Thursday, September 22, 2011

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

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

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, 18th 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 19th 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.)