Frederick Pollack wrote,
>'Reality is always quite clear to the person it hurts most - who by
definition cannot speak or cannot be heard. The story is out there,
coherent, and waiting to be told. The blur is in us,'

How true, how irony falls away when travelling through India or China.
Though an Australian writer/Film maker (unsure which) Bill van der Heide
experienced numerous events in India that he could not correlate. He refused
to write
them down fearing that the mere consecutiveness would give these events a
causality that he did not experience. There is a danger, the momentum of
narrative can blinker context, phenomenology, ideology etc. particularly in
prose writings I'd suggest.

FP >' where Bernstein says that Pound, Williams and Olson all assumed the
irrelevance, the impossibility of traditional consecutive narrative as a
contemporary epic style. He says this in passing, for he agrees with
them. The point is simply obvious, a given'

Yes but where is the evidence against this point? The problem of narrative
poetry gets caught up in the problem of the long
poem (and not sequences) now that traditional structures, ballads etc don't
convince or interest us anymore. This is I think one of the interesting
problems in poetics


FP>' I feel that narrative poetry as a genre should be brought to the
cultural foreground and more fully articulated in criticism.'

I agree - but still find the possibility fo writing narrative daunting
Could you give us a clue as to what The Reaper Essays by McDowell and
Jarman contain?

On the other hand, while I confess to not having read Jeffers
I can't take Dana Giora seriously (Can poetry matter? Essays on Poetry and
American Culture).
Worried that poetry is dying as a practicing artform, he suggests
that the public would engage with long narrative poems with public themes
(he cites Jeffers).

We can't avoid narrative at one level or another, even lyric poetry uses
deictic touches - and time based sequentiality with place is at the heart of
it. We use narratives for remembering/organising the past; explaining human
action and ourselves; giving causal explanations of events, interpreting
social situations etc. Our reality is narrative in character and of course
the poetry of the past was narrative.

I think poetry can do almost anything and that far too many manifestos
squeeze it in this or that direction. The problem is to make a poem
work and interesting - poetry used to be narrative and those poems
are still read today - they still work but now there are other factors:
The dispersal of the tribe for whom the tales are told
The absence of grand Narratives, another tendency to fragmentation along
with collage which I think has been influenced by technology
The tendency of narrative to ignore environment , the aesthetic richness of
experience, for story.





Cheers John Bennett










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