Writing: Completeness in stories, poems, and songs · 8:47pm Jan 5th, 2014
I’ve been thinking about what makes a story complete since writing “All the Pretty Pony Princesses”. It occurred to me that that story would be considered complete if it were a song. Stories, songs, and poems can all be recognized as being complete or incomplete, but the standards for them are very different.
Is this sensible, or merely convention?
You find songs that would be regarded as complete stories in certain genres—ballads, country, & Christmas carols, for instance. “Good King Wenceslas” self-consciously, though not very successfully, tries to imitate story structure with an obstacle in the middle verse. “The Little Drummer Boy”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “The MTA Song”, “Ode to Billy Joe”, and “A Boy Named Sue” are also complete stories. “Norwegian Wood” is a story once you know that the original final words were “Knowing she would”. But even within these genres, we usually find songs that would not be considered complete if they were stories. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is your basic plotless sadfic, introducing a bunch of characters, killing them off, and then holding a funeral for them. Songs and poems routinely present a single emotion, like a single scene in a story. Love songs live in a single moment of bliss; sad songs have no resolution.
Poems, also, can be complete stories. Many Robert Frost poems are (“Mending Wall”, “The Death of the Hired Man”, “The Tuft of Flowers”). Some, like New Yorker “stories”, are tantalizingly close to being stories (“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”). But most poems are not stories. They’re more like songs. They choose one moment in time and invoke its mood, with no plot or dramatic structure or climax or resolution.
It seems that stories are a strict subset of poems and songs. Anything that could be written as a story could be written as a (perhaps overly long) poem or song, but not vice-versa.
Poems are allowed to jump from particulars to universals in a way that stories are not. Here’s “Buffalo Bill’s / defunct” by e. e. cummings:
Buffalo Bill 's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethatJesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
It gives details from the life of Buffalo Bill, then stops abruptly on informing us that he is dead, the author leaping through the fourth wall to grab the reader by the collar and say, "This is not about Buffalo Bill; it is about you." But you couldn’t just drop the narrative and conclude with “He’s dead now, as we all will be” in a story. Poem readers have come to expect that sort of thing. They don’t forget themselves in a poem the way they do in a story; the deliberate obtrusiveness of style keeps the reader always aware of the poet’s presence.
Consider the poem “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1897), later turned into a song by Simon and Garfunkel.
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Here again we jump from the particulars of Richard Cory to a universal statement, this one about happiness and fulfillment. If you tried to do this in a story or movie, readers would be bewildered and demand an explanation of what he was thinking and what led up to it. Citizen Kane is just such a movie. Were it a poem, it could’ve skipped everything between the first scene and the last.
Modern story readers won’t operate at the level of abstraction needed for “Buffalo Bill’s / defunct” or “Richard Cory”; they expect the characters to be real people who matter, not to be reduced to morality-play cutouts standing for Everyman. The convention used to be the opposite: Medieval plays frequently used an Everyman protagonist and caricatured villains, and, I suppose, jumped to universals at the end (or all the way through, as in Pilgrim’s Progress and other allegories). (The friendship report at the end of an MLP episode doesn’t really do this; it is not the dramatic focus of the story the way that “Mister Death” is the focus of “Buffalo Bill’s / defunct”. It’s like a human’s tailbone: a shrunken remnant of something that used to play an important role.)
Here’s the beginning of Statistics:
A sister, ignored and bitter. An evil released. Nine hours of useless negotiating. Thirty-five hours of night. My greatest failure. Six Elements, lost due to the relationship broken. A majestic capital, wiped out. Six thousand, nine hundred and seventy-three square acres of land rendered inhospitable due to the damage from my failure. One hundred and seven thousand, thirty-five citizens displaced.
Now change the format:
A sister, ignored and bitter.
An evil released.
Nine hours of useless negotiating.
Thirty-five hours of night.
My greatest failure.
Six Elements, lost due to the relationship broken.
A majestic capital, wiped out.
Six thousand, nine hundred and seventy-three square acres of land rendered inhospitable due to the damage from my failure.
One hundred and seven thousand, thirty-five citizens displaced.
“Statistics” has a story’s dramatic structure, but it doesn’t work nearly as well when formatted as a story rather than as a poem. Perhaps this is because the line breaks introduce needed pauses. But perhaps it’s because we’re trained not to accept the bare bones of a story without more connective tissue between them. Formatting it as a poem tells us to shift into a different mode with different standards.
Songs without a dramatic structure to the narrative sometimes have a dramatic structure to the melody, at least your basic verse and refrain structure, usually elaborated on by changes in instrumentation and voicing that change the mood across verses. (That’s what I dislike about so many of Daniel Ingram’s songs, such as the one from Rarity takes Manehatten: a lack of melodic structure; monotone sound and emotion from start to finish.) And yet poems have a bit of structure, even free verse, but hardly enough to make up for a lack of a dramatic structure. If songs were allowed to have incomplete stories because the musical performance provides structure instead, we would require the text of poems to be more complete than the text of songs to make up for the lack of that auditory structure — and yet, we do not.
