Reinventing the Long Narrative Poem part 1/3

Writing Anhaga 

This is the first of three posts about the writing of Anhaga. The full report will appear on the website when all three have been posted.  

Further details of the book can be found here.

Reinventing the Long Narrative Poem.

Well, that’s the advertising tag, but anyone who claims to have done something new in poetry is either ignorant of history, suffering from a temporary though convenient historical amnesia, or delusional. It’s all been done, several times and poets and critics who claim to be creating or recognizing something ‘new’ or ‘innovative’ are simply forgetting the wheel has already been discovered and refined. Or they have found new ways of ‘conceptualizing’ the wheel in such a way that the theory sounds like its different but in practice the wheel still rolls.

So in writing Anhaga I wasn’t out to ‘reinvent’ the long poem.

I started with a question: how could a story told in a sequence of poems differ from a story told in Prose.

Background

As a result of what’s been called ‘the lyricization of poetry’ the short ‘lyric’ poem has become the default model: it’s what most people think of when they hear the word ‘poem’. There have been book length narratives, but they tend to be in the minority. Some of them are very good. Australia seems to have produced its fair share of excellent examples: Freddy Neptune, The Monkey’s Mask and The Love Makers stand out. More recently, Lisa Jacobsen’s The Sunlit Zone’was an interesting example.

So I started out to become knowledgeable about the field. I already knew most of the long poems prior to the Twentieth century, though during a break I did read The Ring and the Book….

At the start of this project I set myself the task of reading or rereading all the long poems and sequences written by major poets in the twentieth century side stepping the question of whether they were narrative or not. Whether this is immersion in the tradition, or possession or simply knowing remains a moot point.  I read: The Baboon in the Night Club,  Paterson, Four Quartets, The Waste Land, Cantos, A, On Being Numerous,  Briggflatts, Villon, The Spoils, Chomei at Tomai,  The Great Hunger, Station Island ,V,  For all we know, The Monkey’s Mask , The Sleeping Beauty, What A Piece of Work, The Bridge, Crazy Horse in Stillness,  Bunny, Freddy Neptune, Sedgemoor, The Dream Songs, The Love Makers , Time's Fool, Quiver, Deepstep Come Shining, My Life, The Maximus poems,  Ketjak,  Summoned by Bells,  Slinger,  Madoc: a mystery, The Changing Light at Sandover, Ko:or A Season on Earth,  In Parenthesis,  The Anathemata, Things that happen (Ten volumes), Ghost writer: a novel in verse, Autumn Journal, Autumn Sequel, Autobiography of Red, Meme, Billy’s Rain, Crow,  Mercian Hymns, Rapture, My lover as a horse, Dart, The Golden Gate, The Triumph of Love, the Orchards of Sion, A Drunk man Looks at  Thistle, The Battle field Where the Moon Says I Love You , I have to go back to 1994 and kill a Girl,  The Inevitable Gift Shop …

Anyone reading this list will probably wonder what happened to the idea that I was reading 'Major Poets'. They will also probably notice their favourite absolutely essential candidate is missing. More on that later....

The length of this list took me by surprise. Given that ‘the Lyricization of poetry’ is generally accepted as an historical phenomenon, there seems to be no shortage of long poems or sequences. It’s a good trivial pursuits question: Name a well-known poet who didn’t attempt a longer poem or sequence?

But the length of this list (with the three dots at the end) is not to demonstrate my diligence or to show how well-read am I, but to underline the fact that there is no practical way the list can be ‘completed’.  I’ve always believed Eliot’s comment in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ that a poet needs to know the Tradition but as usual with Eliot, famous and resonant critical statements tend to turn to smoke when you try and put them into practice. 

I had thought to read those written by ‘major poets’ but what does that mean? There was no objective standard by which one poem could be included and others left out.  

If I were preparing a survey course in English Medieval Poetry, there are certain poems and poets that cannot be avoided. I may think the anonymous genius who wrote ‘Gawain and the Green Knight’ is more interesting as a poet than Chaucer, but it would be willfully perverse to pretend Chaucer was not more important in the long term and fatuous to claim that Robert of Gloucester was more important or a better poet than either.

However, it’s difficult to see who MUST be included in a study of the long poem/sequence in the twentieth century.  Or for that matter what constitutes a ‘long poem’ or a ‘sequence’. Attempts at definition are about as helpful as attempts to define ‘the lyric’ or to distinguish between ‘narrative poem’ and ‘verse novel’. Is it even meaningful to lump such disparate productions under their various hyphenated categories. The fact the lines don’t always reach the right hand margin is about all they have in common. That's a thought for a different line of enquiry. 

