Verse Novel Beginnings IV: Davis McCombs and Ultima Thule

It is an accepted tenet in poetry circles today that each poem must be self-contained; the inclusion of notes or other background information is widely considered tacky. In Ultima Thule, however, poet Davis McCombs creates a delicate and sophisticated novel-in-verse by breaking the rule that says poems should be unnoted and self-contained.

We previously discussed how in The Descent of Alette, Louise in Love and Fredy Neptune nothing is explained prior to their first line of poetry. Now let us look at a book in which the other road is taken. In his Yale Series of Younger Poets winning book, Ultima Thule, , Davis McCombs seems intent upon giving the reader adequate background knowledge before letting them see the first poem. With good reason, as the first poem, “Candlewriting,” seems nicely composed but tepid when read “clean”:

I remember the wind and how the sounds
it carried were my name, meant me, Stephen…
called out over the cornfield where I hid.
there was no sound when candlesmoke
met limestone – just this: seven characters
I learned to write with a taper on a stick. (1)

At first reading one might picture a contemporary youth, hiding from his mother in the fields near his home, and graffitiing his name on the walls of a nearby cave. Upon returning to the front material of the book, however, which includes a lengthy forward, a brief biography of the main character, a list of sources, and an 1845 map of Stephen Bishop’s explorations into Mammoth Caves, one rereads the poem with more appreciation.

The main speaker throughout the book is the mapmaker and explorer Stephen Bishop, who lived from about 1820 to 1847. He was the slave of Dr. John Croghan, owner of Mammoth Caves for a decade prior to the American Civil War. For his explorations of the cave complex Bishop enjoyed world-wide fame through newspaper articles and books. (2)

Given this new information one understands that the person calling out to the boy across the cornfield was not necessarily his mother, but the Doctor or perhaps a member of the household staff. The sound of his name carrying out across the sheltering cornfield suddenly takes on a different tenor. With the timeline adjusted, we have to acknowledge a wild and frontier-style Kentucky, which would have only been a state for about 18 years at the time of Bishop’s birth.

Wealthy guests paid Bishop to guide them through the caverns. The forward tells us that Bishop learned to write by smoking their names into ceilings of the cave. Readers can no longer imagine a bored boy smudging his own name on a wall.

Social and legal status, economic status, and a host of other issues are just as much a part of this poem as the poetry itself. Instead of trying to weave these things into the text, McCombs elected to supply preparatory information in the front material of the book. Without having to weight the introductory poems with information, he was free to write a far more delicate and suggestive first poem than would have been possible otherwise.

Exercise: Write four lines about a historical figure of your choice, including as much information on their life as you can. Write four lines about the same person, assuming your reader already knows all the important facts of the historical figure’s life. What do you include in the poem when the data are omitted?

1. McCombs, Davis.Ultima Thule.Yale University Press. 2000. p.3.
ibid., x.

Article first published in Suite 101 as: Beginnings IV: Davis McCombs and Ultima Thule.

Writing the Verse Novel: Setting Your Scene

Poets Alice Notley and Ellen Bryant Voigt make us live their works, but how? Let’s face it; a book length poem is daunting.

It’s more frightening still if scanning the page you come across the voices of people you don’t know, events and objects you’ve not been introduced to. How does an accomplished poet overcome this, so that the reader easily slips into the time and place intended? 

Alice Notley apparently doesn’t worry about this problem.  Witness how she begins, The Descent of Alette without prelude or note: 

“One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly”

“I didn’t know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly”

“Great,” we may think, “even Notley doesn’t know who the speaker is.” She’s pulled a smart trick, though: If the speaker doesn’t know her own identity she must begin a process of discovery. Her surroundings and history will be revealed to us readers as they are revealed to her.  The effect is simple and so complete that we won’t even notice as scene and character information is delivered to us, slowly, as we read.  (1)

To be honest, Alice Notley does include a preliminary note about her use of all those quotation marks, but nothing about Alette or her subterranean world.  We’ll talk further about those quotation marks and other intriguing formal techniques in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, let’s look at Kyrie, a narrative told in a series of sonnets by Ellen Bryant Voigt.  In Kyrie, Voigt takes care of scene set-up by including a two-line mention of the 1918 epidemic from a history text.

Following two pages later she inserts the prologue, which is, in fact, an eight-line poem. It describes the world after the pandemic has come and gone, in lines that echo Walt Whitman:

After the first year, weeds and scrub;

after five, juniper and birch,

….

who can tell us where there was an orchard,

where a swing, where the smokehouse stood? (2)

Voigt began the timeline of her narrative two pages later, with the first poem of the sequence:

All ears, nose, tongue and gut,

dogs know if something’s wrong;

….

