Just when a story seems to be dead in the water, some new wrinkle comes up & it’s got legs all over again. This is a real scoop (courtesy of Private Eye) for the Patteran pages.
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TELLING TALES
Friday’s post contained the first complete poem I’ve managed in a month or two. It slipped out from between two large-scale projects, both of which keep stalling. I’m still inching forward with the as yet untitled rock & roll poem, part of which I posted late last year. A phrase, a line, a sketchy idea for a new stanza are all hard won at present.
Equally challenging but at present more driven is Folk Song # 2, this one a follow-up to the relatively concise Folk Song # 1, posted a few weeks back. Both are based on folk ballads, the idea being to take the formal narrative of the original song & bring to it the naturalistic immediacy of events unfolding in real time. Folk Song # 1 was drawn from The Dark-Eyed Sailor, one of the famous ‘Riley Ballads’ that were issued on broadsheets in the early 18th century. The present project takes a similar approach but this time to a much more challenging song. I’m using a dark & magical tale called The Famous Flower of Serving Men, another broadsheet ballad, this one memorably sung by Martin Carthy. The story is altogether more complex, covering a broad time span & a wealth of incident.
The process of composition involved is interesting because effectively I’m attempting to bridge two mutually incompatible approaches to the couching of narrative in poetic form. Now, please believe me when I say that in invoking the names of the great I am merely trying to clarify what I mean by this. Obfuscation is not the intention, nor is hubris the motivation for the association! Here goes. Johann Goethe & Friedrich Schiller collaborated on a paper that sought to apply to the German poetic dramas of the late 18th century, principles established in a seminal work by Aristotle entitled On Poetics. Aristotle established - & Goethe & Schiller reiterated – fundamental distinctions between two different narrative strategies. There is the poem (or for Goethe & Schiller, the verse drama) that presents its story as if the events were unfolding before the spectator in the here & now, drawing him/her in, implicating him/her in the action &, as an inevitable result of the telling of the tale well, provoking empathy on the part of the spectator for the sufferings of the protagonist. As the protagonist passes through the fire & emerges emotionally purged, the spectator experiences catharsis vicariously. This approach they termed dramatic poetry.
Then there is the ‘rhapsodic singer’ – the minstrel or storyteller – who tells the tale formally, bound by specific conventions of style: the events are presented as having already happened; action is interjected with commentary – in a song, maybe a repeated line or chorus; dialogue is in reported rather than direct form; the narrative flow is not continuous but divided into sections with the action shifting from one to the other; the timeline is not chronological. Whilst the spectator’s emotional response is still sought, now it is informed by the calm contemplation & opportunity for reflection enabled by the distancing devices employed in the telling. This approach they termed epic poetry.
In drawing the story of the lovers reunited when they match the two halves of the ring they severed at their wartime parting years before – The Dark-Eyed Sailor – from the epic across to the dramatic, I’m attempting to instil a sense of the events as taking place between real people in a specific environment within a palpable time frame. I’m attempting to establish for the events a human context with which the reader might – albeit with some exercising of the imagination – identify personally. In so doing elements of the dramatic are brought into play, notably the immediacy of sequences of action unfolding consecutively & the possibility of empathy for characters. But the retention of the historical setting & the use of the obliquities of metaphor & symbolism should ensure something of the distancing effect of the epic approach.
This, anyway, is the intention & it will underpin the no doubt very gradual progress of the poem towards first draft completion. Provided that the compositional process doesn’t atrophy during the long time scale into nothing more than experiment, or mere exercise, the journey should be never less than interesting.
10:32:33 PM 
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