Turn and Turn Again: The Art of Reading Narrative Poetry
A primer in reading and appreciating the verse novel.
By J.C. Scharl
I can pinpoint the exact moment I discovered the force of Poetry; I was standing on the second floor of the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. I picked up a book of W.H. Auden’s short verse and read “The Fall of Rome.” It is a famous poem, very characteristic of Auden’s voice: oracular, frosty, yet heartfelt. The final stanza has never left me.
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
This stanza is an abrupt change from the previous ones, which deal with the pettiness of the administrative state and the tawdriness of a fragmenting society. This turn, so sharp, so swift—from inwards to outwards, from minutia to the universal—spun me off balance entirely. I loved it.
That was the moment I knew I wanted to write poetry—not just pen an occasional verse as I had been doing since I was a child, but really write poetry, really harness whatever that force was that transfixed me in Auden’s poem. I began studying poetry seriously.
But for quite a few years after that, I studied only short verse. Poems of several pages were fine, like Seamus Heaney’s “Bone Dreams” (my favorite of his), but anything that stretched out to ten or twenty or fifty pages, I put aside. I was intimidated by those thousands and thousands of lines. Sometimes I’d try to read something lengthy (I slogged through most of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, grasping nothing), but that vital force, that compact dynamo of Auden’s, seemed so dissipated in these book-length poems.
I don’t think my younger self is alone in this. When someone says “poetry” today, nearly every time he or she means “short lyric verse,” those tight little stacks of lines—often less than a page—that make up the pages of poetry journals and websites. But short lyric verse is only one kind of poetry, and probably the younger kind; the roots of this great art form are in epics like the Bhagavad Gita, Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish, Beowulf, Hesiod’s Theogony, Job, and of course the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Poetry, in other words, was born of stories. And not just any stories; poetry was born of the greatest stories, the most important stories a society can tell itself: stories of creation and destruction, of war, chaos, birth, growth, love, of organization and collapse, of gods and demons, of the void and of the things that improbably come to exist within it. Epic poetry grappled with philosophical and theological questions, as in De rerum natura and Works and Days; politics and history, as in the Aeneid and the Pharsalia; human virtue in the face of horrors, in the Gita; and the nature of the soul and salvation, as in the Divine Comedy. Long poems are the place where peoples—communities, societies, races, religions, nations—work out their identity, grapple with their destiny, and try to understand themselves in relation to unfathomable mysteries. These narrative poems existed very close to the heart of society: they were chanted in the temples, sung by the hearths, studied in the classrooms, recited in the forums.
So I started wondering: why don’t we read them? And why aren’t we writing them?
One thing we lost in the Enlightenment, the West’s modern turn, was the delightful blurriness of the literature of the Middle Ages.
In an intriguing turn, I discovered that we are writing them. In the last ten years or so, quite a few North American poets have written long poems that grapple with epic, sometimes cosmic, themes. There is a push, small but discernible, to reconnect 21st-century verse to poetry’s roots as long stories.
The range of these long narrative poems is wide. Marly Youman’s Seren of the Wildwood (2023) is a modern fairy tale examining the wounds of family life. Jason Guriel has written not one but two verse novels, Forgotten Work (2020) and The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles (2023), about the search for beauty in a future ravaged by climate change and human carelessness. And Aaron Poochigian’s two verse novels, Mr. Either/Or (2017) and Mr. Either/Or: All the Rage (2023), pit an FBI agent against all kinds of sci-fi foes.
These books strike us as unexpected, strange. A verse novel? we ask. Who writes those? Who reads those? We puzzle over where to put them on our shelves: are they more novel or more verse? Are we supposed to pore over them word by word, like we do with Robert Frost, or are we supposed to read through them breezily like an Agatha Christie?
One thing we lost in the Enlightenment, the West’s modern turn, was the delightful blurriness of the literature of the Middle Ages. An example of the medieval world’s wild (to post-Enlightenment eyes) blending of genre and form are the legends of King Arthur: the earliest version of Arthur that we have comes from Geoffrey of Monmouth and purports to be a historical chronicle, though it obviously takes literary license with whatever true history it is drawing on. From there, the Norman poet Wace penned a poem that is in many ways more historically accurate than the historical chronicle that came before it. In the Arthurian sections of Layamon’s “Brut,” a Middle-English poem composed after the Norman Conquest, it is not at all clear if the poet sees his stories as fiction or as history. Indeed, in some places he appears to have taken it upon himself to carefully verify his facts, not relying on the earlier Norman poem, while also fleshing out the character of Merlin and expounding on his magical abilities.
Or consider my favorite Strange Old Writer: Rabelais, the Renaissance humanist novelist whose work is a great mash of violence, satire, scatological humor, and profound reflections on the human condition. It is impossible to untangle all these threads in Rabelais; if he did not have a place on the “Classics” shelf in Barnes & Noble, the poor booksellers would go mad trying to figure where to house his work.
These are all gripping tales full of demons, monsters, climate disasters, political mavericks, creepy forests, the promise and peril of technology—all things that have occupied the human imagination for millennia.
That madness is, I think, a good thing. Poetry has always leapt across the lines dividing a society; it has always wielded a disruptive power. Plato felt it; that is why he banned poetry from his ideal society in The Republic. The confusion we feel when we pick up a contemporary verse novel—that feeling of I do not know what to do with this thing—is exactly what we should feel when we encounter poetry.
