← New Books Network
New Books Network
Sunil Iyengar, "The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse" (Franciscan UP, 2025)
00:47:24
Loading summary
Transcript64 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:06]
B
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dan Moran. I am so happy to be here today with Sunil Iyengar. Sunil is a poet whose verse and reviews have appeared in a New Criterion, the American Scholar, the LA Review of Books, many other places. And he's here today to talk about a new anthology he's edited. It's called the Coliseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse, published by the Franciscan University Press. I've read it. It's great, it's affirming, and I am so ready to talk to Sunil about it. So welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:37]
A
Great to be here, Dan. Thanks for having me.
- [00:39]
B
So let's dive into your introduction first before we get into some of the choices you made about the poems. You begin your introduction by saying that the book assembles some of the best American narrative verse since World War II by 28 different poets. And you add this quote. I want to get your reaction to a quote of yours. You say this quote, to survey this body of work is to witness quiet revolution in literary sensibility. Explain that.
- [01:04]
A
Yeah, I know, I know. Revolution's a strong term, but I used it really deliberately here. So I'm going to try to condense the arc of what I mean, you know, in terms of the thousand years of literary history into two minutes, okay? To try to explain what I meant with that quote. So right now we've gotten to the point where most poems we read or encounter, you know, whether in books, magazines or journals, or whether in print or online, or whether they're spoken on YouTube or posted on Instagram, they're all essentially lyric poems. These are poems that capture a fleeting sensation or experience. Poems that are savored for their images, you know, their rhythms, syntax, what I call lineation and line breaks and all the qualities we associate with short poems. You know, they're typically maybe a page or slightly more. And, you know, we love those poems, but this revolution factor has to do with this. So going back to the dawn of, you know, English language poetry, you've had epics and tales. Everyone knows the names of some of them all the way through. Long narrative poems by most of the greats. But I would say after 20th century modernism particularly, there's what I call in my introduction to the anthology, the supremacy of the lyric. This is a sort of disproportionate valuing of different components of lyric poetry, such as sound, image, the integrity of the line. Those are all important. But there was almost like, you know, I often Think of this quote from William Carlos Williams, who's a master of modern poetry. No ideas, but the thing itself, you know, so there was really a lot of emphasis on that. And then throughout the early and mid 20th century, you had, you know, not only the modernists, but their immediate successors. Okay, so you had poets who were enormously influential on rising generations of poets and readers, and justly so. But few of them really kind of carried the water for when it came to narrative verse, poems that tell a story. So now we fast forward and we're. Let's take us to the, like, the 80s and 90s of last century. Among the poets whose writings became known then, we saw a movement to introduce narrative poetry, reintroduce narrative verse more purposefully into the mainstream of poetry writing. So this revival has carried on for the last few decades, through the period we're in now, really. So, you know, it hasn't been really widely publicized or discussed I would submit prior to this book. And so that was a need that was kind of. That was what really called me to do this. But it's also a need that I think persists among readers or would be readers of today, people who would go to poetry and maybe are afraid of it, or people who even read poetry now. And as a reader myself, you know, I wanted to make sure that that was gratified, you know, that, that wish to sort of see more stories and poems.
- [03:43]
B
Yeah, that's a great. And that's a great idea about, for the anthology, because you think about post, you know, after modernism, right, where the lyric rules everything. And you can't, you know, after, say, I don't know, Williams or Elliot before, you can't back. Right. But, but there is a comfort in narrative verse. There is a comfort in being told a story. And, and I love how you said it, but some people would be afraid, like, do you want to read this new anthology of contemporary poets? People like, I don't know. That's. I don't know if I can do that, but, but it's so accessible.
- [04:07]
A
Oh, thanks. Well, thanks for saying that. And I think, you know, it does bring back some of the original value and interest in poetry. Right. You know, and I, I. There's a quote in there. I, I don't have it verbatim, but it's from Virginia Woolf, who's writing a letter, you know, as a novelist, to a colleague, and is saying, look, you know, why. Why are poets now no longer telling stories? And, you know, that's how the poem poetry improved. And that's Some of the most passionate lines we remember often in the voices of characters, for example, from Shakespeare, where a story is being told and the poet finds the voice through the character. And that's something that we miss as readers too, I think.
- [04:46]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And you're bringing it back. So let's talk about what it's like to do this because I imagine that anybody who likes to read a lot, if, say I need you to put together an anthology, like, oh, I've read plenty of stuff, I could do that in a weekend, just get, just all. And then I imagine at some point you're like, this is a big job. So what's it like to assemble and choose these like 49 or 50 poems here?
