Narrative Strategies

At the most basic level, writing begins with a person, a place, or a thing.

Fiction: a story which is an act of imagination. It uses character, point of view, voice, setting, image, and plot. Point of view might be omniscient, third person (or third person limited), second person, or first person. Dialogue reveals character and the character's agenda. Exposition shows a character’s thoughts.

Essay: The word essay refers to a walk, or walkabout. It can be personal or impersonal. It is
intended to inform or enlighten the reader about a topic. Essays might present an argument (and refute other points of view) or it might be an essay of definition, description, cause/effect, classification, or a blend of these. The best essays examine one of life’s unanswerable questions.

Memoir: a slice of life (as opposed to an autobiography). Memoir often takes a more artistic form or pattern. Vivian Gornick distinguishes between a situation and a story, and she recommends
that writer create a narrator that is a truth-teller, not to brag or to communicate that she has a handle on the truth, but rather she or he investigates her or his own motives and actions. The "voice" is unique and compelling. See George Orwell's: "Shooting an Elephant," and James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son."

Poetry: can be narrative or simply imagistic, but it is a ‘patterned language.’ It has a sound
pattern (like alliteration, assonance, rhythm, rhyme, or figurative elements (metaphor) or a visual
pattern in its images or form. Paul Valery said the difference between poetry and prose is physiological. It is more connected to breath and oral tradition and sometimes ritual. The language of the poem is memorable, and the white space after line breaks and stanza breaks often are there to guide the breath and pace. The language in a poem is meant to create new meaning each time it is read, but the language of prose is meant to fall away once the meaning is delivered. 

Some poetry is “formal,” meaning it uses an established format like the sonnet which has a prescribed number of stanzas, lines and syllables per line, and the lines are in iambic meter (the heart beat rhythm). There are also other meters (trochaic, anapest, etc) and forms like villanelle, pantoum, ghazal, etc. Blank verse doesn’t have a specified form, line length, rhyme or stanza requirements, but it does iambic meter. Free verse refers to a poem without established patterns. The poet creates his or her own pattern.

Forms

ABC : The alphabet is used as the organizing principle. It’s A-Z. In poetry, it is called an
abecedarium and is a very old form often used for laments.

Advertisement: For example, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Yours can be like a commercial or a personals ad.

The Argument: the writing has a focus to persuade; examine other points of view and their limitations (to refute), and to promote one's idea and provide supports for that idea. See Lydia Davis's short fiction: "Letter to a Funeral Director"

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula Le Guin: a story of novel as a container or carrier bag:
https://stillmoving.org/resources/the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction

Curriculum Vitae: Use the form of a resumé for an autobiography. See poet Lisel Mueller’s
“Curriculum Vitae” https://poets.org/poem/curriculum-vitae

Character Sketch: This form was popular during the Progressive Era (early 1900s) and often
used by communistic/socialist publications. It’s a portrait of an individual without necessarily
adding a plot.

Chronology of events: events told in the order these have occurred

Cinematic: list of screen shots, a camera close-up, a camera long-distance view

Collage: assemblage of diverse elements (like “Just Add Water” exercise). Combine images, text
fragments, sensory details, and whatever else you like

Confession: An act of enumerating one’s failings in order to gain forgiveness and
understanding.

Comparison/Contrast: see Natalia Ginzburg: "He and I"

Classification: often used in essay to describe sub-types of a subject

Creation story: how things came to be; the beginning of the universe/world

Definition: explains something using description and classification. It can also use comparison,
contrast, and example.

Description: to provide a strong visual picture

Dream: One piece of advice: Do not end with “and then I woke up.” Let the mystery or dream
logic be.

Epistolary: using the form of a letter (or letters)

Fable: a brief story (usually about animals) that teaches a lesson, fables often use animals as the story's characters

Fairytale: a story might connect to a myth, Biblical story, urban myth, or well known cultural
story (Wizard of Oz, or It’s a Wonderful Life, Elvis)

Fantasy: a storytelling which features magic, the supernatural, or mythical beings; the setting can be past, present or future on earth or alternative universes

Graphic: graphic novels depend on both images & some text

Hybrid form: a combination of narrative forms or any of the modes of telling: a combination of fiction/nonfiction/essay

Instructions or Recipe: A how-to-do something

Inventory or List: Imposing a limitation on a piece of writing can sometimes yield excellent
results. It serves to focus a story, essay, or poem. Lorrie Moore, in her book Self Help, has
several fictional stories based on lists: “The Kids Guide to Divorce” and “How to Talk to Your
Mother.”

