LYRIC POETRY

LYRIC

                                                       NARRATIVE                                                                                    

POETRY

What is Lyric Poetry? 

Originally lyric poetry was poetry written for song. 

Time has transformed the lyric poem to be more about expressions of emotion. Rather than express a story they express the emotions behind stories and lives. Driven by rhyme and rhythm, and experimental syntax, the lyric poem becomes a vast medium for expression. But not all lyric poems rhyme, some don't have a specific rhythm and many don't necessarily experiment with syntax. Lyric poetry in its essence is about words used to feel rather than tell. 

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian American poet, her lyric poetry introduced me to everything I love about reading and writing poetry. Rather than discuss the nitty gritty details about poetic analysis. I want to tell you what I feel about poetry. Sometimes there are words that cant describe, like: pain, war, love, friendship. They carry so much connotation and yet there is little in those sounds and those letters that tells you that pain is hard and sickening, that war comes with pain and hatred spews venom on all those who are already weak, but love and friendship are bonds, ties that matter as strongly as there counterparts. Naomi Shihab Nye knows how to tell these stories, to make you feel that sorrow, and she does it with the utmost skill and sly curiosity. Some of her works are taught in high schools around the world. It was when I read this poem, that I fell in love with poetry:

Making a Fist
For the first time, on a road north of Tampico
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with out unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

Ironically enough this is one Shihab-Nye's narrative style poems. See how flexible the two terms are!

Intention versus Attention: Meet Narrative Poetry

"Intention matters. Intention is a kind of attention, and the underlying attention of a poem (not necessarily singular, not necessarily preordained) is the agency which has discovered and calibrated its effects."

--Tony Hoagland

Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness

Poetry Foundation

To break the above mentioned statement into its parts:

1)

• Intention: the purpose of an agent 

versus

• Attention: a form of concentration 

"Intention is a kind of attention": means that the poet engages in a purposeful act of observation. 

2) 

"The underlying attention of a poem...is the agency which has discovered and calibrated its effects"

• Agency: is the capacity of an agent to act in the world

The poet is an agent, his/her intention is reflected in the attention he/she gives into their poem.

3)

Thus the translation of the above quoted Hoagland phrase is: The purposeful effort put into a poem is based on a form of observation of the world and is reflected in the artist art. This holds profound significance because the art is not arbitrary.   

Why am I talking about this:

Tony Hoagland writes narrative poetry which is in contrast to my lyric poetry. Narrative poetry tells a story in the shape of a poem. His work is extremely interesting and he has some powerful things to say about America, Living, Age, Sickness, and more. 

Narrative poetry by default tends towards a coherent meaning more than Lyric poetry. This is not always the case there are exceptions, which Hoagland points out in his essay. 

Meaning is questionable in a poem, and my family tend to advise me that my meaning is far to obscure. This is where I falter. Because while my family may appreciate the poetry of narrative writers more than the poetry of a lyric writers I cannot but help finding myself drawn to writing in lyric style...

Lyric gives me room to explore the page, to fiddle with language to the edges of nonsense and back. Narrative feels more confined. Though I love reading narrative poetry, I find my attempts at it come off sounding pedantic and flimsy. 

Here is a sample of Hoagland's narrative poem "Cement Truck"

I wanted to get the cement truck into the poem

because I loved the bulk of the big rotating barrel

        as it went calmly down the street

churning to keep the wet cement inside

                                                slushily in motion

.............................................

I knew that I might have to make the center of the poem wider

when the cement truck had to turn a corner

         scraping the bark of an overhanging tree, 

giving a nudge to the power lines--
...............................................

I liked the idea of my poem having room inside

for something as real as that truck

and having to get there by two o'clock or else

to pour the floor of the high school gymnasium.

--And I think at this point it would have been a terrible mistake

to turn the truck 

into a metaphor or a symbol for something else.

It had taken me so long to get the world into my poem,

and so long to get my poem into the world

.............................................

It's powerful! And has as much force as the previous poems I've studied which are lyric.

The full poem is here: Cement Truck by Tony Hoagland

Notice the effort at attention and intention in this poem. The wanting to make something out of one's attention (the cement truck) with an intention of making meaning (the reality of the human condition.)

Great!