[David Mason]

I'm going to try to paste in here an "Afterword" I've done concerning narrative verse to go with my verse novel, Ludlow, part of which will appear in the Fall Hudson Review. I apologize in advance for any formatting problems that might result in this pasting:

AFTERWORD

Fiction, Fact, and Verse


"For one reads what one likes--yet one writes
not what one would like to write, but what one is
able to write."
-Jorge Luis Borges


The story of Ludlow has lived in my marrow for forty years, and I tell it now because it feels ripe and I feel ready. I knew it was a story long before I told it, long before I even did research on the historical facts. I knew it when, as a boy, I first laid eyes on the dry mesas north of Trinidad, Colorado. I have made my experience and that of my family part of the story, which freed me to change focus at will, move about my imagined landscape with greater flexibility than I had attempted in earlier narratives. What excited me about this story was not any political agenda, but the elements that have always obsessed me--family, landscape, immigration, language. It was already part of my life's work before I had written a line or found myself inventing a girl named Luisa Mole.
As in another narrative poem of mine, The Country I Remember (1996), this work braids fact and fiction the way an historical novel would do. There is far more fiction than fact, and "facts are not the story," as I say in the text. When The Country I Remember was first published, one critic assumed that I had just set down family stories in verse, as if he could not imagine a poet actually inventing characters as well as scene-building details. Most of that work is fiction, not only in the sense of being made up, but also in the techniques employed. The same is true of Ludlow, though of course several characters and events are based upon fact. Friends have asked me to set the record straight--what is history, what fiction?--and I will do so briefly here.
The one major character based upon historical fact is of course Louis Tikas, or Ilias Spantidakis, and I have made no secret of my debt to Zeese Papanikolas's book, Buried Unsung. That book gave me a great many details and was itself inspiring in its prose style and interrogative method. The arc of Louis's story as I have given it here owes much to Papanikolas and other writers, though I have also felt free to imagine Louis's mind, using my own experience of having lived in Greece. I even gave him a sex life. Though there really was a Pearl Jolly and though rumors abounded about her and Tikas, we don't in fact know they were lovers. We do know that Pearl was uncommonly brave during the events at Ludlow, and we know the gist of how Louis died that night. For readers who would seek more of his life, I cannot recommend Papanikolas's book highly enough; it is a brilliant and deeply moving investigation.
John Lawson was real--and a real hero, as far as I am concerned. His betrayal by the U. M. W. is one of the union's more disgraceful chapters. My scenes with Lawson are largely invented or "reimagined" from sketchy facts. Likewise Karl Linderfelt, who was if anything more a racist son of a bitch than I have painted here. Pat Hamrock was real, as was Governor Ammons, as was Ethelbert Stewart. General John Chase, accused of corruption, was forced to resign from the militia in 1916 and died two years later. Frank Snyder and the other Ludlow victims are all given their real names in my account. Those names appear on the monument at Ludlow, which gives Tikas's age incorrectly as 30. The monument was vandalized in the spring of 2003--apparently what it stands for still gets under some people's skin. Jeff "King" Farr was forced out of office not long after the massacre, and has passed into legend--a corrupt sheriff suitable for Hollywood. And of course Mother Jones was real. Even her lies were real. Her highly colorful autobiography is worth reading. She really was held under guard at a Trinidad hospital. There really was a women's march in protest where General Chase ordered a ridiculous charge and fell off his horse.
Many of these events did take place as I have recounted them. The Death Special really existed and really opened fire on miners more than once. The Baldwin Felts detectives were at least as brutal as I have made them here. The shootings in and around Trinidad and Walsenburg really took place. My job, though, was to make events comprehensible to the minds of my characters, to give them some "ground sense." I wanted to use the drive, economy and rhythms of verse to make a compelling version of a story I could not get out of my system. The fact that I have spent much of my life in southern Colorado, where my family goes back four or five generations, certainly did not hurt. Nor did it hurt that many of my family members loved to tell stories. The voices of my grandfather Abraham and his four sons still sound in my head. They are among the most powerful influences on my writing life--as powerful as any book. It was my Uncle Tom who first gave me The Great Coalfield War by George McGovern and Leonard Guttridge. And my Uncle Frank was a veritable fount of detail, much of which, alas, had to be pruned away for the sake of narrative compression.
A minor character in my book, because I wanted to focus most on ordinary people where I could give imagination free reign, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was of course a major player in all these events, though he seems to have been ignorant of the hardships of his employees. He reminds me of other people who live life by a theory more than by experience. His laudable idea that people ought to be free and independent of collective bargaining could only have been held by a man ignorant of the violence and injustice of people's actual lives. I've heard of others who wanted life to conform to a theory, and Rockefeller was certainly not the worst of them. They're usually just wrong, rather than wrong and dangerous. Rockefeller's ignorance was dangerous to a lot of people, but to give him credit, he had already established philanthropic credentials with the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, well before the massacre. In 1915 he toured the southern coal fields with his friend, the Canadian politician Mackenzie King, who had more experience with labor relations and helped Rockefeller establish better communications between labor and management. King was also a more openly gregarious man, and at a gathering in the town of Sopris he got Rockefeller dancing with the miners' wives, which proved to be good public relations. Many years later, Rockefeller acknowledged having learned much about humanity from King, who had gone on to become Prime Minister of Canada.
One doesn't want all the historical context in a work of fiction, of course--just enough to give the story some legs to stand on and to acknowledge the truth, such as it is. Most other characters in Ludlow are invented: Luisa Mole, her parents, the MacIntosh family, the Reeds, Cash, Lefty, the women of the camp, the Scholar and Dimitris. I'll admit to using family photographs to help me picture the Reeds, but they are otherwise quite unlike my great-grandfather, George Mason, and his tribe.

