[Michael Juster]

David: First of all, welcome! I'm very pleased you have joined us. I have an embarassingly mundane question. I've been trying to do more narrative poetry the last few years, and I lucked out with the one long poem I've finished because I mentioned to Bill Baer that I was adding it to my manuscript, and he asked to see it in order to talk me out of it, but liked it and ended up asking for it for The Formalist before I ever sent it out. What journals do you see as more supportive of narrative verse, particularly longer narrative pieces?

[nyctom]

Hello Mr. Mason. Welcome to the wacky world of Erato.

I have a follow up question on narrative poetry--as the very first metered thing I wrote was an absurdly ambitious narrative poem I have put on the bone pile (ah--I guess ignoance really is bliss, or something like that). So some questions in general on narrative:

--What makes a good poetry narrative apart from prose? What would you consider its strengths in relation to a prose narrative?

--Dialogue: how much? An idiotic question, but do you use italics, quotation marks, different fonts?

--Plotting: do you subdivide the narrative by sections, with each section being eqivalent to the chapter in a prose story? Or are there other options?

--What subjects have you found resist narrative treatment?

--Do you write narrative strictly/primarily in iambic pentameter or do you use other meters as well?

--Rhyme: how much is too much? Or do long narratives ipso facto demand blank or unrhymed verse?

Thanks. It is something I would like to try my hand at again, now that I have at least a basic idea of how iambic pentameter sounds and works. I have been reading a good deal of Alexander Pope and Dana Gioia's "The Homecoming"--which I think is an extraordinary poem. Any other suggestions besides the obvious ones of Chaucer, Dante, Milton, Homer, etc?

Feel free to answer as much or as little as you like. Much appreciated!

[Robert J. Clawson]

I have the same question as M. Juster. I have several rather long narrative poems (3-4 journal pages), and have managed to place a few in fine reviews such as Southern and Beloit, but many that I feel are of equal quality have been sent back with comments like, "lucid, exciting, but too long for our purposes."

Michael, it's not all that mundane: it could be a question of survival.

Bob

[David Mason]

