On "The New Narrative"
Jack Foley
ON "THE NEW NARRATIVE"
MAKE IT NEW
--Ezra Pound, Canto LIII
In "Letter to Lord Byron" (1939), W. H. Auden writes,
novel writing is
A higher art than poetry altogether
In my opinion, and success implies
Both finer character and faculties...
The average poet by comparison
Is unobservant, immature, and lazy.
You must admit, when all is said and done,
His sense of other people's very hazy,
His moral judgements are too often crazy.
The passage recalls an earlier poem, "The Novelist," in which Auden asserts that, while the poet begins "Encased in talent like a uniform," the novelist must "struggle out of his boyish gift,"
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Dully put up with all the wrongs of Man.
One should allow for some irony here: Auden himself never published a novel--though he did publish some interesting and complex long poems which have some of the qualities of a novel. The point is that both passages emphasize Auden's opinion that the poet remains in some sense immature ("unobservant, immature, and lazy," "his boyish gift") and that it is only through a process of "struggle" that a writer arrives at the "finer character and faculties" of the novelist. This "struggle" involves achieving a "sense of other people."
In "The New Formalism and the Revival of the Love Lyric" New Formalist poet and editor Robert McPhillips voices a rather similar opinion--except that instead of opposing the novelist to the poet, McPhillips opposes one kind of poetry (narrative) to another (lyric):
[If] contemporary poets wish to expand their audience, they must eschew the solipsism of the typical free verse lyric. They must...turn outward from the ego to tell stories about others in narrative poems, and [turn] from the subjectivity of "organic" free verse forms to the objectivity of fixed forms in the lyric.
McPhillips goes on to qualify that position, but the point I want to make here is how close he is to W. H. Auden. In making these remarks, McPhillips is dealing with a phenomenon called "The New Narrative," which is discussed in R. S. Gwynn's anthology, "New Expansive Poetry." Indeed, Gwynn's book is divided into two sections, both of which include the word "new": "The New Formalism" and "The New Narrative."
David Mason is also concerned with "The New Narrative" and actually quotes from "The Novelist" in a central passage of "The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry": "Empathy," writes Mason, "the act of inhabiting a stranger's experience is a civilizing process. It implies connection, community, releasing the poet??who otherwise seems 'Encased in talent like a uniform'??from isolation."
McPhillips writes of turning "outward from the ego." One remembers that Charles Olson's "Maximus" poems also presented the poet as "the figure of outward"--and that Olson's poems are a deliberate thrust towards "connection, community." (A movement away from the ego is in fact the very substance of Olson's famous poem, "The Kingfishers.") Olson's often fragmentary and elliptical "projective verse" can hardly be described as "The New Narrative," however, and in "I, Mencius, Pupil of the Master..." the poet actually refers to rhyme--an important matter for "The New Formalists"-- as "the dross of verse." Olson was, however, the central figure of an earlier anthology which also made use of the word "new": Donald Allen's immensely successful and influential "The New American Poetry" (1960).
What is "new" about Gwynn's "New Expansive Poetry"--note that McPhillips writes, "[If] contemporary poets wish to expand their audience"--his "New Formalism," and his "New Narrative"? In the introduction to his anthology, Gwynn writes,
In recent years narrative poems by Robert McDowell, Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, Sydney Lea, David Mason, Marilyn Nelson, Frederick Pollack and others have found enthusiastic critics and audiences eager to read poetry of a type that has been virtually extinct in the second half of our century.
"Perhaps," Gwynn continues, the "desire to embrace a larger readership is the essence of what 'expansive' connotes; these poets are giving the elusive common reader the missing ingredients that are most often lamented by those who claim to have given up on modern poetry...[These] poets have simply responded to the audience's call...for formal elements that can be heard and narrative qualities that can be understood." New Formalists, argues Gwynn, have returned "to a more accessible vision."
One is reminded of some remarks made in 1949 by Jack Spicer--a poet by no means easily "understood"--at a symposium dealing with "The Poet and Poetry." Spicer cites the letter column of The Daily Californian, the campus newspaper at UC Berkeley: "[E]very time a new issue of Occident [the campus literary magazine] comes out," he says, someone will write in to complain, "'Modern poetry does not make sense...Nobody reads it because nobody understands it." "This," Spicer comments, "is just not true":
If a lack of intelligibility makes a work unpopular with the public, why is it that there is always at least one song with nonsense lyrics near the top of the Hit Parade? "Chickery Chick" was far less capable of prose analysis than Finnegans Wake and no one can claim that its bare, monotonous tune was responsible for its popular favor.
As a matter of fact recently some of the same people that condemn modern poetry as unintelligible express (weirdly enough) admiration for Edith Sitwell and Gertrude Stein. The phonograph records of Facade and Four Saints in Three Acts have made two writers (who are hardly paragons of intelligibility) perfectly acceptable to a large audience. What this audience has found is not the intelligibility that it had modestly asked for, but that greater boon that it did not dare to ask--entertainment.
