Infante's Inferno - Against linear narrative, as such

08:12 am - Against linear narrative, as such

Lately, I've been struck by how much linear narrative has re-asserted its dominance in poetry. By linear narrative, I mean that the poem shows a progression of events in sequential order, frequently (in the case of what emerges from slam) in first person, with commentary.

Now, this is a structure I've used several times myself, although it's never been my favorite. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with it, but on the whole, I'm forced to ask, "Why didn't you just write a short story?" In slam and performance poetry, the difference between a poem and a monologue are slight, to the point where I'm often not entirely sure what's what on the stage.

A lot of people seem to be unclear on the distinction the two genres of writing hold. The woefully uneducated will tell you that it's the fact that one has line breaks and the other doesn't, and considering the head of a major writing program once told one of my reporters that, I think we can assume that the depths of miseducation spread wider than we've been lead to assume.

For me, there's two bellwethers to show whether something is poetry or prose. The first -- and this is a personal standard, mind -- is that the role of fiction is to show the course of change, whereas poetry's job is to show the moment of change. It's a fine distinction, and possibly only applicable to contemporary writing, but then, we're not actually writing in any other era, so there you are.

With fiction, you have characters whom are lead through a plot that, at the end, changes them in some way. Maybe small, maybe large, but at the very least, the protagonist shouldn't be the exact same person he or she was at the beginning. Culturally, it's a tool to understand why things effect us, to help us understand that life does change us. (Not its only role, to be certain, but it's the one that's interesting to me right this second.)

In poetry, it is less important (and indeed, usually counterproductive) to look so much at the why of change, or how the change came to occur, than it is to look at the exact moment of the change. This is why Billy Collins is so appealing: Because he's mastered the art of capturing that small epiphany. And the moment can be complex -- see Eliot's "The Wasteland" -- but fundamentally, we're still looking at one moment there, at the reduction of what's left when the story's been boiled away and left to its raw, emotional elements.

The other factor, and it's a big one for me, is that poetry demands a transformation of one thing into another. Without use of metaphor, there is no poem. I really do believe there's something magical in that portrayal -- the moment Tam-Lin transforms into a hawk, the patient etherized upon a table. In that moment, we are absolutely, 100% free to remix reality in any way we see fit. And yet, so few writers actually do it. Perhaps there's something frightening in that freedom. Perhaps they simply can't imagine a life where the sky is not above them, the ground not below.

In poetry, any aspect of reality is up for grabs, and yet we frequently feel bound to the laws of physics, as if they were applicable here. And perhaps that's why there's so much safety and comfort in the linear narrative: It provides the structure for us. There's a beginning, a middle and an end. Without that narrative, we'd be forced to create our own structures, and that's a frightening prospect.

The mistake I see a lot these days, on both stages and in the pages of journals, is to confuse the object of a poem with its own emotional resonance. It's the difference between saying "a table" and telling me what the table feels like, what emotions the table evokes. (Don't tell me a table doesn't evoke emotions. People read love letters at tables, write letters to their children at them, have sex on them. Everything resounds in one way or another.)

But you don't have to approach that resonance head on. Sometimes, it's best to approach that resonance from a series of associations, from seemingly disconnected things that combine to create an impression that approximates the feeling you're trying to convey.