...as I try to figure out where I'm going with this Siena poem, I keep thinking of the fact that most of the famous long poems - whether verse dramas or narratives - are stories (or groups of stories). & since Don Quixote at least, poetry has faced a big rival in the novel.

Long narrative poems continued to be written through the 19th century. Thomas Hardy was maybe the last of that line, with his King Arthur verse novels (though there have always been a few verse epics & novels here & there - Archibald MacLeish wrote one, I think; Stephen Vincent Benet...). Frost wrote little verse short stories, and others imitated him.

In an essay over yonder I wrote about the theories of some of the Chicago Critics - in which they offer a sense of "form and content" almost diametrically opposed to the received 20th-cent. notions. With them, the verbal surface (the diction, style, figuration, verbal texture etc.) is, paradoxically, the content (the material out of which the poem is made). A poem's form is the complex intellectual-emotive gesture or shape which emerges from the combination of theme (argument) and plot. In this sense, an achieved poem's form is unique and inimitable.

What I'm thinking (tentatively) of doing with this Siena obsession is constructing a sort of altarpiece. Sienese pre-Renaissance art is well-known for multiple narrative perspectives. They will have a set of small pictures showing vignettes from a saint's life - or even cartoon-like action sequences, showing different stages in a single dramatic event. These little pictures will surround the large group image (Madonna & Child often involved); then there will be another whole set of images on the reverse side of the altar.

So the idea is to present a mosaic of lots of different small insights or perspectives, leading toward a larger, enfolding set of themes or design. What that design is I am not at liberty to expatiate on at this time.

The difficulty here is that this kind of long poem seems to lack narrative drive. Or it takes a heck of a long time to get the momentum going in that direction. This is an example of a problem with current poetry generally. It's like an art form which has had its top layer taken off (& shunted over to fiction). What poetry is left with is primarily anecdotes. Diaristic, essayistic responses to actual events in the real world. The similarity between much contemporary poetry and private journal-keeping - or journalism per se - is perhaps something poets tend to avoid thinking about. What myth-making and fiction used to do, was establish an imaginary surround - within which the elaborate thematic and allusive powers of the poet could flourish & play. I don't want to suggest that contemporary poets lack the wit and imagination to re-work the real world in very playful and effective ways... in fact, the opposite may be the case. Necessity is the mammy of invention : in the desert of the (un-fictional) real, poets have to play even harder.

What "Siena" might do for me (I fervently hope) is offer sort of a parallel, indirect version of that "imaginary surround" which a straightforward narrative plot provides for fiction.

The Thousand and One Nights is, I guess (I'm not an expert), structured on the idea of saving life by wasting time : idling it away with stories-within-stories, told to keep the tyrant amused - distracted.

Josh Corey has been conducting an interesting improv on the differing time-effects in prose fiction & poetry. He suggests that good fiction involves an experience of "time-forgetting", whereas poetry always brings us up short with its focus on the fine grain of speech and language, the music of performance.

I've written some on this topic here at various times. What has struck me is that, while good storytelling does encourage us to lose ourselves in the story & forget time, nevertheless fiction tends to make time a theme of the story, so that the experience of reading it is double-edged : we lose ourselves (& time) in stories which describe the effects of time's power. The Odyssey and In Search of Lost Time are, I guess, the prime examples.

Poetry, on the other hand, does not simply intensify our experience of time : poetry changes the basic character of that experience. Prose may demolish our awareness of time; poetry seems to demolish time's very objectivity (as sequential, historical, impersonal phenomenon). Poetic time is a kind of performed Now, in which language spirals back reflexively on itself - and in the process, reshapes perception, knowledge, the sense of self and others.

I think it's worthwhile to emphasize these distinctions between the time-effects of prose fiction and poetry. And to repeat that the experience of a pleroma or a fulness of NOW (containing pasts and futures) - the recapturing and transmuting of past into present, chaos into order - is a theme of major narratives. Thus a notion of poetry is implicit or encrypted in the substance of fiction.

Busy working on a novel these days. Mother is the invention of necessity. Don't really want to go back to the library, mine exquisite golden cage. & haven't, or haven't applied, any other socially-useful skills lately (like teaching). Wish to write myself out of a hole, or try. It's silly & hopeless, but heck, I can't think of anything else at the moment.

Tempted to talk about it, but afraid to give away secrets of the craft. A story is a gizmo.

Another blog-range response to Jonathan :

Lake's outline of the effect of lineation, syntax and meter in poetry in this particular essay is clear, simple to the point of simplistic, bare-bones, basic, unoriginal, and accurate. I don't see anything particularly Victorian about it, maybe because I'm a Victorian?

