Telling Stories Again: On the Replenishment of Narrative in the Postmodernist Long Poem

Abstract

'A Few Don'ts' The legacy of modernism for the postmodernist long poem has been to render that genre virtually unwritable, which has not prevented postmodernists from writing long poems, of course, any more than it prevented their modernist precursors from doing so. On the one hand, the modernists revived the long poem, restoring it to its former status as the measure of poetic ambition and achievement, especially for male poets, especially among North Americans; Pound, Eliot, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens, among others, all essayed the genre.[1] On the other hand, modernist aesthetics effectively deprived poetry of the most valuable of its traditional resources for organizing extended texts, namely narrative. Capping a century-long development towards brevity and instantaneity in poetry, the modernist doctrine of the Image, with its emphasis on the epiphanic moment captured with utmost concentration, made no provision for telling stories in verse.[2] If a prohibition on narrative did not, in fact, figure among Ezra Pound's 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste' of 1913, it might as well have, so decisive was Imagism's interdiction of narrative in poetry; and the Image, as Joseph Riddel reminds us, 'remains the irreducible element of the modern long poem'.[3] Modernism's legacy, then, amounts to a classic double bind: you must write long poems; but you must not narrate, hence, in effect, you must not write long poems. Out of this double bind have emerged the characteristic modernist and postmodernist non-narrative forms of the long poem.[4] Denied the resources of narration, and constrained by the aesthetics of the Image, writers of long poems have been reduced to various more or less desperate expedients. These expedients include the collage poem assembled from imagistic fragments (Eliot's Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, Williams's Paterson); the discontinuous lyric sequence or cycle (Pound's Mauberley sequences, MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle, Berryman's Dream Songs), subsequently updated in the de-centred serial poems of the postmodernists (George Oppen's Discrete Series, Robert Duncan's Passages, the serial poems of Leslie Scalapino); the ruminative verse-essays of Eliot (Four Quartets), Wallace Stevens, A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery and others; and even certain postmodernist revivals of the obsolete long-poem genre of the georgic (Charles Olson's Maximus poems, Ginsberg's The Fall of America, Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers without End).[5] Beyond even the double bind of the mandatory but unwritable long poem, what makes the modernist legacy treacherous for postmodernists is this: that the loss of surface narrative in the modernist long poem, the dissolution of its 'narrative glue', is compensated for by the persistence of narrative at another level. Pound's and Eliot's long poems are exemplary in this regard. In the Cantos, Pound juxtaposed units of various scales, from minute Images to large documentary blocks, and left it to the reader to deduce his interpretation of history; but of course this works only if that interpretation is already familiar, known in advance: only if, that is, the Cantos are already inscribed within a historical narrative that is nowhere in the text but underwrites it everywhere.[6] The same could be said for The Waste Land, with the added complication of Eliot's anxiety, manifested in his notorious notes, to signal the presence elsewhere of the narrative that, with Pound's help, he had so scrupulously expunged from the surface of the text.[7] Successive generations of readers and critics have willingly assumed the task of recovering The Waste Land's submerged narrative.[8] In short, the legacy of the modernist long poem for postmodernists is a twofold burden, comprising not only the interdiction of continuous narrative, but also the catch-22 that, the more scrupulously one suppresses surface narrative, the more complete is one's dependence on submerged master-narratives, and postmodernists, as Lyotard has made us understand, are by definition incredulous towards master-narratives. …