Outside, the vacant yard: then,

within minutes something eats the sun. (3)

Next article: We will continue this discussion of beginnings, featuring two gritty narratives from the dramatic side of the poetic spectrum.

Exercise 1: Write four lines of poetry to deliver information, as in Voigt’s prologue. First make sure your prologue works as poetry. Remember: The human brain is designed to find pattern in chaos, so don’t feel compelled to over explain.

Exercise 2:  Devise a scenario in which information can be delivered without prologue or notes, as in Notley.  Write four lines following that scenario.

1. Notley, Alice.  The Descent of Alette.  New York: Penguin Books. 1992. 3.

2. Voight, Ellen Bryant.  Kyrie.  New York:  W.W. Norton and Company.  1995. 11.
3. ibid., 15.

Article first published at Suite 101.com

The Way-Back Machine -- Where and How to Begin a Book-Length Narrative

The entry piece to a book-length narrative poem holds even more importance than it would in a general collection.  Mary Jo Bang and Ruth Whitman share a technique.

The intro must funnel the reader directly into the scene of, let’s say, 18^th century Russia.  Let’s be more specific and say that the entire narrative takes place in the home of the smartest and most devoted of Count Tolstoy’s serfs.  How confusing to the reader that first poem will be -- involving scythes, rye, 20 versts and a glass of kvass -- unless the mental stage has already been set.

A novel like Moby Dick can afford to take a leisurely chapter or two if need be to explain a socio-economic situation, a political situation, the geography, climate and dominant religious beliefs of the time and place.  A prose piece also has the advantage of being able to use journalistic directness when necessary.  On the other hand, poetry’s very nature is sleight of hand -- saying one thing which leads the reader to understand another, greater thing which is unsayable. Even a prose poem embodies the kind of boiled-down structure that precludes lengthy explanation. How then can a poem set its stage without becoming, well, prose?

Poets often use what screenwriters call “the way-back machine.”  This device opens with the end of the timeline and then jumps back to the beginning. The first poem of a book is set at the end, or perhaps after the end of the story, while the second poem returns to the beginning.  Mary Jo Bang’s Louise in Love, for example, begins with the poem, “Eclipsed,” which happens as the story closes:

It is, she said, so over.  But it wasn’t.

Specters they would be

rooted eighty-two years in the same spot waiting

… and one by one

(which is the way death takes us, he said)

they took their shadows

and went out of the garden and into the house.  [i]

Without sacrificing the beauty of the piece, Bang has deftly showed her readers whom they will be reading about, and when the action takes place. With the work of the way-back machine complete, the story begins in the second poem, “She Couldn’t Sing At All, At All.”

The way-back machine was also put to good use by Ruth Whitman in her book, Tamsen Donner: A Woman’s Journey.  Her first poem begins with the ghostly voice of her dead narrator opening the tale: 

how could I foresee my end

in that soft Illinois spring?

I began my journey certain

that what was unknown

would be made smooth and easy

I forgot the anger of the land[ii]

The next poem, “April 15, 1846, leaving Springfield, Illinois” then loops back to the beginning of the timeline to start the action:

the wagons move first,

one directly behind the other[iii]

By letting the dead Tamsen Donner speak in the first undated poem, Ruth Whitman has effectively placed her narrator outside of her own timeline, acting as much a voice of our own moment as one of the 19^th century. 

Exercise: Imagine you find an old journal while renovating your home. Did it belong to a construction worker, the house’s original owner, a real estate agent, or someone else?

Write four lines of poetry in the voice of the journal writer.

Write four more lines, set 15 years earlier than the first.

Write four lines in your own voice, in which you speak of finding the journal.

---

[i] Mary Jo Bang.  Louise in Love.  New York, NY: Grove Press, 2001. 3.

[ii] Ruth Whitman. Tamsen Donner: A Woman’s Journey. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 1977. 15.

[iii] ibid., 19.

(This article first appeared in Suite 101.)

Book-Length Verse Narratives

Before the age of the novel, much of history and literature was written in narrative verse. With the resurgence of book-length poems, we return to our Homeric roots.

Before the age of the novel, much of world history and literature was written in the form of verse. Narratives such as The Iliad and The Odyssey in Europe and The Bhagavad-Gita in Asia are ready examples. (Narratives such as The Iliad and The Odyssey in Europe and The Bhagavad-Gita in Asia are ready examples of religion, biography and history as poetry. ) As hard as it seems for us to imagine now, the advent of prose was a revolutionary act. One of the reasons the Prose Edda, for instance, is so important to western culture is because it was written in this stunning new non-verse form. The same is often said for the Tale of Genji in Japan.

