“Grapevine, barge pole, whirlpool, chloride, concrete, bandage, station, story”: some versions of narrative

Abstract

Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion were accurate, in their “Introduction” to The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry¹, when they identified narrative as a key element in the development of the new mainstream poetry which they anthologised and which was, as they wrote, still developing. Most conspicuously, Paul Muldoon and James Fenton had written longish poems that playfully combined diverse narrative genres. Poems that tell stories have acquired an even greater centrality since the Penguin anthology was published, some of them influenced by the narrative poems it contained. “Greenheart”², by Alan Jenkins, for example, is indebted to Paul Muldoon’s parodies of thrillers and detective stories. (However, its mingling of these genres with references to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — which produces a disorientation that evokes the shifting boundaries of innocence and guilt — is entirely Jenkins’ own.)