Lecture 10 ‘Narrative Poetry’

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Lecture 10 Narrative Poetry

• What a story looks/sounds like.
• Telling the Story.
• Australian Narratives.
• Allusion.
• Avoiding the Narrative?
• Finding the Narrative.
• Work Ahead.

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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.
• Whats the story?

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An Essential Story

• 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

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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 Homers Iliad
  and Odyssey, from Ancient Greece.

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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?

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A Letter to Egon Kisch

• An epistolary poem
• written in iambic pentameter
• set rhyming stanzas
• tells a story.
• More accurately it tells several stories.
• The story of Egon Kischs 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?

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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.

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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 Dawes 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. Tennysons 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.

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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
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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?

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Finding the narrative

• Seamus Heaneys 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.

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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.
  doctors certificate).
• Any questions about the remaining assignments?
• Long essay.
• Formal presentation.
• Presentation of essays.