124- Narrative Poem

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How to Write a Narrative Poem

One of the oldest poetic forms in the world could be the perfect way to tell a very modern
story – yours.

Narrative poems – which simply mean “story poems” – are among the oldest forms of literature. Before there
were printed books, people would tell stories through narrative poems, using rhythm, rhyme, repetition and
vivid language to make their tales easy to remember and share. Many narrative poems are long, especially older
ones like The Iliad and The Odyssey by the famous Greek poet Homer. But a narrative poem can also be short,
capturing a brief but emotionally intense or darkly mysterious event in just a few lines.

Many older narrative poems have a set rhythm and rhyme structure, but modern narrative poems often have
very free rhythms and no rhyme at all, so there is some wiggle room! However, almost all narrative poems

contain at least one main character awnwd wtel.l ya satohryytahast hoals aibmegainnn.incg,ommiddle, and end. The stories that

narrative poems tell are often dramatic and compelling, detailing events such as rocky romances, epic battles, or
quests to find treasure. Once you’re ready to put together your own narrative poem, keep these guidelines in
mind:

1. Choose a topic. Pick a story that you really want to tell, even if you can’t explain why. It could be
something that happened to you (or a friend or loved one) or it could be something that’s completely
fictional. Maybe it’s a memory that haunts you, a family legend, a startling dream, or a fantasy that
you’d give anything to fulfill. Remember, the narrator of the poem doesn’t have to be you; the narrator
can be a character of your choice.

2. Make your voice heard. If the narrator in your poem is experiencing a particular emotion, make sure
that comes through in the words and the tone that you choose. A poem can be a snarl, a shout, a whisper
or a cry, so pack it with feeling.

3. Skip the build-up. Narrative poems don’t waste words introducing characters or explaining the scene—
most dive right in. Try starting your poem in the middle of the action scene to bring readers immediately
into the heart of your story.

4. Sweat the small stuff. The best narrative poems use precise, descriptive words that bring out a story’s
details and paint a rich picture. Think of the five senses and use adjectives that help describe what the
world looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels like as the story unfolds so readers will experience it just
like you do. For instance, reading about “breakfast” or “a fall day” doesn’t light the imagination, but
reading about “soggy cornflakes and last night’s cold coffee” or “dead leaves that crunch underfoot”
does.

5. Repeat yourself. This is an especially good strategy if your narrative poem is long. Try repeating key
words or phrases that are emotional or musical a few times throughout the poem. (Remember Martin
Luther King’s famous speech? He says “I have a dream” eight times during that speech, which is part of
what makes it so powerful.)

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How to Write Narrative Poetry

Co-authored by wikiHow Staff
Explore this Article Getting Started Writing a Draft Revising Your Poem Ask a Question Related Articles
References
Narrative poetry is used to tell stories. If you've got a story to tell, or have a hankering to spin a good yarn in
verse, the narrative mode might be right for you. By learning the tricks of the trade, and how to properly draft
and revise your narrative poetry, you can take the mystery out of the equation and get down to doing the work.
See Step 1 for more information.

Part 1
EditGetting Started

1.

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1
Read contemporary narrative poems to get a sense of the style. If you're going to write narrative
poems in the 21st century, it's a good idea to read other contemporary poets writing in the narrative
style. You can delve into the history of poems and read the classics, but it's also essential that you read
the types of poems being written today. You're not living in Elizabethan England or on top of a
mountain in feudal Japan, so it wouldn't make much sense to write poetry like you do. Some great
contemporary narrative poems and poets to check out include:

o "The Soldier" by David Ferry
o "Providence" by Natasha Trethewey
o "The Armadillo" by Elizabeth Bishop
o "A Wedding" by James Tate
o "Brazilian Telephone" by Miriam Bird Greenberg

