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 stillness, demurs insouciance—in which Allen Ginsberg declares the story of his life. The poem is one of insanity and brilliance. There are voices too loud to be ignored and too raw to be silenced. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," Ginsberg begins, and from there on nothing stops. His narrative is felt, gasping, each line of "who" wrenching us deeper into his unspooling grief, his agony, his irate desperation. We do not hear the story because we are caught inside it, moving with it, swept along in its torrent.

And then there is "The Colonel." Carolyn Forché does not rely on rhythm to drive the story forward, rather stripping it bare with quiet, clipped sentences. The horror is not in what she describes but in how simply she presents it. There is no embellishment, no overt emotion, just the cold recounting of a moment; and in that restraint, the story sharpens into memory, testimony, something told because it must be and not because the teller wishes to relive it. Free verse, unstructured, prosaic—this is the way stories are often spoken: haltingly, in fragments, in sentences that do not quite fit together but nonetheless seem to perfectly converge.

Each of these poems tells a story, yet each does so differently. Some linger in implication, some charge ahead with unflinching force, some sit in their own quiet weight. But in all of them, poetry becomes much more than words on a page, on a screen, on the tip of the tongue—it becomes movement, as well as the lack thereof. A story, coming apart and coming whole.