It is not possible that this distinction makes any absolute sense. Prose, poetry, and song all exist to have an impact on the reader or listener. It can't be acceptable for a song, but not for a story, to bring alive one moment in time. Any prose that accomplishes the same thing as a song is a good and complete work of art. It’s only historical accident that prevents us from accepting it as such. At least, that’s the only conclusion that makes sense to me.
This conclusion unfortunately means that it is impossible to devise a theory of story, because our notions of what makes a story are tightly constricted by arbitrary cultural conventions.
The best way to test these ideas would be to compare contemporary Western stories to stories from distant time periods, and from cultures isolated from Europe: Native American, Asian, Indian, Arabian, African, Polynesian. I haven’t read enough of those to do that. I suspect that the stories from those cultures that we find translated into English are only the ones that match English expectations of story. But if it turns out that all those cultures have similar rules for what counts as a story and what does not, then I am wrong, and there is some objective explanation for why we expect different things from stories, poems, and songs.
hoss just so you know
ed left his computer up and
damn if his screensaver doesn t
have the longest delay so
hi
this is archy
you probably know me by
reputation and
here I am in my 3457th
incarnation and
I see
poetry
is not as it used to be
now your ee cummings is
poetry though
personally
I think the guy should stop
stealing
my act
and your richard corey likewise
of course but hoss
that what you ve got right there
is
not
a
poem
it is a powerpoint
presentation
a bulleted list
of demands for
consideration
approbation
celebration
presented
like an ultimatum
to an audience which has no choice
but to
yield
now hoss I know you are not
presenting that as a best work or
even a work at all but
the fact that you
who should know better
could say that is
even
like
a poem
speaks to something wraughten
in the states
which bards
in fealty to apollo hold
a poem may be narrative
or lyrical
elegiac
or mystical
but it is in all cases
a seduction
maybe smooth
maybe rough
maybe joking
maybe pleading
all depends on whom you re courting right
but too often nowadays
the poet is just slapping the reader's face
with his or her
end-stopper
no hard feelings I
just had to get that out
pop
1685946
The term I think you're looking for is "prose poem:" a bit of prose that is not so much a story as a highly-concentrated expression of feeling, image or experience conveyed by means of language carefully chosen for its lyrical effect--like a poem, only written out deliberately as prose. Dunsany and Wilde did a lot of this sort of thing. In the fandom a good example would be Lost Cities by Cold in Gardez (which, if you haven't yet read, I strongly recommend)
Could you break up a prose-poem into enjambed long lines and claim it's a poem?
Try it at your
Thesis defense
And see
If it works
Either way
You will end up asking
"You want fries
With that?"
1685946 But the question is still, Why is it acceptable for the Beatles to write, "She loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah", when that would not be tolerated in a story? This is not a subtle point. It's a glaring difference between songs and stories. Kafka's stories are certainly odd, and you can throw "Waiting for Godot" in there as well, but they are atypical. Don't dismiss the distinction, which is real and obvious, by citing a few exceptions.
1685948 Very nice Archy, but I don't know what you're trying to say. What makes one poem "a seduction", smooth, rough, joking, or pleading, while that is not? Did you click on the link and read the whole thing? I've edited the post to make it clear what that's the beginning of.
1686161
Actually, yes, I read it, and it reminded me exactly of Dunsany's prose poem "Wind and Fog," which I didn't much care for either.
Eh, "diff'rent strokes" as Gene Wolf said.
For the love of any god of your choosing, I have never understood blank verse poetry and I'm not going to start anytime soon. While the rhymed one imposes some strict rules, forcing the writer to stop and think back on each verse's structure, the blank verse looks just like prose with random line breaks.
Seriously, come on! I too can throw in some random new lines into my sentences, but will it make them poetry? No? Then why do you think your does, [insert any famous blank verse poet name here].
1686197
I thought it was Gary Coleman.
Anyway, this is all digression, unless you thinks "Statistics" works as a story but not as a poem. You're trying to make some subtle point about what makes a good poem, while I'm asking about a huge glaring inconsistency in what we expect from poems or songs vs. stories. A song can get away with presenting just one part of a story: It tells of a protagonist who wants something ("Girl", by the Beatles), or who has a problem ("Sixteen Tons", "I left my heart in San Francisco", "Hurt"); it gives a setting or prologue ("Little Boxes", "Surfin' Safari", "Yellow Submarine"); it describes a conflict ("The Old Apartment"); it describes a character's emotional reaction to a situation or plot point ("Paint it Black"); it describes the happy or sad conclusion to an untold story. It can do many other things besides that don't count at all as stories, such as make assertions (church hymns).