*

Anyone who writes narrative verse will confront a version of the following question: Why didn't you just write it in prose? The assumption underlying this question is that prose is the proper medium for storytelling. After all, no one really takes verse seriously any more except for the poets, adherents of a counterculture of one sort or another. Prose is thought to be more lucid and true to the tale--easier to read, closer to how people really understand life, etc.
This, I would argue, is an impoverished view.
It's not just that I have literary history on my side and can cite vital narratives in verse from Homer to Frost. It's not just the perpetual popularity of new translations of ancient works, or that my own generation has seen a resurgence of interest in narrative and dramatic verse, from figures like Anthony Hecht and Louis Simpson to Vikram Seth, Andrew Hudgins, Mark Jarman, Marilyn Nelson, Rita Dove, Robert McDowell, Sydney Lea, Brad Leithauser--a woefully incomplete list, to be sure, though it does include some of our ablest contemporary poets. The fact that narrative verse continues to be written does not entirely justify it as an art form, or so many literary editors might claim. Narrative verse may well be popular when performed, but few are eager to publish it. For one thing, it takes more space than lyric poetry. It's like a rapacious tree that crowds out smaller plants.
There have been champions of narrative verse, including the poets listed above and the editors of a few journals such as The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, and The New England Review. These angels are just like anyone brave enough to publish imaginative writing these days, whether prose or verse. We live now in a culture of nonfiction and the even more popular media of film and music. A few good novels can break through to a popular audience now and then; a few mass market periodicals still publish fiction, and one can't help relishing the fact that Seamus Heaney's vigorous version of Beowulf was a bestseller. But I would still admit that writing stories in any form is a risky business, and writing them in verse is positively quixotic.
Nevertheless, I do not see why this must be so. To begin with, verse is often more cinematic than prose in its rhythms and images, its narrative economy. When I worked in the movie business in the 1980s I met a film editor who was also a poet. Over drinks in a Beverly Hills bar, we discussed similarities inherent in the two media, the poem and the movie, and I came away feeling that one was more popular than the other only because it was usually more passive. Reading takes more effort. Nowadays, teaching difficult poems by, say, Eliot, I often begin by asking students to make an imaginary film in their heads as they hear the poem performed; it's remarkable how much understanding can take place before one gets down to the usual business of analysis. Poems can speak rather more directly than they are sometimes given credit for.
Narrative verse is not inherently harder to read than narrative prose. In the right hands, verse actually has more clarity, drive and economy than prose, and it can offer literary pleasures of a sort unavailable in other genres. Take a look at the old Scottish border ballads--poems like "The Wife of Usher's Well" and "Sir Patrick Spens--and you will see how a simple stanza allows the poet to eject reams of exposition. Speakers of dialogue don't need to be identified but are inferred from context. And that same quatrain stanza can be used for lyric repetition, a rhythmic underscoring of tones and themes. One can see these techniques at work in a more recent poem such as Elizabeth Bishop's "The Burglar of Babylon," as good a ballad as any I know.
Look at the short narratives of Robert Frost--poems like "Home Burial," "Out, Out--" and "The Witch of Coös" and you will see how blank verse technique can be used to dramatic effect. A line break can illuminate psychology, put an extra twist in dramatic tension, impressing tonal shifts more subtly than sentences alone. There is a culture of verse that is different from the culture of prose, but just as capable of engaging great subjects at length.
Of course "Home Burial" is a mere 115 lines long, though every bit as intense as the best Pinter play. What happens to that intensity when you move to book-length narratives? The truth is that it falters on occasion, just as prose novels have their peaks and valleys. Rising and falling language, like rising and falling action, is part of the experience of the longer work. Poe famously objected to the long poem on these very grounds, suggesting that the quotient of poetry would be diminished the longer the poet kept going. He had a point. Homer apparently nodded. Even Milton gets a bit much now and then, doesn't he? I would be lying if I insisted that lyric intensity could be sustained indefinitely, though these old masters performed remarkable feats.
But lyric intensity is not the only component of a narrative poem. There is also the story, and if you have a good one it will have a form of its own. To me, the story is a remarkable and irreducible element of humanity. Stories are forms every bit as much as sonnets and ghazals are, yet even the most traditional stories allow for the subversive imagination of strangers--readers--each of whom might experience the tale in remarkably different ways. Stories are stable in one sense, unstable in another, just as great lyrics may be coldly logical in form yet passionate in expression.
In his Harvard lecture called "The Telling of the Tale," Jorge Luis Borges concluded,