Consider the modern verse novels I have mentioned. Seren of the Wildwood is the tale of a girl who, because of a careless wish by her father, sucks up her brothers’ life as she grows. When she is born, they die.
How singular it was to see her dance
Around the brothers’ grave, to hear her sing…
The situation is blown up to poetic extremes, of course, but isn’t there a strange universal truth here, that with every new birth there is a little accompanying death, especially for older siblings? Mothers weep at their children’s weddings, and it’s not entirely from joy. Every new thing signals the end of something else. It’s not something we like to talk about, or even think about, but here in this poem, Youmans gives us permission to feel it.
Loss is also the theme of Jason Guriel’s verse novels. They are difficult to summarize, but both are quest narratives, weaving together the tales of many people seeking some singular beauty or wisdom. In Forgotten Work, the action centers around an unfindable rock album; in The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, the search is for the author of a YA fantasy novel. Characters roam dystopian landscapes and deal with robots, bounty hunters, and terrifying new technologies in their search for what has been lost—which is, we gradually realize, our own sense of what it means to be human.
Aaron Poochigian’s two verse novels about Mr. Either/Or are dazzling thrillers with dizzying rhymes and plots ripped straight from a video game: an undercover FBI agent battles aliens and ancient demons while wooing a lovely, lethal museum curator and confronting his own inability to commit and settle down. Mr. Either/Or, like Odysseus, is a classic hero on a nostos—a journey home—but with a twist: He, unlike Odysseus, never leaves his island (New York City, in this case) to face monsters. Rather, the monsters come to him. Coming home for Mr. Either/Or isn’t a matter of returning to a place, but of being willing to stay in that place and make it home.
These are all gripping tales full of demons, monsters, climate disasters, political mavericks, creepy forests, the promise and peril of technology—all things that have occupied the human imagination for millennia. But there is that barrier, that difficulty: they’re written in verse. Youmans writes her tale in heroic verse—iambic pentameter—spread across 61 page-long sections, each capped by four lines of rhymed trimeter. Guriel employs rhyming couplets (a tricky form to sustain for long, but he does it). Poochigian pairs heroic lines for narrative sections and switches to alliterative verse for fight scenes (of which there are plenty).
Why?
The way we turn determines the way we live, and poetry—by its very nature—teaches us how to turn well.
Vers, the root of the word verse, points us towards an answer. It’s the same root we find in universe, conversation, reversals, and adversary. It means turned or turning, and in its earliest form, it refers to the turn a plowman makes at the end of a row to begin anew. The universe, literally, is that which turns together. Conversation means a turning with another. Reversals are backwards turns, and an adversary is someone who turns against us. So to write verse is to write full of turns: both literal turns, like the turn at the end of a line, and metaphorical turns. Narrative poetry must move us from one place to another. It cannot leave us where we began, and more importantly, it cannot leave us as we began. It must turn us to—and into—something new.
So in Youman’s Seren, we walk straight into the strange feeling of loss that accompanies every new thing. But we do not stay in that feeling. From her inauspicious beginning in (seemingly) stealing the lives of her brothers, Seren grows to become a bearer of great beauty and wisdom into the world, “a golden bowl of flame/in an enchanted world—this one, a place/of paradise and hell and mundane hours…” Youmans allows us to experience the feeling of loss that accompanies even the most joyous of new things, and then she guides us through that feeling to the beauty on the other side.
This is the art of verse: the very texture of the form teaches us to turn and turn again, to be open to turnings. It prepares us for the perpetual turnings of life, where there really is no last word: loss gives way to joy, and joy to grief, and grief to tenderness or anger. The way we turn determines the way we live, and poetry—by its very nature—teaches us how to turn well.
I think this is why, for years, I struggled to read long poems: they require a spiritual posture I was not capable of sustaining for very long. They require a flexibility and movement of the soul that my younger self feared. Poetry does not purport to make the kinds of clear claims we seek in nonfiction writing. It does not trace out arguments like a philosophical treatise. In a narrative poem, the very plot is subject to the form; the strictures of the form push and pull the story in a way we do not find in prose fiction.
The turns of poetry are a gift. T.S. Eliot writes in Ash Wednesday, his conversion poem (there’s that root vers again!), “Because I do not hope to turn again/because I do not hope/because I do not hope to turn…” In these three lines, he forges an iron link between turning and hope. The life of the soul, Plato says, is in motion; verse gives us that motion.
But of course, there is one final turn in our consideration of verse. Eliot points us to it, when a few lines deeper into Ash Wednesday, he writes, “Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.” The secret of right turning, it seems, lies in stillness, in receiving the turns that come rather than fighting to manufacture turns that seem to make sense to us. Reading a long narrative poem requires us to give up many of our ideas of how stories work, of how life works and things work, and simply submit to be turned and turned and turned again, until we find ourselves returned, very different from when we set out.
J.C. Scharl is a poet, editor, and critic. Her poetry has been featured on the BBC and in New Ohio Review, Classical Outlook, Measure Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Dappled Things, Plough Quarterly, Fare Forward, and Euphony Journal (among many others). Her criticism has appeared in Plough Quarterly, Dappled Things, and others.