- [05:05]
A
Yeah, so of course, that's the hard part, as it always is with anthologies. So who made the cut and why? So I set the following criteria really early on, and it's, you know, may seem obvious, but I had to like the poem, right? At least entertain the possibility that it would endure longer than, say, the author. Right. So that was something that was in my mind. And also, you know, though it had to tell a story, even if it's just a fragment of a story. I also wanted to avoid poems that told a story in which the, the protagonist was clearly recognizable as the author or the poet. I didn't end up doing this entirely because I think there's at least one poem in here where the reader may think of the speaker as synonymous with the poet. But in general, I wanted to favor poems that might have, would have been short stories or at least try to develop a character and plot situation. Then I also made a choice not to include any excerpts from longer poems or from translations. And then I had finally some more kind of idiosyncratic rules. And, you know, I think every editor kind of has a prerogative to, you know, impose their views because that helps to cull down what you actually publish. So partly because of costs and permission issues, I wanted to limit the anthology to American born poets. And I wanted to get a little clear of poets writing in the first generation or two after modernism, because their works already have been widely anthologized for the most part. So I focused on poets who were born after 1939. That was my cutoff. And who started getting known or published in the 1970s or 60s, even throughout, through the present day. And so once this thing was in proofs, you can imagine, Dan, you know, I arrived at, you know, I realized there were maybe a handful of poems I would have loved to cram in there, but it was too late. So I always say, you know, optimistically, well, maybe that's for the second edition.
- [06:49]
B
But, you know, there's only this many seats in the lifeboat, so you gotta figure it out. Well, so let's talk about that. You made this decision. It's out there. And you say in your introduction that the form. This is the type of poem that you say is not currently prominent in literary journals or the kind of magazines that still publish poetry. Like, how do you account for that? Like, why? Why is that? Because reading this, I was like, yeah, this is. I wish this book were ten times its length. Why do you think that that form has. Has kind of gone away?
- [07:16]
A
Yeah, you know, that's a great question. So I think it has something to do with, you know, maybe just sheer brevity. You know, I think a lot of the poems, you know, when we started seeing, you know, I always say this is, you know, kind of cliche, but, you know, you think somebody average, you know, maybe somebody who doesn't read poetry, you know, regularly might think, okay, the New Yorker publishes poetry. There's like a. There's. And they actually do sometimes publish, you know, poems that go on for a page and a half or something. But generally, not just the New Yorker, but any magazine, it's often like a little part side of a general interest magazine or, you know, I'm not. I'm not talking about literary journals even. But then when you even go on to literary journals there too, you know, you don't see a lot of. Of very long poems or, you know, storytelling poems that develop a character or situation for pages at a time. So, I mean, it's kind of. I do think it has something to do with brevity. And I also think, you know, we. We often. I didn't consider this until late in the process, but of course, we all are hooked to other media and other ways of getting stories right. So there's some of. That perhaps has transferred. You had people like Edmund Wilson writing you know, way back in, I think it was the 20s or something in 1920s about, you know, what's. What's become of poetry in terms of being able to capture an audience and carry the audience for a long period of time. And I, I think, you know, that sort of understand, you know, he was talking. Are the novelists kind of taking over this ground? And I think we're now in a new age where, of course, you know, yes, of course, fiction, you know, literary fiction has, you know, is. Is. Is a dominant place of where we find these kinds of stories that maybe used to be told in poetry. But also, of course we have, you know, we have Netflix, we have series, you know, have all kinds of, you know, video and, and YouTube and you know, all kinds of social media outlets. That's not to say that it can't coexist in poetry. And that's what I'm trying to show, that it is very much alive. It's just something that needs to be, I think, nourished and cultivated because it's a.
- [09:15]
B
It's.
- [09:16]
A
There are a lot of forces that are kind of opposing it. The other thing I talk about a little bit is, you know, there is a tendency, I think in poems that do maybe talk about a character, you know, tell a story sometimes to be very, very introspective and about the person themselves who's writing the poem. And it might not be a straight up, you know, story about my life, but it's essentially reflecting on lived experience. What's called lived experience. Right. And that's all great, but I think there's a tendency, maybe there's even a coyness to tell, to really inhabit the voice of. Inhabit another person and really try to say, look, I don't know anything about this person or even their culture, but I'm going to learn to write this poem from their point of view. And I think is that audacity there anymore? You know, is that likely to be censured, you know, or spoken of as non authentic? I think some of that dynamic is also swimming around. So I. It's a complex question, but I think in general there are a lot of streams that are forces that are, I think perhaps counter, you know, counter availing narrative poems.
- [10:20]
B
This idea of that the poet is going to write a narrative and not just an eye, a first person introspective, but actually a full on narrative where you inhabit some. I mean, that's like you made me think about, you know, memoir is such a hot genre in the last, say 25 years. I mean it's always been around. Right. But like the difference between a memoir and an audacious first person narrative where you completely, you know, like Nabokov wrote Speak Memory, but he also wrote Lolita and they're both first person. Right. But the world's apart. Right. And so the idea to make that leap.