Poetry's "main source of interest," insists Spicer, is "the human voice...Live poetry is a kind of singing...[It] demands a human voice to sing it and demands an audience to hear it":
Today we are not singers. We would rather publish poetry in a little magazine than read it in a large hall. If we do read in a hall, we do not take the most elementary steps to make our poetry vivid and entertaining. We are not singers. We do not use our bodies. We recite from a printed page.
Thirty years ago Vachel Lindsay saw that poetry must connect itself to vaudeville if it was to regain its voice. (Shakespeare, Webster and Marlowe had discovered this three centuries before him.) Our problem today is to make this connection, to regain our voices.
Gwynn's remarks about "new expansive poetry," written fifty years after Spicer's, are also an attempt "to regain our voices," though his means are very different from Spicer's. (Spicer would scarcely have endorsed "accessibility" as a primary value.) Interestingly, though, both Spicer and Gwynn link the rejuvenation of poetry to the oral and to some sort of populism. "The new formalist and new narrative poets," writes Gwynn, "returning to a more accessible vision, have claimed that an audience is entirely indispensable...Indeed, if we are to think of expansive poetry as a truly populist movement (and I, for one, do, in the most honorable senses of the term), then its poets have simply responded to the audience's call...." For Spicer too, "an audience is entirely indispensable."
In his introduction to Robert McDowell's "The Diviners" Dana Gioia admits to some of the difficulties involved in reinventing "a forsaken poetic mode." "There have been a few genuine successes" in the attempt to create a new narrative, he writes, "--Sydney Lea's 'The Feud' and Charles Martin's 'Passages from Friday,' for instance--but generally this new direction in poetry has been more notable for its experiments than its unqualified achievements":
The central difficulty of writing the new narrative poetry is easy to summarize--how does one create a compelling and credible story in verse without becoming prosaic? Modernism may be exhausted as a vital literary movement, but it permanently changed the contemporary sensibility. The transformation of poetic taste is nowhere more evident than in the almost impossibly high expectations now placed on narrative poetry. The evocative compression and lyric integrity of Modernist poetry left most readers impatient with the loose, expansive style of traditional narrative verse. The new narrative must tell a memorable story in language that constantly delivers a lyric frisson.
It's interesting that the word "expansive" is used here in a somewhat negative sense ("the loose, expansive style of traditional narrative verse").
The problems to which Gioia points are real ones and cannot be solved in a simple way. His own poem, "The Homecoming," in "The Gods of Winter" (1991), is a superb example of the fusion of dramatic monologue and narrative. "The Diviners" is an admirable attempt, but I don't think it's quite successful. McDowell's poem has its virtues, and accessibility is one of them, but its narrative is nowhere near as compelling as that of, say, Longfellow's Evangeline--and, frankly, I can't see anyone putting down the latest Barbara Kingsolver in favor of McDowell.
Here is a passage from the second half of "Evangeline":
Many a weary year had passed since the burning of Grand-Pre,
When on the falling tide the freighted vessels departed,
Bearing a nation, with all its household gods, into exile,
Exile without an end, and without an example in story.
Far asunder, on separate coasts, the Acadians landed;
Scattered were they, like flakes of snow, when the wind from the northeast
Strikes aslant through the fogs that darken the Banks of Newfoundland.
Friendless, homeless, hopeless, they wandered from city to city,
From the cold lakes of the North to sultry Southern savannas,--
From the bleak shores of the sea to the lands where the Father of Waters
Seizes the hills in his hands, and drags them down to the ocean,
Deep in their sands to bury the scattered bones of the mammoth.
Friends they sought and homes....
It is perhaps unfair to place a passage from Longfellow's masterpiece next to McDowell's more limited attempt to write a novel in verse, but surely part of the pleasure of reading a "poetic narrative" is precisely to experience the pleasure of poetry, the pleasure of gorgeous, complex language. Longfellow's lines are marvelously musical and are meant to be enjoyed as such. There is nothing even remotely comparable to them in McDowell's rather pedestrian and slightly awkward pentameters:
When Al and his career were very young,
Before the nickname, Boss, was pinned on him,
He had to spend most weekdays far from home.
From Chicago or New York he'd call the house
To say goodnight and talk with his only son,
Who hated phones, the voices trapped in them.
The distance from his homelife gnawed at Al,
Whose own dad had forsaken family.
Far from experiencing this as pleasurable poetry, one wants to rewrite it as prose:
When Al and his career were young--before he was given the nickname, "Boss" --he had to spend most of his weekdays far from home. He'd call the house from Chicago or New York to say goodnight and talk with his only son (who hated phones, feeling that there were voices trapped in them). The distance from his homelife gnawed at Al, whose own father had forsaken his family.
