Narrating

The other day I came across an essay by American poet Tony Hoagland, called "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment." It originally appeared in a 2006 issue of Poetry magazine, and is available on their website. Well worth reading if you're interested in some of the current debate about what might characterize (at least a part of) the current poetic era.

I've been mulling the question of narrative in poetry for a good while now, both in relation to my own work and in my reading of other poets. My own work tends to fall really naturally into a "Once upon a time" kind of lilt, and in the face of a lot of the more associative, less "I" driven work being published lately, I've often felt compelled to rethink my inclinations. Do I write this way because it comes naturally or because I'm too lazy or not a strong enough poet to jog myself out of it? The conclusion I've come to is that at this point, anyway, this is the position from which the work I'm happiest with comes, and that if the things I find myself interested in writing about present themselves as stories then my job is to try to shape the strongest narratives I can, rather than try to bash them into ghazal-like series of sideways glances. (Both the ghazals and the glances being entirely respectable modes, but decidedly not mine.)