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          In classic book-length narrative poems, such as the Iliad and Beowulf, the reader is engaged by the heroes and the action-packed drama. The ebb and flow of the verse charms the reader and propels him through the narrative. Such an experience with this genre only intensifies my disappointment with contemporary American storytelling through poems. Now that the Expansive poetry movement can safely be pronounced dead, I believe it is also safe to say that one of the movement’s aims, to expand poetry into storytelling, has failed. Though there have been a handful of book-length stories in verse produced over the last twenty years (indeed, good book-length narratives by American poets are in short supply for most of the twentieth century), when compared to the number of novels and films that have been made, they fall woefully short. Not only are there extraordinarily few book-length poems in story form, but many of the stories that do exist are incredibly boring, lacking interesting subject matter, burdened by dull characters, needlessly chatty, and marred by excessive meditation that interrupts or destroys the story. Notwithstanding various reasons for the shortage of book-length narrative poems in America, the fact remains that the form has virtually died. Like the dodo, a heavy flightless bird, it has become extinct.  

          Whenever I want good stories, I turn to novels and film. I must admit up-front that I have a particular affinity for stories that are mythic, symbolic, and often fantastical, rather than for stories based in realism. I prefer such books as Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Amin Maalouf’s Balthasar’s Odyssey, or John Crow’s Devil by Marlon James—and stories by exciting young authors such as Neil Gaiman, Ted Chiang, and Nalo Hopkinson. They tell stories that deal with the big issues from a variety of imagined perspectives. I would much rather watch such films as The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aliens, or The Matrix—stories that are told with creative energy and with an abundance of vitality—than read the poetic narratives that are written today. Where are the stories of adventure and romance? Where are the science fiction stories and the stories of fantasy? Where are the Westerns and horror stories? Where are the allegorical and fabulist stories in verse? Do American poets even have the skill and imagination to write book-length narrative poems? Or are American poets so self-obsessed, so concerned with the immediate rendering of inner experience, that the only poem they can create is the lyric? 

          Even if a short narrative is encountered, it invariably consists of the author’s self-involvement and the detritus of his ordinary life, a narrative in which we all conveniently share the same ordinary circumstances and perceptions, subject fodder shoveled from the stale and circumscribed environment of the poetry seminar or writing workshop. The poems are invariably about childhood, home repair, eating osso buco, family reunions, or the occasional tame sexual encounter. Often included in these poems are lists: lists of places visited, lists of people known, lists of foods, and my favorite, lists of flowers. Ubiquitous are the “scents of blooming lilies” or “the tangled vines of hibiscus,” as if everywhere these poets go, brilliant gardens and fields of flowers await to be catalogued. They are dull stories told by dull creative writing professors whose worlds (interior and exterior) do not venture far from the Victorian facade of the English Department. These poets and their students have been schooled in the poetry of plain speech and ordinary circumstances on which so much of their imagination, and careers, depends. For instance, take the poem “Charles Street, Late November”:

A friend on the edge of death tap-taps
his way, cane-first, to the apothecary.
My arm is the apple branch at his side,
his hand more oriole than invalid.
Ever elegant, he wears a wide-brimmed hat
and mackintosh, pausing often to deplore
the self-indulgence of this wealthy corridor:
the French provincial rosewood perfume box
lined in velvet, “a little coffin for scents,”
and the Portuguese linen smocks
embroidered with ducklings
“who’ll get their feet wet more often
than the poor heiresses for whom
these dresses will be bought.”
At the corner, a pair of border collies
who seem to have just steered a herd
of sheep back up Mt. Vernon Street
bound to a halt at my friend’s feet.
They admire each other, this man
and the neighborhood’s working dogs
caught in the thrill of a fresh task.
Their names fall softly from his lips
as he struggles to remove one glove
so they may lick his fingers.
We continue over crazed brick.
Inside the narrow shop that smells of chocolate
and cellophane-wrapped cordwood,
he glides by the pharmacist and dwells
in the stationery aisle; I wait as he chooses
a pocket date book for the coming year. 

