It seems to me that the best narrative poems are ones which don't just "give an accounting" of an event or experience -- in fact, I think you can almost bet that when something happens in real life that makes you think, "Wow, this is such a great story, I've got to write a poem about it" -- or a novel, for that matter -- the resulting poem or novel is going to be lousy. As Clay correctly implies, poetry isn't journalism -- it is artifice, and it has to succeed as the artifice it is, if that makes any sense.
For instance, I remember David Mason's saying that that long poem he read at West Chester had been a problem for years and years -- he had received this amazing story, and had kept trying to write it as a poem, and it just wasn't working, until at last (and forgive me, David, if I'm not remembering this right), he came up with a voice -- a separate persona -- to tell the story, and also put it into "rhyme and stuff." I would guess that those two things -- inventing a character to tell the story, and thus distancing himself from it and making it more of a fiction; and focusing on the technical problems (which maybe shifted the story itself to the background for a while) -- made the poem come together as a poem, and not just as "this really cool story in lines."
I also think that literal details -- the color of her dress, the time of year, the name of the town, the names of the people involved -- are completely up for grabs. A poem -- I think -- has no obligation to be faithful to those kinds of particulars, and it's probably better for the poem if it isn't (especially if "January" sounds better in a line than "March"). But the truth of what happened -- one friend betraying another, the emptiness after someone dies, etc -- I think there's an obligation to be faithful to that. Although I don't know -- I remember once hearing Brad Leithauser read a poem about the night his daughter was conceived -- literal daughter, here on earth in the flesh -- in which he changed the entire scenario. Instead of wherever it was, he made it happen in a cabin in the woods, and I remember thinking that that was just weird. What, the actual event wasn't memorable enough? I just couldn't see the point, especially when writing about a person so close to him, in utterly fabricating an event so closely connected to that person. I mean, not that the event itself was fabricated, obviously -- but the cabin didn't seem in the least metaphorical. It sounded as though he just thought it sounded better to be having sex in a cabin in the woods than in whatever setting this particular sex had taken place in real life. As I say, I couldn't see the point -- although this was a long time ago, and if I read the poem again I might see a point . . .
Oh well . . . a good question, though, Clay. Thanks for bringing it up.
Sally
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