- [10:48]
A
Yeah, there's nothing wrong with first person, second person. I mean that's. I try to also be very conscious of that in this anthology to try to include those different vantage points. And there's a lot of first person stuff in here. And you know, there's also a thin line between what you know, and we might remember literature classes, the dramatic monologue versus narrative. I tried to basically, in my view, a dramatic mental, like something like from T.S. eliot, you know, some Gironton. Those, those could be dramatic monologues. But do they really tell a story? Not so much. So I tried to be mindful and you know, Frost was marvelous and dramatic monologues that actually had a story within them. So I, I was. That was a good model in some ways. I did want to though, to pick up on something you said about the. Were asked about again, why. Why aren't we seeing these kinds of poems as much? And one other factor I just would throw in there is. And I don't mean to kind of pillory him, I mean, I love a lot of his work, but you know, John Ashbury and the poems, the poets of that. I won't even say that generation necessarily, but there's a certain kind of poet who really thrives on disjunctions. Right. And what you know, are kind of a stream of non sequiturs, but are brilliant and create a sort of sorcery. Right. Of language, but don't necessarily push or, you know, have a momentum in terms of narrative as we would think of it. And so I think there is a tendency, and I talk a little bit about this in the introduction. I think there's a little bit of that in the air as well, especially the turn of the century, the last century, which kind of may have inhibited some of the more straight up narrative poems. And when I say straight up, let me be clear, it's not that it just tells a story and that's it. Then you can just do that in prosecution. Clearly every line has to carry its own weight and has to be a poem in every way.
- [12:31]
B
I read many of these out loud to myself at the kitchen table.
- [12:34]
A
Oh, that's great. Best way to savor that. Thanks.
- [12:37]
B
So let's actually jump ahead. Let's talk about. You mentioned Frost. We'll talk about Frost in a bit. But I want to ask about another figure you bring up in the introduction. So you say that the figure that pioneered this type of narrative verse, that the one who you say he introduced a mode that we recognize is Thomas Hardy. Talk about the debt we owe to Thomas Hardy.
- [12:54]
A
Yeah. And I can't find anything in the record, so to speak, to show that, for example, Frost or any of these other writers that came out, you know, were directly, you know, supremely or Very influenced by Thomas Hardy. But let me just say Thomas Hardy, it may be kind of surprising to most people, but, you know, he's kind of like almost like Kipling in that sense. You know, kipling was about 20 years younger than Hardy. But really, I think in Hardy's poetry, Poetry you saw for the first time he was working at narrative as a craftsperson would, through, you know, due attention to line integrity, to sonic properties. You know, when what Keats called kind of loading every rift with. Or, you know, he's every. You know, he really paid attention to the lines and to the rhythms and to the rhymes, if they're rhyme, and the verse of it. And yet he told a story. And the other thing that's different, I think, is you would have his poetry would, you know, maybe be one to three pages. Some of his best narrative poems, and they often have a deeply ironic sensibility. And again, I don't know to what extent it crossed over the Atlantic, to what extent people like Frost imbibed that work. Maybe not. But you can see that in work like Edwin Arlington Robinson, you know, who's another. Who's an American poet who's great at narrative poetry. I often see a kind of kinship there between some of Hardy's work and Robinson's in that way. Both kind of satires of circumstance, as Hardy called them. And again, he also does ballads, all kinds of great Wessex Tales, as he called them. And I think it's worth revisiting Hardy. We think of Hardy a lot of times. He enjoyed a vogue because of someone like Philip Larkin, who credits Hardy as one of his major influences. But Hardy is also not only for his lyric poems, but for his narrative poetry is really worth going back to.
- [14:43]
B
So you mentioned that you weren't sure if Frost. What Frost thought of Hardy, but let's jump onto him because he's another big fan. When I was reading the poems, I'm like, oh, Frost is all. And there's even a poem in the anthology called Frost at Midnight, which is that you think it's about the Coleridge poem, but that it's really, you know, it's actually about Robert Frost at midnight. But I couldn't stop thinking about how many of these poems with the blank verse and like Frost, you know, the rhythms of everyday speech, how much they owed Robert Frost. And you have this quotation in your introduction. You say, quote, for many poets in this anthology, Frost is the chief exemplar. Talk about the debt that these poets in your anthology owe to Frost.
- [15:21]
A
Yeah, And I think some of the poets, in fact, perhaps some of the poets I've mentioned that were kind of starting to write narrative poems in the 1980s and 1990s, I think somewhat self consciously, even looked back to Frost from this distance. It's kind of hard to sort of reimagine how strange and different Frost's particular brand of modernism was because it was modern and how it made its way into both English and American poems. But just staying with narrative poems, you can look at his, you know, his first mature book, which is north of Boston, 1914, and you can see how poems such as Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial and lots of others, which advance storytelling through really, you know, highly wrought and kind of intelligent blank verse and even sometimes in rhyming couplets, you know, or something like that. He was master of different forms, of course, and then as his books progress, you know, in all kinds of forms. And these are poems that really stick to the ear, lodge themselves there and, you know, beg memorization, I think. But they also. What's great about some of Frost poems. And again, if you look kind of the trajectory and you compare it to someone like Tennyson's poems on, you know, King Arthur and those kinds of long narrative poems or something like that, there's really. With Frost, there's a cinematic quality. You know, it's like the beginning of Out Out. If people are familiar with that poem, it's. Boy gets his hand cut off, you know, by a chainsaw, you know, and it's just the way he sets that up is really stark and vivid. And, you know, poem like the Code, which tells us darkly amusing vignette about labor relations, you know, things like that. And Frost, I really, I think, kind of set the tone. And then if you want to go even further back, I really think he was getting his. Ripping a page out of Chaucer. I think Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, there's this great anecdote. I think it's in Donald Hall's book of, you know, Reminiscences of Poets, where he talks about visiting Frost and, you know, his farm or wherever the house. And he sees behind him is a shelf and it has the Canterbury Tales particular edition of it, I forgot, which right behind them. And I think, you know, Canterbury Tales, I think, you know, that's where you get a lot of these story poems.
