the importance of story
I've been thinking about narrative lately and the importance of story and storytelling in my work. Especially in light of some more fiction-ish forays I occasionally dabbled in last year and have hauled out for some edits, but also when it comes to essays and poems and even visual work.While they use slightly different muscles, even the things that don't necessarily have a language or text element to them still feel like a narrative or story of sorts. It is still a way of creating and delving into an imaginative world, just coming out in a different form. Like if you took an apple and made different things from it--some juice (a poem), applesauce (a picture) a cake (an essay), a pie (fiction). Different things combine in different ways.
I am always curious about the education of fiction writers, having only taken one fiction workshop when I was 19. I was in no way as absorbant at that age, and really would have preferred it maybe a decade later when I feel I would have been more open to take things from it and use them wisely in my main genre. Instead, somewhere, there is a file folder of bad short stories about the sort of things you write about as an undergrad--maybe not terrible, but certainly not that good. The instructor once commented that my sentences were way too long and Faulknerian and perhaps I was better suited to be a poet. I sort of already was, sending out terribly skinny and spare missives (though thankfully, the year of rhyming *yikes* I was saving for a couple years later.) I had written a one-act play that won honorable mention in a contest for young playwrights at the very end of high school, but, beyond quite a few drama and theater history classes in college, I was no better in that genre. By the time I took poetry classes, I was very good at some things, but also terrible at others. This did not change until I was in grad school, despite a steady dose of reading and novels in the intervening years, but very little poetry beyond the usuals--Dickinson, Whitman, Eliot. And of course, Plath.
To hear most of my classmates--both in undergrad and my MFA classes in poetry-- story and narrative was not important (and dare I say wholly unfashionable in the sort of experimental lyric or langpo world I was steeped in.) This may have been part of my difficulty in finding people who could agree on what a decent poem was. Or even other poets to talk with about story and storytelling when it came to this genre. Perhaps it may be also why I historically gravitated more toward prose poems and hybrid work than traditional verse.
But poems are perhaps the best place to find stories and narratives beyond the lyric moment or experiments in sound and language. Or maybe poetry has a space where something can be all three at once, Or at least I hope so.
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