Three Narrative Poems

Narrative poems have a special power to reverberate, and it occurs to me that they should be used in the classroom to develop terms and issues. Here's three that I heard on the way to work today: "Mrs. Miller" by Charles Douthat takes the form of a memoir in progress ("And to the south lived dear old Mrs. Miller...") and peaks in a sharp connection between the woman of the past and the man of the present:

Saturdays, I'd wash Mrs. Miller's Buick with a bucket, soap and sponge. The fifteen cents she paid was good money in '61. Later, on the lanai, she'd pour my coke, wave away her cigarette smoke, and engage me in grown-up conversation. "Since nothing ever goes according to plan," she'd say, "You'd think we'd figure out the plan." I was at most eleven. She was a drunk, I suppose. Confused, but open-hearted. Lonely, of course. The first person like me I'd known.

The eye of the poem is in the last stanza, but the penultimate stanza is full of narrative details that set up, stage the point to come. "Changing Genres" by Dean Young is a great reflection on story, and what it is to have plot:

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a Russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping, another 75 of what you think staring out a window. I don't care about the plot

Ahem, excuse the interruption -- this is another poem with good use of enjambment and other rhetoric (come back to this) to keep us interested. The second part of the poem is on plot in the general sense -- metalitureature!

although I suppose there will have to be one, the usual separation of the lovers, turbulent seas, danger of decommission in spite of constant war, time in gulps and glitches passing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest, speckled eggs somehow uncrushed, the sled outracing the wolves on the steppes, the huge glittering ball where all that matters is a kiss at the end of a dark hall. At dawn the officers ride back to the garrison, one without a glove, the entire last chapter about a necklace that couldn't be worn inherited by a great-niece along with the love letters bound in silk.

Finally, I love the poem "Spilled Milk" by Willa Schneberg, and think it would be useful to open my course unit on senescence with a close look at the poem. I'll read it twice, and we'll close read the ending:

Lovemaking wasn't so easy between us in the early years. We both felt guilty. We thought we weren't supposed to enjoy it and I was always worried about becoming pregnant. Later on we worried the children would hear. But after they grew up and moved out and I couldn't bear anymore we began to have fun. It wasn't always before going to sleep either. Sometimes during breakfast he would say, Let's go and roll his eyes up to the bedroom. Luba, he would say, I'll help you take out the hairpins.

Why end with "lovemaking"? How does this convey the experience of aging in all its ironies, bodily disfunctions, and new freedoms appear in the poem? Students will answer such a question in 10 minutes, then pass the papers in on their way out.