I see questions from Mike Juster, ncytom and RHClawson, and I think--pardon my technical ignorance--that this reply will be to all three sets of questions:
First of all, Mike, heartiest congrats on having your narrative poem taken by The Formalist, whose editor I admire both for his own narratives and for his editorial taste. The truth is, I don't think the climate is much better for narrative poetry than it has been since the early sixties. Very, very few magazines print it, and some poets and editors still think of narrative poets as quixotic fools. The Hudson Review has been remarkably supportive of narrative poems, partly because Fred Morgan has written them himself, partly because he has championed poets like Louis Simpson, who writes free verse suburban narratives, some of which I find rather wonderful. Morgan and his wife, Paula Deitz, published the complete text of The Country I Remember, which astonished me. It allowed me to see that the poem needed still more revision, and I went back to it again before it appeared in book form. But to be honest I do not know any other journals that regularly support narrative poetry, except perhaps Edge City Review and Pivot. There is one obvious reason: narratives take more space, and are thus more expensive to publish. But I also think contemporary taste has not caught up with the possibilities of narrative poetry, despite the bestselling status of Beowulf, Homer and Dante.
To nyctom, I've got an essay on narrative poems in THE POETRY OF LIFE AND THE LIFE OF POETRY that might interest you, but I can say a few things about what makes good narrative in verse. First and foremost, while any narrative in verse, including Paradise Lost, will have its highs and lows (remember Poe thought the long poem a contradiction in terms), and while my own veer from the lyrically charged to the prosaic at times, one ought to be aware, reading a narrative poem, that the use of lines has become helpful to the telling of the tale. That lyric moments are made more lyrical because of the line, that line breaks create dramatic and psychological effects as well as musical ones--that sort of thing. Most of my narratives have in fact been variations on the dramatic monologue, so the speaker's voice has been a primary concern of mine. I did one third-person narrative called "The Escape" based on a tiny newspaper clipping, and my most recent narrative, "The Collector's Tale," is in two voices, one in rhymed stanzas, the other in blank verse. Now, one's formal choices will always be called into question by close readers, often legitimately, but I must say that if these formal choices seem to be working as the poem creates its atmosphere of reality and some dramatic tension, then their appropriateness is established. Merely to read narrative poems with the lyric poet's concerns about verse technique is not sufficient: one must also have the novel reader's sense of social milieu and voice and scene.
Dialogue: just as in prose fiction, enough to make the scene come alive. The illusion of vitality is all-important, which is why I have perhaps too often hidden my lyric effects or made my artistic choices seem less apparent. As Alan Sullivan would no doubt point out, great poets like AD Hope have written utterly convicing narratives in which verse technique is every bit as rigorous as it in in their lyric poems, and in that sense I think I have a ways to go, to say the least. As to how one designates dialogue, or how one punctuates it, I'm not sure it matters a damn, as long as the system is consistent and easily followable. I've grown fond of italics for bits of dialogue, but I have also used quotation marks. Different fonts might make the page look busy to me. Look, poems on the page are just scripts for performance as far as I'm concerned, so the issue is to make a text as reader-friendly as possible.
Plotting: most of my narratives have been the length of short stories, so plot is something that happens in one burst. The story is pretty much wholly in my head before I write a line--though I've been surprised by plot elements on occasion. With The Country I Remember, which is about as long as a long book of Paradise Lost, I worked intuitively, feeling my way toward little dramatic moments where it would be good to end a chapter and swtich to the other voice. I wrote a long version of the first section one winter, then set the poem aside while I taught a heavy load, then in one summer drafted all of the rest, then tweaked and fiddled for another year and a half or so, but the narrative structure (as opposed to the verse technique, which is rough) happened quickly and instinctively, partly following family roecords for one voice, then working wholly in the dark for the woman's voice, which is 100 per cent fiction. A good fiction teacher once told me that one should end a chapter feeeling that a scene or moment has come to some culmination, but that something is left unfinished--there's some dramatic reason to turn to the page and keep reading. I think that's good advice for the narrative poet as well. I've never read any story better structured in that sense than the Iliad.
I don't think any subject ever resists any treatment. We are able to write about what we are able to write about as specific people because of a whole host of things that make us the writers we are. No one can ever tell you that a subject is inappropriate for poetry, as far as I'm concerned. However, there may be subjects better treated in prose or in lyric verse or in drama--these are things you come to realize only by setting out and trying to write the damned thing. Working writers all have manuscripts somewhere that have not yet found their form or genre--that's just part of the game.
As for meter, I wrote my first narratives with a rudimentary sense of the pentameter, which I thought of as a sort of loose net for containing the passions of my characters. I'm now tightening the net a bit more. But even poems in faulty verse, like Spooning, from my first book, now seem to me to work pretty damned well, especially when I perform them, so I've forgiven their verse flaws--and revised them a tad bit. I don't recall ever doing narrative in another meter--pentameter is so handy--but I've seen good narratives in free verse by others.
I don't think rhyme will seem too much in some cases, especially if you have a character whose tone of voice might be abetted by rhyme---Shakespeare's the model here, as far as I'm concerned. He can make those concluding couplets tie up a blank verse scene either comically or forebodingly. Hope's narratives in couplets are utterly convincing--though of course he ties them to historical period. I've got a character who speaks in rhymed stanzas in The Collector's Tale, and I thought of him as someone whose psychological ornateness contrasted with the roughness and obscenity of the other character, who speaks in blank verse. Now that I think of it, look at how Browning and Tennyson use rhyme in narratives, the former to particularly great effect. In the latter's Locksley Hall, I'm usually more away of the trochaic meter than the rhymes. (Tennyson's blank verse in Idylls is gorgeous.)
Yes, Dana's two narratives in Gods of Winter are very good--see also The Room Upstairs and others in his first book, and for dramatic effects look at his libretto for Nosferatu--also from Graywolf. I recommend Anthony Hecht's narratives in sumptuous blank verse--you simply must own all of his books. The Miltonic sumptuousness may not be to every taste, but he uses it so splendidly and has such good instincts for multiple points of view--he's a must. I also recommend Michael Donaghy, whose "Black Ice and Rain" appears in his new book, Conjure, published in England--that poem also appeared in The Hudson Review perhaps two years ago in their special British issue. Marilyn Nelson's The Homecoming has very good narrative moments, and her Selected Poems, The Fields of Praise, has a "narrative" crown of sonnets that I can't praise highly enough, Thus Far By Faith. Oh yes--one of the best poets in America right now, BH Fairchild, is superb at narrative--look at his The Art of the Lathe. And his next book, coming out next fall from Norton, will also have at least one superb narrative, which I've heard him perform. Fairchild is the very best poetry performer I've heard in years. Our jaded audience here gave him a spontaneous standing ovation.
Again, Hudson's usually your best bet, but just remember that they don't publish a lot of poetry and they have quite a few advisory editors voting on their selections. I'm glad to hear about Beloit. I'm fond of Tar River Poetry Review for its editorial range--maybe they'd be worth a try. Sorry I don't know more places. I feel very much a minority taste as a narrative poet, and I wouldn't advise going into it if you want to get published. I went into it because my performance instincts sent me there.
Well, that's enough for now, isn't it? I'm a poor if speedy typist, so forgive any typos in the preceding....I'll try to edit some of them.