Letter: In a letter, a writer often can find an intimate voice, if it is to a friend. For an example of
a letter, see Lydia Davis’ “Letter to a Funeral Parlor.”

Narrative Verse: a story or legend told in poetry form, using line breaks, stanzas, and possibly attention to rhyme and meter

Prose poem: a brief writing that looks like prose (because it doesn't use line/stanza breaks) but often borrows other characteristics of poems: metaphors, images, sound patterns, manipulations of time, or associational leaps

Snapshot: one image, one moment, like a photograph

Travelogue: This describes a trip or journey, and not just the external places (things to see, places to go, foods) but generally, the internal trip or journey of the writer

Vignette: usually a page, a brief story

Essay Daily: Talk About the Essay: Rebecca McClanahan's Selected List of Literary Gea...

Poetry, prose poems, flash fiction, essayettes, and creative nonfiction often borrow each others forms.

First, structures of poetry and prose that bind the lyric essay:

https://www.assayjournal.com/diana-wilson-laces-in-the-corset-structures-of-poetry-and-prose-that-bind-the-lyric-essay-12.html

Second, this list of possibilities to explore when writing an essay, a poem or a hybrid work:

Essay Daily: Talk About the Essay: Rebecca McClanahan's Selected List of Literary Gea...: In her talk on Imagination and the Essay at AWP 2017, Rebecca McClanahan mentioned that she has a list of 72 (as I wrote it down) moves in c...

Brigit Pegeen Kelly - Prose Poem

Iskandariya

By BRIGIT PEGEEN KELLYDEC. 31, 2005

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It was not a scorpion I asked for, I asked for a fish, but maybe God misheard my request, maybe God thought I said not "some sort of fish," but a "scorpion fish," a request he would surely have granted, being a goodly God, but then he forgot the "fish" attached to the "scorpion" (because God, too, forgets, everything forgets); so instead of an edible fish, any small fish, sweet or sour, or even the grotesque buffoonery of the striped scorpion fish, crowned with spines and followed by many tails, a veritable sideshow of a fish; instead of these, I was given an insect, a peculiar prehistoric creature, part lobster, part spider, part bell-ringer, part son of a fallen star, something like a disfigured armored dog, not a thing you can eat, or even take on a meaningful walk, so ugly is it, so stiffly does it step, as if on ice, freezing again and again in mid-air like a listening ear, and then scuttling backwards or leaping madly forward, its deadly tail doing a St. Vitus jig. God gave me a scorpion, a venomous creature, to be sure, a bug with the bite of Cleopatra's asp, but not, as I soon found out, despite the dark gossip, a lover of violence or a hater of men. In truth, it is shy, the scorpion, a creature with eight eyes and almost no sight, who shuns the daylight, and is driven mad by fire, who favors the lonely spot, and feeds on nothing much, and only throws out its poison barb when backed against a wall -- a thing like me, but not the thing I asked for, a thing, by accident or design, I am now attached to. And so I draw the curtains, and so I lay out strange dishes, and so I step softly, and so I do not speak, and only twice, in many years, have I been stung, both times because, unthinking, I let in the terrible light. And sometimes now, when I watch the scorpion sleep, I see how fine he is, how rare, this creature called Lung Book or Mortal Book because of his strange organs of breath. His lungs are holes in his body, which open and close. And inside the holes are stiffened membranes, arranged like the pages of a book -- imagine that! And when the holes open, the pages rise up and unfold, and the blood that circles through them touches the air, and by this bath of air the blood is made pure . . . He is a house of books, my shy scorpion, carrying in his belly all the perishable manuscripts -- a little mirror of the library at Alexandria, which burned.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly is the author, most recently, of "Orchard."

Published in NYTIMES at https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/31/opinion/closing-time-iskandariya.html

Prose Poem or Microfiction?

It doesn't matter, does it, whether a piece of writing is labeled a prose poem or a flash or microfiction? Is it the same, apples to apples?  Or is it apples to oranges?

Russell Edson said, “A good prose poem is a statement that seeks sanity whilst its author teeters on the edge of the abyss.”  

As for me, I haven't yet decided. Is there a difference in compression? in the predominance of figurative language? in the music of the language?  Yes. No. 

No end words: 

Poetry yields as many end words as there are lines in the poem. End words are particularly important in poetry. They are usually very important: nouns or verbs. They can be used skillfully to develop enjambment and to increase meaning through a line break and ambiguity. Prose poems have but one end word. This may allow a poet to give the emphasis to the word that ends the prose poem. In microfiction or flash fiction, not much attention is paid to the end word of a paragraph.  Maybe not enough attention.  