Even in the nineteenth century books of popular literature, if not history, were written in book-length lyric volumes. Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin (1833) for instance, is still widely read. The 1860 novel-in-verse, Lucile, by Owen Meredith, however, was not so long-lived and is out of print now even though it was wildly popular for decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Many poets writing today are returning to the traditional story-telling form. Publishers, on the other hand, seem shy about announcing a book as a lyric narrative. Though it is often hard to tell from the title, cover, or back material, bookstores today are stocking more and more novels-in-verse and linked narrative collections.

For the next few weeks we will explore the role poetry can play in the telling of a good story.  Here are a few we will be examining:

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

An urban drama based on Greek Mythology.

Louise in Love by Mary Jo Bang

A romance based in Flapper-era America.

After the Lost War by Andrew Hudgins

A biography of Poet Sidney Lanier, and history of the post Civil War US.

Ultima Thule by Davis McCombs

Two stories -- one historical, one fiction -- set in Mammoth Caverns.

Fredy Neptune by Les Murray

Action-packed historical fiction of WWI through WWII.

The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley

An allegory using the Paris Metro as Underworld.

Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voigt

Historical fiction based on the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Tamsen Donner:  A Woman’s Journey by Ruth Whitman

Historical fiction based on the Donner Party tragedy.

Notice how many times the word “fiction,” is used in the above descriptions.  This is done purposefully, because of the need to underscore an important distinction. After decades of confessional poetry being the dominant model, especially in American classrooms, many assume that all contemporary poetry is true – that what it records actually happened. Poetry has become confused with journaling. “So, how did you get into poetry?” a student asked recently.  “Did you feel depressed one day and pick up a pen?” 

Poetry used as personal confessional, however, is but one use of the genre. In the next few weeks we will be letting poetry out of the confines of the expected, and take it off-roading into the wild literary woods.

Think of an important prose biography, history, or novel.  How is the story served by being told in prose? How could the story be told through poetry?  Does the change in form change the story, and if so, how?

(This article first appeared in Suite 101)

The Poetry Workbook: Learn by Reading, Learn by Doing

It’s the complaint of many an editor, “this person just doesn’t read contemporary literature!”  A rejection slip goes out.  The poet may never know what sabotaged his submission to that publisher, so into another envelope goes the same set of poems, destined for another rejection. 

Informal experiments performed by disgruntled poets suggest that if John Donne or Elizabeth Barrett Browning submitted their work today it would never see print.  So too the work of those who write as if they are contemporaries of Donne or Browning.  As artists we must learn from our predecessors, yet use the tools we’ve gained in a new way.

For instance, one writing a sonnet today must make different choices than Shakespeare would.  Rules of rhyme, word order and word choice have changed from what they were even decades ago, as has what constitutes interesting subject matter. 

In this set of lessons we will use contemporary poetry to identify what today’s editors demand. Each lesson will feature a short exercise set at reinforcing what we have learned from the reading. The long term goal is to train the reader to read as a poet does – at first enjoying, then analyzing and finally absorbing a work. In this way the reader’s own poetry will grow and develop, and become part of that living body of work: Contemporary poetry today. 

Hello Friendly Reader,

Yes, it's true: some of my best friends are poetry editors. Let me tell you, they complain about their submission piles a lot.  What I hear most is, “wow, some of these people just don’t read contemporary poetry.” Rejection letters fly, and those unfortunate poets– who may be well versed in, say, the poetry of the 18^th century -- stare at their in-boxes in disbelief. 

Let me clarify: There is INESTIMABLE VALUE in being well versed in poetry of the 18^th century, or 12^th, or 6^th century BC. The work of poets who have no love for the history of their art appear frothy and soulless when it crosses an editor’s desk.  Even on the bleeding edge of modern poetry, the poet’s skill at writing a Sapphic or a sonnet will reveal itself. On the other hand, a poet who submits nothing but Donnesque odes to Poe-Killz Annual will smother in rejection slips.

Contemporary writers, even those working in traditional forms, approach them differently than did their predecessors. (Take a gander at A.E. Stallings' work and then the classic poets she follows.) Reading libraryfuls of poetry -- ancient and modern, in original languages as well as translation -- is the only way to absorb the tradition in a way that will deepen your writing.

In the following set of articles we will read the work of contemporary writers who use traditional forms in modern ways.  We will begin with the revival of the epic form or, in modern terms, the “book-length narrative poem.”