[basil ransome-davies]

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

[Mark Blaeuer]

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

[Maryann Corbett]

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."

[Tony Barnstone]

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

[Gregory Dowling]

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

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.'

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.

[Maryann Corbett]

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.

[Andrew Frisardi]

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.