Here is a story filled with sweet and delicate optimism. The narrator patiently waits for her friend to choose a pocket date book for the coming year, even though he’s “on the edge of death.” We are provided a comfortable, tender, and boring scene that is “ever elegant.” Now consider this poem, “Family Reunion”:

The divorced mother and her divorcing
daughter. The about-to-be ex-son-in-law
and the ex-husband’s adopted son.
The divorcing daughter’s child, who is

the step-nephew of the ex-husband’s
adopted son. Everyone cordial:
the ex-husband’s second wife
friendly to the first wife, warm

to the divorcing daughter’s child’s
great-grandmother, who was herself
long ago divorced. Everyone
grown used to the idea of divorce.

Almost everyone has separated
from the landscape of a childhood.
Collections of people in cities
are divorced from clean air and stars.

Toddlers in day care are parted
from working parents, schoolchildren
from the assumption of unbloodied
daylong safety. Old people die apart

from all they’ve gathered over time,
and in strange beds. Adults
grow estranged from a God
evidently divorced from History;

most are cut off from their own
histories, each of which waits
like a child left at day care.
What if you turned back for a moment

and put your arms around yours?
Yes, you might be late for work;
no, your history doesn’t smell sweet
like a toddler’s head. But look

at those small round wrists,
that short-legged, comical walk.
Caress your history—who else will?
Promise to come back later.

Pay attention when it asks you
simple questions: Where are we going?
Is it scary? What happened? Can
I have more now? Who is that? 

          Here we have a maudlin poem that acts as therapy. In this particular poem, that old middle-class culprit, divorce, is the subject that needs treatment. The poem is bloodless as everyone at the reunion is “cordial,” “Everyone/ grown used to the idea of divorce.” Tragically, “Almost everyone has separated/ from the landscape of a childhood.” The narrator/therapist advises we should put our arms around our childhoods and our history, a history that “waits/ like a child left at daycare,” and everything will be okay. Is this poet serious? Are we supposed to be surprised by that simile as the poet breaks the line at “waits”? Is a child being left at daycare that traumatic an event? How can we take the poem as satirical and ironic with the poet in that last stanza posing those questions in such earnest? In any case, this poem isn’t really a story, as the tale falls apart midway through as the poet urgently needs to tell us to “Caress your history.” The last narrative I would like to present is “Traveling Alone” 

At the hotel coffee shop that morning,
the waitress was wearing a pink uniform
with “Florence” written in script over her heart.

And the man who checked my bag
had a badge that said “Ben.”
Behind him was a long row of royal palms.

On the plane, two women poured drinks
from a cart they rolled down the narrow aisle—
“Debbie” and “Lynn” according to their winged tags.

And such was my company
as I arced from coast to coast,
and so I seldom spoke, and then only

of the coffee, the bag, the tiny bottles of vodka.
I said little more than “Thank you”
and “Can you take this from me, please?”

Yet I began to sense that all of them
were ready to open up,
to get to know me better, perhaps begin a friendship.

Florence looked irritated
as she shuffled from table to table,
but was she just hiding her need

to know about my early years—
the ball I would toss and catch in my hands
the times I hid behind my mother’s dress?

And was I so wrong in catching in Ben’s eyes
a glimmer of interest in my theories
and habits—my view of the Enlightenment,

my love of cards, the hours I tended to keep?
And what about Debbie and Lynn?
Did they not look eager to ask about my writing process,

my way of composing in the morning
by a window, which I would have admitted
if they had just had the courage to ask.

And strangely enough—I would have continued,
as they stopped pouring drinks
and the other passengers turned to listen—

the only emotion I ever feel, Debbie and Lynn,
is what the beaver must feel,
as he bears each stick to his hidden construction,

which creates the tranquil pond
and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle,
the pair of swans a place to conceal their young. 

          In this poem, the reader is comfortably familiar in the environment of the plane ride. “Ah, yes,” the reader will exclaim. “How very much like my own experience this is when I fly.” One feels that the narrator really wants to “perhaps begin a friendship” with the reader, since the loneliness of the poet pours like syrup throughout the poem. The only people the poet encounters are the employees with name tags. And the narrator continues his self-absorbed journey as he imagines, ironically I’m sure, that everyone on the plane is interested in him and his “writing process.” The scene becomes more pathetic as the narrator compares himself to a beaver, “as he bears each stick,” certainly like a cross, and provides a tranquil world with ducks, swans, and the like. The poet provides us with a story of pure honesty, revealing a secret desire, and we are amused and say, “Gee-whiz, I sure would like to be this guy’s friend.”

