The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse
ed. By Sunil Iyengar
(Franciscan University Press)
The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse invites readers to broaden their expectations about contemporary poetry, arguing that the experimental and the postmodern are not the only modes capable of “making it new.” Not only is there a lively continuation of formal and narrative verse; this collection displays with refreshing elasticity the complexity of modern life in tales of tragedy, maternal drudgery, dubious faith, and existentialism.
In his recent editorial endeavor, the poet and arts research director Sunil Iyengar collects selections from 28 poets to delineate “the revival and development of the short narrative poem over the past fifty years” (Iyengar ix).To that end, Iyengar focuses on those poets whose work has consciously promoted the “story-poem” (xi). Seeking to demonstrate the range of narrative verse, Iyengar samples all styles of poetic storytelling in this collection. Tales large and small are represented, from a petty feud turned utterly devastating to the tense excitement of a game of hide and seek in a child’s mind.
In an age where we tend to identify contemporary poetry as the natural descendant of the lyric, experimental, and confessional strains from the 20th century, Iyengar proposes this collection as an introduction into an oft unsung-edge of the contemporary poetic landscape, a means “to witness a quiet revolution in literary sensibility” (ix). The poets Iyengar highlights follow after an older but essential mode of poetry, leaning into the expressive possibilities of narrative verse, “both fiction and nonfiction” (xi). In his view, the tradition this anthology descends from still has some indebtedness to Modernism. And yet, most clearly, this collection is full of poetry that finds its closest relatives in the works of Robert Frost and E.A. Robinson, and its poetic roots as far as Chaucer’s works. Moreover, given the urge to be either expansive, as in the pursuit of the verse novel or age-defining long-poem, or explosive, as in the wildly experimental or imagistically brief, Iyengar’s emphasis of mid-length narrative promotes a style and length that is both immersive and easily digestible. Such poems are sorely needed in a time where reading, not to mention reading poetry, is a pastime fighting for attention among myriad distractions.
Iyengar’s privileging of narrative verse in this collection is by no means an attempt to deride the mainstream emphasis on lyric. If anything, it is a call to widen the aperture of our poetic gaze once more to see all the possibilities available in verse, not just the most common or popular ones. Calling upon a well-known modernist writer, Iyengar excerpts Virginia Woolf’s “Letter to a Young Poet” (1932) in defense of fictional narrative, emphasizing her insistence that “to inhabit the lives of others would accelerate the learning of his craft” (x). Given this, narrative verse is the whetstone of the writer, and can provide some of the sharpest examples of contemporary poetic craft.
Beyond highlighting narrative verse’s refining capacity, Iyengar also seeks to foreground mid-length poetry as a genre of mighty rather than “modest” impact, echoing Dana Gioia’s essay “Other Lives: On Shorter Narrative Poems” (1990) in the second leg in his editorial ethos (xi). Building off Gioia’s reasoning, Iyengar agrees that while efforts at verse novels or the definitive long poem persist, it is the “memorability” of the mid-length narrative poem that “‘[helps] to sustain a literary culture most of us would agree is in danger of extinction’” (xi). Indeed, this warning from Gioia, now reiterated by Iyengar, proves less of a fearmongering claim from a literary elite than an eerie premonition of where the road of our modern, easily distracted, and increasingly digital age has taken us. This collection presents the literary road less taken in contemporary verse, and allows writers and readers alike to traverse the “countercurrent, winding past the obstacles that postmodern and post-postmodern aesthetics have thrown in their way” (xx). Concluding his introduction, Iyengar makes it clear that it is his hope that The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse pushes us “beyond the supremacy of the lyric form” and invites poets to write beyond autobiographical “preoccupations” and the fear of “being labeled inauthentic” for assuming the freedom to immerse themselves in the fictive lives they craft (xx).
