Narrative Poetry and the Critic

I tell stories. I don’t think of it as writing poetry.

 

Poetry is T.S.Eliot, W.B.Yeats, David Jones, Basil Bunting, Louis MacNeice, R.S.Thomas, Wyatt, Shakespeare...it's an endless list.

 

OR 

 

If you prefer your poets alive then Jeremy Hooker, John Mathias, Jo Balmer, Jenny Lewis, Leslie Saunders... They write poetry, and I wouldn’t be able to define ‘poetry’ any more than most people, but like Graves’ honest housewife, I know the genuine article when I read it.

 

But I’m not trying to do that. My models are the adults I remember who told stories as a form of entertainment; the rhythms of the liturgy, with the congregation chanting in unison; traditional stories, be they folk or fairy tale; the story songs of the tradition, stripped back to bare bones and beautiful; voices round a campfire shaping the day into a narrative, and of course, the medieval storytellers. 

 

What I write is historical fiction. But it’s sold as poetry because the lines don’t go all the way to the right margin. 

 

The people who would normally read historical fiction are put off by the layout and the label. The people who read poetry are used to reading short verse, and have a set of expectations about what that verse should and shouldn’t do and are therefore put off by a book length narrative.

 

It's a problem facing everyonewriting narrative verse. 

The critic and reviewer are lost, a vocabulary developed and designed to talk about ‘poetry’ and what ‘poetry’ is supposed to be and do, flounders. 

 

Or they buy into Kinney’s ‘doubling’ even if they haven’t heard the phrase: the idea that verse narrative can be separated out into verse and narrative, forgetting you could just as easily separate prose narrative into prose and narrative. And then the verse can be considered on its own and the critic can play the usual ‘poetry review’ games while ignoring story. 

 

It’s as though someone reviewing American Psycho discussed nothing but sentence structure and word choice, or made a great deal of fuss over another writer’s preference for similes over metaphors.

 

And because in a verse narrative the intelligence should be in the architecture, the inability to discuss this means no one notices how plot and character can be constructed so that they (can) work differently in some ways then they do in (some kinds of) prose, or how some prose writers can create stories that work more like verse narratives.