The Waste Land is only four hundred lines long. If it’s long, what is The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, at 15,283 lines.  At the beginning of my research I assumed The Waste Land and the Cantos were essential parts of the tradition, (rather than essential in the way I think Briggflatts is) but there are lines of influence in twentieth century poetry that simply ignore their existence. The field is not coherent. There will always be a text I haven’t read, and no way of knowing if that text would have answered my question had I read it. So if you think I missed out an essential text, I'm sorry. But you can always tell me and I'll read it. 

However, the majority of these poems, no matter how good they are, leave the question open: Would Freddy Neptune or the Monkey be lesser books if they were written in continual prose? They tell a story with fixed internal focalization using an autodiegetic narrator. Compared with the narrative freedom of a lot of modern prose or even some forms of cinema, poetry seems very conservative as a narrative vehicle though I’d exempt Carson’s ‘For all We Know’.  It seems to me that Alan Garner and Werner Herzog have been doing far more interesting things with narrative. And I’m sure other people with vastly more knowledge of prose could make a longer list. (Okay, I’d throw in Cervantes, Stern, Le Fanu,  Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien.)

There are of course the ‘post modern’ variants. Brian McHale managed to write a fine book about the postmodern long poem, The Obligation Towards the Difficult Whole, without actually defining either long or post modern. He identifies (p. 258ff) three ways in which the postmodern poem outflanks the modernist ‘interdiction on narrative’, the third being the strategy McHale calls ‘weak narrativity’. This ‘involves precisely telling stories ‘poorly’, distractedly, with much irrelevance and indeterminacy, in such as way as to evoke narrative coherence while at the same time withholding commitment to it and undermining confidence in it’.

It’s a classic example of what passes as profound in literary-speak. The return to telling stories involved not telling stories.  The return to cooking involved avoiding cooking. As Peter Brooks pointed out, if the narrative elements don’t cohere, you don’t have a narrative. You can theorize this til the cows come home, but unless the reader can link the story elements without external prompts, then you don’t have a story.

So my question was: how might a story told with poems, be different to a story told in prose and still be a recognizable story.  Part two to follow. There is an answer to this in part three. 

The Sunlit Zone by Lisa Jacobson. A review of sorts

So I’ve already moaned about the pre-publicity for The Sunlit Zone, by Lisa Jacobson. Three meaningless statements, which have now morphed into the blurb on the back cover and seem to suggest the publisher is not interested in attracting anyone’s attention to this book,  which is a pity.

To sum up the blurb,  The Sunlit  Zone is apparently “A risk taking novel in verse with pure poetry in which romance joins hands with science and takes to the water.”

But “novel in verse” implies a narrative, and the minimum information a prospective buyer might want would be characters, plot and setting.  Imagine putting The Da Vinci Code, The Brothers Karamazov and The Story of O down on the table and saying: “three novels in prose, and that’s all the information you need, so pick one.” 

A first person female narrator relates her autobiography, alternating between Present tense (2050/51) and her past (literally from the act of her conception in 2020 . Ab Ovo in deed).  In doing so she comes to terms with her twin sister’s death, her awkward relationships with her friends and family, the ghostly boyfriend who returns, and after the father’s death and her mother’s art exhibition, finds happiness and,  if not love,  then satisfying sex with the no longer ghostly boyfriend.  Coherence is primarily the fictional narrator’s autobiography. 

It’s set in a faintly dystopian future Australia with many technical widgets and gadgets and cloned whales and other mutant sea creatures.

There’s nothing here that wouldn’t attract the average reader of modern prose. The publishers could have put tongue firmly in cheek and promoted it as Sci-Fi Chick-Lit (although that would have been unfair).  It feels like a softer version of some of the stories Ellison was publishing in the Dangerous Visions series, or Ursula Le Guin’s writing for adults. Or, stripped of the SF trappings and closer to home, like Stephen Herrick’s  ‘A place like this’.

There’s nothing here in the poetry either to alienate a prose reader. No Post Modern Avant-Garde experimental Language games. (This is neither criticism nor praise, just a comment)  The story is told in a series of tightly controlled stanzas, almost all of which are end stopped.  The result is that the text mimics a rhythmically organised speaking voice,  though the formal quality of the stanza shifts the voice away from the impression of a natural speaker which can sometimes be produced in good first person prose. The sections alternate between the now of telling and past phases of the narrator’s life.   

 Although lacking the pace of  The Monkeys’ Mask or the technical virtuosity of ‘Freddy Neptune’,   the rhythmic control  keeps the story moving.  Whether or not it’s “Pure poetry” depends on your definition of that vacuous term.  As Clare Kinney pointed out, narrative poetry has to negotiate two binaries: Narrative/Poetry and Narrative/Lyric. Modern readers (and critics) tend to assume narrative will be in prose.  ‘The Sunlit Zone” doesn’t dissolve the binaries but tends to sit firmly on the narrative side of both of them.  Pace is perhaps won at the cost of the absence of the kind of  image or phrase that might make a reader pause and reread it. Whether that means the book won’t reward rereading is no more an issue than it is with any other narrative.