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2. Keep a notebook of imagery and carry it around with you. Poems don't arrive out of thin air, like
transmissions from the muse. You've got to work to find a good poem, or a good place to start. For that
reason, many poets carry around small notebooks, journals, or take little messages on their phone or
mobile device to return to at a later date when the time is right. As a poet, keep an eye out for striking
images, weird phrases, and moments that might be right for a poem.
o Poems can happen anywhere, at any time. Maybe you'll be struck by a particular patch of graffiti,
or the a way an off-duty mariachi lights his cigarette on the street. Even when you're not sitting
at your desk writing, keep an eye out for poetic moments. "Write" all day.
o Increasingly, many poets like to write on the computer, and it's true that using word processors is
much more quick and efficient. But let yourself write out your initial fragments by hand every
now and then. This serves to slow you down and force you to think about what you're recording,
and let's you be less attached to your initial ideas and images, making it easier to explore them
and revise them later, when you're writing.

3

Find a good story to tell. What story will your poem relate? A good narrative poem tells a story that

could be omfuthnadtasnteoroyr.cNoaurlrdawtbievweswppeo.cetmyacsauclhaarny, bbauestloeointghl,eirdrwmaamayanftiinc.decspoincasmrroartisvheowrteaingdhtlyinricsoalmferaigmmaegnetso,r
moment

depending on the story you want to tell.

o Good narratives always have moments of "tension," in which things act against each other. A
friendly cop could be a moment of tension worthy of story, as could be an angry lover. If the
story is very harrowing, add some lightness in the details. If the story is light, find the darkness
in it to create tension that will come through in the poem.

o Narrative poems can be true-to-life, like Sheffield's "A Good Fish," which details the reeling in
of an aggressive catch with luminous particulars. They can also be made-up, imaginary, or
absurd narratives, the like of which James Tate, Russell Edson, and Matthea Harvey have built
careers upon. A good story might revolve around a fishing trip, a romantic encounter, or a post-
apocalyptic marching band.

o If you experience an encounter that you think will make for a good narrative poem, write it down
right away in your journal. Record the details you might forget, specific things that you'll have
trouble remembering. What did it smell like? What was your mother wearing? Had your
boyfriend shaved that day? Fill your journal with as many particulars as possible to mine them
later.

3.

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4. Start with the most striking image or unusual moment in the story. One of the most important things
in a narrative poem is finding your "in." What is your particular perspective on this story? What unique
angle will you introduce into it? Pretend that you're going to tell a story everyone's already heard and
want to make it new, make it different, make it surprising. That's what we want from a narrative poem:
to feel like we haven't heard it before, even if we have.
o The opening should propel you through the rest of the story, giving us a thirst to finish. Think of
Emily Dickinson's famous opening line "My life has stood - a loaded gun / in Corners." She gets
at a completely surprising and unusual mode of solitude, frustration, and anguish in only nine
words. It would be impossible to not finish reading the poem.
o Poetry lets you play with time like no other medium. A narrative poem doesn't have to start at the
beginning of the story, and it doesn't even have to tell the whole story. Shave off everything
except the bones of the narrative and start there.

5.

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5
Make sure your story has a beginning, middle, and end. Even if your narrative is just a single
moment, a meal, an encounter, or a fight, it needs to have some forward motion that propels us. Before
you do any writing, give some through to where the poem might go, how it might move forward into
new territory. What happens is just as important as what happens next.

o It's likely you'll get sidetracked along the way, and the poem will go awry, but that's a good
thing. Poems should surprise the reader as well as the writer.

o Most narrative poems will only detail a particular moment, not a whole day, a whole life, or a
whole person. Still, it needs to have an arc to it. You won't be able to say everything you want to
say about your grandmother in a single narrative poem, so look for a single moment that captures
that life, and give it the narrative weight it deserves.

