[David Mason]

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?

[Bruce McBirney]

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?

[Wild Bill]

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

[David Mason]

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).]

[Wild Bill]

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.

[David Mason]

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

[Wild Bill]

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

[David Mason]

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).]

[Janet Kenny]

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).]

[Janet Kenny]

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).]