- [17:28]
B
Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. So you say again, let's get. I want to push this thing even further. You talk about, like, about. About extended lyrics. You say in the beginning that you say that now we have extended lyrics that shift abruptly into narrative register, but without fulfilling the reader's expectations from the narrative. I just want to say that again for our listeners today, we see extended lyrics that shift abruptly into narrative register, but without fulfilling the reader's expectations from the narrative. So when you read the Death of the Hired man, you do have expectations for the narrative. And you certainly get. You get a, you know, dead was all he answered at the end. And in Home Burial, like there is, you know, it's inconclusive, but you get an arc right. Of a story all there. But here you kind of say that. Now, a lot of people, they kind of like tease readers with narrative elements, but they don't fulfill all the expectations.
- [18:15]
A
Yeah, you know, when the light bulb came off for me was. I was actually going over a very old anthology. It was, well, somewhat old. It's 1982. Contemporary British poetry. I think, if people are familiar with this. It was edited, edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion. I think the infamous part of this, if you remember just an aside, is Seamus Haney objected to being in it because, hey, I'm an Irish poet, you know, it was like. But it was really funny. But that said this poem. So that's where I got, you know, I mentioned John Ashbury, and I don't mean to go berry picking, ha. But John Ashbury, you know, this sort of, you know, they. They quote like a line from, you know, stanza from him and I. And I. And they also talk about that sort of. Actually, I think they were talking in this case about James Fenton, I'm sorry, who I think is a marvelous poet as well. But they were talking about this sort of false start of narrative poetry where it sets up kind of like, you know, a plot or a scene, and then they move on to some digression or outright, you know, kind of poeticism that's not in keeping with kind of the. I would call the sort of the blunt imperative of narrative, which is one thing following another, you know, I mean, Toynbee, you know, this historian, said history is one damn thing after another. I don't think poetry has to be quite that rigidly linear. I mean, storytelling. Sorry, it doesn't have to be that linear. We know all about flashbacks, we know about all kinds of other parallel narratives, all kinds of ways to mix it up. But what I'm trying to say here is a lot of times there. There is that quality of a non sequitur, a stream of non sequiturs that sometimes happens in poetry that sets you up for an expectation because they've really described vividly a scene and then something's about to happen and it never quite happens, but on the way, you. You instead, the compensated value is maybe the lyricism, which is fine. And again, I'm not against. I mean, that would. I think it's understood, understandable, why the majority of poems written are lyric poems. Also, again, it has to do with brevity. It has to do with the energy and the compression of it, which is all, you know, we can't gainsay that. But narrative poems, I think you do expect something and you expect to be told. You expect that. I'm sitting down, I'm telling you a story. Here's an arc I'm going to draw for you. And again, I don't want to sound dogmatic here, but I do feel that that distinction is important because that way you could look over a lot of stuff right now and say, okay, there are narrative elements to it, but it's not a narrative poem in the sense I'm talking about.
- [20:39]
B
Right. And certainly. And you've said a couple times so far in this conversation today that you're not anti lyric poem. This is, you're not, you're not claiming that this is the form that should be celebrated above all other forms. But it's interesting. That's what I loved about your introduction, which is full of illusions that show you've clearly done your poetic homework. Right. But I love how. Excuse me, I love how when you, when you, when you talk about the need for this form, you're kind of addressing something that you. You're acknowledging like an elephant in the poetic room. If that makes sense.
