpful. Thank you.

Bill

Glad to be of some assistance. You know that fine Catherine Tufariello poem, too, about the couple in the museum, retold from an anecdote by Dick Davis. That would be worth another look, and another, and another......

PS: I've got a rather fussy antiques dealer in "The Collector's Tale," which is posted somewhere (introducing DM?) and might be of interest as well.

[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited August 31, 2004).]

Bill, I can remember commenting favorably about your poem.


Dave
I have a redoubled sonnet about Eliot and Auden which reduced the forum to a stunned silence. I am too kind to post it here again but I wondered what your feeling is about these old extended narrative forms?
Janet


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited August 31, 2004).]

Dave:
In Andrew Sinclair's rather wonderful film of Dylan Thomas Under Milkwood, the entire text of the play is presented, and the images on film are an enrichment of it.

On the translation thread I just referred to Benjamin Britten's setting of Rimbaud's Les Illuminations which is a magnificent example of the mutual reinforcement of two mediums. Any poet who cares about music should familiarise themselves (him/herself eek) with it.
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited August 31, 2004).]

Bill & David,

That is quite a response to the poem, Patina. Well done. It takes a lot of time to write something like that, the poem and the response. We all need more time.

David, two years ago at West Chester there was a symposium of first book authors, who read from their books, moderated by Len Krisak. (If my memory serves.)

When questions came up, I asked the only one. I asked for each of the panelists to quote a favorite line from each of their books, and explain why it is their favorite line. Len said, "I think that is the hardest question I have ever heard at WC."

I think only one offered a line, and it was a meant-to-be jokey line, effective but jokey, humorous. The other poets flipped through their books and squirmed.

It is a hard question, one I like. Could you offer several favorite lines from your poems and explain the line itself, how it came to be, how it relates to poetry in general, how it is your voice, how it is effective, readable and original.

TJ

I too like this question and thank you for it. I can be fond of lines that are perverse, like Auden's "and even then if perhaps," from a heptasyllabic masterpiece, "Atlantis," that I've written about elsewhere. But if a poem does not have a high quotient of resonant lines it's not likely to grab me, and I'm often taking private pleasure in little effects that few others will ever notice. I've got a poem called "Home Care" coming out in TLS that begins:

My father says his feet will soon be trees

This is something that my father actually said once. He looked down at his feet and said, "They're gonna be trees." Since his ashes will be scattered in the mountains among stunted firs and heather, he's right in a way. I used that line as the opening because it seemed to have an element of surprise, and it helped me set up a pattern of rhymes.

In "Larking for Larkin" I rather like this one:

Suffering always felt better when it was brief

Because it takes my natural tendency to the maudlin and turns it ironically. And it sounds rather Larkinesque, too.

From a poem called "Nooksack" that appeared in the Formalist I like the ending:

Snow me an island. Rain me a mountain.

Perhaps it's that derrangement of the senses I like there?

From "The Bay of Writing" I like the conclusion:

Music of everything I have not written.

That poem was inspired by a reading of Anne Carson's brilliant early scholarly book called Eros the Bittersweet, but the landscape referred to, Kalamitsi, a diminutive of Kalamus, the reed from which both flutes and pens have been fashioned, was once my home in a happy time, and remains the home of one of my all-time heroes among writers: Patrick Leigh Fermor. Fermor's tragedy is that his memory is sufficiently shattered that he will never finish the trilogy of books some have called his masterpiece. My poem is dedicated to Fermor, though TLS did not print the dedication for some reason.

I'll finish with two pairs of lines I like:

from "A Thorn in the Paw," a poem about religion that appeared in Poetry a while back:

Birds high up in their summer baldachin
obey the messages of wind and leaves.

I've always tried to imagine bird life, and was happy to get that biblical baldachin in there.

And the end of "New Zealand Letter" I like for its celebratory complexity:

this metamorphic world, tidal and worn,
rooted, adrift, alive, and dying to be born.

One of my students complained that I end with a hexameter in a pentameter poem, but the effect was a deliberate underlining on my part.

No doubt I'll change my favorite lines another day. But here are a few of which I am not ashamed.

Janet,
Are you asking what I think about the longer poems of Eliot and Auden? I wrote a dissertation onAuden's longer poems and could go on about them, if you like.

