Well, I personally LIKE narrative poems, at times with grand ellipsis one
would not use in (traditional) prose story-telling - such as Louis Simpson
uses. On my journeys now I hear stories from ancient times and I'm now
trying to use them in my poems, such as the one which follows. Sorry if I
used it as my Snap this week (I can't remember which poem I used, which is a
healthy sign of output but not of ageing memory) ... Here is a gentle story
used as a poem:
**
*Across the Bridges Noodles … Draft 2*

*A story of ancient times. ***



The wife of a worker

would bring him lunch every day,

and each day the meal was

not warm enough when she arrived

at the field where he was working.

So she pondered and planned

and realised that she could

boil the spiced water first,

with lots of oil to keep it hot,

and pack the tasty little ingredients

separately. She would carry this

to him, and, when she reached

the bridge, she would

add the ingredients and it would be

cooked when she arrived.



Now I walk over the bridge

and feel behind me to my jeans' pocket

for my wallet, making sure

I have enough to buy my wife

Over the Bridges Noodles
in Kunming on a sunny Tuesday.


On 18/01/07, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Fascinating conversation, Chris and Frederick: and perhaps it
> interests me particularly because my days at present are busy writing,
> well, narrative. And it's old fashioned narrative, an adventure story
> which is supposed to tranfix teenagers to the chair. This is the final
> of four 500-page books, and the other three, if I'm to judge by sales
> and fan mail, are fairly successful at said transfixing. One thing
> that writing this work has made me hyper conscious of is that a good
> story is as much (or even primarily)  its means of telling as the
> story itself. What is Kipling's "Listen, O my beloved" or "Once upon a
> time" or "Sing in me muse" or any of those tropes but exhortations to
> listen, promises of a kind of magic?
>
> I agree with Frederick about how its "distance from reality
> reveals...that of mainstream writing". However, this is for me
> liberating rather than otherwise; what honest fiction writer pretends
> that he/she is transparently reflecting the world itself, rather than
> his/her perception of it? And I am not so sure that SFF is as despised
> as Frederick supposes. Only by literary snobs, I'd suggest; there are
> too many good writers practising the form for it to be so comfortably
> dismissed. Speculative fiction is as full of sub-standard writing as
> any other branch of literature, but it's only fair to judge it, like
> any other literary genre, by its best practitioners. They include
> writers as thoughtful and various as Stanislaw Lem, Ursula Le Guin,
> Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, China Mieville, Ismael Kadare or
> Russell Hoban. All of them are as engaged in the "real" world as in
> the world of imagination and language.
>
> Writing this kind of work, even at the conventional end like me (and I
> like to think that it's writing that has some beauty and insight and
> meaning, even so) has for me opened a new richness in the work of
> people like Beckett or Bernhard or Howe (or Prynne or HD or Milton or
> anyone you care to name, really). But I don't think one reads fiction
> or poetry to learn about "a slice of reality": I think one reads for
> pleasure. A "difficult pleasure", as Brett Whitely said of painting.
> And there are many kinds of pleasure to be had.
>
> All best
>
> A
>
>
>
> On 1/16/07, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> >
> > But all that's by the way. "Deconstruction becomes an excuse to avoid
> real
> > critique" - exactly.  And this "excuse" pervades not only criticism (and
> > "theory") but poetry itself.  Doug Barbour and I have locked horns many
> > times about Language poetry; he sees Susan Howe as important, and enjoys
> her
> > work; I see in it nothing but versified footnotes, an academic
> hermeticism.
> > In response to his quotation, from Kroetsch on bpNichols - "The story as
> > fragment _becomes_ the long poem, the story becomes its own narrative;
> i.e.,
> > our interest is in, not story, but the _act_ of telling the story" - I
> have
> > to say No.  This kind of thinking is evasive, self-serving,
> pseudo-clever,
> > and all too prevalent: a potentially threatening idea ("narrative") is
> > verbally coopted, reduced to a meaningless buzzword, and denatured.  The
> > story of a story is, most likely, a weaker story than a story about
> reality;
> > for a poem to be about its own construction does not make it a
> narrative.
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Editor, Masthead:  http://www.masthead.net.au
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>



-- 
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/