Stanzas or paragraphs

Stanzas are poetry's paragraphs. Turns occur between stanzas. Leaps can be made in time and space. In prose, there are transitions, associations, and leaps but the paragraph might be barely noticed. It is easy to conclude that form is less important in prose. One still can use music, rhyme, rhythm, and sound patterns. They are "buried' inside the paragraph.  

Form 

The form of a poem might be considered a container. Poetic forms have history, patterns, associations: sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, quatrains, etc.  Prose forms are more loose and flexible. A poem or a prose might be a letter, a list, a story. Content is perhaps more important in prose. The intention might be to entertain, investigate, or illuminate. 

Audience

Perhaps the answer resides in which audience one wants. Naming the genre or using a genre form sets up an expectation. In prose, genres are sci-fi, fantasy, murder mystery, romance, western, or nonfiction. Poetry is a genre.  Prose poetry might be blend of genres, a hybrid form. Of course writers of both poetry and prose explore and widen the boundaries.  There is plenty of genre-bending. 

Definitions:

According the Poetry Foundation, "A prose composition that, while not broken into verse lines, demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry. See the prose poem,"Information" by David Ignatow: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43416/information-56d222285400c

Perrazo and Dal wrote an academic paper examining the differences and similarities between these two forms. They identify criteria: brevity, fragments, ambiguity, and pivots. Either the prose poem or the flash fiction (or microfiction) could be narrative. The difference might be that the microfiction suggests a larger story or is a pivotal moment in a larger story. 

Writers:

Amy Hempel has written brief fiction.  "Sing To It," in the book of that title, is less than half a page.  Of her writing, Amy Hempel said, “I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story." In a review of Hempel's work, Ruth Franklin said, "For Hempel, a story often takes place not at the moment of crisis but in its aftermath." Hempel recalls a writing class with Gordon Lish.  For his students’ first assignment, Gordon Lish instructed them to write about their worst secret: the thing they had done that, as he put it, “dismantles your own sense of yourself.”  

Lydia Davis is a master of short fictions. "Letter to a Funeral Parlor" is simply that, a brief and amusing (and poignant) demand for an explanation of the use of the word "cremains."  Davis cites the influence of Russell Edson. She is interested in stories, and she is interested in etymology. In her work, they often come together in ways that are comic and profound.

Diane Williams writes very brief narratives. They are elliptical, associational, and sometimes even musical.  See https://lithub.com/bang-bang-on-the-stair/ and https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mvx79p/five-very-short-stories-0000667-v22n6, plus http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/diane-williams-two-stories-and-an-interview/

Peter Orner dislikes the term flash fiction. This form is not new, he says. "How many lines are in the story of Adam and Eve?" he asks. Well, I looked it up. Chapter 3 of Genesis is less than 700 words. Electric Literature has samples of flash fiction.  https://electricliterature.com/7-flash-fiction-stories-that-are-worth-a-tiny-amount-of-your-time/

Nick Ripatrozone wrote an essay examining this question. He says, "...genres are not spouses. Monogamy has no place here: the writer should–and must–be flexible to genre. Genre, mode, form: these considerations are contextual and situational." 

Natalie Diaz: Devouring Her

Event: Poetry Book Club on Feb 13 at 5:30 pm at Zenith Books, facilitated by Sheila Packa https://www.zenithbookstore.com/. This is the selected book for discussion.

Book Review

Natalie Diaz has created an outstanding book of poems with strong figurative language, passion, and allusions to influential and mythic stories.  Hunger. Teeth. Mouth. Biting. Eating. Devouring. Apple. Fruit. Red.  The addict has an unending appetite, but he is devoured by the addiction. Family relationships are also fed upon by the addict who uses up resources and second chances. Love is used up, exhausted, broken and reclaimed.

Another kind of hunger: the lover feasts on the beloved.  "I Watch Her Eat the Apple" is a delicious and erotic love poem that evokes Eve in the Garden of Eden, but it's a contemporary woman who tears the sticker from the apple skin "...this woman / who is a city of apples, / there is only me licking the juice / from the streets of her palm."  This is one of the most beautiful lesbian love poems I've read.

Diaz draws on her American, Latinx and Mojave heritage (and a long heritage of literary tradition in Europe and the Middle East) to create powerful poems.  The title also brings in the images of the old Aztec culture in association with this brother who is addicted: art, poetry, rituals, junctions with Spanish explorers, and religious ceremonies that sometimes included human sacrifice.