But what interested me about it was that the analysis of poetry came through a description of fiction & narrative - how the minds of writer & reader "dream" & evoke the mimetic signals in the text. He points out how the mind shapes "wholes" (in a "fractal", recursive expansion) out of these minimal but subtle & delicate language signals. This really is an area which I think you can make the argument has been dealt with mainly through disruption, "dis-figurement", in postmodern poetics.

My own interest has been engaged in the composition of long semi-narrative poems in which story & landscape & character "appear" in surprising ways, which experience makes me think there is more to be discovered through such synthetic rather than disjunctive processes.

Tomorrow is the day celebrated as the anniversary of John the Baptist's beheading. Also the day Atahuallpa (last ruler of the Incas) was executed by the Conquistadors.

But today is the 40th anniversary of the original March on Washington, and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which should be heard in its entirety. I was 11 years old at the time, not really aware of what was going on outside of Hopkins, MN (until JFK was assassinated a few months later).

Tomorrow I'll be flying out to Minneapolis for a few days (on NW flight 1963, as a matter of fact).

The trouble with language poetry is, that by denying narrative coherence, it denies the "story" part of history, the drama. The historian Taylor Branch put it pretty well on the Peter Jennings show tonight: "People don't realize that the King speech at the Lincoln Memorial was a founding father's speech; to this day Americans don't realize that their founding fathers are black" (quoting as close as I can from memory).

Anyway, Happy Trails (until next week), & O Happy Day.

Sometimes I've been criticized for my repetitive definitive assertive assertions about what "poetry is". But in today's literary climate, a return to basic first principles might be a healthy thing.

The confusion in avant-garde oppositional circles seems to be what it's always been : a displacement of the most basic aspects of poetic making with technical novelty. Imitation, as practiced in all the thousands of MFA programs etc., is castigated as not only unnecessary but as positively bad (The "School of Quietude" polemic is only the latest in a long line); what is put in its place are rotating models of literary rebellion or idiosyncrasy, as if rebellion & idiosyncrasy themselves were the substance of art and poetics. This is the fundamental mistake.

The contempt for imitation reveals an underlying misreading, an erasure of past poetries and their replacement with an a-historical continual revolution. But past poetries will not go away, will not be shunted aside; what the various idioms of futurism reveal, more than anything else, is aesthetic impoverishment and the debasement of literary values.

The oppositionalists read Whitman or Dickinson, for example, as utterly sui generis, geniuses from nowhere, whose lack or displacement of any lineage whatsoever then becomes a model for authenticity. But the activity of poetic making came before them; their technical achievements are a secondary effect of the intensity of their poetic thought, not simply stepping-stones in some kind of diachronic procession of unconventional literary progress or revolution. Literature does not simply "add on" to some "advances" in a linear progression : it wavers over time, swayed by individual authors whose insight & capability allow them to counter whatever rhetorical excesses or inauthenticities overshadow their times.

The basic character of poetic making has never changed. It is a verbal response to reality, a narrative ordering of experience, keyed to harmony (in both its musical and its logical or thematic senses). Praise come naturally to this activity; lyric ardor unites the perception of, and the desire for, what is beautiful; elegy and mourning express its loss; the logic of truth places beauty in a moral context; irony and denunciation are its negative image, its complementary shadow. The technique displayed in the working-out of this activity is secondary, the way Coleridgean fancy is secondary to imagination : poiesis itself is inherent talent, capability, a natural artfulness which emanates technique, rather than proceeding from it.

The great narrative of human experience is illegible without the first perception of the over-arching shape of the narrations which are already there. This is a hard thing to explain, but it gets to the root of the distinction between classicism and revolutionary modernism, or acmeism and futurism. The acmeist, for example, enters into a dialogue which is already ongoing : what this reflects is an aesthetic receptivity - beginning in childhood - to the natural continuity of human expression with time and nature. We learn the beauty of language and songs and stories at our mother's knees; our own artistic endeavors take place in the context of pre-existing beautiful sounds (other poems, other stories, other narrative orders). The world is shaped by the great narratives that preceded us : literature is not merely demystification, a purely negative critical activity of disaffection or disillusionment : it is also a sharing in the delightful apprehension of a stable and recurrent beauty or an underlying order.

This kind of classicism gives rise to those personal canons of aesthetic fitness and rightness which spur the poet to make something likewise, something both new and fitting : something right for the time and place. The great models of the past also challenge the poet to reach beyond the petty, the minor, the vulgar, the repetitive, to make something genuine, authentic and aesthetically meaningful in the clearest terms, for the widest, most disinterested audience.