Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014

Write a story in a poem
Poetry country

We’ve seen how poems can contribute to a story, but we can also tell a complete tale in a poem. This kind of poem falls into a category called narrative poetry.

Below is a narrative poem I wrote that was published in The Louisville Review. Before you read it, you may need some background. Two elements of the poem come from Greek mythology. The first is Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in Hades, the mythic underworld. The second is Cassandra, a tragic figure. The god Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, but when she angered him, he turned it around so that no one believed her whenever she accurately predicted the future.

Tarot cards are used by fortune-tellers. An acupuncturist, for those of you who don’t know, practices a kind of Chinese medicine. The word dolorous means mournful, and self-recrimination is self-blame.

THE RIVER LETHE

The fourth graders crowd around

Cassandra’s fortune-telling tent

at the state fair. A slender hand

opens the flap.

“Come in, children.”

They file inside.

The tent’s a fire hazard, lit by a dozen

candles, but Cassandra knows

it will never catch. Incense

smolders. Only Fletcher,

son of an acupuncturist,

recognizes the smell.

Cassandra sits behind a rickety table

that holds a crystal ball and a deck

of tarot cards. She’s weeping.

They’re so young.

“Who’s first?” she asks.

“Me. Sara Allen.”

Their teacher said to go alphabetically.

Sara is tall for her age, with a gap

between her two front teeth.

Cassandra keeps herself

from brushing the girl’s long bangs away

from her eyes. “Don’t marry the boy

with the ponytail. Remember.”

“Will I have children?” Sara asks.

“Will I be a scientist?”

“If you remember. Next.”

Grinning, Max Barshansky steps forward.

This is a game.

“July 20th, ten years from now, stay inside.

Lock your door. Remember.”

The children come to her, one by one.

She tells them how to avoid tragedy,

ordinary misfortune, dissatisfaction,

disappointment, self-recrimination.

“Never go to Oklahoma.”

“Everything does not depend on you.”

“Eat your vegetables.”

Gradually, her tears, her dolorous

Remember seeps into them.

They repeat her words. Murmurs

fill the tent.

The last child, Tyrone Williams, comes to her.

How straight he stands.

“Pick the navy if you must, not the army.”

He nods. The navy. The navy.

The children leave

and blink in the bright sunlight.

A woman in overalls is spraying a bed of poppies.

The water runs in front of the tent

in a sparkling stream too wide to jump over.

The children step in somberly,

but by the middle they’re stamping their feet

and laughing. Max shouts, “Look!

The roller coaster.” They run toward it.

A sad story, right?

Here’s where compression comes in: If we were to tell this in prose, we’d have to go on for much longer, and we’d need to be more obvious about the connection between the water the children walk through at the end and the river of forgetfulness.

We’d have to decide who our MCs are, maybe Tyrone Williams and Cassandra herself, or maybe Sara Allen and Max Barshansky, who, a few years later, ties his hair in a ponytail. Probably we’d extend the time in the tent, include side conversations, have the teacher poke his head in and get his own grim prophecy. This short poem could become a novel, as we spin out all these fates and discover if anyone escapes. We could go forward through the generations and turn this into a five-book saga.

But the story also stands alone as a poem.

There’s a tradition of fairy tales and stories about fairies told in poems. Here’s the haunting first stanza from “The Stolen Child,” a poem by the famous late nineteenth century—early twentieth century poet William Butler Yeats:

Where dips the rocky highland

Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,

There lies a leafy island

Where flapping herons wake

The drowsy water-rats;

There we’ve hid our faery vats,

Full of berrys

And of reddest stolen cherries.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand.

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Haunting, isn’t it?

Notice that long last line, which repeats at the end of every stanza. My guess is that Yeats made it that way for emphasis.

I’ve written a poem version of “Cinderella,” which was published in an anthology of fairytale poems called On the Dark Path: An Anthology of Fairy Tale Poetry. This Cinderella is entirely different from my Ella in Ella Enchanted. In fact, I suspect Ella would have no patience with this one.

BECOMING CINDERELLA

Daddy admired the lady’s lineage,

she his golden coins, so they married.

She embraced me, and I endured

the stoniness of her bosom.

Her daughters hugged me too, snatch

and release, heir faces turned away.

Daddy galloped off to fight in foreign wars.

If only my mommy had left me a hankie

with a magic teardrop to keep me safe.

My stepsisters stole my glass slippers,

my jewels, my nanny’s care. They promised

to love me if I moved into a smaller room,

swept the fireplace, but not if I complained.

I became Cinderella, goo to their granite,

though they never loved me. The prince says

I needn’t wash his hose or trim his toenails,

but I’m not taking the chance.

In addition to brief storytelling poems, entire novels have been written as narrative poems. You may have read some. This is the first stanza of the novel Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff:

I am telling you this just the way it went

with all the details I remember as they were,

and including the parts I’m not sure about.

You know, where something happened

but you aren’t convinced

you understood it?

Other people would maybe tell it different

but I was there.

Notice how readable this is, how relaxed the language. It doesn’t get all stuffy just because it’s a poem.

Soon, we’re going to transform our own prose into poetry, but first, let’s change where Jinny (Virginia Euwer Wolff is a friend) ends her first two lines:

I am telling you this just the

way it went with all the details I

remember as they were,

To me, this doesn’t feel as pleasant to read. The new line endings don’t seem as natural. For example, there’s no comma after the word went, but when went is at the end of the line, we pause briefly. When it’s in the middle, it zips right into the next word, and I wish for a comma to slow me down. Often, when we write poems we want a breath to come at the end of a line.

But not always. Poets sometimes end lines with the because they want to pick up the pace; they want the reader to hurry to the next line. Maybe a surprise or an important idea is coming.

Stanza breaks introduce an even longer break than the end of a line. We can end a stanza at the end of a sentence. In “The River Lethe” each stanza does that. But they can also close with a comma or no punctuation at all. It’s up to the poet.

Also, see that I incorporated dialogue into “The River Lethe.” You can too.

Writing time!

• You’ve guessed that this was coming: Take a page from a story you’re working on or from an old story and turn it into poetry. You’ll be breaking your prose into lines, so consider your line endings, and think about when and how you want to move along to a new stanza, which may not always be at the end of a paragraph. Since we’ve looked at how poems are often more compressed than prose, see if you can find places to cut and simplify.

Now, look it over. Try again, making different decisions about where to end your lines. Read your new version. Which seems more like a poem to you? If you’re on a roll, fiddle with the lines some more. And, if you’re enjoying yourself, continue, and turn the entire story into a long narrative poem.

• Write two fairy-tale poems, either from the same fairy tale or from different ones. Write one with a modern feel and the other with an old-fashioned feel, like we find in the Yeats poem. It’s up to you whether they rhyme or not.

Have fun, and save what you write!