When successful, a short poem immediately launches into its lyrical potential; any narrative grounding happens in service to the lyric. (I don’t think there’s such a thing as a successful short narrative, at least not one in less than ten average-sized lines or so. That’s just not enough to tell a complete story in verse.) The sound and shape of the words must immediately be keener in a short poem; a longer poem doesn’t require such lyric density because there is more potential for variation and rest in a longer poem.
An unsuccessful short poem, however, can do all of those things and still fail. Where I see many short poems go awry is that they describe but never illuminate; they represent a thing but do it no service; they present truth in entirely truthful terms. Where’s the fun in that? Why represent a thing exactly as we know it all to be? These short poems fail to take advantage of trope or figure, fail to imagine their subject in a subjective light, fail to make the objective truth more accessible through the tenacity and frailty of words, or fail to recognize their own flaws as representative descriptions. At their best, the Objectivists understood at least the difficulty of getting it right in a way that was doomed to be wrong: not the thing itself, but the thing captured for a moment on the page; not the thing itself but the essence of the thing communicated in words. Such poems, even when willfully obscuring the speaker, must reveal the speaker in the details chosen to describe the thing…
The only counter-example to your parenthetical I can think of is “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” …
And “The Death of Randall Jarrell,” although I haven’t read it yet.
Hm. This is an interesting argument, but I’m not sure that I would call the Jarrell a complete narrative, though the lyric does contain narrative information. I recognize that this is a slippery slope, though… so if I ever do anything with the thoughts above, I’ll have to edit that. 🙂
Personally, I find the power of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” not in the story that it tells, but in the co-location of such strong images over rapid movement in time. Time markers, however, don’t always tell a story: here, Jarrell presents so much information concurrently that the story can hardly be said to have a beginning, middle and end… it hardly has a beginning before it has its end.
As I have been reading through my poems to prepare my thesis/manuscript, I am encountering what you are saying and not just with the short poems. Thanks for phrasing it for me :).
I think what happens often with poems of any length is that the initial image, line or thought that started the poem sometimes gets lost as we try to shape the piece. Sometimes we forget to actually listen to the poem and only listen to ourselves.
I sound yoda very like today.
Sorry I didn’t get to see ya at the Small Press Fest. Hope to make a run by Warren Wilson during the January residency. Queens residency is last week in May.