Stories in Verse

Virginia Woolf once wrote a letter to a young poet friend, advising him to avoid the all-too-frequent trap of writing exclusively about “one single person”—himself. “Two hundred or three hundred years ago,” she remarks, “you [poets] were always writing about other people. Your pages were crammed with characters of the most opposite and various kinds—Hamlet, Cleopatra, Falstaff.” Woolf admired the strength and versatility of writers who could imaginatively inhabit and portray characters other than themselves. As such, she concludes saying that the best recipe for success in poetry is to “embark upon a long poem in which people as unlike yourself as possible talk at the tops of their voices.” In other words, she advised her friend to write narrative verse. 

A small, but growing number of contemporary poets are doing just what Woolf suggested, even amid a contemporary poetry world that typically fosters the opposite. Contemporary verse proliferates with short, first-person lyrics, trauma-based identity poems, and scattered pseudo-intellectual musings based solely on a poet’s own autobiographical experiences and fluctuating interior proclivities; many of these poems are digressive, rambling, and so disjointed as to be impenetrable. This type of verse disheartens average readers, many of whom flounder through such poems and decide that they simply “do not like poetry” at all.

...poems have room for phone booths and snowplows, biographies and betrayals, heroes and villains of various stripes

On the other hand, most people are pulled in by a good story. Narrative poems, such as those featured in The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse, are poems that exhibit all the qualities of a good short story, albeit in a shorter, more condensed form. These are poems that, like stories, feature characters (real or fictional) in a particular place, and a sense of plot that unfolds over a longer or shorter period of time. They offer to the reader a discernible setting where rising action, complications, and a climax take place; they close with a resolution that shuts the door on the poetic experience, even if this is, at times, gentle, mysterious, or oblique. Although a poet’s life experience may contribute to or guide a poem’s narrative arc, the imaginatively crafted protagonists of narrative poems are often quite distinct from their authors, making narrative poems an inviting alternative for readers who are discouraged by inaccessible contemporary poetry that can sometimes stumble into sinkholes of obscure narcissism. 

Sunil Iyengar’s comprehensive introduction offers a compact but rich history of narrative verse, with a particular focus on how it fared in the 20th century. Indeed, all of the book’s twenty-eight featured authors were born after World War II. Iyengar notes that although the narrative poem decreased in popularity at the end of the nineteenth century, poets such as Thomas Hardy, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Robert Frost each kept the narrative tradition alive in the twentieth century in their own way. It is in their footsteps, and under their influence—as well as under the influence of classical epics, mythology, Chaucer, Dante, and Shakespeare—that the poets in this volume take up their pens. These poets continue the tradition of verse-based storytelling that flourished in ancient cultures (Hebrew, Greek, Hindu, and others) that told many of their foundational tales in verse. 

One distinctive feature of the poems in the Colosseum Book is their length: although several of the featured poets have published book-length narrative verse, the works selected for publication in this volume are of short to medium length. They vary from one to fifteen pages long, which highlights the fact that the term “narrative” (when used to describe a poem) need not be equivalent to “epic.” The compact story-poems found in this volume allow it to be an approachable introduction to what might be, for many readers, a new sort of contemporary poetry, in which poems have room for phone booths and snowplows, biographies and betrayals, heroes and villains of various stripes. 

The contents of The Colosseum Book may be new to many who are used to the average poetry scene today, because poetry featuring identifiable storylines began to decrease in visibility in the twentieth century as nihilism and atheism began to proliferate, and man’s sense of his own “story” —his origin, his dignity, and his destiny—began to be lost. As many have pointed out—including Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Servant of God Luigi Giussani, and Popes Benedict XVI, John Paul II, and Francis—salvation history is in fact a story, one that has its own arc from creation to perdition to redemption. Whenever man loses sight of salvation’s “story,” he also loses his ability to see the stories that swell from every source within this sacramental world. And without the eyes to see such stories, poets also come to lack the hands to write and offer them as literary art. Even still, as Iyengar remarks, the “pattern-making instinct” from which stories proceed endures, whether in film, novels, or television, and The Colosseum Book attests that narrative verse still survives today, and may one day thrive again.

Father Jósef Tischner, a Polish phenomenologist, priest, and student of Karol Wojtyła, is another modern thinker who has noticed the story-like quality of human existence. Thanks to a happenstance assignment to work at the Ludwik Solski Academy of Dramatic Arts in Kraków, he developed what he called a philosophy of drama. “To be a dramatic being,” writes Tischner in his Philosophy of Drama: An Introduction: “is to live in the present time, with other people around and the ground under one’s feet.” Tischner continues, “man would not be a dramatic existence but for these three factors: opening up to another man, opening up to a scene of drama and to the passage of time.” His comments apply aptly to narrative poetry, particularly narrative that is imaginative, rather than thinly veiled autobiography. It revels in the opening-up to the other, by way of an encounter with a character that is “not-me.” Both author and reader encounter the other through this character, through their writing and reading respectively. Authentic reading and authentic writing, like authentic relationships, require vulnerability; both writer and reader must be open enough to offer and receive a character “on their own terms” in a particular narrative space and time.

