Bruce Lawder tells poetic stories … or are they fictional poems?
Poetic stories have been around ever since there were stories. The Epic of Gilgamesh, scholars say, was written sometime between 2150 and 1400 B.C. Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey sometime in the 9th or 8th century B.C. Closer to our own time, John Milton wrote his epic poems in the 1600s, and in the 19th century we had epic poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But our attention spans have grown shorter, as have our poems and our novels (a few contemporary European works notwithstanding).
It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Writing short, or writing short well, requires laser-like focus, concise words, and abandoning adverbs. In Dwarf Stories, his most recent poetry collection, Bruce Lawder does exactly that.
The use of “dwarf” isn’t about a person’s size; it’s about the shortness of these story-poems. And that’s what I must call them — story-poems. He tells stories, often including dialogue, and he has pared his use of words to the necessary.
Lawder’s poems tell stories — about work, life, writing, literature, art, mythology, protests, family relationships, history, philosophy, religion, culture, contemporary life, fairy tales, and many other subjects. Many, perhaps most of the poems are a single, short paragraph. (If you doubt the difficult of writing a story in one short paragraph, try it). A few are two to three pages. But Lawder uses words sparingly, only what’s needed. The stories are tight, terse, and to the point.
Several of the stories rethink Shakespeare in contemporary terms.
The Lears
Nice people, the Lears, we said. From the old country. Bringing
the benefits of the old ways to our new world. What we need here, the
old values, the old traditions. And so we welcomed them with open
hands. And the property those people could accumulate! The woods,
the swimming pool, the helicopter pad, the English garden with its cottage and the heath! Look what the gardener is doing to the heath, we
said. How natural the walk-ways have become. And what a view you
get of the sea now from those beetle-browed cliffs, we added, before
those paths were closed to us. And the father, we said. Now there is a
father! Someone to respect. A single parent who can do it all. Strict, we
had to admit. Strict, we said. Strict but generous. Look how the girls
adore him. So we sent our girls out to play with his. That was a mistake,
of course, as we saw later, much too late.
Then came the relatives. The Macbeths, Coriolanus and his
mother, Gertrude and Claudius. Ambitious people. Great party-givers.
And the talk! You couldn’t sleep at night, it was so rhythmical. What
syntax! What evasions! What shifts of meaning! Of course, it wasn’t
long before they all went into politics.
Bruce Lawder
The humor is wry and understated, but it’s ever-present in this collection of more than 190 poems. Lawder has divided the collection into five parts: “The We People,” “The Empire of Words,” “Late at Night,” “Salad Days,” and “Coda for Unaccompanied Silence.”
Lawder previously published four poetry collections, including Shorelines, and Vers le Vers, a collection of essays on poetry. He has also published stories, plays, and articles on art for the catalogues of several major European museums. Computer Time, his most recent play, was staged at the American Theatre of Actors in 2022 in 2022. An American by birth, he lives in France and Switzerland.
Dwarf Stories is creative, perceptive and thought-provoking. The perspective is distanced and observational, and yet clearly that of the dispassionate bystander. Lawder cares about his subjects and themes; these poem-stories seek illumination and understanding.
Photo by Jenny Downing, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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- Poets and Poems: Sarah Carey and “The Grief Committee Minutes” - October 29, 2024
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