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Part 2
EditWriting a Draft

1

Uncensor yourself and let the poem happen. The best way to start? Just write. Don't worry about
getting every image perfect, or spelling each word correctly, just stay with the page and write as much as
you possibly can when you're feeling inspired to work. Keep your fingers typing, or writing, and get as
much raw material out on the page as possible for you to craft later.

o Sitting down to a blank page can be an intimidating thing for lots of people, both experienced

and inexperienced poets, but it doesn't need to be. You're not going to write a poem in five

minutes, and it's not going to be done just because you've gotten a few words on the page. Just

start writing.

o Try not to think of what you're writing as a "poem," just start writing. The "poem" happens as

you revise, as you Jwuwostrwkw,woarn.rdyyaaasboyhuotyugaceatsrtivnoeglthitieodmuetataaninlds.igncivtooinsmgomyoeuthrsinelgf concrete. Don't worry about
making it perfect. something to work with.

o Don't worry about form, or rhyme, or the line-breaks right now. If you want to write in prose,

write in prose. If you want to break the lines arbitrarily, break the lines arbitrarily. The

techniques of form are ways to add meaning to what you've already written.

2.

Let yourself get sidetracked. As you write, focus on the tiniest possible details. Let yourself get
sidetracked from telling the story, and focus on things that seem small, that seem insignificant. You're
not writing a novel, after all, you're writing a poem. Jump around to different images, different locations,
and even different people.

o Robert Bly wrote an influential essay with accompanying poems called "Leaping Poetry,"
detailing this idea. Poems allow the poet to illustrate the "motion of the mind," he writes, making
associations and leaps between subjects, images, and moments part of what makes poetry great.
If your grandmother's hands suddenly conjure images of gray whales, let that association happen
on the page, even if it seems "weird" to you. Weird is good.

3.

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Let the details drive the narrative. A poem should be built of "luminous particulars," very specific
details and images, things that we can see, touch, smell. Look for the little moments and let your mind
make leaps and connections. Make those details drive the narrative.

o Maybe, as in Bishop's poem "The Fish," the eye of an animal might resemble "isinglass" and the
skin "old wallpaper." These particular details make us feel the weight of the image, without
having to tell us about how to feel.

4.

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Avoid abstractions. Don't worry about "explaining" the poem to us. Make a thing for us to interpret, not
an argument for us to understand. A narrative poem made of abstractions and concepts like "the weight
of my anguish" or "the pounding depression in my soul" won't be as effective as a poem build from
luminous particulars that illustrate those abstractions and make them real. What does that anguish look
like? Instead of feelings, focus on the things you can see.

o Maybe you can find anguish in the coffee cups left around the apartment, half-stuffed with coffee
grounds and tissues. Or maybe you can find anguish in the way your neighbor lovingly picks up
his old dog's turds, diligently. The image is more powerful and more weighted than the idea.

5.

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Find the right speaker for the poem. The "I" in a poem doesn't have to be the poet, though it might be.
Don't worry about a poem needing to tell the truth, and let the poem speak from a place that it needs to
be spoken from. Finding the right speaker for the poem can be a great way of creating tension in the
narrative.

o Think of as many different perspectives as possible before picking one. Maybe your narrative
about the killing floor at the slaughterhouse could be cool from the perspective of the cow, but
what about the perspective of the foreman? The guy at the end of the line? The truck driver? The
grocer who unpacks the meat? The kid who lives down the road and smells the barnyard smells
every morning when he gets up for school? Explore the idea fully and find the one with the most
juice.

o "Persona poetry" is poetry that takes a particular speaker from history or life, like writing a script
with a particular character in mind. Maybe your poem is about a gas station worker, written from
his perspective, or even from the perspective of an inanimate object, like a fork or a mountain.
What does your dog have to say? A poem is the right place to explore it.

6.

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Surprise yourself. The way to write a bad poem is to go into it with a plan and stick to the plan. Great
poems come from happy accidents, surprises that reveal themselves only as you get into the poem. Don't
worry so much about what you want the poem to do, or be, just try to pay attention to where the poem is
going and what "it" wants. Sounds weird, but it works.

o Richard Hugo calls this "writing off the subject." Poems of every kind have a subject, whether
the writer knows it or not. And while great poems might stay within their subject entirely, most
poems work to touch something more. To create tension, a poem needs to write away from the
subject into other places. Charles Simic's great study called "Fork" merely describes a fork the
most pedestrian of objects, but the poem starts "This strange thing must have crept / Right out of
hell." With that, we're not in Kansas anymore.

