----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Jones" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, January 13, 2007 4:38 AM
Subject: Re: "Some Guests"


> This is a very interesting comment, indeed. Trying to avoid throwing
> this question back onto Frederick alone, I was wondering if anyone could
> comment further on this "basic trick" of changing first person dramatic
> monologue to third person?
>
> I'll try to add some comments from my POV... it is something I have been
> at least trying to do, more so to move toward free indirect discourse,
> so that may be the first comment. (FID's ambiguous point of view, it
> could be first, second or third.) The other thing that occurs to me is
> the distinction between digesis and mimesis seems to get lost. (To risk
> a rough translation; digesis as telling and mimesis as showing... wrt to
> narratology, Metz and Genette and to Plato if you so wish.) To follow
> this on, if digesis as telling a story is obviously narrative and
> mimesis can be stretched between narrative and lyric then the formal
> distinction between narrative and lyric on which narratology (from
> Chatman, Story and Discourse) seems to blur so much that it becomes
> almost impossible to make such a distinction. (I am tempted to discuss
> Hegel but I will leave that... esp the elision of time into space in
> _Science of Logic_.) Which sort of gets back to Frederick's comment on
> narrative and lyric.
>
> Can't think much more to add quickly, best press the send button...
>
>
Chris goes directly to an issue I consider crucial for my poetry and for 
poetry generally.  I've read very little narratology, so I'll speak only in 
my own terms.  For a poet, writing narrative is psychologically and 
existentially different from writing lyric - i.e., it feels different, and 
involves a different stance towards experience.  A critic, theorist, or 
reader, looking at a work from the outside, will see more continuity.  To 
ask which impulse (towards narrative or lyric) is primary within poets is 
different from asking which need is greater for readers.  And to ask either 
question in a historical vacuum creates chicken-or-egg aporias. 
Historically, and therefore (I think) in essence, both the poetic impulse 
and the poetic need are for storytelling.  The traditional primacy of the 
epic results not merely from the imposed wishes of ancient, medieval, or 
Renaissance princes but from a basic intuition: poetry should tell the tale 
of the tribe, explain the universe, and advance values.  The kind of tales, 
cosmologies, and values desired by the men who paid for epics may have 
amounted to propaganda; in the hands of good poets they became criticism. 
(I'm thinking primarily of Virgil here, but even the Nibelungenlied and the 
Song of Roland "criticize" the bloody worlds they seem to celebrate.)

For over two centuries now, poetry has meant lyric poetry.  The ancient and 
Renaissance hierarchy of genres was not inverted but discarded.  Yet every 
lyric poet, writing "about" his or her own grief , pique, or ecstasy, is 
writing in the context of a larger story, being recited by society as a 
whole.  The tribe is always telling its own, unexamined tale, and imposing 
it.  Today the theme of that tale is that individual and immediately 
interpersonal experience is primary; that it alone, in fact, is real. 
However much mainstream poets may despise Margaret Thatcher's "There is no 
such thing as society, there are only men, women, and families," they accept 
it in their poetic practice.  Which is why I find it increasingly hard to 
read literary journals.  One more dead father, one more walk along the 
beach, yet another dreadful divorce ... for me, mainstream (or workshop, or 
magazine-verse) poets blur into one bourgeois figure, miserable but 
comfortable.  They asume two things: 1) that however predictable experience 
may be, sensibility is unique; 2) that if sensibility is adequately captured 
in a style, it alone can make average experiences seem unique, important, 
and "universal."  When they succeed, their poems suggest some timeless, 
human truth.  But timelessness is an illusion, and humanity consists of 
classes and ideologies in continual conflict.  The synchronic, solipsistic 
mainstream lyric cannot encompass this fact.  All contemporary "political" 
poems fail, because poets as poets are in flight from politics, i.e., from 
history.

More later, perhaps, but must run.