Lecture 10 ‘Narrative Poetry’

1. Lecture 10 ‘Narrative Poetry’ • What a story looks/sounds like. • Telling the Story. • Australian Narratives. • Allusion. • Avoiding the Narrative? • Finding the Narrative. • Work Ahead.

2. Narrative • Narrate means to tell a story; a narrator is the teller of a story… • Narrative means what gets told: • It is the story. • It is also the story quality, or storyline, that runs through any communications between people. • What’s the story?

3. There was a girl. There was a boy. They never met. They never kissed. They never knew that they had missed, ’cos she lived on the morning side of mountain and he lived on the twilight side of hill. — Traditional. Narrative tension providing expectation Climax that reveals the sad story An alternative story is nonetheless implied or suggested An Essential Story

4. Telling the Story • Many poetic traditions or styles are principally geared towards telling the story. • Much of the earlier poetry in our anthology is narrative – and carries with it the associated notions of argument and allegory. • Chaucer 541 The Canterbury Tales – a story of a group of pilgrims who while travelling to Canterbury tell each other stories to keep themselves amused. Narratives within a narrative. • Milton 455 Paradise Lost – a book-length poem written in blank verse about the fall of Adam and Eve from Paradise and the clash between heaven and hell – strongly allegorical, dealing with the English revolution. • We might also look back further to works like the Old English heroic poem Beowulf and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, from Ancient Greece.

5. Australian Narratives • Many Australian bush verses are strong examples of narrative poetry. • Eg. Almost anything written by Banjo Paterson. • But arguably not ‘Waltzing Matilda.’ • ‘Principally geared towards’ means other poetic aspects are intended to support the story, not outshine or overshadow it. • Can this ever work in practice? • Have another look at the ‘Ballad of Moreton Bay’ (from the Book of Readings): • Can we say the storyline is the strongest element here?

6. An epistolary poem written in iambic pentameter set rhyming stanzas tells a story. More accurately it tells several stories. The story of Egon Kisch’s trip to Australia in 1934. The story of Australia in the intervening years. Sub-narratives of politics, technology, culture and sport. An unusual poem insofar as it is book length and tells an integrated whole story – which is not to say that it is unique. Contemporary Australian poets, Dorothy Porter, Les Murray and Alan Wearne have each published book length poems. Why might a poet write such long poems? A Letter to Egon Kisch

7. What Poetry Adds to Narrative • The discipline of structure • Line • Stanza • Pattern • The ‘music’ of the poetry communicating beyond semantic textual meaning • In a sense the story has already communicated a meaning by virtue of its being written in poetic form.

8. Allusion: Narrative by Stealth? • Alluding (to a given story) means… • Saying something that hints at a story the readers/listeners know from somewhere else. • Poems can add a sense of universality to their own stories by hinting at comparable stories. • Bruce Dawe’s ‘Life-Cycle’ alludes to a wide range of myths — why? • Eg. what does ‘empyrean’ mean? What is it doing in line 9? • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyrean • Poems can also add depth to their own narrative by alluding to a backstory. • Eg. Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot tells a unique story about the heroine, but adds little to the (vast) tradition of stories about Sir Lancelot — instead it draws on them to establish his character in the poem.

9. Avoiding the Narrative? • Here William Carlos Williams shows us how a poem can tell no story at all, and yet we (readers) still try to infer narrative from the few details we are left with… so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

10. Narrative and its discontents • There is a more recent tendency in the history of poetry to eschew direct narrative and rely on/resort to more reflective or subjective types of poetry. • The history of poetry is a struggle between the objectivity of narrative and the subjectivity of personal reflection. • This is a major factor in understanding the history of human culture, never mind poetry. • Why has non-narrative poetry come to the fore? Or has it?

11. Finding the narrative • Seamus Heaney’s ‘Punishment’ is a poem that reflects on the discovery of a body in a peat bog. • There is something forensic in the way it discusses the body and sees evidence of crime, punishment, morality and guilt. • The poem is a metaphor for ‘finding the narrative’ in a reflective poem. • Perhaps it is also a model for the process of ‘finding the narrative’.

12. Work ahead • Students who have missed their informal presentation assessments • Must complete a make-up presentation in order to pass the Unit. • Have only got one more week to arrange a make-up presentation with their tutors. • Cannot do a make-up presentation without special consideration and the appropriate documents (eg. doctor’s certificate). • Any questions about the remaining assignments? • Long essay. • Formal presentation. • Presentation of essays.