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.

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[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.)