Dave, you wrote:
Janet,
Are you asking what I think about the longer poems of Eliot and Auden? I wrote a dissertation onAuden's longer poems and could go on about them, if you like.

I'm really asking whether you think there is any life left in older forms such as the redoubled sonnet's connected string of 15 sonnets, or do you think our modern aesthetic directs us more comfortably to more "organic" forms which grow out of our speech and film/video experience? The necessary virtuoso re-use of lines in the redoubled sonnet may seem like an affectation to modern readers.
The long poems of Derek Walcott are led by the shape of their narrative although they refer to older forms.


Unfortunately I don't own a copy of "Omeros" so I can't discuss it specifically. I have only read it once.
Omeros


I would love to know what you think of Auden's longer works.

Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited September 01, 2004).]

David,

Good lines and good comments on them. Thanks.

TJ

Janet,
The crown of sonnets is still being done effectively. One of the best works of Marilyn Nelson is her sequence called "Thus Far By Faith," and she's got one or two more crowns that I've yet to see in print. I actually think the longer poems will work best if they do have some formal buttress. For example, while most of Ludlow is blank verse, I deliberately used a sort of Shakespearean method of ending scenes with rhymes to create subtle resonance. Walcott is in a sense a model here for the admixture of formal patterns and freshly heard aural culture.

Auden's longer poems are all over the map. Unlike Walcott, he didn't really have the dramatist's ability to make characters and is more likely to make allegories, but what astonishing things he did despite that weakness. I think he's the most intellectually rewarding of all the modern poets. Here are a few quick sketches of each of his longer poems:

Paid on Both Sides: his early charade, is a fabulous allegorical drama about the divided self, the way private conflict creates public conflict. His use of Anglo-Saxon patterns to create a "primitive" energy in the poem is remarkable.

"Letter to Lord Byron": a delightful defense of "light verse" but also an early stab at the verse essay, circling through autobiography as well as a set of ideas about society. This in a sense morphs into his hudibrastic verse essay, "New Year Letter," which pulls in an extraordinary range of intellectual history as it tries to dissect the dilemma of a world at war (1940-41). Contemporary poetry is so thorougly imagistic in its character that the verse essay is incomprehensible to many modern readers. Auden makes it a lot of fun.

One longer poem I'm leaving out for now, because I haven't come to grips with it, is "The Orators," but for me the two masterpieces of the long poem in Auden are really "For the Time Being" and "The Sea and the Mirror." These both take dramatic or mock-dramatic form (characters, scenes, etc), but since I've never seen them performed I can only judge them as literary performances. Britten thought the former too wordy to be set to music, which was Auden's original hope. In any case, as a non-Christian I'm intrigued by how deeply I love Auden's skeptical Christianity in "For the Time Being." I think it has to do, really , with the way he catches so much modern feeling and modern experience in his ironic retelling of the Incarnation story. The Narrator's speeches are among my favorite passages in Auden, and his Herod is weirdly hilarious.

"The Sea and The Mirror" takes up that skeptical sense of self that goes all the way back to "Paid on Both Sides" and has wonderful things to say about the limitations of art in our lives when we face the ultimate things: death, etc. These two longer poems are veritable encyclopedias of poetic forms, by the way, and could be used in a class teaching poetic form very profitably.

Finally, there is his wonderfully weird long poem called "The Age of Anxiety," which frequently uses a more strict approximation of Anglo-Saxon measure as it relates a story both Joycean and allegorical about four people. The complexity of this piece is daunting, and I think it's rather marvelous while at the same time feeling that it's just not my favorite of the longer works. To call it a failure is going too far. It's just an acquired taste.

One might argue that some of Auden's longer poems, like Eliot's Quartets, are really sequences rather than sustained long poems, and that narrative, per se, is not his bag. Yes, I agree. But if anyone can be said to have made a sort of narrative of ideas, it's Auden, and if anyone can give emotional color to intellectual life, it's Auden.

The fact that I'm more interested myself in grounded drama about people does not prevent me from loving Auden's longer poems.

Dave
I will read "The Age of Anxiety" carefully and be back when I've done so.