At the same time that Diaz relates stories of growing up on the reservation and her brother's drug addiction, she speaks out against colonialism, racism, sexism in our contemporary culture. She claims herself and her right to have pleasure from the damaging effects of poverty and these -isms. There's sex, love, and death in her poems. As Muriel Rukeyser has said, the poem creates a form of theater. In Diaz's poetic theater, she claims the use of violent images, grief and sorrowful images, physical and sexual imagery.  This book of poems has wide reach.

The Passion

The word passion has its root in Latin, and it meant to suffer or endure. In Christianity, it was the crucifixion of Christ. In My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz the suffering is caused by addiction, poverty, racism, and exploitation. Poems pick up images or words from Christianity: the gospel, Mary, mercy, prayers, Jesus, Eve, apple, and Gethsemane, heretics, charismatics, the Rapture. In the narrative forms, Diaz intertwines images from the passion of love into these tales of suffering.   

The grief is an intense, deep anguish and sorrow. Natalie Diaz: “My friend and I call grief the beautiful terrible because it is a wound that opens you but also shows you the miracles of what is inside you. Rather than try to escape my griefs, I’m trying to recognize them as a wildness I can submerge myself in, to be washed clean by the very thing that aches me so deeply. To give my grief to a beloved’s body, to take her grief into my body, to rearrange ourselves with it and become both more and less of one another and of our own selves—this is a lucky thing.” See this poem of hers, "Grief Work" archived at poets.org: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/grief-work

Love and grief, passion and violence, sorrow and celebration animate these poems. The reader experiences the work's visceral and vivid images and its compelling immediacy. Octavio Paz says in The Bow and the Lyre:

Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or uprooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.

In his review in Rumpus, Ryan Teitman describes the poems like this:

...They embrace what Lorca called the duende: the kind of force and struggle that—unlike the angel and the muse— “surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.” They aren’t the kind of perfect, crystalline poems that seem to have fallen from the heavens. These are rangy, muscled works that have both a dancer’s grace and a mechanic’s oil-stained hands.

The duende was a spirit that enters the body of Spanish dancers and other artists. It is a dark spirit that is passionate, both erotic and close to death. Lorca describes this possession, and it lifts the work of the artist into spell-binding ecstatic expression. It is an experience that artists like Billie Holiday achieved, for instance.

The body of the poems

Diaz has used her own forms and some very ancient poetic forms. The title of Diaz's abecedarian evokes an antiquated Christian tract, but the poem itself reflects the voice of a contemporary narrator. The abecedarian is list poem. Each beginning line begins with the successive letter of the alphabet. an ancient form that was used in laments in medieval times which were commonly community expressions of grief, often the lamentation was conducted by an individual who specialized in this, like a shaman. The poem itself is an interrogation of Christianity's perspective toward Native American people and colonization.  "You better hope you never see angels on the rez. If you do, they'll be /marching you off to / Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they've mapped out for us." 

The pantoum is a usually built as a series of quatrains, with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the next.  Poet Nzotake Shange used the pantoum form skillfully.  

The triolet is a short poem of eight lines with two rhymes that recur inside of it. It's a French form, and in the 17th century, the triolet form was used by a Benedictine monk Patrick Carey in devotionals.  "Downhill Triolets" effectively use repetition to express the recurring crises that occur in the life of an addict.  

The ghazal also has a long history. It is made of anywhere from two to fifteen couplets. Each couplet can be thematically or emotionally distinct. The ghazal does not reflect a continuous narrative with sequential paragraphs or stanzas. According to poets.org: 

The first couplet introduces a scheme, made up of a rhyme followed by a refrain. Subsequent couplets pick up the same scheme in the second line only, repeating the refrain and rhyming the second line with both lines of the first stanza. The final couplet usually includes the poet’s signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet’s own name or a derivation of its meaning.

This was used by Lorca and many others, but this form originated in 7th century Arabia and later used by Iranian, Pakistani, and Indian musicians. The Minnesota poet Robert Bly and many American poets have used this form as well.  Bly described the ghazal as a form often used by women, and it carries a tone of intimate communication. 

