Narrative Poetry for the iPod Generation, Comic Book Plots for Poems: or, Is Poetic Narrative Dead?
Ron Silliman’s blog has a long post about how Ron is tolerant of narrative in film but intolerant of it in poetry. I made a short comment about how narrative should still be celebrated, but it could be that the narrative type transforms every generation – so, for the generation growing up right now, texting each other and downloading scenes of television on iPods, reading manga – how will they define narrative? What kind of narrative structure will they need or want? But in the end, people are hungry for communication, for structure and story, for emotional and intellectual connection – perhaps it may look different, but at its heart, that is why we turn to poetry.
I just got finished writing an article about how pop culture may become more dominant for the new generation of poets…because it is the new universal language, because this generation have been taught to be constant consumers of media…for a lot of reasons. I have been thinking about Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life a lot, maybe because it represents a way of talking about serious subjects in pop culture language, avoiding the personal narrative for a surreal type of narrative, making ridiculous leaps and at the same time, keeping the reader emotionally invested.
I don’t believe, myself, that narrative will ever be dead, any more than poetry will ever be dead – it will be continually reborn in new ways, with new voices, in new modes.
Thoughts? Arguments?
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
Steven D. Schroeder
Ron’s rationalization of his conservative movie taste/reviewing ability was rather amusing, but I think he’s correct to highlight the formal differences between media and genres, something I think a lot of artists would do well to think more about. People are obviously a lot more accepting of abstraction in visual art than they are in poetry, for example, but a lot more tolerant of sonic play for the sake of sonic play in verse than in a novel. The examples go on…
Lyle Daggett
I should maybe say first I haven’t read Ron Silliman’s post, so won’t try to comment on it directly. Your post sent my thinking in a couple of directions —
I’ve had a notion for some time that dreams (i.e. the ones we have at night, not talking here about daydreams etc.) occur without any linear narrative structure; the scenes and events in a dream occur, in effect, simultaneously, all at the same time. The need, or (maybe) instinct, of the waking mind to order events into something resembling waking life is what gives the simultaneous events the appearance of a narrative sequence. One evidence of this is that the events in a dream often make more sense, reveal more of their content, if we consider them as occurring simultaneously with each other and having a mutual cause-and-effect connection with each other.
The other place this took me was to a comment made several years back by Roger Ebert during one of the “At the Movies” shows (I can’t remember now if the other reviewer was Gene Siskel or if it was Richard Roeper by then). Ebert, in discussing whatever the movie was that they were reviewing, mentioned in passing that he had recently written and published (don’t know where) an essay on “the replacement of existentialism by irony in contemporary film.” That’s not the title of the essay, I’m just quoting Ebert from memory and I may not have his precise words right.
And Ebert didn’t go into any more detail about what was in his essay, but it occurred to me that he might easily have substituted “culture” for “film.” The replacement of existentialism by irony in contemporary culture. I’ve thought much on this notion since the random happening of having heard him articulate it in a movie review T.V. show; and on the possible implications for poetry, literature, the culture at large.
Existentialism is gravity, concentration, tears, trembling, inner fire, the weight of the earth. Irony is zero gravity, distraction, dry humor, mild boredom, surface coolness, the weight of helium. (Does either of these describe, more than the other, the current president of the United States?)
I don’t believe narrative is dead, not even poetic narrative, which tends to work a little differently from poetic narrative. What is narrative? It’s telling a story, telling things that happen, or that have happened. I suspect people will continue doing that.
Not having read Silliman’s post, I can’t speculate on the reasons for his intolerance (using the word you used in your post) of narrative in poetry, though obviously to feel intolerant of something, even to say so out loud, isn’t (in and of itself anyway) to cause it to be dead.
Whenever I come across some conservative cultural critic declaring the end or the death of some aspect of literature, culture, etc., I tend to wonder if they have a sideline business selling coffin nails to the undertaker.