7.

Write too much. It's always better to have a lot of material to work with when you're writing poetry,
giving yourself the goods to cut and repair, like Frankenstein. It's very hard to enter back into a poem

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and try to produce more stuff after you've already gone through the hectic drafting phase, so try to get it
all out when you can and worry about what's working later. If it looks too long, you're off to a good
start.

o Alternatively, some poets treat the writing of a draft like a building a sculpture, slowly piling up
a few words, lines, and images at a time, until the poem starts to take shape. There's no right way
to write, so experiment with different styles and processes and do what works best for you.

8.

Find the open ending. How do you know you've gotten to the end? Short answer: end on an image. A
poem doesn't need to close like a lock-box of meaning, especially when you're writing a narrative. Try to
find something weird and reverberating that will echo beyond the end of the poem. In most cases, poems
shouldn'tf end with a line like "and then everyone died."

o Cut the poem off before the end of the story, to leave us wanting, or carry the poem beyond the

ending, into yaosutrragnrgawenddwmewtoai.tlhytehraaetnhwdyislloacnsatshotealgsaihrabmdaoagwenmb.aeccnkoaorvmrievrinwgh,aatnwdeth'veemjuasmt rmeaodth. Mfoarykbseofyothuer
poem about

truck clanging like monsters, so you can't hear her talk. Or maybe your poem about your

girlfriend's beauty ends with an image of her dog. Surprise us and yourself.

o Many beginning poets like to end poems on "epiphanies," which can have a preachy effect. Try

to avoid ending a poem about feeding deer in your grandmother's backyard with something like,

"And then I understood death." Epiphanies can be an important part of poetry, but they can feel

like being slapped in the head to the reader, or like a cheap trick. Stick an epiphany elsewhere in

the poem to see how it works, if it serves the poem.

Part 3

EditRevising Your Poem

1.

1

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Make the form match the function of the poem. The difference between poetry and prose is that
poetry offers all kinds of little tricks that allow you to create meaning and affect the way the poem is
read. Line breaks, musical elements, and and

o A poem's "meter" refers to the number of syllabic beats in each line of the poem, and formal
poets may count up the unstressed and stressed syllables to shape the poem. In "pentameter," for
example, each line will have 10 syllables, with five stressed and five unstressed beats: "To be, or
not to be, that is the question" is an example of pentameter.

o You can break your lines any way you like. In a free verse poem (a poem that ignores metrical
restrictions), you can break your lines to affect the speed at which we read the poem. "Enjambed
lines" are broken in the middle of clauses, while end-stopped lines will end at the end of classes,
or with punctuation.
 Enjambments: "I woke to the smell of frying / gasoline, my father's car howling / up the
driveway."
 End-stops: "I woke to the smell of frying gasoline, / my father's car howling up the
driveway."

o Stanzas are like the paragraphs of poetry, and can be broken into a variable number of groups of
lines, broken by an extra space. For contemporary narrative poems, the most common stanza
forms are 4-line stanzas, called quatrains, or in one long, unbroken stanza.

2.

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2

Eliminate unnecessary words. After you've written your story in lines, go through the poem an
eliminate extra words, unnecessary lines, and anything that makes the poem a chore to get through. Try
to cut everything you can and get down to the bare essentials.

o Adjectives are good candidates for cuts. If you've written the line, "The hugely gigantic war
beast was completely and totally swollen with the blood of innocents as it moved across the
field." you've gotten a lot of luminous particulars in there, but probably too many. Try cutting
everything back but one or two: "The war beast, blood-swollen, moved huge across the field."

o Use strong verbs. Avoid passive verbs, replacing them with more muscular cousins. "We were
flying the plane into a storm" is much better off being written: "We flew into the storm." Fewer
words means stronger images and moments.

3.

