Narrative Poetry (Mark Strand)
Yesterday at the supermarket I overheard a man and a woman discussing narrative poetry. She said: "Perhaps all so-called narrative poems are merely ironic, their events only pointing out how impoverished we are, how, like hopeless utopians, we live for the end. They show that our lives are invalidated by our needs, especially the need to continue. I've come to believe that narrative is born out of self-hatred."
He said: "What concerns me is the narrative that provides no coherent framework for measuring temporal or spatial passage, the narrative in which the hero travels, believing he goes forward when in fact he stands still. He becomes the single connective, the embodiment of narrative, its terrible delusion, the nightmare of its own unreality."
I wanted to remind them that the narrative poem takes the place of an absent narrative and is always absorbing the other's absence so it can be named, and, at the same time, relinquishing its own presence to the awful solitudes of forgetfulness. The absent narrative is the one, I wanted to say, in which our fate is written. But they had gone before I could speak.
When I got home my sister was sitting in the living room, waiting for me. I said to her: "You know, Sis, it just occurred to me that some narrative poems move so quickly they cannot be kept up with, and their progress must be imagined. They are the most lifelike and least real."
"Yes," said my sister, "but has it occurred to you that some narrative poems move so slowly we are constantly leaping ahead of them, imagining what they might be? And has it occurred to you that these are written most often in youth?"
Later I remembered the summer in Rome when I became convinced that narratives in which memory plays a part are self-defeating. It was hot, and I realized that memory is a memorial to events that could not sustain themselves into the present, which is why memory is tinged with pity and its music is always a dirge.
Then the phone rang. It was my mother calling to ask what I was doing. I told her I was working on a negative narrative, one that refuses to begin because beginning is meaningless in an infinite universe, and refuses to end for the same reason. It is all a suppressed middle, an unutterable and inexhaustible conjunction. "And, Mom," I said, "it is like the narrative that refuses to mask the essential and universal stillness, and so confines its remarks to what never happens."
Then my mother said: "Your Dad used to talk to me about narrative poetry. He said it was a woman in a long gown who carried flowers. Her hair was red and fell lightly over her shoulders. He said narrative poetry happened usually in spring and involved a man. The woman would approach her house, wave to the man, and drop her flowers. This," Mom continued, "seemed a sign of narrative poetry's pointlessness. Wherever the woman was, she sowed seeds of disinterest."
"Mom," I ventured, "what we call narrative is simply submission to the predicate's insufferable claims on the future; it furthers continuance, blooms into another predicate. Don't you think that notions of closure rest on our longing for a barren predicate!"
"You're absolutely right," said my mother, "there's no other way to think of it." And she hung up.
He said: "What concerns me is the narrative that provides no coherent framework for measuring temporal or spatial passage, the narrative in which the hero travels, believing he goes forward when in fact he stands still. He becomes the single connective, the embodiment of narrative, its terrible delusion, the nightmare of its own unreality."
I wanted to remind them that the narrative poem takes the place of an absent narrative and is always absorbing the other's absence so it can be named, and, at the same time, relinquishing its own presence to the awful solitudes of forgetfulness. The absent narrative is the one, I wanted to say, in which our fate is written. But they had gone before I could speak.
When I got home my sister was sitting in the living room, waiting for me. I said to her: "You know, Sis, it just occurred to me that some narrative poems move so quickly they cannot be kept up with, and their progress must be imagined. They are the most lifelike and least real."
"Yes," said my sister, "but has it occurred to you that some narrative poems move so slowly we are constantly leaping ahead of them, imagining what they might be? And has it occurred to you that these are written most often in youth?"
Later I remembered the summer in Rome when I became convinced that narratives in which memory plays a part are self-defeating. It was hot, and I realized that memory is a memorial to events that could not sustain themselves into the present, which is why memory is tinged with pity and its music is always a dirge.
Then the phone rang. It was my mother calling to ask what I was doing. I told her I was working on a negative narrative, one that refuses to begin because beginning is meaningless in an infinite universe, and refuses to end for the same reason. It is all a suppressed middle, an unutterable and inexhaustible conjunction. "And, Mom," I said, "it is like the narrative that refuses to mask the essential and universal stillness, and so confines its remarks to what never happens."
Then my mother said: "Your Dad used to talk to me about narrative poetry. He said it was a woman in a long gown who carried flowers. Her hair was red and fell lightly over her shoulders. He said narrative poetry happened usually in spring and involved a man. The woman would approach her house, wave to the man, and drop her flowers. This," Mom continued, "seemed a sign of narrative poetry's pointlessness. Wherever the woman was, she sowed seeds of disinterest."
"Mom," I ventured, "what we call narrative is simply submission to the predicate's insufferable claims on the future; it furthers continuance, blooms into another predicate. Don't you think that notions of closure rest on our longing for a barren predicate!"
"You're absolutely right," said my mother, "there's no other way to think of it." And she hung up.
From Ploughshares, Fall 1986
posted by egay at 5:00 PM
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