You can't do any of those things in prose and call it a story. Why is there a category of "prose poem" at all? We don't divide poems into "story poems" and "poems like prose poems".
1686132
I would guess that it's because music, including musical speech (singing, poetry) is processed in a different part or parts of the brain than prose is. Not completely differently: there has to be some overlap. A certain amount of repetition can be quite euphonious in prose ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...").
Also note that when the Beatles first came along, "Yeah, yeah yeah" was roundly mocked as a lyric, and if you're not The Beatles that kind of thing will still get you dissed. R.E.M's "Texarkana," for example, with its repetition of the phrase "forty thousand," received a fair amount of grief.
1686304 1685946 I was being unclear. I'm not talking about word repetition. Why is it okay for the Beatles to write a song that only expresses the notion, "This girl really likes me and I really like her"? "She loves me" isn't even a good example of that, but there are plenty others. "I'm in love with her and I feel fine", etc. You can't write a story that just says "Everything is great and I'm really happy." But songs do that all the time. "Sunshine Day", everything by John Denver, etc.
Also, we need a Pulitzer category for Powerpoint presentations.
Speaking of completeness, every time I see an e. e. cummings poem, I think I'm supposed to fill in the blanks.
Regarding the question, I find myself without a definitive answer. I mean, there's plenty of poetry that tells a story, sure, but precious little prose that just captures a mood or a moment. It exists but it isn't nearly as common.
I have access to one more literary tradition aside from the Anglophone one, and I can't recall traditional stories that jump from the particular to the general. I do remember a class of story that's based on a legend or a myth that jumps freely from the acts of supernatural things far away and in the general case to the particulars of your life, but that's rather common for mythology, yes?
I do remember quite a few stories from my native language's (I'm being vague because of privacy reasons) modern tradition that are highly lyrical and do, in fact, leap poetry-like from the general to the particular and back again. But that smacks to me of artists deliberately bucking against what's expected of a story.
1686201
...blank verse doesn't mean 'just any random words tossed together.' It, depending on language, generally has a some fairly stern limiting rule. In English it's almost always written in iambic pentameter, which is easier said than done. That means line breaks aren't random but come after five feet, each foot generally being an iamb, that is to say an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (dah-DUM).
And this is just the base version, as it were. Many options for expression and variation exist within iambic pentameter (trochaic inversion, cunning use of caesurae, feminine endings, and so forth) and even more options when dealing with other poetic meters.
Parallel to all of that there's great expressiveness to be had in playing tricks with articulation, such as alliteration[1], assonance, and consonance. You can use it straight like in "The Raven"
Hell it's fun just saying it, all those sibilants hissing past your lips like wind beneath a sash slipped open.
Or you can play at subverting it, like Milton in Book II, verse 5:
Where the leading bit (before the caesura) has a lot of near-rhyme but ends with all the pomp hissing out from between your teeth. Milton is being mocking here, and being that he was the hypernerd, he's mocking via subtle use of poetic convention.
So. Um. Bottom line is, there's a whole lot to poetry aside from rhyme. Even if you have entirely free verse[2] poetry is still easy to distinguish because it relies on an exceptionally heightened sense of language. Rigidity of structure can help--and I find that I often prefer poetry that relies on such things--but it is not necessary.
[1] Indeed. In certain languages poetry hardly ever rhymes, but is marked by, say, alliteration. Old English poetry is like this, Beowulf being a prominent example.
[2] It's a common misconception, I think, that modern poetry's occasional free verse nature is a sign of modern decadence. I think, rather, that it is merely the result of a decoupling poetry from music which is a relatively recent invention and also the result of feeling freed from scholastic pedantry that infected intellectual pursuits for most of the modern age.
1686301
What, in Urkel of the New Son?
And I'll double down on my bet that it's because lyric speech is processed in (somewhat) different parts of the brain than prose speech. I believe that's true generally, not just for repetition. I kinda went haring off after repetition because I thought it rather neatly illustrated the area of overlap. But I see it was wrong of me to chase that particular rabbit.
trbimg.com/img-507db347/turbine/tn-gnp-1016-dvd-review-warner-bros-doubles-up--003/599/599x444
So wrong--and yet so right...
I have a little background in theatre, which I have been coming to suspect has an outsized influence on the way I approach writing. Translating something from a script to the stage involves so much time spent scrutinizing what is conveyed by pauses, hitches, inflection, etc, because those are such an important extra communication channel in the medium.
So, it's interesting to me that you start talking about rhythm and pauses when looking at 'Statistics'. I find that when I write, I often have a very specific cadence and rhythm and set of emphasis in mind--I'm not writing a short story so much as I am recording the verbal storyteller in my head.