- [21:08]
A
Yeah, I mean, you know. Well, I'll tell you this. When I started on this and I was. I sat down to do it, I worried about opposition or let's say disgruntlement or criticism about that. Look, you haven't included a whole vast swath of contemporary poetry that is in fact narrative. And I looked at. And I kind of looked all around and I looked at other poems and other poets, you know, some of them very popular right now. And every time I would light on something and say, oh, this is a story, I would read further. And it was either something that was a very deeply personal, a fold. What's the word I'm looking for? Expo. You know, kind of expostulation. Or, you know, this is what I'm something about the person that's. That's. Or it was something that was setting up for. To be A narrative, but then essentially proved to be a meditative lyric. And I think that's the kind of the genre, sub genre, I think, of meditative lyric versus a narrative poem. Is there such a thing as a narrative lyric? I don't think so. I think what. What's possible is to have a lyric with narrative elements or narrative parts. Now, that might be parsing it too closely. You could just call it a narrative lyric. But for the save for this purpose, I'm talking about a narrative poem. And so I draw that distinction. And, you know, it'd be fun to. I actually was hoping, and I'm still hoping that I hear from people saying, you know, you missed this or this, and making a case for it and having these discussions out in the open and really learning from others and learning together what do we feel about the state of narrative poems? Is there a future for it? I'm saying there is, but I will confide this as well, that when I was doing the book. So part of my job outside of this stuff is, you know, I do. I kind of do measurement, statistical work for a federal agency. But my point is when I when I think about the sort of the bell curve, the curve, the statistical curve, when you start to see the rise of. Of lyric of narrative poems and where did it go? So I will say that I found much sort of diminution, I would. Diminution, I would say, of poems after people born in 1970 or so. So I didn't see as many like universal poems to look for. For narrative poems was smaller. Now, maybe I maybe missed a lot. And in fact, I'm confident I have missed some. But, you know, I still am every day exposed to new poetry, new poems. But I think by and large it was much easier to find narrative poems among people who were born in the 50s and 60s than it was 70s and afterward.
- [23:41]
B
Were there poets or poems you discovered during your work in preparing this anthology that you had never, never read before and that you read for the first time, doing research for this, that made you say, oh, this is going in.
- [23:52]
A
Right? Well, let me. So there is a poem by. And I knew of this poet, but actually was not as familiar with her poems. Catherine, I hope I'm pronouncing it right. She has some wonderful poems. But what I found is a poem called February 18, 1943. And that is about the day when Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were part of the White Rose resistance movement in Munich, you know, essentially were distributing leaflets and in university and were apprehended by Like a hotel porter. I mean, not a porter, sorry, I want to say custodian or somebody who worked in the school, but not a faculty member. And they were, they were, you know, brought to the Gestapo. And four days later they were, you know, they were beheaded, you know, guillotined. And they were, you know, 21 and 24 years old. And this story is this. This sort of fragment of a story about how this happened is really, you know, really stirring and remarkable. And. And she does it in a way that's also very metrically interesting and has rhymes that are really apt. So I think it's, it's a really well done poem and that's one I had not known prior to working on this poem. But there are lots of things like that.
- [25:09]
B
Yeah, a bunch of great discoveries, I'm sure, as you went through it. So let's, let's. Let's talk about some of the poems. We've done a lot of theoretical stuff. Let's go, let's dive into the contents here. We can't go through every poem, but I thought it would be interesting that I'll give you the names of some of the poems here and you could tell us about what happens in the action, what the plot is, things like that. There's so good ones, I just have to tell the listeners. There are so many good ones in here. So let's start with. I think it's the first one in the collection. Jared Carter has a poem called Barn Siding. And when I read that one, I must say, I'm like, all right, I'm in good hands here with this editor, Sunil Iyengar.
- [25:37]
A
Well, thanks. You have to start off right, with the right notes. So this is. Okay. So I'm gonna probably. I don't want to misspeak about the, the storyline because, you know, it is. Is involved. But I will say that the poet. It's. The poem itself is, is, you know, it's told in quatrains, you know, four lines to, you know, a stanza. And he also uses syllabics just for inside knowledge. You know, it kind of, it's, it's. And I think that allows a certain flexibility of the line in him to tell the story, but also to kind of make side remarks as he's going along. So it is a first person narrative and it's. It's about somebody who is essentially working, you know, in working with barn siding. You know, barn, you know, sort of the wood and the, the house, you know, this sort of side of the barn. And he Kind of. He kind of. He stumbles across a past love, and we know something dark has happened. And he's. Will she rescue him or not? And he's in this situation where he needs to be rescued. And I'm not going to go into it. And that really is a very striking scene, and then how he resolves it. So I know I'm going to be mysterious here, but I don't want to, you know, give away too much. He kind of is left and there. And also there's this character out there called the Strangler. So he's alone in the woods because he's essentially. I won't explain, but some accident, some mishap has happened with the siding of a barn and all this stuff. And he's left on his own, and he's waiting for someone to rescue him. And she comes by and will she help him? And he's wronged her in the past and all this stuff. And there's a strangler on the loose as well. So I won't go too far into that. I hope it wasn't disappointing.
- [27:26]
B
No, that's a great. That's a great description of it. But certainly. I mean, it's funny, you said you have to start out, right, because that poem does, like. Like, talk for a second, if you can. Like, how does that poem do. How does that poem fit the criteria aesthetically for what you wanted in this book?
- [27:40]
A
Yeah. Well, so this story, something happens in the poem that's. That's important, right?
- [27:45]
B
For sure. It sure does.
