Is there any realistic market for a long, modern, narrative poem?
I started this several years back, then realized it order to tell the complete story it would end up being as long as an actual Book from the Bible. Four pages into it I stopped working on it. Because so few people read poetry these days, other than poets at heart, the odds would be pretty slim that something long would be published, much less read, right?
Here are the first few stanzas to help you understand why I’ve never finished Jana’s Book.
*
THE BOOK OF JANNA
1.
During Earth’s mad destruction,
as multitudes slaughtered each
other in their own god’s name,
yet another child was born.
Metaphorically conceived in a pure infant state,
wrapped in paupers blankets and left in a basket near
the oft disputed intersection of Lost and Found
where hypocrites daily judged everyone but themselves.
While the fragile waif softly cried out to be nourished,
comforted and loved, the faux pious falsely assumed
this newborn the consequence of original sins:
pre-condemned by dogma’s wrath as deserving her fate.
As these righteous turned away
a young woman, disdaining
denominational ire,
embraced the child as her own.
2.
Given the name of Janna,
the girl was raised in a home
that revered natural life as
the Creator’s precious gift,
an enclave where the women were perceived as equals
and could be wives by choice, mothers by desire, scholars
by inclination, leaders when circumstance allowed:
a safe haven holding destiny’s child in faith’s hands,
an environment that was clandestinely maintained
because they lived in a time, in a place, where fearful
males, doubting their own self-worth, collectively proclaimed
weakening the natural partnership granted men strength.
Warping The Creator’s will,
they banished healthy women
to lives of obedience
as man-made baby makers.
Not a poem, even though it’s written in exacting, abridged, stylized pentameter? More abstract than ‘The Waste Land’ or ‘Prufrock?’ Selective icons project much.
Thank you, Heals. I'm not doubting my ability or what I'm done so far. It's good enough to be granted an NEA Grant to give me time to finish it. I was simply pondering the slim possibilities that something like this could actually turn a profit. As to the Golden Gate, that tome is little more than plagiarized Pushkin, peopled with yuppies, not much more than pop literature, the equivalent to Richard Bach’s prose.
Lapiz, the Eliot references were directed towards one of the replies who said it was too abstract and was not even a poem: even though each longer line stanza has the same metered poetic feet (measured syllables, count them out yourself as beats) per line, as does the shorter line stanzas, perfectly symmetric in form and structure. The style type is symmetric verse, a lot more difficult to work in than modern free or blank verse, the same poetic device type Poe used for ‘The Raven.’
To some people if you aren't rhyming moon with June or there with bare it's not poetry. Modern poets left that format behind decades ago. And, by the way, I loved Bach's 'Illusions' and 'One.' He is a great storyteller but not a great writer of prose.