----- Original Message -----
From: "bj omanson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 1:22 PM
Subject: Re: The Mermaid
> Thank you Frederick & Doug. Refreshing not to be lectured on the futility
> of resurrecting dead styles.
>
> Can you recommend any narratives that escape being "mired in the telling'?
> Can a narrative be entirely based in imagery?
>
> Does an abstract idea have any place in a lyrical poem, or is "no ideas
> except in things" still the inviolate principle?
>
>
BJ: I don't see "The Mermaid" as a narrative poem. It's a lyric-narrative
hybrid, like most of what I write. That is, it has narrative elements, but
the images, and the very different kind of "story" they tell, are the main
point. In strictly narrative poetry, esp. book-length, what counts I think
is relentless ACTION. Incidental metaphor should be kept to an absolute
minimum, as should authorial abstraction and moralizing; the one metaphor
that counts is the overall story itself, which everything else in the poem
should serve. Derek Walcott's *Omeros failed (I think) because its dense
metaphors, germane to modernist lyric, stop the action dead. Glyn Maxwell's
*Time's Fool succeeds.
Re abstractions: Pound's principle of "making it new" overrides, I think,
"no ideas but in things." You can use anything you want - abstraction, even
cliche - as long as it is somehow recontextualized, revitalized.
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