- [27:46]
A
And it also is a very. There's a magnificence in how he tells the tale that's very understated, and yet it kind of lodges in your ear. Kind of like Frost, as I was saying. And you have this. You have a consequence. As I said, things happen. But also you have some character development a little bit. You have some understanding of who this protagonist is. He talks about his life, his background, how what happened with a woman. And there was an element of surprise. You know, there's a suspense element, too. So all these things happen in the span of. Let it be known only. Well, by my addition, you know, two to 20. So it starts on page two. It ends on page 20. And you have a stream of these. These quatrains. And, you know, as I say, he does it really. You know, the craftsmanship is really pretty impeccable. And, you know, I think it's a really good poem to tell as it. To start it off for that reason, 100%.
- [28:46]
B
Let's move to another great poem told in quatrains. It's. This is Sydney Lee Leigh. I said this poem called the Feud, which is a harrowing, harrowing poem about a third of the way in, also told in quatrains. And another poem that I. That I'd never read, which knocked the wind out of me. So talk about this one.
- [29:05]
A
It's interesting. And these two poems don't have any kind of rhyme too, I will note. But what's interesting or, you know, line, end, rhymes. But what's interesting about this one and this I've heard from people. Oh, I didn't know that poem. It's so great. And a lot of people have spoken to me about this Sidney Lee poem. So this poem has a. It kind of. You said it is harrowing because what happens is there's a feud. And it's really about the obsessiveness and the kind of. The nature of sort of one upsmanship that's happening. It's somebody in his neighbor and how the feud just gets out of control. It's not even an in your face feud. It's scary because it happens like something will happen to his mailbox overnight. And then next time something happens to the other person's dogs. And it's like back and forth and back and forth until it gets truly out of control. And the wife is really tolerating. His wife is tolerating it and just kind of like, you know, urging him not to go any further. And he keeps escalating it. And then at the end, truly tragic. You know, it's tragic at the end and not in a way that you would think it would be, in a sense that the narrator. The narrator lives to tell this tale, of course, but you realize at the end what loss he sustained as a result of his madness. So it's just a really great poem that way. And, you know, so it's. It's these kinds of. These are some of the anchors of the anthology, you know, Sidney Lee, going back. These are, you know, fairly, you know, they've gotten on in years, I don't think they'd mind me saying, and have had a very storied career in terms of their own poetry. But it's really telling that when you go back and look at dust, dust things off the shelf, what is working? You find that they were some of the first true singers of these kinds of stories back in, I would say, you know, the early 80s and starting onward from that period when you started to see a kind of recrudescence or starting to see a revival of some of this narrative verse that happened. And I will say that that period that I'm referring to coincided with what's often called new formalism. I'm not a big fan of the label, but I think in General, that was 80s 90s. There were a certain bunch of poets. There's some of them in this anthology. Dana Joy, of course, who I quote in the anthology, and David Mason I also quote, and others, too, who kind of, you know, Marilyn Hacker is sometimes brought into that group. But people around that period who were writing tended to write in fixed verse forms or rhyme, for example, and they also were often writing narrative poems. And so some of that, there's, I think, a good representation of that cross section in this book. But then you also see that there are people outside that tradition who are also writing maybe in free verse or even in prose, paragraph. I mean, prose poetry kind of stuff. So it's really an elastic form.
- [31:53]
B
Yeah. And you said the word tradition a couple times. Just now, when I was reading the Feud, I was reminded of you mentioned the beginning of the introduction, that the rise of romanticism and lyric poetry. But when I read that, when I was done, I'm like, this would be a great poem to teach alongside Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.
- [32:09]
A
Oh, yes, right.
- [32:10]
B
It's the same kind of like, you know, the quatrains of the story. I've survive this thing, and I'm. And I'm talking about it.
- [32:15]
A
So, yeah, I hope people see those kinds of resonances. I did, too. And a lot of times I wondered. I wanted to ask the poet if they were around, you know what? I didn't. But, you know, was this built on the frame of this other thing? You know, that's really great.
- [32:30]
B
Well, here's here. Let's talk about a poem that is built on the frame of another thing. This is a poem by Charles Martin, passages from Friday. And this is a poem that you could describe to us in a moment. But this is a poem that I thought was so enjoyable to actually see on the page and the way the orthography works. And sometimes that's such a gimmick, and it's not gimmicky at all. I think it's deeply moving and deeply meaningful. So can you talk about this poem, passage from Friday? Talk about the setup of it and what happens in it.
- [32:57]
A
So I'm going to quickly say about the form. It's kind of funny because these first three poems we're talking about are all in quatrains. And Charles Martin is also one of these poets who's well known for that shot, that milieu that I just referred to as new formalism, et cetera. But what's remarkable about this, there's so many great things about this poem. It's a pretty long poem, and it's told from the point of view of Friday, of course, from Robinson Crusoe. And because you imagine Friday writing. And the conceit is that he learned how to write English and maybe he was taught, I think, by Robinson himself. And, you know, there's a lot of misspelling. There's a lot of antiquated phrases which maybe would have obtained even in the previous English, you know, English of that period. So it provides, you know, kind of. It's. It's a little startling when you read through it, you know, like simple things like the word feathers spelled F, E, T, H, E, R, S or, you know, a lot of these ampersands and, you know, just different kind of. I mean, a lot of apostrophes where there would be an ed apostrophe D. So there's a lot of that kind of linguistic stuff he gets away with because he's telling Charles Martin. Because he's telling it from the point of view of Friday. But that adds a kind of. You know, it's really funny because in a way, after you're like a third into it, you really believe that this is being written by somebody of that time.