Is it risk taking? Perhaps it is,  though if it is,  it’s a sad comment on modern poetry.  By narrating them; sex, birth, death, loss, family, develop contexts. The narrative returns the human subject and human concerns to poems in a way lyric poems on these subjects don’t.  It also takes the obvious narrative risk. Just as with any novel, if a reader doesn’t like the characters, or the plot, or the setting, he or she will stop reading.

But this book should attract a much larger readership than it is probably going to. It could escape the narrow confines of Poetry World and find a wider range of readers than the usual buyers of poetry books. 

blurb wars revisited: The Sunlit Zone by Lisa Jacobsen

Five Islands press; Advance Information: Exciting new poetry

Let us imagine someone, me, who is doing a PhD on narrative poetry, and is therefore interested to learn that FIP are releasing a “Novel in Verse”. Let us imagine him reading the advance information for this book supplied by the publisher ( I’ve added the quotes I'm discussing to the bottom of this post). What does he learn about the book?

It’s a novel in verse, with narrative sweep and drive and it’s true poetry, with some familiar adjectives stuck on the end (Brilliant, poignant, disconcerting magical and irresistible). And the poet has won some prizes.

How does that give me enough information to decide whether or not I want to read it? (I will, but not because of this advertising.)

What this flier doesn’t say about the book is revelatory about the publishing of Poetry. Apparently telling me this is a "novel in verse" is all I need to know to part with my money.

We are not told the content of the narrative, the style of the narrative nor are we told what type of "verse" is being used. Could you sell a novel by advertising it as a “Novel in Prose” and leaving it there? You’d expect at least a one sentence plot summary?
Surely you’d at least assume the potential reader (me) wants to know what this novel is about ? “Romance holds hands with science and takes to the ocean” is the nearest we get. (Visions of underwater sex reinforced by the cover?).

And what kind of “Novel”. A narrative? What kind of narrative? (conventional: The Monkey’s Mask/ different: For all we Know/”experimental”: Deep Step Come Shining) What kind of verse? Chopped prose, Tennyson on Ecstasy, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry…. as formal as Freddy Neptune?

Why is it that the people who are supposed to be selling this book seem to think these questions are irrelevant to a potential buyer?

And what do they offer instead?

Three generic blurb quotes (see below) and a biography of the poet?

A risk-taking work of rare, imaginative power. What could that possibly mean? It might describe Flann O’Brian’s The Third Policeman or Pound’s Cantos, but we’re getting close to the hundredth anniversary of The Waste Land and there was a risk-taking work of rare, imaginative power. Should I expect something of the class of Deep Step'? The Waste land, Briggflatts, the Anathemata?
What could “risk taking” and “rare imaginative power” possibly mean without some kind of context. And why is "risk taking" admirable? Drug addicts take risks.

As for the narrative drive of the novel with the perfect pitch of true poetry. With no information about the plot or the style of narrative which novel? Ulysses? Murder on the Orient Express? How is "the novel" anymore a meaningful category than "a novel in verse"? What could narrative "drive" or "sweep" mean? War and Peace on Benzedrine?

As for the perfect pitch of true poetry …..answers on a post card please…why is it considered meaningful to use the phrase “true poetry’ on the back of a decent writer's work? it sounds like something one of my grade eights might write about her favourite bit of poetry in Dolly magazine or one of the "comments" posted on Authorsden.com.

So let us assume that the publisher actually wants people to buy the book. The question then is why do they present it in such a way? It may well be the most exciting thing to be published in Australia since The Monkey hit the stands but how would you know from this information?

The quotations below are the three in question. The rest of the flier simply has a paragraph about the author. And if my grumbling makes you curious go buy the book. (-:

The Sunlit Zone is a moving elegy of love and loss, admirable for its
narrative sweep and the family dynamic that drives it. A risk-taking work of
rare, imaginative power.
The Sunlit Zone combines the narrative drive of the novel with the perfect
pitch of true poetry. A darkly futuristic vision shot through with bolts of
light. Brilliant, poignant, disconcerting.
Adrian Hyland, author of Kinglake 350 and Diamond Dove

This novel in verse, at once magical and irresistible, draws us into a vivid
future. In Lisa Jacobson’s telling, the Australian fascination with salt water
and sea change is made over anew. Romance holds hands with science and
takes to the ocean.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe, author of The Domestic Sublime and By Title