Perhaps, then, as dramatic beings, we are persistent story-makers because we are story-livers, creatures immersed in a drama of our own, who cannot help but make sense of the world by telling stories. The poetic story-makers in The Colosseum Book offer a range of stylistic approaches to the technique of narrative verse. Some of the shortest poems in the volume pack the biggest punch. B.H. Fairchild’s “Les Passages” tells, in less than one page, the tale of a weeping piano player in Nordstrom’s and how an infant’s scream echoes through the store, mysteriously making present the carefully muffled sorrows of all the well-heeled shoppers who hear the piano player’s sobs. Robert Shaw’s “Hide and Seek” tells a sliver of a story about a little girl hiding in a closet, who contemplates her skin’s contribution to the dust she sees floating through a keyhole’s light. Rita Dove, described alongside Bob Dylan as “the most decorated contributor to [the] anthology,” writes in “The Bistro Styx” a modern reimagining of the myth of Demeter and Persephone. 

Many of the poets in this book are well-versed in the methods of formal poetry, and although not all the poems are formal, a sampling of various metrical forms appears, including blank and rhymed pentameter verse and long runs of rhyming stanzas of various length. Marilyn Nelson and Dana Gioia both offer ballads that nod to family history: Nelson’s “The Ballad of Aunt Geneva” relates in catchy quatrains the escapades of a wild aunt; Gioia’s extended cowboy ballad, “The Ballad of Jesús Ortíz,” tells the true tale of the life and death of his vaquero great-grandfather. Gioia’s Haunted, a mid-length, blank verse poem, which weaves flights of lyricism with narrative, falls somewhere in the delightful middle ground between The Great Gatsby, a ghost story, and an Augustinian conversion tale. Patricia Smith’s “Ethel’s Sestina” is an accomplished dramatic monologue in the voice of an elderly woman who passed away outside the New Orleans Convention Center in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and it is a searingly unforgettable version of a sestina—a complex form that is always hard to achieve and even more so when written “in character.” 

There is much more in the anthology that is worthy of exploration, extended study, and rereading. For this reviewer, as a mother, writer, and poet, the piece that was worth the price of the whole book itself, and which elegantly illustrates both the way that contemporary narrative poetry can be up-to-date while remaining in conversation with the poetic traditions of the past, is classicist A.E. Stallings’ poem “Lost and Found.” It is a Dantesque dreamscape, written in ottava rima, woven with mythological and classical allusions and kicked off by a wild search for a child’s lost toy amidst the detritus of family life. The thirty-six stanza poem begins: 

I.

I crawled all morning on my hands and knees

Searching for what was lost—beneath a chair, 

Behind the out-of-tune piano. Please, 

I prayed to Entropy, let it be there—

Some vital Lego brick or puzzle piece

(A child bereft is hiccoughing despair),

A ball, a doll's leg popped out of its socket, 

Or treasures fallen through a holey pocket. 

II.

Amazing what webbed shadows can conceal—

A three-wheeled Matchbox car, or half a brace

Of socks and shoes. Oblivion will steal 

Promiscuously—lost without a trace, 

Microscopic bits of Playmobil,

The backup set of house keys. You misplace

Your temper and your wits, till you can exhaust 

All patience with the hours it cost.

III.

I thought too of that parable, the other—

Not the one men preach of the lost sheep, 

The lesser-known one, on the housewife's bother

Over a missing coin: how she must sweep 

The house to find it. No doubt, she was a mother, 

I think, and laugh, and then I want to weep: 

The hours drained as women rearrange

The furniture in search of small, lost change. 

Much like Dante in his own dark wood, the poem’s protagonist wanders through the midlife wilds of child-rearing, dishwashing, and paper-shuffling, and upon falling asleep finds herself in an imagined lunar land that serves as a refuge for lost things. The moon-valley is filled not only with the world’s lost stuff that “oblivion will steal / Promiscuously,” but also with “the halls to which we can’t return,” “the lost threads / of conversations, arguments” and even “the letters / We meant to write and didn’t,” and “insomnia’s desperate hours.”

The dreamer is guided by Mnemosyne (the mythological goddess of memory who gave birth to the Muses) as Dante was by Virgil. Like the Florentine bard, the speaker of the poem is graced with certain revelations and realizations as she journeys through new and fantastic landscapes. At one point, she seeks her lost beauty in shards scattered in gray moon-dust, and she is startled to see her daughter’s face reflected back at her. Her guide chides her: “‘Not truly lost,’ she laughed, at my surprise. / ‘Some things fetch up on the bright shores of the world / Once more under a slightly different guise.’” With an elegantly chiastic structure, the poem ends as it began—with a similar morning scramble for a lost permission slip, as the children head to school. 

XXXV.

There are lunches to make, I thought, and tried to find

Some paperwork form last week I'd mislaid

(Due back, no doubt, today, dated and signed),

Instead, unearthed a bill we hadn't paid, 

Located shoes, a scarf, a change of mind:

I tried to put aside mistakes I'd made, 

To live in the sublunary, the swift,

Deep present, through which falling bodies sift. 

XXXVI.

I saw the aorist moment as it went—

The light on my children's hair, my face in the glass

Neither old nor young; but bare, intelligent.

I was a sieve—I felt the moment pass

Right through me, currency as it was spent,

That bright, loose change, like falling leaves, that mass

Of decadent gold leaf, now turning brown—

I could not keep it; I could write it down. 

As the poem's short tale draws to a close, its final stanzas are a brilliantly understated mosaic of themes and images that remind readers of where the poem has been. These last lines also look ahead, and are an invitation, or perhaps an open door: as the protagonist resolves to live her motherly morning scuffle with heightened perception and gratitude, readers may be inspired to reflect upon how they spend the "bright, loose change" of their own days. Like Stallings' poem, The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse is both an opportunity and an invitation to develop a deeper sense of attention, interest, and gratitude for the varied stories of the world by passing through its pages.