----- Original Message -----
From: "sharon brogan" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2008 1:52 PM
Subject: Re: "The Circuit Rider"
> Thanks, Frederick. I completely agree with your first pont. I do not
> always
> succeed at this, but I do see it as the goal.
>
>
> On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 6:04 PM, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> . . . Two tips: 1. Distinguish between your genuinely subjective
>> experience
>> and your narrowly autobiographical experience. The former is what
>> counts.
>> As I said before, neither "I" nor "you" (nor parents, siblings, Aunt
>> Tilly
>> etc.) are at all important in themselves; only as functions of a poem and
>> how it engineers its reader's experience.
>
>
> *This* -- your second point -- is very helpful. I will work with this
> idea,
> and see what I can do. I've never seen it put quite this way before.
>
>
>
>> 2: Realize that a narrative, a story, is a metaphor. In a narrative
>> poem,
>> the guiding incident is the poem's metaphor. (Stylistically, therefore,
>> there should be as few other metaphors as possible.)
>>
>
> ". . . as few other metaphors as possible." Oh, my. Not like me at all,
> is
> it? I'm thinking of writing a blog post about this; may I quote you? And
> if
> so, how would you like to be linked?
>
> It may be some time before you see your influence in my work. In fact, I'm
> about to post the most recent Moon poem, which breaks every rule there is,
> I
> suspect. But then, like most all of my poems, it's still *in draft*.
>
> --
>
>
You might look up *The Reaper Essays,* by Robert McDowell and Mark Jarman.
The Reaper was a magazine devoted to narrative poetry, which M and J were
trying to reinvent and popularize 20+ years ago. Several essays set out and
defend a clear and simple checklist of poetic-narrative techniques. The
formula, that "the incident in a narrative poem IS its metaphor, and
precludes an overly metaphoric style," is my own, and only partly expressed
in M and J's work. What I consider the utter leaden failure of Derek
Walcott's book-length *Omeros results from his not seeing this point, and
trying to write an epic as if it were a lyric. Glyn Maxwell's *Time's Fool
succeeds because it does, primarily, tell a story, and that story has as
many meanings as any powerful lyric symbol.
I can't be linked with, as far as I know; I have no blog or website. Your
readers would find some of my work on the Web if they googled my name.
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