Gioia rightly points out that McDowell's poem has achieved admirable narrative momentum, but one feels that McDowell has done it at the expense of the poetry--and, after all, the experience of poetry is one of the main reasons for reading such a work. It's as if McDowell were fearful that if he made his work too "poetic" the reader would flee. But then, what is the point of making it poetic at all? David Mason writes in "The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry," "Good narratives have been written in free verse as well as meter, but in the best of these poems there is always a moment when we know we are hearing poetry, not prose, when the line transforms thought, feeling, plot and character into memorable speech"--the last phrase being W. H. Auden's famous definition of poetry. Mason's model here is Frost, not Longfellow, but we might remember that Frost's first book, "A Boy's Will" (1913), took its title from Longfellow's poem, "My Lost Youth." Certainly in Longfellow it is not a question of "a moment when we know we are hearing poetry, not prose"; this poet revels in the fact that he is writing poetry and expects us to revel in it too:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks....
The emphasis on speech and the transformation of trees into "harpers hoar" is not merely conventional: Longfellow is expecting that his readers will be speaking his poem aloud.
One of David Mason's poems, "Spooning," from his first book, "The Buried Houses" (1991), seems to me a very successful example of the fusion of storytelling and poetry. As in the passage from Longfellow, "speech" is a central issue of Mason's poem, though it manifests in a very different way. "Spooning" is short enough to quote in full:
SPOONING
After my grandfather died I went back
to help my mother sell his furniture:
the old chair he did his sitting on,
the kitchen things. Going through his boxes
I found letters, canceled checks, the usual
old photographs of relatives I hardly knew
and my grandmother, clutching an apron in her hands.
And her. There was an old publicity still
taken when she wore her hair like a helmet,
polished black. Posed before a cardboard shell
and painted waves, she seemed unattainable,
as she was meant to.
For years we thought he lied
about his knowing her when he was young,
but grandfather was a man who hated liars,
a man who worshipped all the tarnished virtues,
went daily to his shop at eight, until
the first of three strokes forced him to retire.
He liked talking. Somebody had to listen,
so I was the listener for hours after school
until my parents called me home for dinner.
We'd sit on his glassed-in porch where he kept a box
of apples wrapped in newsprint.
He told me about the time he lost a job
at the mill. Nooksack seemed to kill its young
with boredom even then, but he owned a car,
a '24 Ford. He drove it east to see
America, got as far as Spokane's desert,
sold the car and worked back on the railroad.
Sometimes he asked me what I liked to do.
I told him about the drive-in movies where
my brother, Billy, took me if I paid.
In small towns everyone goes to the movies.
Not grandfather. He said they made them better when
nobody talked, and faces told it all.
"I knew Lydia Truman Gates," he said,
"back when she was plain old Lydia Carter
down on Water Street. One time her old man
caught us spooning out to the railroad tracks.
Nearly tanned my hide. He was a fisherman--
that is, till she moved her folks to Hollywood."
I don't know why, but I simply couldn't ask
what spooning was. He seemed to talk then
more to his chair's abrasions on the floor,
more to the pale alders outside his window.
The way he said her name I couldn't ask
who was Lydia Truman Gates.
*
"Nonsense,"
was all my mother said at dinner. "His mind
went haywire in the hospital. He's old.
He makes things up and can't tell the difference."
I think my father's smile embarrassed her
when he said, "The poor guy's disappointed.
Nothing went right for him, so he daydreams."
"Nonsense," my mother said. "And anyway
no Lydia Truman Gates ever came
from a town like this."
"It's not so bad a place.
I make a pretty decent living here."
My mother huffed. While I stared past my plate
Billy asked, "Who is Lydia Truman Gates?"
*
It wasn't long before we all found out.
The papers ran a story on her. How
she was famous in the twenties for a while,
married the oil billionaire, Gates, and retired.
She was coming back home to Nooksack. The mayor
would give a big award and ask her help
to renovate our landmark theatre.
Our mother said we had better things to spend
our money on than some old movie house,
though she remembered how it used to look.
She said that people living in the past
wouldn't amount to much.
Billy and I pretended we didn't care.
We didn't tell our parents where we went
that night, riding our bikes in a warm wind
past the fishhouses on the Puget Sound,
and up Grant Street to the Hiawatha.
Inside, Billy held my hand, and showed me
faded paintings of Indians on the walls
and dark forest patterns in the worn carpet.
The place smelled stale like old decaying clothes
shut up in a trunk for twenty years,
but Nooksack's best were there, some in tuxes,
and women stuffed into their evening gowns.
We sat in the balcony looking down
on bald heads, high hair-dos and jewels.
Near the stage they had a twenty-piece band--
I still remember when the lights went out
the violins rose like a flock of birds
all at once. The drums sounded a shudder.
