“On The and Story”
from an interview with Stanley Plumly
by Peter Davison

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ore than most poets you rely on spinning a narrative thread in your poems, a sort of story that unwinds itself. I presume that is deliberate?

Thread, yes. I prefer an attenuated narrative, an interrupted, delayed narrative. Narrative, I believe, is indispensable to the lyric; it’s what makes it move instead of spinning its wheels. It’s what motivates the poem to turn, to go on, continue, rather than simply returning, over and over. Narrative provides the major formal tension to the lyric stability in a poem. It’s what causes the line to turn the corner. What is a “story” anyway but someone speaking, drawing a line that assumes a shape, a shape that becomes a figure But a line too straight is uninteresting; that’s why the “narrative” must break, bend, meander; that’s why indirection and juxtaposition are so important to maintaining the intensity, the surprise all art needs to keep the music going, the line moving. It’s the strength Keats at his best that he depends, even in the odes, on a narrative base-line; it’s what brings his lyric drama to life. It’s the weakness of Shelley that he too often substitutes the didactic in his nature for the implicit drama; whatever the narrative spine, it seems to exist in order to promote an opinion. When Keats advises Shelley to load every rift with more ore, he’s not talking decoration but narrative. Even metaphor, announced or otherwise, is an implicit narrative: “like a patient etherized upon a table” (T. S. Eliot); “Loneliness leapt in the mirrors, but all week/I kept them covered like cages” (W. S. Merwin). The subtext of narrative is time, the subtext of time is mortality, the subtext of mortality is emotion. Try to remove the narrative sense of things and you take out the heart, the cause of the effect.

Two questions about style. First, in a poem like “Hedgerows,” you utilize the definite article over and over again, nearly fifty times in fifty lines. Some critics have suggested that when a poet overuses the definite article that he or she intends to exert exclusion, to refer to things or events which the poet finds more familiar than the reader does.

“Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the,” says Wallace Stevens. I don’t believe the the is exclusionary as much as it’s denominational. Critics who suggest exclusion as a motive need to look at context. The context of “Hedgerows” — nominationally and musically — is naming, specifying, nailing down the actual. Any straying from the particulars, the the-ing, and the poem might have turned into one more pastoral glib moment. The definite article, as a separator, could become merely rhetorical — I can see that in certain poems. But in “Hedgerows” the use of the is intuitive not inventive, especially since the poem’s narrative course follows a fairly blind path (in Devon, on a one-lane two-way road between giant hedgework). For me, the definite article in the poem is a way of including the reader more directly in the literal nature of the experience. It’s part of the texture.

You have written a lot of prose about poetry, both to assess the poets of your own generation and to explore the nature of English and American poetry. In your prose I have noticed you depend heavily on the verb “to be,” as though you were writing notes toward the definition of definitions. Your prose style is quite different from that of your verse. Why?

If I may say so, this is a remarkable observation — precisely on the point. Definition is what nearly all my prose writing has been about, even the more lyrical analytical pieces. There must be a legion of reasons why my poems put different pressure on the language compared to my prose. Different parts of the brain? Obviously different purposes. Prose, critical prose, examines and explains; its thrust is expository. Poetry dramatizes; its thrust is to present. But the secret of good prose is not that far from the secret of poetry, which is narrative. When Pound says that poetry ought to be at least as well written as prose, he’s clearly talking about language, but I think he means the language of the experience, a language tied directly to some kind of grounding. In prose, however, the connective tissue is allowed to show; in poetry it is subverted, subtracted, made invisible, suggested. I think my prose enjoys the space it’s been offered, the cubicle volume. My penchant in my poems is to describe, if not complete, a circle; to bend the line severely. Prose is a way of creating so much circumference that the curve of the thinking and telling is disguised, though the good reader will ultimately see it if the good writer has written well enough to satisfy unity. Prose, for me, is exploratory too” notes toward.” I like the idea of finding my way. Thus if the lyric poem is a path, prose is a road somewhere.

As for the verb “to be”, I loathe the creative writing notion that verbs necessarily need to act, to juice the pale nouns and poor modifiers. Verbs are part, only part, of the voice of all the words. Perhaps, for me, state of being verbs are faster or more direct means between the subject and the complement. I don’t know, except that is verbs are quieter, more given to silence. Or perhaps, in my mind, all verbs are state of being, depending on what state of things, active or still, the writing is calling for.

Let me add that writing criticism, review-essays and whatnot, is one kind of prose; writing about Whistler or nature or Keats is an entirely different kind. The first is thankless, the second thankful and a lot more fun. I think I got into the criticism business in the first place because I had, and have, strong feelings about distinctions of generations. Which, like narrative, is the subject of mortality.

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