Most certainly, Americans love stories, but it seems our poets are more than happy to let novelists and filmmakers fulfill our desire for the best ones. The pleasures of stories in verse are manifold for both writer and reader. The poet has the opportunity to place individuals in a larger outward context and explore ideas too large for the lyric poem. As with the best stories, the reader has the opportunity to meet characters unlike himself, to be immersed in times and places with which he is unfamiliar, to have his own perceptions of reality challenged, and encounter something beyond his normal experience. Unlike prose, poetry moves more cinematically, from line to line, image to image, scene to scene. Time is compressed, and the skilled poet can manipulate the movement and pacing of a story in less space than prose. Words carefully chosen and placed can produce a wealth of allusions and meanings that prose cannot. Finally, poetry charms the reader. A good story in verse pulls the reader into it so that he is both intellectually engaged but also imaginatively entranced. This may sound like so much hocus pocus, but a good poem has the power to alter the brain and the body. 

If one looks beyond America, there are a few poets who have written interesting stories in verse. Glyn Maxwell’s Time’s Fool: A Tale in Verse is a revision of the Flying Dutchman story about a man who is cursed to sail the seas forever, though Maxwell’s protagonist rides a ghost train. In the Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson updates the myth of the winged red monster Geryon to create a different kind of romance. Others have explored historical fiction. One of the more memorable stories I have read is The Emperor’s Babe by Bernardine Evaristo. It is a playful, sexy, and entertaining historical novel-in-verse set in Londinium, Britannia, A.D. 211. Fredy Neptune by Les Murray is a blend of Homer’s Odyssey and Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is an action-adventure story involving an Australian hero, Friedrich Boettcher, who is endowed with superhuman strength.  

Two Americans have recently attempted long narrative poems: Bill Tremblay with Shooting Script: Door of Fire and Kevin Young with Black Maria. Even more interesting is that both poets have also used the art of the screenplay to create their stories. 

Now Kevin Young has a cool rap. His poems are bluesy and sexy, characterized by clever wordplay and short, two-line stanzas often rhymed and enjambed. One could imagine Lightnin’ Hopkins jamming on an acoustic and talk-singing these lyrics. Take this poem “Dixieland” from his previous collection, Jelly Roll: 

I want the spell

of a woman—her

smell & say-so—

her humid

hands I seek—zombied—

The bayou

of my blood—standing

water & the ‘squitoes

all hungry—hongry—

to see both our bodies

knocked out—dragged

quicksand down— 

Young continues this style in Black Maria: being the adventures of Delilah Redbone & A.K.A. Jones (Maria rhymes with Delilah and is slang for both a police van and a hearse). Except in this book, Young switches from the country blues of Jelly Roll to the hot and jazzy urban or electric blues reminiscent of Langston Hughes. Consider this passage from “The Hunch,”

She wore red like a razor—

cut quite a figure

standing there, her

slender danger

dividing day

from night, there

from here. Where

I hoped to be is near

her & her

fragrant, flammable hair— 

          Black Maria is film noir in verse. When I received this visually appealing book, I was excited. The dust jacket read Black Maria in bold letters at the top, while midway down a hole had been cut, and through the hole could be glimpsed a woman’s leg and a gun muzzle. As I slowly peeled away the jacket, the seductive image of a woman in a blood-red dress stood before me.

Roger Ebert calls film noir “the most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear, and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.” And the main character, A.K.A. Jones, is optimistic as he persistently pursues the man-killer Delilah Redbone. The story is told in five “reels,” with each reel beginning with a prose summary that Young titles “Voiceover.” Throughout, Young mixes slangy, 1940’s American language with his own musical rhythms, and they are a natural fit.

The film noir world is one of sharp-edged shadows, strange angles, and lonely settings. Young does well to duplicate this atmosphere. The story is classic noir and goes as follows: The setting is Shadowtown. Delilah Redbone is a nightclub singer and the moll of The Boss; “Even his walking / stick was crooked.” A.K.A. Jones is a hard luck PI who falls for Redbone and spends a lot of time at the bar because of it. She is forced to betray him, and he’s forced to break the law to win her back. Along the way we meet all the stock characters of film noir such as The Killer, The Snitch, and Goon #2. Most of the story centers on Jones and his desire for Redbone and his attempts to attain her.