…there is something about a tale, a story, that will be always going on. I do not believe men will ever tire of telling or hearing stories. And if along with the pleasure of being told a story we get the additional pleasure of the dignity of verse, then something great will have happened. Maybe I am an old-fashioned man from the nineteenth century, but I have optimism, I have hope; and as the future holds many things--as the future, perhaps, holds all things--I think the epic will come back to us. I believe that the poet shall once again be a maker. I mean, he will tell a story and he will also sing it. And we will not think of those two things as different, even as we do not think they are different in Homer or in Virgil.

It is my fervent hope that Borges was right, that we are ready again for stories in verse.


--David Mason

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Interestingly, I sat down to study Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" last night, mostly to pay attention to her metrical techniques and variations, but I was also struck by how her narrative did not flag or make the reader lose interest, drawing one on to the next scene by various techniques and never losing the narrative thread. The lulls that were there were still filled with tension: first foreboding, then danger of various sorts, always upping the ante as any good drama should, with the backstory of Jeanie laid in early to set out the stakes, and the sexy descriptions of goblin fruits put in for more foreshadowing and subtext. It's a well written short story even without the verse, and could easily be turned into a one hour teleplay. Though I think it works best as a poem.

Narrative is its own craft, regardless of the form, be it film, novel, short story, poem, or graphic novel (ie. comic book, many of which contain poems as part of them). Writing lyric poetry no more prepares you to write narrative verse than writing letters prepares you to write a novel. You may have the basic structure of verse or prose in place, even quite prettily, but that is a separate thing from narrative and the things which make it interesting.

[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited August 13, 2004).]

[Terese Coe]

Dave

I'll look forward to reading "Ludlow" when it comes out. It sounds as if you've got hold of a fine story, and adding personal and family experience to that has been what makes it compelling for you. I'd go even farther and say that without these personal elements, that compelling quality would have been lost to you and your readers.

You write, "I do not believe men will ever tire of telling or hearing stories," and of course this is true. I would go even farther: human beings need their experiences to be presented in verse narratives. It helps them see the wholeness and, to some extent, the meaningfulness of the experiences. Not to mention the considerable pleasure of re-living it (this is true even if the experience was tragic, naturally). And yes, as you say, in the right hands narrative verse has "more clarity, drive and economy than prose."