We saw Morocco Gold, The Outlaw, Colonel Clay
and the comic short, A Bird in the Hand,
flickering down to the screen
where Lydia Truman Gates arose in veils,
in something gossamer
astonishing even in 1965.
Lydia Truman Gates was like a dream
of lithe attention, her dark eyes laughing
at death, at poverty or a satin bed.
And when they brought her on the stage, applause
rising and falling like a tidal wave,
I had to stand up on my seat to see
a frail old woman assisted by two men,
tiny on that distant stage.
My brother
yanked me past what seemed like a hundred pairs
of knees for all the times I said, "Excuse us."
We ran out where the chauffeur
waited by her limousine, his face painted
green by the light from Heilman's Piano Store,
breathing smoke. "You guys keep your distance."
"Is she coming out?"
He crushed his cigarette:
"No, she's gonna die in there. What do you think?"
More people joined us, pacing in the alley,
watching the chauffeur smoke by the door propped
open with a cinderblock.
And then the door half-opened, sighed back,
opened at last on the forearm of a man.
Behind him, Lydia Truman Gates stepped out
with her cane--hardly the woman I had seen
enduring all the problems of the world
with such aplomb. She stared down at the pavement,
saying, "Thank you, I can see it clearly now."
"Mrs. Gates," Billy stuttered. "Mrs. Gates."
The chauffeur tried to block us, but she said,
"That's all right, Andrew. They're just kids. I'm safe."
"Our grandpa says hello," I blurted out.
She paused for half a beat, glanced at Billy,
then peered at me as if to study terror,
smiling. "Well I'll be damned. And who's he?"
"Don't listen to him," Billy said. "He's nuts."
"George McCracken," I said, "the one you spooned with
down by the railroad tracks."
"George McCracken."
She straightened, looked up at the strip of sky.
"Spooned. Well, that's one way to talk about it."
She laughed from deep down in her husky lungs.
"Old Georgie McCracken. Is he still alive?
Too scared to come downtown and say hello?"
She reached out from her furs and touched my hair.
"Thanks for the message, little man. I knew him.
I knew he'd never get out of this town.
You tell your grampa Hi from Liddy Carter."
The man at her elbow said they had to leave.
She nodded, handing her award and purse
to the chauffeur.
Then flashbulbs started popping.
I saw her face lit up, then pale and caving
back into the darkness. "Christ," she whispered,
"get me out of here."
I stumbled, or was pushed.
My eyes kept seeing her exploding at me,
a woman made entirely of light
beside the smaller figure who was real.
Two men tipped her into the limousine
and it slid off like a shark, parting the crowd.
*
A picture ran in the next day's Herald--
the great actress touches a local boy.
For two weeks everybody talked about me,
but I kept thinking, "Is he still alive?
Too scared to come downtown and say hello?"
I thought of her decaying on a screen,
her ribs folding like a silk umbrella's rods,
while all the men who gathered around her
clutched at the remnants of her empty dress.
My immediate reaction to reading that poem silently was to go find my wife and read it to her aloud--not a reaction I would have had to the piece had it been written in prose. How vivid the speech is! "'Old Georgie McCracken. Is he still alive? / Too scared to come downtown and say hello?'" And how delicately Mason allows us to notice that ordinary phrases such as "I make a pretty decent living here" are in fact examples of iambic pentameter. "Accessibility" by no means guarantees entrance into what Gioia calls "the contradictory impulses at the center of the human heart." "Spooning," however "accessible," is alive with imaginative energy. One comes away from it saying, "What a wonderful story!" And then: "Isn't it wonderful that it's a poem, too!" Where else but in a poem would you find a passage like this:
Then flashbulbs started popping.
I saw her face lit up, then pale and caving
back into the darkness. "Christ," she whispered,
"get me out of here."
I stumbled, or was pushed.
My eyes kept seeing her exploding at me,
a woman made entirely of light
beside the smaller figure who was real.
Two men tipped her into the limousine
and it slid off like a shark, parting the crowd.
And of course the entire piece centers in that single odd word, "spooning." (The name of the theatre, "the Hiawatha," is Mason's tip of the hat to Longfellow and a reminder of the immense popularity Longfellow's poems once enjoyed.)
David Mason ends his essay, "Other Lives: On Shorter Narrative Poems," with a beautiful passage that deserves to be quoted here. "At a time when so many poets work in the university," he writes,
when the very architecture of campuses sets them apart from the surrounding communities, and poets encounter an increasingly limited and specialized range of experiences, narrative poems offer the unexplored territory of other lives. Poets may write about farmers or business people, children or terrorists; the point is that they look into the larger community, into the hearts of strangers, helping to restore the relation between poetry and the increasingly complicated world.
At a time when there is considerable confusion about narrative, about the lyric, about poetry, about everything, David Mason is following Pound's directive: he is making it new.
Jack Foley
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