The prose poem is also used very effectively in this book. The last poem, "A Wild Life Zoo," closes this book of poems with a visceral story of the mauling and death of a zoo visitor who has provoked the lion in its cage. "Here kitty, kitty..." also reminds me of a cat-call made by men to women.  Evocative images of fruit, red dress, teeth, a circle of teepees of Indians on the warpath, the salty olive-like eye, the asshole.  In the last line, the narrator also seems to provoke the same fate in the lines "rang my bowl against the cage to let them know." Them might be the Zoo's Delta Force Team who has shot tranquilizers at the lion (like a tambourine of pink aloe flowers) or it might be the crowds (like bandits) who have split and now are next to the electric koi and the snakes (boa constrictors).  The lion is a powerful metaphor. It is a poem so vivid that it leaves its mark on a reader.  

Poetry Society's Adrian Matejka writes: "At its center, this collection is about the transformation of traditions—the traditions of poverty, the traditions of Indigenousness, the traditions of poetics."  

Transformative, yes, she is. Natalie Diaz is a model for any woman dealing with the challenges of gender, race, and class.  She's a model for any poet who is interesting is literary allusions, metaphor, physical detail and word choice. This primary metaphor of devouring/being devoured evokes an earlier work of a French lesbian writer, Monique Wittig.  The Lesbian Body.  Diaz is also a strong lesbian voice who claims her identity, her pleasure, and her autonomy. Nobody can hold her back, and nobody should. This woman promises to bless everybody with her brilliant work. 

Notes: 

Book Review: https://therumpus.net/2013/10/when-my-brother-was-an-aztec-by-natalie-diaz/
Book Review:   https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/new_american_poets/natalie_diaz/

Essay: "A Body of Athletics" by Natalie Diaz published in PEN America. https://pen.org/a-body-of-athletics/

Interview NPR: https://www.npr.org/2018/10/14/657341924/macarthur-genius-poet-natalie-diaz-tackles-issues-facing-native-americans

2018 MacArthur Fellow: Meet the poet: https://www.macfound.org/fellows/1007/

Natalie Diaz was a successful professional basketball player before she was a poet. In the essay noted at the end of this book review, I've included a link to her essay, "A Body of Athletics," published by PEN America.  This essay also exemplifies her mind: she has a wide associational capacity. She gathers the wit and wisdom across several disciplines: sports, literature, media, Mojave language, religion, and music. She has participated in Standing Rock protests and has her work published in Orion magazine and several places. She is interested in language, in preserving the Mojave language, in protecting the land and the water, and she can synthesize and create astounding works of art.

Prose Poems

My piece, "Soliloquy," is a biographical story featured in their October 2018 issue, here:
http://unbrokenjournal.com/2018/10/soliloquy/

A prose poem is a hybrid form. It looks like prose, but it uses techniques of poetry: sound patterns, figurative language, and compression.  Unbroken Journal is an online literary magazine that publishes prose poems.

This is a story about my Finnish immigrant grandmother who couldn't speak English. She wouldn't speak English, my aunt says. The word soliloquy comes from the Latin word solo, which means “to himself,” and loquor that means “I speak.”  I was inspired by watching a beautiful video entitled "Soliloquy," created by Iranian/American Shirin Neshat and exhibited at the Walker Art Museum in 2018.  The installation was a split screen arranged at opposing points in the room, and on each screen a woman gazing, entering doors, ascending stairs, going through the streets. Each was the same woman, in the same Istanbul, but one was contemporary and the other,  ancient. They were facing each other, but not seeing each other.  There was a quality of haunting or being haunted by the future or past. The subject was about place, about spirituality, about culture and gender.

This provoked thoughts of my grandmother and me, she in one language and I in the other. She was rural, and I was not.  Her life seemed traditional and mine, not traditional, and yet we are intimately connected by blood.  We looked at each other's lives, and I thought of hers as unimaginable, impossible. She passed on thirty-five years ago.  I wondered what she would see if she could see me right now.  I wondered what I can see of my small grandsons lives in the future. What would our differences be? What would be our possibilities?

In a description of Shirin Neshat's work at the Tate Museum:

Since the early 1990s she has travelled frequently to Iran, and Soliloquy is a comment on Neshat’s experience of living between two cultures. She has said of the piece, ‘although Soliloquy was not a biographical piece, it is based on my personal experience ... those of us living in a state of the “in between” have certain advantages and disadvantages."

To grow up between two languages and two cultures is a unique experience. I was not able to grasp the second language although its sound and rhythm was and continues to be familiar, continues to evoke the joy of childhood.  The place of between-ness is full of shadows. There is language, and the language is more music than meaning. Things approach but not emerge. There were secrets in the family that my mother and aunts refused to talk about; these secrets are one of the forces in the poem.