- [34:19]
B
It was like, if you've ever read Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, like, there's this illusion that after, like, a hundred pages, you're kind of like, well, this isn't Thomas Pynchon. This is just some old book I found.
- [34:27]
A
Yeah. And you. Great. And you give it liberties, too, because, you know, some of the things that are said would not be said in today's, you know, English and stuff. And so. But what's happening is you have Friday's point of view of the whole situation. And that's always been an appealing, I think, idea. But here it's done really well. And what happens until Fridays, you know, in Robinson Crusoe are picked up, right, and brought back to England. And so there's a lot of, you know, talking about the slaying of goats and, you know, what, you know, trying to get away, build a raft together. This wonderful scene where they try to build a raft, which to me echoed a little bit of Tom Sawyer. I mean, sorry, Huckleberry Finn, but you had that element there. And. And then, you know, you could see, like, how There's a sort of snarky, sort of satiric edge to it, which you have to believe it's great because Friday is unconscious, that he's saying something ironical, right? And he'll say something about Western moors or how we. You know, or a particular, you know, the sort of. Sort of ostentatious religion of Robinson Crusoe, you know, and he'll say it in a way that's really. You know what I mean, Tongue in cheek, which you chuckle at. And you realize that that's a great way of Charles Martin getting that across through Friday. And then at the end, of course, what's great about it is there's a coda, too, which is a separate poem which is added to that, and that's told from the point of view of someone called Mr. Dorrington, who's the person who supposedly found. Found them and describes what, you know, what happened and, you know, afterward with Friday. So it's just a really great. That coupling those two poems, the actual passages from Friday and then the Mr. Dorrington's discovery, I think, really was a nice pairing for the book.
- [36:12]
B
One of the poems that. That I really. That I read here for the first time, I read. I read most of them for the first time, but there's one I kept rereading. This is a poem that really got its hooks in, for reasons I don't really know. And it's this poem, Two Tales of Clumsy by Gertrude. Gertrude Schackenberg. And I kept reading it and reading it out loud, and I'm like, this is funny. And it's also dark. And. And I just. It just. I never encountered it before. So talk about this poem, Two Tales of Clumsy.
- [36:38]
A
Well, the thing about this. And there's actually, to me, there's a little bit. If, you know the Beatles song Maxwell Silver Hammer a little bit in there. But anyway, it's. It's a very. So this is the thing. There's. There's nonsense. Poetry is something that we also sometimes forget when we talk about narrative poems. You can tell a story that's essentially like this one, where it could be seen as an allegory, it could be seen as just having fun with language. And, you know, it depends how you read it. And I'm just trying to pull it up right now. But, yeah, that's a poem that really grabbed me as well. And, you know, what a poem. And I would say that Schnakenberg is really great and has all kinds of poems just for people who haven't read her Gertrude Schnakenberg. But this poem also talks about. I'm trying to. Sorry, let me pull it up here. I'm having difficulty finding it. Had it in my. The. Marked up just a moment ago. Sorry. Yeah. Two tales of clumsy. So, yeah, this. This is really. Got some great lines in it. And again, it's. It has a sort of. It has a rhyme in it. And it's. You know, these. I guess it's. It's what she does with rhyme and meter is also really remarkable in this poem. And so I think, you know, it has two parts. And it's sort of like making fun of kind of academic. What she calls academic haberdashery. And, you know, that kind of mode of, you know, kind of appearing in the world and then, you know, this.
- [38:07]
B
This.
- [38:07]
A
No, no. Being very emblematic.
- [38:09]
B
He's the villain. No, no.
- [38:11]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So this. This idea of a. No, no is. And Mr. And Mr. Clumsy and Mrs. Clumsy. Sort of. Kind of like. Opposed to. No, no. So very picaresque. Also, the other thing I will say is there's a poem by. I don't know if you're going to reference this, but Josh Mohegan, who. Who has a poem called the Orange Bottle, which also has a lot of nonsense elements to nonsensical elements to it. So I thought of those two poems as kind of kindred that way. Although Mohegan's poem is. Is, you know, has this intention around it to. In. In the sense that it's about substance. I mean, I don't want to say poems about something in this case, but the. The sort of theme is substance abuse and what happens to the character and, you know, the caretakers and all the, you know, all that stuff. And so it's just. It's. It's quite. That, too, also resonates. And he does some wonderful things outside of conventional, you know, traditional verse patterns. You know, he really comes up with some really great sort of interlude, sort of lyrical components within the narrative frame.
