Further meditations on narrative versecraft

[larryhammer]

Though this is more floundering, because I don't have the words to talk about it.

I've mentioned before the quantum nature of writing in stanzas, as opposed to the continuum of prose or blank verse. This requires shaping your narration into equal-sized bins, each stanza a story beat in which a single something happens. Where this something is larger than one action: closer in span to a "turn" in an RPG. It can be a description, a meditation, a series of concerted acts by a character, and so on.

The chunking is a delicate balance, of course: you need to both conclude the beat and draw the reader forward to the next stanza. This is similar to the technical issue of not ending scenes or chapters with too much finality, except it happens every 7 lines (or however long your stanza is). In seriocomic verse, like the myrmidon stories, one way to shape is to pause for an epigrammatic final couplet -- thus do form and voice interact, as I've noted before. But there's many other strategies, and for any work of length, you'll likely have to use them all.*

Anyway, in the story I'm revising,** I noticed a problem passage: rough all over -- narrative flow, stanza structures, individual lines -- and no amount of polish was fixing it. Finally, after some floundering, I noticed that for a couple stanzas in a row, a subject continued for a couple lines into the next stanza. As a rule of thumb, I find I can do that sparingly, when I want to hurry the reader directly into the next stanza (transition by enjambment), but it works best when the story unit naturally fills two complete stanzas, and not successively. In this passage, the effect was a wonky flow. The little sting that usually goes at the ends of stanzas was showing up at the starts.

As you've guessed by now, the root cause was a beat a stanza and a half in size, forcing the following beats to cascade into succeeding stanzas. A unit of story that wouldn't compress inside the stanza walls, and I'd compensated by trying to compress the symptoms instead of the cause. The fix turns out to be easier than I expected: I'm already rewriting the stanzas after the passage for story reasons*** and need to change the transition anyway. So now I'm rewriting a larger stretch with different beats for a different character reaction.

But as I was saying, I don't have the terms for this. It's not a structural issue per se; it's not a flow issue -- that's the symptom, not the problem. "Stanza blocking," as opposed "action blocking," maybe? And what to call that stanza-sized story-unit -- "beat"? "event"?

It would probably help if I found a community of formalist narrative poets. Ones who know their stuff. I feel like I'm reinventing wheels, without being able to name an "axle bearing."

* Repeat after me: "Ovid is our master. Ovid is our master."
** The third myrmidon story, "Atalanta's Races."
*** I'm replacing one character with somebody else with the same name.

---L.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Fascinating stuff--from someone who would be driven from any self-respecting versifying community by barrages of rotting cumquats.

[larryhammer]

Anyone who doesn't value light verse is overly-self-respecting.

---L.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

I am not actually here (sneaking online at Varuna because this week's group doesn't linger over dinner and i am not quite ready fro work) but you might want to consider laisses similaires. The classic example is the Song of Roland where he takes 5 laisses (irregular stanzas? I never really know how to define a laisse) to die, but each laisse has a differnt focus and action overlaps significantly. it is also cool cos it foreshaows in form (by slowing perception of time) the actual sun stopping dead in the sky later on in the poem. I can't think who to refer you to on form and function of laisses similaires except perhaps jean Rychner.

[larryhammer]

Ariosto and Pulci both did something similar (to serious and comic effect) in their big poems. I should remember that trick, when I have need to punch a moment up. And look up Roland again.

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

Come take a workshop with us :)

http://www.wcupa.edu/_ACADEMICS/sch_cas/poetry/conference/index.html

Or just hang out and talk shop.

Mary
http://www.pantoum.org

[larryhammer]

Hmm. Tempting.

---L.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

But as I was saying, I don't have the terms for this. It's not a structural issue per se; it's not a flow issue -- that's the symptom, not the problem. "Stanza blocking," as opposed "action blocking," maybe? And what to call that stanza-sized story-unit -- "beat"? "event"?

I'd vote for calling it a "stanza." ;-) You've defined the imperative of a stanza very well: not merely one structural unit of so many lines in so many feet with such and such rhymes, but one conceptual unit of content.

Do you know Barbara Herrnstein Smith's book "Poetic Closure"? It's about how poems end, but it may have some useful thoughts about how stanzas end. I should think it would be interesting to force an occasional event ending into the middle or beginning of a stanza for particular jarring effect.

Do you know this little poem by Dan Pagis?


"Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car"

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i

[larryhammer]

I'd vote for calling it a "stanza."

But then we get confusion when talking about the interaction of form and content. :-)

I do know Poetic Closure, but it's been a couple years since I read it. Good thought. I have ending a beat mid-stanza, a couple times -- mosting in service to a transition or digression, though. Should look at it for narrative purposes, too.

And no, I'd not met that Pagis -- what a delight!

---L.

[junoxxiv.livejournal.com]

I would love someday to join you as a formalist narrative poet, and then eventually to move to Latin and perhaps Greek, when I am oler and greyer. As I am still trying to fiure out straight fiction, the verse will have to wait. In the meantime I am having a blast teaching such things to 6th graders. In our anthology, they have broken Fitzgerald's poetic translation of The Odyssey into "Episodes." I am not sure how that fits into the formal terminology, but episode does the trick when trying to distinguish between stanzas and action in uninterrupted verse.

[larryhammer]

The structure of stichic verse (the technical term for continuous verse, as opposed to in stanzas) is closer to that of prose, at least in narrative terms. You can analyze it in term paragraphs and scenes and episodes as you do in prose fiction.

---L.

[larryhammer]

And yeah, doing both narrative verse and prose novels at the same time is an interesting juggle. But I've been startled at how many insights from one I can apply to the other -- more even than taken from prose short stories to novels.

---L.