One need only look at Shakespeare, Lorca, and Moliere to see the power of verse drama.

[Bruce McBirney]

Best wishes for the success of Ludlow. I'll look forward to it.

Two verse narratives, very different from each other, that I've admired in relatively recent years (well, okay, recent decades!) were Vickram Seth's The Golden Gate and W.S. Merwin's The Folding Cliffs. I'm curious what modern, novel-length narrative poems you particularly admire or use as models for yourself, and what you think about those two.

[David Mason]

I think Seth's is one of the best. I do admire certain structural elements in Merwin's book, though as poetry I think it pretty bland in many places (I gave it perhaps too positive a review in Hudson when it came out). Merwin is such a graceful prose writer and such skill influences his handling of the "verse novel." Having said that, it does seem to me that the verse novel, as opposed to the epic or other narrative genres, is itself a peculiar, hybrid beast, and probably requires some of the prose novelist's sense of structure and character to succeed, a set of skills many poets just don't possess. I think Brad Leithuaser's Darlington's Fall is a very, very good novel about a man with a real intellectual life, and I think Leithuaser finds a pretty good balance between the demands of verse (handled rather more loosely here than in his shorter poems) and the necessities of story. Mark Jarman's Iris is damn good too, if you find the Jeffers line to your taste. There's a peculiar sense in which he might not have found the right balance between story and lyricism to pull off the ending, but I'm not sure whether that's a matter of taste or not. Robert McDowell's The Diviners begins splendidly, but falters badly, I think, as he tries to resolve the story.

Well, in a world where reading itself is in sharp decline and imaginative literature is being marginalized virtually everywhere (as demonstrated by the recent NEA report), I don't see why not try something audacious like a verse novel. I don't know yet what the fate of mine will be, but I thought I'd raise the issue, anyway.

I'm very glad to see Christina Rossetti's work mentioned above, by the way, and of course narrative poems had a real popularity in the 19th Century.

I have yet to come to terms with book-length poems by Glyn Maxwell and Les Murray. I do know very well Derek Walcott's postmodern epic Omeros, and think it has great things in it, but I'm disappointed that he did not do what a good novelist would do and honor his story and characters over his conceptual frame. It's as if he sold his story out to the postcolonial critics of academe. Still, what brilliant things there are in that book. It's not a novel, though, so much as a troubled epic.

More later.

[David Mason]

Terese's entry offered much that I intended to respond to earlier. I don't have any agenda at all for this thread, and only posted my own "Afterward" as a reminder to Sphereans that this is one genre they can tackle if they choose. The wonderful British poet James Fenton published a brief essay in the New York Review of Books a while back in which he called upon contemporary poets to try verse drama again. Those of us who review new books of poems often feel (I do, anyway) that contemporary poetry has become a meeting place of poor technique and insignificant subject, rendering the art utterly boring to all but poets. Perhaps narrative verse, like dramatic verse, offers pathways to significance. The fact that Terese has worked in both ballad measure and blank verse is commendable, I'd say, and if she or anyone else would like to post narratives for all of us to see on this thread, I'd be happy to go with that. I do intend to post a new thread on dramatic voice pretty soon, and Tim's idea of talking about career paths is also fine with me.

PS: I should add that the new contemporary American poetry anthology being edited by April Lindner and Sam Gwynn contains a larger number of narrative poems than most. And Story Line pPress will publish an anthology of narrative poems edited by Sonny Williams this fall. I very much look forward to both books.

[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited August 15, 2004).]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

I think, on balance, I work chiefly in narrative verse. My latest, "The Hare's Song" (retitled "The White Hare) is over at the Deep End, and I should likely get back to adding more cantos to The Dream of Anne of Gandersmythe when the mood strikes me. But for discussion, I think I'll repost my Feghoot below (previously published in the 60th World Science Fiction Convention souvenir program and reprinted in the first issue of The Buckeye).


