Here comes a long overdue guest post on poetry by Mary Soon Lee. Enjoy!
~~~
"And what will you pay for the crown,
little princeling? Gold? Men? A song?"
"My freedom!" he shouted at her.
"Well," she said, "that's a start."
From Interregnum, The Sign of the Dragon, Mary Soon Lee
~~~
The Unwise Practice of Writing Epic Narrative Poetry
by Mary Soon Lee
I
write both poetry and fiction. Viewed as separate activities -- wearing either
my poetry hat or my fiction hat -- I have little to add to the voluminous
advice already out there. But I do have thoughts about what happens if you try
to jam both hats on your head at once. In particular, I have thoughts about the
unwise practice of writing book-length, hard-to-market, epic narrative poetry.
Firstly,
be careful. If you dabble in poetry at all, there's a risk you will succumb.
Back in 2013, I wrote a standalone fantasy poem about a boy chosen by a dragon
to be king. At least, I'd intended it to be a standalone poem. Nearly four
years and 340 poems later, I completed a full draft of "The Sign of the Dragon." It was the hardest, most
addictive, most all-absorbing work I've ever attempted.
In
2013, I had young children. I was writing poetry because I could squash a poem
into a short space of time, then set it aside and concentrate on being a
stay-at-home parent. The trouble began when I found myself thinking about the
boy in that first poem, about what happened next. Poem by poem, I kept
returning and expanding King Xau's story.
This
brings me to my second observation about epic narrative poetry. There's a
breathtaking freedom to it. If you decide to tell a story by means of many
individual poems, you can then switch style, length, point of view. You can
dart from a poem about the hero near the beginning of the story, to a poem in
the middle from the perspective of his elderly cleaning woman. You can choose
to skip over major battles altogether, or to show them in separate glimpses
from assorted characters: soldiers, generals, stableboys, women accompanying the
army.
Poem
by poem, you can tell an epic piecemeal, each poem a tile in the final mosaic.
Many of the oldest stories we have come from an oral tradition of narrative
poetry, though they may be essentially a single long poem. I would have found
it hard to tell my story in one piece. But by breaking the story down into
self-contained poems, I was able to juggle parenting and writing an epic. Not
only was this a convenient form for me, it was also liberating. I could return
to an earlier point in the story to add an arc about another character in a
handful of poems. I could slip into rhyme, or tell a scene in the dialogue
format of a play, yet not be constrained to maintain that form throughout.
Thirdly,
I have a few tips that helped me during the process of writing "The Sign
of the Dragon." Since every writer works in different ways, even if you
decide (unwisely!) to write epic narrative poetry, these may or may not be
useful to you. Although I darted about in the story as I wrote, I wanted the
narrative as a whole to be consistent. I found it especially helpful to jot
down the date that each poem took place, even though these dates are omitted
from the final book. Noting down dates let me check such things as the season,
the phase of the moon, the age of the king's children, how long it would take
to a character to travel from one place to another.
Similarly,
I sketched a map to show the different countries and cities. It was not a
beautiful map, quite the opposite. But it was enough for me to gauge distances
and to know whether a city lay to the north or east of another city. I kept
many other notes common for novelists: notes on character backstories, on the
fictional history, on the nature of my fictional dragons and monsters, etc.
Among
those notes, I kept one set of records that ties in more closely to poetry: a
record of repeated phrases or tags. For instance, I adopted the following tag
for one of the enemy kings: "the Red King: red-haired, red-handed in
war." Sometimes I would include the full phrase, sometimes just a part
("red-handed in war"). This type of device is ancient. Homer uses
such epithets as swift-footed Achilles, rosy-fingered dawn, and the wine-dark
sea. Epithets can remind readers of which character is which; they can call
back to earlier moments in the story in a few words; they can provide common
rhythms or linkage between different poems. If I had understood the scope of
what I was writing from the outset, I think I would have used epithets more
systematically and more extensively.
Fourthly
and unsurprisingly, I also ended up doing research. Although "The Sign of
the Dragon" takes place in an imaginary secondary world, it draws on
elements from ours. So I found myself researching ancient China and the
Mongols, along with sundry items from foaling to archery. For poets, I
recommend picture books in addition to drier reference works. The single book I
returned to most often was an illustrated children's book: "Ancient China" by Arthur Cotterell, part of the Eyewitness Books series. Images
are highly evocative, conjuring an atmosphere, a sense of time and place,
whether or not you include specific details from them. For illustrated military
references, Osprey Publishing offers short books on topics ranging from
"Siege Engines of the Far East" to "Pictish Warrior AD
297-841," and I am indebted to a friend, Timons Esaias, for introducing me
to this resource.
Fifthly,
I should caution you that writing epic narrative poetry may be a poor career
choice. My agent (Lisa Rodgers, JABberwocky Literary Agency) received a series
of rejections for "The Sign of the Dragon," several saying they loved
the book but didn't publish poetry, others saying they loved it but didn't
publish fantasy. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke, I very much wanted King Xau's
story to be published, so we released an ebook version, with a print edition
forthcoming in 2021.
Lastly,
unwise or not, commercial or not, I have never written anything that matters as
much to me as "The Sign of the Dragon."
I love it fiercely, protectively. Sometimes, writers should be unwise.
~~~
Mary Soon Lee was born and raised in London, but now lives in Pittsburgh. She
writes both fiction and poetry, and has won the Rhysling Award and the Elgin
Award. Her two latest books are from opposite ends of the poetry spectrum:
"Elemental Haiku,"containing
haiku for each element of the periodic table (Ten Speed Press, 2019) and
"The Sign of the Dragon,"
an epic fantasy with Chinese elements (JABberwocky Literary Agency, 2020).
After twenty-five years, her website has finally been updated: marysoonlee.com.
~~~
Mary's home
page and Twitter
(@MarySoonLee)
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