Thinking about poems and stories.

“When poets stopped telling stories, they not only lost a substantial portion of their audience, they also narrowed the imaginative possibilities of their art. As long as there have been potes, those poets told stories. Those stories were rarely about their own lives but about imagined lives – drawn from myth, legend, history, or current events.”
–Dana Gioia

I’ve been thinking about this passage since I read it on Friday, in the preface to Good Poems, collected and introduced by Garrison Keillor. And as obvious as this statement is, it really hasn’t occurred to me before now that the poems which have stuck most with me in my lifetime are those which have a narrative of some sort or another. Not necessarily a fully developed plot, sometimes just a moment or description that exposes a person, a world, or a thing. Sometimes a story which can be read in multiple ways. But never has a poem stuck with me which contained only a pretty image or a deft turn of phrase – they are sometimes pleasant to read, sometimes annoying and pretentious – but in either case they don’t stay.

Brian and I have recently been reading the Canterbury Tales to each other, and remarking often how different a cast poetry had in an oral culture and when lyric was the main form of news broadcast. How memorable it is, how engaging to listen to. How unlike the poetry that is fashionable today – which dismiss lyricism as “too light” and narrative as “too traditional”. Rather we would have opaque, sometimes unreadable images layered upon each other – because it obscures the fact that nothing much is being said.

During a recent conversation with more traditional literature followers, I have heard it said that “spoken word” (a poetic form unto itself) is too cheap in its use of modern vernacular and the ostentation of those who come on stage with bombastic presentation. In 2003, the poet laureate George Bowering went public with his belief that slam poetry competitions were “crude and extremely revolting,” further elaborating by saying that a true classic poet is humble before the word and respects language, that using poetry to win a competition or for the writer’s own glory is missing the point.

As if poets have never been rock stars, as if Lorca and St. Vincent Millay were not celebrities in their own day – producing as much to dig themselves out of poverty as anything else. As if the bards of Chaucer’s day were simply humble to language, and had no self-interest beyond the love of words and language. I am no poetry scholar, but it seems to me that Bowering and others would like to corner the market on what art is and never have it change except in ways that maintain its elitism (a thing which is a change in itself – poetry once being the most accessible form of storytelling).

While there are aspects of the spoken word community which irritate me (celebrity creation, tough guy posturing etc), it’s quite simply ridiculous not to recognize what the genre has brought back to poetry. That would be memorable stories told in accessible language. Stories told about invididual experience, collective experience, the lives of the people around us – working stories, spiritual stories, romantic stories. Poems so big that they need to be shouted out to rooms full of people. Tales that make you laugh and shout out in appreciation. How can that be “revolting”? A shared experience of the art and craft of writing.

I’m not a spoken word poet, and it’s unlikely I will ever be – my topics are simply not hip enough for the stage – but I want to take this lesson of form on in any case. Right now I am working on a five poem series I hope to enter in a contest in early 2009 (is the fact I am using a contest to spur my work to a deadline considered “crude” also?) – but I am thinking about the narrative which will thread these five pieces together. Each of them being its own story and part of a larger one when read together – which I believe is all that could make a five part series interesting enough to read through.

To me, poetry has to tell something. To be the essential words needed for a story, for the imparting of information – but it ultimately has to say more than “that rose is beautiful” or “that city is a crazy, abstracted panopoly of lights” or whatever thin thing passing for insight is getting published these days. And so I suppose I am figuring out exactly what it is I want to say. What makes me want to write is the sense I have stories worth sharing, so why throw those out in favour of a word kaliedscope the reader simply puts down when they are done?