[David Mason]

PS--For more narrative models: Look at Tam O' Shanter, by Bobby Burns, and by Longfellow the Tales from a Wayside Inn and Evangeline. Of course, the modernist and postmodernist editors these days think of narrative poetry as an essentially 19th Century taste, forgetting the 30-odd centuries that preceded it.

[Robert J. Clawson]

Richard Howard praised narrative in his issue of Best American Poetry a few years back and he edits for both Paris and Western Humanities reviews.

Vejay Seshadri writes narratives and his book (Wild Kingdom) credits AGNI, Antaeus, Boulevard, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, and Western Humanities Review.

Make the tale impossible to resist!

Bob

[David Mason]

I don't remember Seshadri's narratives being very long, and most of those magazines credited would not have published very long poems. Nevertheless, your advice is good, Bob.

[Clive Watkins]

What do people think of E. J. Pratt’s long narrative poems in formal meters? Or have they vanished from view?

I particularly like "The Titanic" (written in fluent and vigorous pentameters rhymed in couplets and other patterns) and "Brebeuf and His Brethren".

For me they work both as narrative and as verse.

Clive Watkins


[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited December 30, 2001).]

[Tim Murphy]

I agree with the argument often advanced that poetry has impoverished itself in the 20th C. by marginalizing everything but the short lyric. Splendid things have been done in bigger genres. I think of two mock epics, Hope's Dunciad Minor, and Gwynn's Narcissiad. David (who's AWOL due to problems with the college's server) has taught the seminars on Narrative at West Chester, and as author of The Country I Remember, is far better qualified than I to comment on this thread. I am pretty underwhelmed, though, by the New Narrative, particularly the book-length efforts of so many of its practitioners. Joe Kennedy in his interview with the Formalist said "Jim Cunningham could tell a better story in a quatrain than these young fellows do in a book." To my mind, the larger form that's really regaining its health is the dramatic monologue. Let me refer you to just three: Hecht's "The Ghost in the Martini," Wilbur's "The Mind-Reader," and Gwynn's "Cleante to Elmire."

[David Mason]

I think Tim has a good point, which is that none of the book-length narrative poems of recent decades have been overwhelming. When I think of "narratives" I particularly like, I'm often thinking of shorter ones, from Thomas Hardy's lyrics to Robinson's character sonnets and other lyrics to Frost's ironic eclogues. And a sort of cousin to the narrative, the dramatic monologue, is certainly where I've put most of my own effort, for what it's worth. The Country I Remember is made of two alternating monologues.

So many issues were raised by earlier questions that my long answer may have dwelt too partially on some matters like story. I do believe that in short stories, whether told in verse or prose, the stories themselves are forms with a kind of musicality--or elegance, to use a word mathematicians are partial to. When you bring such stories across with strong verse technique, the result is an even more intense and multi-layered experience. The same is true of dramatic monologues. One can see this in audience responses to such poems in performance--one can see people swept up by both story and song, as it were, and the experience is a rich one. Narrative assumes that one is part of one's audience--not above them or apart from them--one is speaking to one's tribe, as it were. I think a number of our avant garde movements have an essential contempt for audience, and to put it mildly I differ with them there.

The dramatic monologue, usually shorter and more intense than the "long narrative poem," whatever that means, is a deeply attractive form to me. I turned to it first because I was sick of poetry that seemed only to be about the poet and his or her domestic concerns--I wanted a larger range of subject matter. Though I think I've had some success in the poems I've done, I'm always striving for stronger verse technique.