When in Doubt Tell A Story

Michele Herman on the processes and power of narrative in poetry

I asked a new adult poetry student I’m working with one-on-one to do an exercise based on a short, rhymed Gwendolyn Brooks poem called “The Bean Eaters.” It’s a portrait of an elderly couple from the point of view of a third-person narrator who seems to be peering into their shabby but memento-filled rented room.

My student chose a scene she had recently witnessed in a hospital room, an oddly intimate moment involving her uncles — a pair of brothers, both doctors — one standing with a razor and the other, clearly the patient, holding a bowl of water in his lap. Seemed like a natural match for the assignment: a specific setting, third-person witness, built-in poignancy.

But on closer inspection, there was a mismatch of form and material. I tried to explain this to her on a Zoom call. For starters, Brooks’ narrator was able to sum up the basics in the opening line:

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.

This left Brooks’s narrator free to spend the rest of the poem painting an intimate, sympathetic portrait of the couple’s habits, memories and décor.

My student’s poem felt potentially poignant to me – clearly one of these brothers was being lovingly tended to by his big brother. But even after reading the poem a half-dozen times, I didn’t know if the brothers were old or young, if one was dying or just in for an operation, how they differed in looks and garb, whether they got along, whether their usual roles had reversed.

My lovely, thoughtful student was very frustrated with me. How could she make the situation more clear? Or was I asking her to come at it anew with different material? Or to switch to a more expansive form?

I sensed she was resisting the Brooks itself, and sure enough, when I pressed gently she told me that in a prior class, one of my colleagues had said that no one is interested in tight little rhyming poems anymore. My student didn’t see the point of the exercise.

I begged to differ, and gave her some examples of current journals publishing tight little rhyming poems. I introduced her to sly Kay Ryan, who’s all about tight little rhyming poems, the rhymes hidden like tiny presents.

This student is used to doing assignments, the way art students study and emulate the craft of the masters. My impulse was to add new constraints to compel her to wriggle outside of the confines of strict autobiography and deeper into the realm of imagination. I wanted her to be busy trying phrases and counting beats and moving lines around. I wanted her to struggle to find good rhymes and in so doing land on words that she would otherwise never think to deploy. I wanted her to study Brooks’s assortment pack of rhyme schemes – a different one for each of the three stanzas, particularly these rhymes that I love from the final stanza, separated, a little provocatively, by a pair of non-rhyming lines:

Remembering, with twinklings and twinges…

tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

I also wanted my student — a mother of recently grown kids, clearly not new to problem-solving — to come at the process the opposite way: to take an image or feeling that’s exerting some pressure inside (the uncles) and find her own form for it. This was not what she wanted to hear, either. Writing without a model can feel like exiting a warm pool to plunge into an icy open sea.

So I did the only thing I could think of: told her a story. It was a contemporary story, with an unglamorous star: me at my desk. I remembered that I had recently written a three-stanza poem with a tight rhyming scheme myself. My main character was made up. But the poem wasn’t not autobiographical either, because what’s in my head – that attic full of knowledge and notions and memories – is me. This in-between stance, I understand only now as I think about it, is a perfect one for poetry writing.

Here’s how it happened, I told her. One morning I got to thinking about those old Christmas cards with glued-on snow, the lumpy ones that shed white glitter. Before long a fuzzy image of Palmer script emerged, the way my parents were drilled in cursive – neatly rhythmic but not always pretty. Before long an older single woman began to appear. The term “hostess gift” arrived, and soon there was a party and she was bringing one. She grew heavyset and sported a brooch over her breast.

I was groping toward something, but I didn’t know what. Was this an act of nostalgia? Was I expressing fondness for actual people in my past? Was I feeling sorry for my made-up woman? A little bit of yes to all these questions. I found I was also picturing a woman who was a presence throughout my childhood: my father’s secretary for the 32 years he ran his medical practice. He called her Mrs. Olsen and she called him Dr. Herman, a sign of mutual respect, the sort my generation scoffs at.

And bingo: my third-person narrator revealed herself as a “we” in the final stanza, and I was scoffing at my generation’s irreverent ways. I finagled the rhymes a little more and had a finished poem. My student thanked me profusely. I could see in her eyes that she understood. Now the sea wasn’t so icy. I had recently suggested some of my favourite how-to books for a beginning poet, and I could see one of them sitting on her desk. She gave me a suggestion: when you write your own how-to book on poetry writing, you have got to include this story.

About the Author

She’s a devoted teacher at The Writers Studio, a developmental editor, a contributor to The Village Sun, and an award-winning translator of Jacques Brel songs.

Featured Image: courtesy Ilaria De Bona on Unsplash