- [39:15]
B
Yeah, that's another good one, too. That's a terrific poem. I have to also mention, I was so happy to see that you included two poems by Bob Dylan. So, as a lifelong fan of Bob Dylan. Right. You have here are Seven Curses, which is on the bootleg series and other places. And Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, which, of course, is on Blood on the Tracks. So what is it about? I'm going to assume that everybody listening knows these songs. And if you don't, you know, go find them because you've gone too Long without hearing them. But how did you pick these two to get in?
- [39:42]
A
Well, I. I always was moved by them and I felt they. Such wonderful tales. And, you know, part of this, the question that's always going to be there is, can they be disturbed, detached, disattached from the song, the melodies? And I would say, yes, they can. Now, you can see some areas, for example, in a long poem like Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, where you were like, okay, it's maybe not as tight of a stanza as you would see in something like Schnakenberg or something, but it still rolls along in a very, I think, a melodious way when you read.
- [40:19]
B
Reminded me reading it on the page. I've heard that song 10 billion times. Right. But reading it on the page remind of, like, Robert Service.
- [40:26]
A
Oh, yeah, exactly. And I talk about Robert Service in my anthology, People Like Robert Service. Thing about the Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. Other people. You know, there's. There's this tradition of that kind of work, too. But so, yeah, it falls into that category, I would say, with Seven Curses, though, it's a pithy narrative and it's just. I've read it in a coffee house or whatever or, you know, a poetry reading, and people. It just stopped. It's. People stopped. And it was kind of like. I mean, I want to say, like that did really well when I read it. And I think. And so that told me, oh, that might actually work in this book. And it is, you know, it has that element of a curse, which is this sort of genre, if you think about it, storytelling. Right. It's not necessarily purely lyrical. The tradition of curses and poetry, you know, giving a justification for why someone's going to reign. Abuse on someone, you know, is a story, you know, and that's what it. What it was.
- [41:17]
B
And it's funny because in the Jack of Hearts, there's this whole. It's amazing that, like, you know, I don't know, Quentin Tarantino has never made a movie of this, but there's this complex thing about drilling in the wall and they get in the safe with the gambler and this rogue figure with the leading Rosemary. But of course, in Seven Curses, it's so stripped down. It's like, you know, in the night the price was paid, she sleeps with the judge. He reneges on the promise. And then here's the seven Curses. And it's like the slimmest of narrative, but it's so bone chilling.
- [41:44]
A
Yeah, I thought so too. And, yeah, so, you know, there's, you Know, there are a lot of. Again, I want to just own. Own the fact, I guess, that there are a lot of great storytellers who sing and, you know, a lot of great. We all know, probably, whether they're folk songs or current songs, and maybe even in rap and hip hop, where there's stories being told. It's just that this. These two, I really felt deserved a place in the anthology.
- [42:08]
B
So let's. Let's look at our last poem we're going to talk about today. I would like to ask you to read it. And this is a poem that I. That I knew earlier, before I met you, and read this book. And when I saw it was in here, I'm like, oh, that's such a good poem. And this is a poem by Daniel Mark Epstein, and it's called Helen. And I would love it if you could just read it to us and then talk about why you picked it.
- [42:28]
A
Thank you. So it's Helen by Daniel Mark Epstein. Tell us a love story, pleaded the class in chorus. Our lessons are all done now. Don't lecture or bore us, they prattled, except for one Helen, whose gaze looked lost in the maze of willow branches, the girl the boys liked most for the faraway blue of her eyes and brown hair straight as rain. Tell us a love story, please, they begged the teacher again. He frowned and longed for the bell, saying, all the love stories I know end in heartache or death. Then Helen from the back row called at last from her daydream in the voice of an innocent lover. Tell us the love story anyway and stop before it's over. So, I mean, that poem. I've always liked that poem as well. And it's, you know, is it a story? It seems to me an anecdote, which I think is a class of stories, so I defended that way. I also think, you know, it's about telling a story and, you know, it has this allusion to Helen, and of course, we all know Helen, Helen of Troy and all that. There's. So it just kind of registered for me as something worth putting in here, and I'm really glad it is. There's also another fine poem by Daniel Mark Epstein in this book as well.
- [43:45]
B
I love when she says, tell us a story anyway and stop before it is over. Everyone loves the beginning of the love story, but Helen knows how they end.
- [43:55]
A
Yeah. No, that's exactly right. And there's a little eroticism there, too, of course.
- [44:01]
B
Absolutely. So the Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse is published by Franciscan University Press. It's available everywhere. And I'd also like to add here for our listeners that unlike many books published by university presses, it's absolutely affordable. It's well worth the investment because you'll go, this is not a book you read once and stick in your closet. You'll keep going back to this, and every time you see it on your table, you'll pick it up and go through it again. So, Sunil Iyengar, thank you so much for coming on the New Books Network.
- [44:26]
A
It's really been a pleasure. Thank you, Dan.
- [44:41]
B
When you host with Cut Water Canned cocktails, expect company.
- [44:46]
A
Entertain effortlessly.
- [44:47]
B
Cut Water Real cocktails, perfectly mixed. Copyright 2026 Cut Water Spirits, San Diego, CA Enjoy responsibly.