How do poets subtly introduce background information to a narrative while maintaining poetic integrity? In Les Murray’s gritty drama, Fredy Neptune, photos help.
In previous articles we've looked at how two American women poets, Alice Notley and Ellen Bryant Voigt, have approached the problem of delivering background information to poetic narrative. Now let's look at how an Australian man, New South Wales' Les Murray, has dealt with the same issue.
In Murray's amazing book, Fredy Neptune, the way back machine works in a different way than we have seen previously. In Mary Jo Bang's Louise in Love, and Ruth Whitman's Tamsen Donner, the narrator steps out of time to explain how the story ends...or rather, to describe the situation that exists after the story has ended. Then, seeming to forget what she already knows, the speaker returns in the next poem to the past and tells the story from the beginning.
In Murray the way back machine appears in the form of photos; the speaker is going through old photographs, and they spur him to recall his life story:
There's my father Reinhard Boettcher,
my mother Agnes. (1)
and
Here's me riding bareback in the sweater
I wore to sea first. (2)
In the third stanza the central story begins. By taking a job on a German merchant vessel weeks before the outbreak of WWI, Fredy sets out on his adventure.
In this case, Murray has chosen to give further background information of his narrative by placing in the front material a single poem: a translation from the Armenian of Siamanto (the poet Atom Ergoyan, murdered in 1915). This piece gives no information on the German-Australian speaker or his place in the world; instead it foreshadows what will be the central event of his life, the Armenian genocide:
Then someone fetched a pitcher of kerosene.
....
They touched the naked women with a torch.
And there was dancing. The charred bodies rolled. (4)
At first readers are stunned by the reference. How can the story of a gentle young man from New South Wales have anything to do with the Armenian Genocide? With no other information aside from this eerie premonition, Murray drops his readers into his narrative and trusts that they will find their way. Alice Notley did the same with The Descent of Alette, but her intention was to make the reader feel the same disorientation as her lost and confounded narrator.
Fredy Neptune, however, is not lost nor is he confounded. He knows exactly who he is, where he is, and how he got there. In the simple act of reminiscing he explains what we need to know.
Exercise: Write a premonition in the voice of the main character of a drama. Write one in the voice of the writer. Write one in the voice of a reader.
- Murray, Les. Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 1999. p. 3.
- ibid.
- ibid. p. i.
