The Poetic Anecdote

Big Frank has been thinking lately about poetry. Why is it that the content of the poem is relaid at a slant? With prose the thought or feeling is laid out directly. The person says that they have this kind of idea or this kind of feeling. There is a label put on it and some examples and explanation put to it. With poetry there is a recognition that the idea or feeling is bigger than the explanatory power of words -the lexicon cannot carry the load. It is bigger than words, and so something more resonanat is sought - images, symbols, metaphor, or ancedotes. It is the first three that most poets rely on, but the anecdote is very powerful when applied to something different. Here's an example from a great poem by Don Paterson:

The Gift

That night she called his name, not mine
And could not call it back.
I shamed myself and thought of the blind
girl in Kodiak

who on the stoop each night
to watch the daylight fade
and lift her child down to the gate
cut in the pallidade.

And what old caution love resigned
when through that misty stare
she passed her boy not to her bearskinned husband
but the bear.


Here we have a horrific story that is linked to one lover calling the other by the name of a previous lover. The irretrievable loss of that "gift" is captured in all its intractability in the story of the blind woman mistakenly handing the child - out of love - to the bear. This is poetry. It cannot compare in force or poignancy to a simple prose summary of the slip of tongue. Such poems are rare.