Quite a few years back, I attended a small conference where the primary speaker was a gentleman who published a poetry magazine as well as collections of poems. He talked a bit about form and content and how each needed to complement the other in order to make a truly successful poem. Then he discussed why he chose some poems over others for publication in his magazine.
“The poems most likely to be published almost always have something in common,” he said. “They have a strong narrative line.”
A strong narrative line–that was something that I knew on some level but had never put into words. I’m grateful that the speaker did that job for me. A thought might ride around in our minds for years, but until it finds words, it isn’t really born.
Now I’m passing those words along to you. A really good poem, the type of poem that someone might remember for a lifetime, is almost certain to feature a strong narrative line.
But exactly what do we mean by a strong narrative line? We’re not referring to the horizontal lines of a poem. The line we mean runs vertically through a poem. The line of narration is the skeleton on which the imagery, word-play and, sometimes, symbolism hangs. Without it, the poem might not collapse, but it won’t be as strong or as memorable. If a poem is written without a narrative line, in order to be successful, it needs to be short.
Let’s look at a narrative line in action. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is a poem that people tend to remember. Very little action really occurs in its twenty lines, yet the poem does have a strong narrative line. The speaker is in the woods, at a place where a path forks. He looks down one fork, then takes the other for the merest of reasons. As for actual movement occurring, that’s it. But the speaker also does some thinking and some imagining: “I shall be telling this . . . somewhere ages and ages hence.” Thinking, when combined with even a little movement, can be good narrative material.
Narration involves three elements: (1) someone–could be plural, could be an animal, might conceivably be something non-living; (2) somewhere–usually, the setting provides most of the imagery and sometimes symbolism as well; (3) doing something–and for a poem, that something doesn’t have to be anything very complex.
The narrative part of the poem brings movement into it, and when there’s movement, the question of what will happen next always hovers in the reader’s mind. The writer brings drama, or suspense, into the poem by creating that sense of uncertainty. Frost himself said that anything written is only as good as it is dramatic.
Good poetry is dramatic. Drama comes from having someone (or something) in a specific setting doing something. Make a little narration serve as the bones of your poem, then flesh it out with good imagery and artful wording.
Even poems that aren’t explicitly meant to tell stories can benefit from having something of a narrative line written into them. Consider this poem of mine in which the speaker is an old man who has no one to love but wishes he did.
That I Would Love
That I would love but have
no love perplexes these old bones,
a jalopy rambling on a road
toward no address, having no end
in mind, but from a heart
running on fumes and a soul
that never ages, that never forgets
the spring winds raising, then bending
the jonquils, the sound of girls
laughing in places long passed, sounds
of women turning houses into havens,
of tires turning slowly onto driveways.
Still rambling, old and perplexed, I
putter on, but where is home?
The old guy pretty much states his position in the first two lines, but in line 3 a narrative line begins even though the narrative itself is entirely metaphorical. In other words, no real action takes place in this poem. Narration begins when the speaker refers to his old bones as a "jalopy." At that point, the jalopy starts doing things.
"Jalopy" is a word I haven't heard used for a while. It refers to a broken-down old car--a reasonably appropriate metaphor for an old man, even if it isn't very complimentary. This particular jalopy, because it refers to a person, can think. It also performs acts. It rambles, it has no destination in mind, it runs on fumes, and its soul remembers springtime (in poems about being old, spring almost always refers to youth). It also remembers "sounds of girls laughing in places long passed" (such as high school), "women turning houses into homes (relatively young adulthood and early parenting) and "tires turning slowly into driveways" (coming home from work). The old car still putters, seeking a driveway that it just doesn't have anymore.
Now I'm going to ask you a question. In the phrase "girls laughing in places long passed," why did I use the word "passed" instead of "past"?
I hope you can see the narrative line in the poem. If anyone should read this poem and remember it after even a little time passes, the memory will linger because of what begins in line 3 and not because of lines 1 and 2.
In the next blog, we'll look at my most recent poem, which I polished a little even today, and we'll focus on its narrative line and how (I hope) I created a backstory within it. In the meantime, keep walking the path, take care of yourself and be safe. And thanks for reading.