The sampled poets do the proposed work, and “justify this vision” that Iyengar lays out in his introduction (xx). Prioritizing those who have published predominantly in the past 50 years, Iyengar limits his focus to poets born after 1943, and organizes the group by birth year. As a result, many of the poems presented illustrate the active work of living poets in the last 30 years. This allows Iyengar to show that though these relatively young poets are influenced by older roots than that of modernism, their poems nevertheless represent vibrant new branches in the literary landscape. They are growths of a living tradition, rather than an attempt at reanimating obsolete or antiquated poetics.
Iyengar opens the collection by featuring two Faulkner-like poems from the eldest poet in the collection Jared Carter, “Barn Siding” and “The Purpose of Poetry,” illustrating devastating modern and intimate realities with dark humor and depth. Both poems set the stage for stories that wrestle with the complexity of our current age, either through the existential questioning one accident can cause, or the weight of modern progress on the vulnerable. Of the well-known poets he excerpts, it is unsurprising that Dana Gioia is among them. Indeed, the selections from Gioia can serve as an exemplar for the ethos that undergirds this collection, with “The Ballad of Jesús Ortiz” illustrating the dynamic short-story character of narrative verse in impeccable fashion. Rita Dove also features quite rightly in this collection, though her poem “The Bistro Styx” is set an ocean and an age and a scene away from the western tale Gioia’s last poem depicts, again evincing the range of narrative verse. Dove’s verse depicting a concerned mother meeting her increasingly unfamiliar daughter has connective tissue to the closing scene in “Jesús Ortiz,” as tragedy makes new and quieter men out of two sons who leave their mother for their father’s old pastime. Iyengar continues to exhibit the potency of story-poems with the haunting imagined meeting between the last soul to die and Charon in Daniel Mark Epstein’s “The Ferryman,” and with the haunting realities of history in poems like Marilyn Nelson’s “Freeman Field” and Catherine Tufariello’s “February 18, 1943.” He further makes good on his claims to promote the mid-length narrative poem, including such poems as Paul Lake’s “The Inspectors,” David Yezzi’s “Tomorrow & Tomorrow” and Christian Wiman’s “The Ice Storm.” On the whole, the length and variety of this collection allows for a significant introduction into contemporary narrative verse without being overtaxing or towards a single thematic agenda, instead allowing for diverse subject matter and styles of narration. If anything, Iyengar shows an affinity for the “anecdotal” or “dramatic monologue” poem in his selections from Paisley Rekdal, Robert B. Shaw, and several others. While the collection would have benefitted from a more thorough indication in the editorial introductions as to the place of selected poem(s) within each poet’s larger career, as an introduction to contemporary narrative verse, Iyengar achieves his goal. Still, greater contextualization of each poet’s oeuvre would allow readers to better understand how much of this “revival” is truly “countercurrent,” or simply concurrent and concomitant with the lyrical mainstream in contemporary verse (xx).
What makes this collection impactful are those poems which prove that narrative verse is a medium that can tell thoroughly modern tales, while still reaching deep for its poetic roots. One of the shorter and most impactful inclusions is Daniel Mark Epstein’s “Helen.” In it, the eponymous school girl’s desire to listen to the ancient tragic love that shares her namesake, but not hear the ending, speaks to our own insatiable desire to hear the story, to mimic the heights of the myth, to embody the heroine, and yet somehow avoid the same fate. Another poem, “Lost and Found” by A.E. Stallings, again employs both narrative verse and ancient myth masterfully, as a harried mother’s dream encounter with Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses, allows her to find her identity as both poet and mother, not erasing the struggle between these two roles but reinvigorating it and enlivening the mother to write her dream. These moments of mythical realism, where the narrative evokes both the literary and the abundantly real, are where these poems shine, as they “reorder events and perceptions to convey them acutely and profoundly” (xx). Such potent storytelling, coupled with the density of craft and language found in poetry, is celebrated and championed by Iyengar’s collection; I can only hope that as time progresses, he will have every need and ample material for a much expanded version of this collection.