Last night I went to the launch of the American and New Zealand poetry duets which was held in a cosy room at the Southern Cross Bar. It was launched by Bill Manhire who read snippets of poetry by Walt Whitman and R. A. K. Mason and in both poems the poets offered advice to future writers. Whereas Whitman was encouraging and hopeful, Mason was a little doomesque which I think is a wonderful generalisation about the differences between New Zealand and American poetry. More importantly Bill’s implied link between historical and contemporary poetry made me realise that I need to spend more time looking back.
At the moment I am writing long narrative poems (LNPs) with varied characters – The Holiday (recently published in Sport) is about how the relationship between an older woman and a young man mirrors the relationship between Picasso and Matisse. Marathon Men, my longest poem at twelve pages, is about the unlikely friendship between a garbage man and a wealthy but agoraphobic prosthetic limb painter. At the moment I am writing a long poem about the impact of a transgender revelation between a father and daughter while they set up an orienteering course. What I am wondering is what makes a LNP? How do I define “long” and what differentiates a long poem from an epic poem? What elements make a poem narrative compared to lyrical, conversational or experimental? When does a poem stop being a poem and become a short story?
Writing LNPs was a mostly unconscious choice; the voice of my poems started to lengthened out. When I first started writing, my poems were spare and compact but once I experimented with short stories (which were passable but not publishable), my poetry started to change. As an aside to my doctoral research I want to write an essay about LNPs in New Zealand poetry as a way to inform and place my own work. When I met superstar poet Simon Armitage I asked him if he had any advice for new writers.“Read,” he said. If a new writer asked me the same question today I would tell them to “Read and write critically” because I find the process of investigating other poets eventually elucidates my own work.
If you are a reader of New Zealand poetry and can suggest a poet who writes long narrative poems, I would love to hear from you.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Helen R // Jul 13, 2010 at 9:54 pm
Hi Sarah. I too am a fan of long narrative poems, and I enjoyed your one in the latest Sport. My favourite is ‘The Glass Essay’ by Anne Carson – I love the different rhythm and resonances a long piece can set up.
I’ve written some – though perhaps they are poem sequences. Is there a difference do you suppose? My published ones are in My Iron Spine – the longest are one about Empress Elisabeth of Austria and Hungary, and one about late renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi.
A quick perusal of my memory banks and my book case has brought to mind a few other NZ examples, though I’m sure there are many others. Tim Jones’s ‘Red Stone’ (All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens) is kind of a narrative about exploring Mars. The poems in Jenny Bornholdt’s The Rocky Shore are pretty long, and often narrative, though loosely I guess. Diane Brown’s Before the Divorce We go to Disneyland mixes poetry and prose in a long narrative, and I think she may have done something else similar more recently. Anna Jackson has a couple of long narrative poems in her first collection, The Long Road to Teatime: ‘The Long Road to Teatime’ is a fanciful retelling of the Divine Comedy, and ‘Teatime with the Timorese’, which is the first thing I ever read (and published) by her and it is awesome. Oh, and ‘Stow stay stow stay’ in her Catullus for Children is a long narrative poem about moving to Wellington.
I’m sure I’ll be thinking about this for days now, and finding more and more examples. I’m interested to see what suggestions other people come up with.
2 Bill // Jul 13, 2010 at 9:55 pm
Older woman? Please.
Haha. Sorry that’s not really helpful is it? I’ve given you the long poems I’ve thought of anyway.
Good luck! Maybe it’s a newish type form? I’d be interested to hear if that’s right or wrong.
3 mary mccallum // Jul 22, 2010 at 11:41 pm
One of my most favourite long poems is The Time of the Giants by Anne Kennedy (AUP) – do, do, do read…
4 Sarah Jane Barnett // Jul 23, 2010 at 7:30 am
Funny enough I read The Time of the Giants just a few days ago. It was fantastic and a really good example of a sequence of LNPs that create their own LNP.
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