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Tweak your similes and metaphors. A poem has the power to make one thing into another, or to
compare two things simultaneously.

o A simile uses "like" or "as" ("the fish's skin like old wallpaper") while a metaphor generally uses
some form of "is" to call one thing another ("the fish was a wall, covered in old paper"). You
could even use both at once: "The fish was a wall like a brick battlement, covered in ancient
paper."

o Similes and metaphors are great ways to add power to your descriptive lines in your narrative
poem, but only as long as you keep them straight. Keep one metaphor going, extending it, rather
than piling one on top of the next. Play by the rules and don't mix your metaphors: "The sun was
a ship that fell into the sea, a bird-star cascading through the night."

4.

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Find the music in the poem. Poetry is meant to be spoken a loud, and many poets use the musical
elements of rhythm and sound to affect their poems in sly ways. Often, these techniques have less to do
with the content of the story, and more to do with the experience of it. A harrowing narrative poem
might be strange if it were very mellifluous, instead choosing hard consonants and jarring rhythms to
move the poem forward. Match the music to the content.[1]

o Alliteration and assonance refer to words used with common sounds. Alliteration happens in
words with similar consonant sounds: "chair" "church" "Carlos." Assonance refers to words with
corresponding vowel sounds: "Albion," "allowance," "alive."

o Rhyme with sly intent. Poems don't need to rhyme to be good, and it's often very difficult to
rhyme well. Avoid clunky end rhymes, and avoid rhyming for the sake of rhyming. If you want
to try, get a good rhyming dictionary and make friends with the "slant" rhyme, words that rhyme
consonant sounds or sound close to the word being rhymed with. A true rhyme would be "house"
and "mouse," while a slant rhyme might be "house" and "shoes" or "now."

5.

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Experiment with different revision techniques. Working on a poem should be fun. Many poets like to
turn the act into a kind of craft project, cutting the poem up, moving things around as if they were
making an art project. These experiments might not always result in a perfect poem, but it might give
you a fresh perspective that you could use to restart and rejuvenate your interest in something you've
already written. Here are some great revision techniques:

o Circle every noun and go the dictionary and look up the word. Replace it with the word seven
spaces up from it in the dictionary you're using.

o Retype your poem with all the lines in the reverse order. Start with the last line and work your
way toward the first. Would the poem be better if it worked backward?

o If your poem uses formal elements, rewrite it in free verse. If your poem is in free verse, Try to
rewrite it as a formal poem of your choice.

o Draw a picture under your poem, of images the poem jogs for you. Without looking at the poem,
examine your drawing and imagine you were supposed to write a poem to accompany it. Write
that poem.

o Pick six words that you like from your poem and delete everything else. Start fresh with those six
words.

o Change the title to something terrible, like "String Cheese Incident Love Poem" or "Death
Licorice." Change the poem you've written to make it work with the new title.

6.

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Set the poem aside and return to it in the future. Every poet experiences the false moment of genius:
after finishing something, we put it down and exclaim, "Perfect!" The next morning, after some rest and
coffee, it suddenly doesn't look so great. We are our own best and worst editors, but our eye tends to get
a little better with some time. When you get a draft you're happy with, let it sit and try to think about
other things. Go back to it later. New ideas, images, and techniques might occur to you.

o New York poet Ron Padgett published a book called Poems I Guess I Wrote, in which he
finished a batch of poems he found in a drawer that he didn't remember writing. Some of them
were more than 20 years old. While you don't have to wait that long, letting a poem sit for a
while and working on new material can allow you to return to it with a fresh perspective. You
might like it more later.

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7.

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Revise aggressively. Poems are work. The first stuff you get down on paper might be great, and it might
be terrible, but either way the real poem happens during the revision process. Don't give up! Keep
revising those poems until they become well-greased machines made out of words. Revise poems that
you think are finished by reading them repeatedly. Can you memorize them? Keep looking. Keep
thinking about them. Keep a stack by your bedside and read them before you go to sleep. Make changes
as they arise.

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