Because I come from a culture that was , in my youth, more focused on England than on America, my approach to Auden and Eliot was a little different from that of most Americans. I think that the contemporary events at the time I posted my poem and the shared old world romantic middle-class socialist conditioning I share with Auden, meant that my poem might as well have been in Chinese.
Thanks for those more than interesting insights and reflections.
Back when I've refreshed my familiarity with the works in question.
I should say that I know and love the Byron letter.
best
Janet
PS: I'm reading "The Age of Anxiety. I find the prose sections rather deadly and never in my life have I been so annoyed by capitalised lines. Little gems appear but, my word, we earn them.

"The Sea and the Mirror" impresses me more deeply. "Prospero to Ariel" is rich. Surely the best of the plays and the most philosophically resonant character in any play. Auden is deep in Shakespeare's head. Prospero always seems to me to be the closest voice to what must have been Shakespeare's own voice and Auden has put it on like a costume and then starts to weave his own voice and thoughts through the other voice.
Caliban must wait. Obviously a complex prose monologue.
Ariel's Postscript seems the best poem in the piece.


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited September 02, 2004).]

Yes, I love that evaporating sigh....And what Prospero says about having to live without magic at this point in his life.

Take a look at the Narrator's speeches in For the Time Being. There are great things in them.

Dave you wrote:
Yes, I love that evaporating sigh....And what Prospero says about having to live without magic at this point in his life.

I saw a superb Italian production by Giorgio Strehler of"The Tempest" in the Piccolo Teatro of Milan. Prospero was Tino Carrarro, a great actor with the right commanding presence although not a tall man. He sent Ariel out through the auditorium into the Milan traffic, then, at the moment of relinquishing his powers he snapped his wand above his head--there was a loud CRACK and the theatre went dark. When the lights came back the stage was just an empty place with sticks and cloths lying about and Prospero was an ordinary bloke in shirt sleeves.

Auden has caught the same thing.

Thanks for encouraging me to read it.
Janet
For those who are interested:
Giorgio Strehler

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited September 03, 2004).]

Dave
If you're not exhausted, how about a list of basic reading for those who wish to develop dramatic and narrative poetry?
If the answer is:"Go and look for them yourself", that would be understood.
best
Janet

I just noticed this. One starting point will seem peculiar to poets: I strongly advocate reading fiction, reading all the fiction you can get your hands on. If you want a spritely sense of contemporary dialogue, try Tim O'Brien and Don DeLillo. I recommend the novels of Shirley Hazzard, Patrick White, John McGahern, and Barry Unsworth (esp The Songs of the Kings). I recommend the plays of Tom Stoppard and Brian Friel.

For dramatic voice and narrative in verse, the best thing you can do is read Shakespeare till the pages wilt in your hands. Read the Fitzgerald versions of Homer and Virgil. Read the bloody Victorians--all of them.

Read narrative poems by James Fenton, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Mark Jarman, Brad Leithauser, Marilyn Nelson, Sam Gwynn..................

Read all of Bobby Frost. Then re-read him. Read Robinson Jeffers. even when he pisses you off. Remember, he who reads only what conforms to his taste is doomed not to grow. Find writers who expand what you are willing to read and attempt.

Read all of Anthony Hecht, the one poet of his generation who has had a genuinely dramatic and narrative talent (Wilbur's dramatic talent went into his translations).

People who read only what they agree with in advance are not real readers. Real readers read everything, and I mean everything. I once met someone who would not read Shaw because of Shaw's socialism. That is a reader who will never grow, because Shaw is an immense writer, and I mean immense. If you are a real reader you will read Shaw and be amazed at his breadth.

Read Shaw, even when he pisses you off. Then read him again.

Read the fascist Knut Hamsun. He was a great story teller. he was utterly wrong as a human being, but even in the translation of Robert Bly, he is very good as a storyteller.

I recommend reading Glyn Maxwell, who will sometimes take some work for you. But read him. That guy is going places. Read Michael Donaghy--everything you can find by him, including his classic dramatic monologue called "Black Ice and Rain."

I am continually amazed by how narrowly poets read. Unless you read widely you are not really engaged in this business.



[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited September 05, 2004).]

Dave
Excellent!! I have always done and will continue to do so. I absolutely agree with every word you have written.

Many thanks.
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited September 05, 2004).]