What happened to the narrative?
For the past year and a half, I’ve been trying to work my way away from narrative, away from linear sense. Instead, I’ve been playing with juxtaposition–almost like collage, with threads but not a strong story. (I was calling the work fragments, but I haven’t really reached the fragment stage yet.) And then the sequences–stories strung together (hoping they connect, but do they, or how much do they?).
I’ve wanted to push it the other way–to see how far I could push it, to let more disparate connections lead people to invent their own stories in the spaces between those images.
Now, I’m looking back at those poems, and I feel something critical is missing.
Those poems don’t have a story–and that might be what I’m looking to find in them.
Haven’t we spent millennia making up stories for everything around us, inside of us?
Can you break away from the narrative and still fill that human need?