"Ferdinand Feghoot and the Zero-G Nunnery"

Ferdinand Feghoot, whose fame ever burgeons,
Encountered a castle with ninety-nine virgins
All floating in space, a Zero-G Nunnery
Bursting with bombshells, just like a gunnery.
He sauntered in swinging his black bumbershoot,
Then stopped and he stared and he dropped his cheroot,
And while weightless tumbled his burning Havana,
The nuns as one cried out, "'Tis Feghoot! Hosanna!
'Tis Ferdie! Our main man! Our savior! The Dude!"
While Ferdinand stared, for the nuns were all nude.

The Space Nuns explained then, with smiles and dimples,
"Some horrible space-rats have eaten our wimples!
Our vestments as well, our albs and our cassocks-
They've gorged on our raiment till they're fat as hassocks!
Our nunnery's cursed with a plague of Rodentia
And soon we'll be hosting the Pope-in-Absentia!
We even dare knickers, the space-rats will bite us,
Yet if we're seen starkers, the Space Pope will smite us!
Our nakedness, truly a shame we can't bear-
Please help us, Feghoot! Get us something to wear!"

"Of course, holy sisters!" our hero cried, gallant.
"I'll do what I can, for I have a small talent
For getting things done, and if it's attainable,
Explaining a moral if one is explainable.
Now show me these space-rats; I'll put my old magic
To bear on this problem you find oh-so tragic:
Celestial rodents, in their rude depravity-
I see this is grave, even though there's no gravity-
Have gobbled up every nun-sensical suit.
I'll get them all back, or my name's not Feghoot."

The nuns sang "Hosanna! Praise be! Hallelujah!
Of course, Ferdinand, we will show the rats to ya!"
They opened the vestry: Space-rats floated eating
The vestments till Feghoot gave bumbershoot beating-
Umbrella held high, Feg' leapt into the fray
And beat rats around like 'twas space-rat croquet.
Then once all the space-rats were screaming and shrieking,
He reached down their throats and thus silenced their squeaking,
Removing the cassocks and wimples and tons
Of vestments to cover the naked Space Nuns.

Once clothed (freshly laundered) the Space Nuns were praising
Ferd Feghoot, "Oh Ferdie, you're simply amazing!
Those horrible space-rats that filled us with loathing,
You taught them a lesson and got back our clothing!"
"'Twas nothing," said Feghoot, "I just know my lores:
Like it says on the salt box 'When it pains, it roars.'
I knew that, and once I had seen your position,
I recalled something else I learned from a magician,
Who taught me the magic of conjuring hats:
All I did was pull habits out of the rats.

[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited August 15, 2004).]

[Terese Coe]

Poem has been much revised since original date.

[Terese Coe]

ditto above

[Tim Murphy]

David, I frequently post member poems for the consideration of our guest lariats. I think we have two superb narrative poets at the Sphere, Wakefield and Murray. I'd like to know what you think of Richard's poem:


A Boy's Work

They sent the boy to build a fire beneath
the steel water trough after a week
of freezing fog had hung a hoary wreath
on every bud and leaf along the creek.
The men were busy at the barn with new
cold-weakened calves. The boy would have to go.
He loaded stove-wood chunks he'd split in two
until the shouldered rucksack bent him low.
In fifty strides the barn was lost - or taken.
He stood confused with cloud, more alone
than in the broad summer fields, forsaken
by or perhaps forsaking the life he'd known.
He staggered along the frozen creek a mile.
He knew the way, but in that cloud it seemed
all unfamiliar; he backtracked twice, and while
he searched, unsure, it was as if he'd dreamed
his life and now awakened cold and lost.
But then the looming rock crib marked his place
to turn, made strange beneath a coat of frost,
and then the pasture trail a wispy trace.
With no more landmarks to help him find his way
he had to kneel as if in prayer to see
if he had kept the trail, until from gray
the trough emerged, a solid certainty.
He found the water solid too, so made
his feeble fire, fed the growing flame,
saw how heat and light rose up and played
against the steel. And then the horses came.
From formless white in single file appeared
the thirsty horses taking living form,
condensed from cloud, more solid as they neared.
He stroked them as they drank and felt them warm
with living heat that he had helped to save.
Their breath plumed up in clouds, more fog unfurled
into the void, and as they drank they gave
a solid, living purpose to his world.

Knowing as you do that Wakefield is a Frost scholar, I should be particularly interested in your thoughts about how this poem communes with our dead master.