Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets

Not Metaphor but Magic: The “How” and Why of Narrative Poetry

35 Not Metaphor but Magic: The “How” and Why of Narrative Poetry Lisa D. Chávez My grandmother told me stories. I wish I could say that these were the stuff of great tradition: family stories handed down orally for generations. They were not. They were stories from the Little Golden Books, often sanitized versions of fairy tales, and, to be more accurate, my grandmother read them to me. Until she taught me how to read—which happened before I entered kindergarten. I don’t remember her lessons, but I do remember getting to pick out a new book at the store each week. The ones I chose were invariably about talking animals, and I loved these stories because they were not my experience—they were a way for me to experience the world as I thought it should be. My earliest memories are of stories—of reading or being read to and, later, of trying to write my own stories, trying to place myself in a world beyond my own. When I was in kindergarten, I told everyone about the pony that I kept at my grandparents’ house. Understand that there was no pony. My grandparents’ house was small, on the corner of a busy street in southern California, and while we did have some unusual animals living with us—a duck named Petunia, a sparrow named Tucker and other birds—there certainly was no pony in the small backyard. At school, no one questioned me, but finally, when I related one too many unlikely pony adventures, the teacher asked me if I was “telling stories.” I nodded, until I saw her frown. I was five years old, and it was the first time that I’d had to question the separation between my imagination and real life. I understood quite well that I didn’t have a real pony, but I also knew that telling stories created another world. I thought my teacher remarkably unimaginative—didn’t stories come alive for her, too? For me, stories were not metaphor but magic. )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 lisa d. chávez 36 The point of stories, that oldest human magic, is that they are both true and not. In the world as it is, Sethe may not “really” be haunted by the ghost of her daughter Beloved, but she is in the context of the novel, and in the “real” world, it is quite possible that a woman can be haunted both by the loss of her child and by the terrible scars of slavery. Thus, Toni Morrison’s novel is both true and fictional, and it is this combination of truth and fiction that makes literature compelling. My early education in literature was fairly traditional. Often, the lyric— elusive and elliptic as it can be—simply baffled me. As an undergraduate, I had no idea what Keats was saying in “Ode to a Nightingale” (though my already poetic mind clung to lines like “Fled is that music: Do I wake or sleep”), but I immediately fell in love with “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “The Eve of Saint Agnes.”1 They told stories. Still, I remained under the impression that poetry was primarily “difficult” and hard to understand —that I might end up repeating a line over and over again, but the meaning of the poem would remain elusive. I became convinced that the narrative poems I’d read were just flukes, and these early classes hardly sparked my interest in poetry. And it wasn’t until I got into my first undergraduate poetry class with Alaskan poet John Morgan (who has been known to write a narrative poem or two) that I finally read contemporary poetry and realized that people still wrote “story poems” and that I could do it too. My interest shifted from fiction to poetry immediately. My early influences were poets I read (including many Native American poets, especially Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, and Joy Harjo) and poets I later worked with: Norman Dubie, Ai, Alberto Ríos. It is no surprise, then, that my earliest poems emulated them: I wrote dramatic monologues and other narrative poems, often very short-lined until Tito Rios taught me to understand the use and tension of the line. I had no understanding of form: I didn’t know how to use stanzas for effect, and often my poems were one long block of text. Since then, I’ve learned that the narrative poem is...