On Narrative Poetry: Williams, Ginsberg, and Forché
Narrative poetry tells a story in how it moves and how it doesn't. Some poems materialize slowly, rounding out the shape of an experience, a memory, a rumor, while others seem to snowball forward, breathless and urgent and insistent. The telling, as always, is altered with the voice that utters it. " The Red Wheelbarrow " tells its story through absence, through the careful yet ordinary placement of images. William Carlos Williams never tells us why "so much depends" on the red wheelbarrow, only that it does. And yet we feel everything, the rainwater, the white chickens—they are more than themselves, they are what remains of something larger, weighted. Think Earnest Hemingway's Hemingway’s six-word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." In both, the narrative is skeletal, implied rather than told. It is in the spaces between that a story manifests. Then there is " Howl ," a different type of narrative entirely—one that rejects stilln...
