To Gillian:  "Fred" is fine.

I don't think we have any real disagreement about "linearity" - i.e.,
that sequential narrative need not preclude multiple meanings or
readings.  Colloquially, however, the word "linear" has been used in my
experience to mean "tendentious," "simplistic" and so on; and that was
why I said the word blurs too many meanings and should be dropped.

It seems that all our examples of "narrative" have come from prose; the
issue for me is precisely the poetic validity of narrative poetry.  Let
me ask, then, if you have read much, or any, Robinson Jeffers?  One of
my *lieber Meistern*, he wrote some very powerful short lyrics but is
most known for long narrative poems, some of them book-length.  (I
should note that praising, even mentioning his name will brand me, to
many on this list, a hopeless unsophisticate.)  I can't quote offhand
from *Roan Stallion* or *The Women at Point Sur* or *The Double Axe*,
yet they remain in my sensibility as hard knots of image and emotion.
Plot is merely an aspect of these "knots" or, most often, a mere pretext
for them. (J has a world-view; one more or less knows what will happen;
the question each time is not so much "how" as "how intensely.")  The
time and effort it takes one to read one of these poems (or any good
narrative poem) assures the poem more mental storage space than any
lyric; but - and this is my point - the emotional effect it leaves, the
"poetic" effect, is not so different.  Further: this effect does not
solely result from what you have called "leaps and gaps".  Poetic
narrative must be more condensed than prose, its incidents more spare
and concentrated, but it is not necessarily more elliptical.  To go
further would require a long discussion of style.  Meanwhile, you might
test out my claim on C. K. Williams (when he's good), Pushkin (in D. M.
Thomas' translation), Frank Bidart (whose longer poems are as much
"dramatic" as "narrative"), Tony Harrison's *V,* Kendrick Smithyman's
*Atua Wera*, Les Murray's *The Boys Who Stole the Funeral* or *Fredy
Neptune*, perhaps Alice Notley's *Descent of Alette* and very definitely
HD's *Helen in Egypt* - the modern narrative poem that most influenced
me.

It seems to me that your assumptions about poetry are so subjectivistic
that we are talking past each other. Valery defined a poem as "a machine
that produces an emotional effect in a reader."  My concern is with this
machine or object, and the poet's responsibilities to it.  To your
question, whether "some forms of language are better than others at
addressing 'being *within* the experience'," I can only repeat Rilke's
distinction between experience and mood and my earlier discussion of
it.  Do you perhaps mean "mood" rather than "experience"? I suppose the
short lyric is the best form in which to capture - to attempt to capture
- a powerful mood while one is in it.  The quality of such a poem will
depend on whether one is unconsciously rational enough to relate that
mood to one's own experience, and to the reader's.


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