|
Nothing has ever affected me like a story. When I was a young teenager in the 1950s, first discovering a world of my own making, untouched by parental influence – the world of pop music – it was the story songs that got me. All of them. It didn’t matter if they were the maudlin sentimentality of “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane” or “The Little Shoemaker,” or the maudlin cleverness of “Deck of Cards,” or the hardbitten violence of “Stagger Lee” or “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” I was drawn to all of them. I did get that the stories of Chuck Berry, of chasing Maybellene in a Coup de Ville, or the brown-eyed handsome man who escapes prison by seducing the judge’s wife, were a cut above the rest. Likewise the stories told by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, of the riot in Cell Block Number Nine, in which Scarface Jones can’t stop the dynamite because the fuse is lit, or of the innocent young man who wants a suit of pure herringbone, but that’s a suit he will never own. Later in that same decade, I was to discover the songs of Lead Belly, who took storytelling to a whole different level, an impressionistic suggestion of the story, rather than a blow-by-blow account of it: the chain gang prisoner escaping through the swamp, or the Black girl about to be evicted from her company-owned home after the death of her railroad worker husband. The power of the unsaid in Lead Belly’s songs continues to wield its influence on me to the present day. It was there in Chuck Berry’s songs, too, though I didn’t see it right away. Years and years later, when I taught a course in the Literature of the Blues, my students had no trouble recognizing that the brown-eyed handsome man who won the game was Jackie Robinson, but I didn’t think of it at the time, any more than I stopped to reflect on the little shoemaker’s double bad luck – not only does he not win his heart’s desire, he doesn’t get paid for the shoes. Poetry was something I got in school, so it didn’t have the powerful impact of the music I heard on the radio, and the records I bought with my hard-earned money (yes, I even bought “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane” and “The Little Shoemaker”), but when it began to really reach me, it was the stories that got to me first. I can still summon up the sensual excitement of the buried treasure lost forever on John Masefield’s island surrounded by Spanish waters. I can still be stirred by the memory of first reading Kipling’s ballad of the of the theft of the colonel’s horse, and how “There is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two brave men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.” I still remember, whether I want to or not, how John Betjeman’s subaltern wooed and won Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. And of course I remember Oscar Wilde’s condemned murderer and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s cursed sailor. I liked Ogden Nash’s clever and pithy observations about life, but I loved his story about Pendleton Birdsong, the wise child who knew his own father until his world was turned upside down by a catty remark from a conservative Southern senator. Of course I love stories in prose, both fiction and nonfiction. And stories in movies, whether they be original or adapted. Nothing can match the depth and breadth of Herman Melville’s prose, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be stirred by seeing that craggy face of Gregory Peck, and hearing that rich baritone voice calling out, “Have you seeeeeeen the whiiite whaaaaaaaale?” I’ll watch stories on television, whether they be Olivia Benson and her crew neatly tying up another sex crime in an hour minus commercial time, or the extended epic of a New Jersey gangster and his family. But there’s something about a story told in verse that’s particularly engaging. I think it has to do with what was first awakened in me by the songs of Lead Belly: the battle between the story and something else, both of them striving for prominence, neither willing to let go of the other, like conjoined twins with very different personalities. Cleanth Brooks and William Empson and the rest of the boys in the New Critical band have been somewhat relegated to the dustbin of theory, but they had a lot to say at one time, and they’re still worthy of at least a smidgen of consideration. Brooks’s idea that “the language of poetry is the language of paradox” still holds water. Poetry, particularly the lyric poetry which has been the predominant mode since at least the Romantic era, is all about the tension created by paradox, starting with the line, which is the central unit of poetry, and which places itself at odds with the central unit of grammar — the sentence. A line can contain a single grammatical unit (“The land was ours before we were the land’s”), or part of a grammatical unit (“As I sd to my”), or parts of two grammatical units (“Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand”). And that’s the tension that makes a story in a poem so compelling – paradoxically, the fact that it isn’t compelling. A story compels you to keep going – what happens next? What does she reply when he tells her he loves another woman? Who killed Laura Palmer? What’s going to happen to Young Goodman Brown in that forest? How is Leinengen going to stop the ants from taking over his plantation? A poem keeps insisting that you stop. In the middle of a line, in the middle of a sentence. A poem throws up all sorts of roadblocks in the way of your keeping onward, and finding out what happens next. Take Browning. Surely no one tells a more straightforward story than Browning, which is why G. M. Hopkins complained that “Browning has a way of talking, and making his characters talk, like a man bouncing up from the table with his mouth full of bread and cheese and saying that he meant to stand no blasted nonsense.” But does he? There’s that painful, impassioned utterance in “Andrea del Sarto”:
In prose, you most likely wouldn’t write it that way. You’d go for a more naturalistic line of dialogue: “Let some good son try to paint my two hundred pictures.” It makes the point, it doesn’t sound awkward or affected, it lets you keep moving. And those aren’t the whole two lines. The second line is part of a sentence, but the first line is parts of two sentences. You may take that part away from the poem, but if you go back into the poem, the lines are:
And, as the caesura is structured to guide you, you’re drawn backwards into what you just read, and time goes into a loop. The story pulls you forward, the poetic structure pulls you back, and it adds a dimension of magic to the story. And what if you start with no story? You start with words, with sounds, with isolated lines? You start like Patti Marshock, taking a poem apart, turning it into words and phrases, seeing where they lead you, in a method she calls “collaging.” In this case, she started with a poem of mine:
Marshock starts with the bread and cheese, but the story (“I was seeing some of Richards' poem still surviving, but a new story was coming through. And it was my story”), about Marshock’s coming to grips with a diagnosis of breast cancer, will stand for no blasted nonsense, or at least not a whole lot. As the tagline for an old TV commercial for a discount appliance store went:
. |