          Young also combines his own natural talent for wordplay and the comedic effects of film noir. Take this line from the classic movie The Killers: “He’s dead now, except he’s breathing.” Now take this description of one of Young’s characters called The Killer: “Only good thing about him / was his aim.” However, the book is also filled with a lot of kooky jokes like “Here comes the bribe” and “weed em & reap.” There are also seven or so sections called “Stills” that are filled with unconnected two-liners like “Ashtray full of butts / & maybes” and “two eggs / over queasy” that devolve into repetitious, bad gags and don’t do much to enhance the story. Young is best on heartache and desire: 

I didn’t have a rat’s chance.

Soon as she walked in in

That skin of hers

violins began. You could half hear

The typewriters jabber

as she jawed on: fee, find, me,

poor, please.

Shadows & smiles, she was.

   “The Chase”

Her eyes whiskey

over ice, melting

me till I’m mostly

water.

   “The Hooch”

She sends me flush

as a fever, or a down-

&-dirty dealer—

I see her

& raise plenty.

   “The Deal” 

          Despite the clever approach, the often sharp phrasing, and the potentially exciting subject, the story fails. Unfortunately, Black Maria doesn’t have the action and twisted plot line of film noir, despite the book’s claim of being “a twisting tale of suspicion.” When there is action, as in the poem called “The Heist,” the rather muted excitement lasts the length of a page and a half. I do not expect the convoluted plot of The Big Sleep, but I do expect some plot. AKA Jones is a weak-willed man in the hands of a femme fatale, a classic noir element; however, plot twists are also an essential element. By ignoring or rejecting this device, Young has lost the riveting pace and anticipation a noir story provides.

Another problem is that Young’s style never varies. The voices of Redbone and A.K.A. Jones sound identical, and the structure creates a monotonous pace. Each poem runs a page or two and plods from one scene to the next. It becomes especially tiresome after 230 pages. One of the uses of white space in poetry is that it can help to propel the reader down the page as he anticipates the next move. Alas, the story becomes tedious, as I had to force myself to continue sludging through this most inactive of action stories. As individual lyrics, many of the poems are quite nice, yet there are also too many. When compared with the engaging books of Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane and the films of Huston, Welles, and Hitchcock, this story falls exceedingly short. 

Bill Tremblay approaches his subject in much the same way as Young; Tremblay writes a screenplay. Shooting Script: Door of Fire is an historical story about the intertwined lives of Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky. While I read this book, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the movie Frida starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina. The poem’s plot covers the time between Trotsky’s arrival in Tampico, Mexico on January 9,1937 and his assassination on August 20, 1940. Told in thirty-nine individually titled poems, each poem represents a scene or frame, and the story shifts cinematically from scene to scene, creating a montage. The story is actually written like a shooting script, told in sentence fragments, with missing articles and prepositions, terse dialogue, and camera directions. The cast of characters include Trotsky’s wife Natalia; their son Lev Sedov; Ramon Mercader, the Spaniard who killed Trotsky; David Siqueiros, a radical Mexican painter; Paulette Goddard, the movie star; André Breton and his wife; Marc Zborowski, known as Etienne, an agent of Stalin, and many others.

          The “film” begins with the poem “The Blue House,” which is Rivera’s magnificent residence in Coyoacán:

Evening. Pan down a herringbone sky

the color of hammered copper, sunbeams

through royal palmfronds striking the indigo walls

Diego painted as a wedding present to Frida,

giving it a fountain for a mouth and a tongue of water

so it could bear its blue witness. 

          But the scene is far from idyllic and is interrupted by the arrival of Trotsky on a Norwegian steamer. Tremblay creates a surreal atmosphere that mirrors the world of Kahlo and Rivera. There are a number of intermittent dream poems, and they provide moments of meditation and flashback, such as Trotsky’s return to his childhood in the Ukraine in “A Dream and Waking,” which also provides an icy contrast to the sultry scenes of Mexico. Tremblay does an excellent job recreating this world and fleshing out characters such as Trotsky and Ramon Mercader, “the naive idealist” who killed him. Even Ramon has a dream poem, “Ramon Dreams the Conquest,” a strange and bloody dream of feathered warriors and a masked priest. Tremblay creates the fantastic imagery and erratic effects through his poetry, his metaphors allowing for a surreal experiment: “Distant peaks float like schooners with snow-colored / sails,” and “Sunlight on cacti makes long crucifix / shadows in the dust.” He also creates surrealistic effects by using camera directions like “close iris,” “open iris,” “pan down,” “freeze frame,” and a number of flashbacks and voiceovers. The directions are effective, and the reader can enter the eye of the camera and actually imagine the piece as a film. The descriptions are as vivid as a painting, as they must be if the reader is to visualize the scenes. Tremblay supplies beautiful flashbacks that work seamlessly with his narrative. For example, he recaps the tragic events that transpired to cripple Kahlo:

In the sky above her,

a film in slow-motion: a trolley-car

crashes a bus, an 18 year old Frida spins

like a ballerina from the wreck, one giant fishhook

through her abdomen and out her vagina,

her girlhood prayers to be special answered at last.

She tilts the whiskey back:—I try to drown my sorrows,

   but they’ve learned to swim. 

Such scenes evoke the surrealist paintings of Kahlo herself. Though the overall effect of the story is largely expressionistic, there is a narrative arc, and Tremblay builds tension throughout the story as the conspirators make their plans in Europe and travel to Mexico, and the reader awaits the climax, the inevitable assassination of Trotsky.  

The reader could follow the story without knowing all of the political turmoil of Europe and Mexico during the 1930s, inasmuch as it’s a story about a man trying to avoid being killed. In the same way, one need not know Cold War politics as a prerequisite for viewing James Bond movies. However, since the story is one of political intrigue, it helps to know at least some of the political and historical events surrounding Rivera, Kahlo, and Trotsky. Tremblay provides some flashbacks, but usually only to develop a character. He does not fall into the mode of documentary and discuss the political history of the day.  

So Trotsky hides out under the protection of Diego and Frida in a fortress built especially for his protection. No sooner does Trotsky arrive than he falls in love with Frida, enamoured by “the voltage of Frida’s thigh . . . her warmth melting his Ukrainian ice,” and has an affair with her. Meanwhile, Stalin and his thugs are plotting the murder of Trotsky and his sons. Diego’s and Trotsky’s relationship begins to fall apart, and Trotsky leaves Diego’s protection, unknowingly yielding to his fate.  

As with many creative interpretations of historical events, the goal was not to actually document them, but rather illuminate the events and people involved. In fact, the story resembles a Rivera mural; each scene or frame of the movie is like a fresco panel combined with another to tell a larger story. Tremblay provides insightful moments throughout the story to help the reader better understand each of the characters. In the poem “Diego Drives Leon to Cuernavaca,” Diego takes Leon to visit the Palace of Cortés to show him the murals he painted: 

Conquistadors roll a calendrical stone off a cliff

to smash the Aztec’s belief in the solidity of time.

. . .

Next panel—an Aztec warrior in jaguar skins

plunges his stone dagger into a Spaniard’s throat.

Leon nods:—You know war.  

Tremblay appropriately includes a poem called “Calavera.” Calaveras are typically brief; they are often political, and are associated with El Dia de los Muertos in Mexico.

          Essentially, the writer of calaveras imagines a political figure, a celebrity, or a family member as dead. It is meant to be humorous as well as a reminder of our own mortality:

In his right hand, the painter holds a square box,

pulls out a human skull made of white sugar,

the word STALIN formed from clove buds

stuck in its forehead like thumb-tacks.

Diego smiles:—This is the Mexican way of death, Leon,

to merrily, defiantly, devour the Great Devourer.

Go ahead, put your fingers in his eye-sockets, take a bite.  

So the story moves between dream and reality, and the lines become blurred, again mirroring the paintings of Rivera and Kahlo.  

Door of Fire has no emotional closure, leaving the reader unsettled. Trotsky is murdered almost at the end of the story, yet the reader is left with only the image of Trotsky’s wife, Natalia, digging beside the “thorny” and “cruel” maguey to bury the funerary urn. The themes are as layered as a painting, and the reader is left to consider if Trotsky’s murder had any political or social implications. What, ultimately, do all of these events mean, and what place does art have in those events? Since Rivera was a communist, was the purpose of his art to promote The State, even though he states, “Forget the politics”? Is Tremblay offering an ironic view of communism? We question the verity of history, and the lines of genre begin to dissolve. Yet Tremblay does not lose the integrity of his tale. 

Perhaps that heavy flightless bird isn’t quite dead. Or so I hope.

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