This gives me a lot of trouble with dialogue, ironically. What I've got in my head is often too detailed--I want to tell the reader about the hesitation here, the rise there, the hitch in the middle of this word, the specific way the character works their mouth before using that word. And I find, in trying to convey the rhythm and cadence in my head, that it starts to try to turn into free verse poetry.
So if you're looking for the difference between prose and poetry, I would propose this starting place: poetry, even when written and published, is a verbal medium. It is meant to be read aloud--in your head, if nowhere else. Prose storytelling is something that has evolved along with the written word, and is particularly adapted to it. It is not an accident that our oldest stories come in the form of epic poetry and songs.
1686201 1686361
Thanks, Ghost, for understanding the question.
I'm pretty sure Karach meant free verse rather than blank verse.
1686482
It's a good question, a very good one, in fact. It's just that I think actually answering it would require an actual research project.
That all said, I'd like to float a hypothesis: Maybe the root of this split is in the technology of storytelling, as it were. Today's tradition of literary works being written down in one place and read in identical form by a wide audience is relatively new. Originally storytellers knew their tales by heart, and so there was a lot more poetry, the rigid structure of it serving as a mnemonic device. Plus it was often mated with music, too. What got told in prose form was a lot more flexible, a lot harder to remember, and as a result couldn't rely on heightened language and so focused more on things happening rather than evoking emotion through carefully tuned turns of phrase. This can't help but be universal because, whatever your culture, you had to have had a thriving oral tradition before literacy came along, if for no other reason that because writing utensils used to be much less accessible before industrialization.
Once the pattern is set, it's hard to abandon it, and as a result, lyrical prose became a special case, while poetry retained universality.
How's that sound?
As for Karach, I thought of that as I was winding down my rant and I address it near the very end. Free verse is no less legitimate as a form of poetry.
1686443
To depart from my own starting point, I would suppose that the difference is indeed a cultural one, but it's a cultural expectation that evolved alongside the written word. With reading, writing, and written works being scarcer commodities, things that get written down are supposed to be important enough to go through the effort. Spoken words and songs, on the other hand, are more or less free.
That shapes what's expected of each of them, and I suppose that continues to shape what we expect from them, even now that the written word is just as free (thanks to electronic communication). Perhaps over the next century or so, we'll see a resurgence in snippets of prose that are 'incomplete' in the way that it is acceptable for poetry to be.
The difference between prose, poetry, and songs is the same as the difference between a screwdriver, a wrench, and a hammer. When you write you have to decide what your goals are and how to best go about achieving them in the same way that a carpenter needs to decide which tools are right for what job. Sometimes it is possible, and even practical, to use a tool not necessarily designed for a particular task, but a wrench makes a poor screwdriver.
1686482 1686361
I probably did, thanks for clearing that up. English isn't my native language and I had no idea how you people call what I had in mind (probably the free verse poetry - no rhymes, no structure, nothing, just ransom line breaks). Google translate handed 'blank verse' for what we call it my native language, but I guess it isn't always correct.
As always a blast to read, you're some kind of Jedi Master (Yoda or Obi Wan, take your pick) of language.
1689714 There are songs that don't make sense--Stairway to Heaven--and there are people who don't listen to the words, like my mom. But songs that /do/ tell a story, are subject to a different standard for how much of the story they have to tell. "Eleanor Rigby", another example that jumps to mind. It paints a picture of an emotion, but it doesn't go anywhere with it.
Then again, my mom's German.
This is probably the... stupidest answer you're going to get, but maybe people rarely make stories like that because it's too hard. Not too hard to write a story (to make a description really simple) like that, but that it's too hard to
surmountmake a story good enough for both/either the writer and/or the readers. This is just late o' clock musings, but it's expected for songs and poems to invoke emotions+deeper stuff that are within you, while stories are supposed to present these things to you. Making a story that If I wrote a story about eating chocolate, if there wasn't some narrative or whatever and it was just an everyman eating chocolate, it would have to do all those weird inside-your-brain+tickling-your-soul thing that a real good song or poem about eating chocolate does, but entering through the part of your brain that does stories. Like, you can write/read a story about the experience of eating chocolate, but you're expecting it to do that thing that a song or poem about chocolate can do, and when it doesn't it just feels flat.1691438
That's a really good point. But then it should be possible, if an author were good enough, to write a story that invoked the emotions already within you. I wonder if it would be easier to do that in second person.
Idle thought:
It seems to me that the story equivalent of the disjoint-chunk-of-'life'-(for-lack-of-a-better-word) you identify in songs and poetry might be what we call 'parables'.
If that's the case, you should probably also look up some zen koans.
1686361
>>> Detailed and probably extremely nerdy discussion of meter
Like a boxer, in a ring
one-two!, one-two!
jabbing
I dunno, quite honestly. I might just be on a fanboy kick of some sort.