narrative explained

A narrative poem carries a story however unconventionally it’s told.

against story

Story is what can be taken out of the fiction and made into a movie. Story is what you tell people when they embarrass you by asking what your novel is about. Story is what you do to clean up life and make God into a good burgher who manages the world like a business. History is often written as a story so that it can seem to have a purpose, to be on its way somewhere; because stories deny that life is no more than an endlessly muddled middle; they beg each length of it to have a beginning and end like a ballgame or a banquet. Stories are sneaky justifications.

—William Gass, “Finding a Form,” Finding A Form: Essays (Knopf, 1996)

sum of a story

The sum of any story is the impact of its content plus the quality of the imparting narration.

bad blurb

I confess I couldn’t wait to get to the end of this story. I had to skip ahead many pages to get to that comforting sigh of the book closing.

no retelling

Tell me a story I’ll never be able to retell as well.

should end well

The main thing about a story is that it should end well, and perhaps it is not too much to say that a story’s ending casts its voice, color, tone and shade over the whole work.

—Muriel Spark, The Informed Air (New Directions, reprint 2018)

nonce upon a time

Poems that are half-told tales, interrupted narratives, improbable parables, or stories that lose their way.

stream of story and theme

The same stories and themes follow us because we as a society are constantly breaking camp and moving on.

unnecessary information

Always the temptation of more than enough information in a poem that tells a story.

storied song

A lyric clad in narrative.

good story

A good story can't be told badly.