At least one participant in the PSA's Narrative Impulse Festival last fall took it as an occasion to reconsider the scope and potential of narrative for many contemporary poets. When asked what anyone would want to write narrative poetry, I used to give a three-word reply: "Homer. Dante. Chaucer." Asked again, I think I'd offer a tape of the PSA Festival and let them listen to, for example, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carol Muske, David Mura, Ana Castillo, Robert McDowell, and Frank Bidart. Narrative of any kind asks for reader identification, appropriation of a character's experience (at least for the short term) as one's own. That helps explain why narrative has become so important in a period when the question of identity and difference stands in the forefront of contemporary cultural debate. Through narrative, poets explore and define identity; and through the process of identification, a reader whose gender, race, or culture is not the same as those poets' comes to understand and feel solidarity with them--the reader, that is, with good will and the ability to exercise the imagination in behalf of others. "No man is an island," Donne's poem says, and narrative fleshes out that assertion, showing us how all our destinies are bound up together as fellow-tenants in the Global Village.

Some of the Festival's participants (like Carol Muske and Joyce Carol Oates) write both prose fiction and narrative poetry, which gives an implied, shorthand answer to the query, "OK, narrative is important, but why not just write fiction?" A longer, explicit answer is that poetry provides special lenses, wilder resources. The audience for poetry is used to a more intensely written text, with greater compression, a higher degree of dreamlike improvisation, radical juxtaposition and collage--and, dare I say it, the expressive support of meter and lineation. Another way of putting it is that narrative subjects sometimes generate startling lines that neither lyric nor prose fiction would have wrung out of the writer.

Another issue brought up during the Festival's panel discussions (restated in an interview with poet-novelist Sherman Alexie in the current number of Columbia magazine) is the claim that authors aren't entitled to write about a character with racial or cultural identities different from their own. I would say, That depends. During the early 70s America went through a period when emerging groups tired of the cookie-cutter mold of majority presuppositions said, as Vine Deloria put it in one of his books titles, "We talk, you listen." Well, some Americans, even straight white males, did listen, and listened very carefully; not only to the gist of what was being said, but the language and the cultural references surrounding it. They also listened to the American quilt of poets and novelists who began to publish at that time--and to the voices of unliterary people within other cultures. Among the things they discovered was that, despite fascinating and instructive differences, there were overlaps and resemblances that people from widely disparate backgrounds could nevertheless recognize in each other.

Resemblances aside, when considering poetry or fiction, is it right to dismiss the imagination, the mysterious ability to evoke scenes and emotions that have not actually occurred to us outside the written page? We expect philistines to undervalue imagination, but when a creative writer does so--depressing. Careful attention and strong imaginative abilities enabled James Baldwin, for example, to create vivid characters who were straight, white, and for that matter Italian, like Giovanni in Giovanni's Room. A moment's reflection ought to show who the "exclusive entitlement" argument quickly reduces to absurdity, implying, for example, that men can't write about women or women about men (Chaucer's Wife of Bath and George Eliot's Lydgate notwithstanding). If the difference is race, one the Festival's participants, the poet Ai, presents a crucial test case, as she suggested in comments presented before her reading, since her background ins Japanese-American, African-American, and Choctaw. According to the argument, she would be qualified to write only about characters with exactly the same genetic composition as herself, which is outrageous. In any case, writing and reading are complementary activities. If we weren't able to inhabit the experience and consciousness of another person, reading stories apart from our own autobiography would be impossible. Identification is the readers' counterpart to the authorial imagination.

The poet Suzanne Gardienier, in a panel discussion, offered a useful qualification in this debate. She agreed that writers can invent characters different from themselves, but noted that readers can, in turn, object to fictional portraits whenever they found them incredible or offensive. Showing exactly how a male author has misunderstood women, for example, wouldn't amount to blanket censorship but instead would open the door for discussion and deeper comprehension. Dialogue is needless to say preferable to censorship, which, in any circumstance, is always a self-contradiction when it comes from the Left.

The Festival's purpose was to celebrate and encourage narrative. So, rather than concluding with an abstract argument, here is a "scene": Imagine a crowd of faces leaving Rosenthal auditorium at the New School, faces of different ages, different colors, men and women, lesbian, gay, and straight, talking to their friends, of the opposite sex, sometimes, or another race. They look excited, some few a little wonderstruck. They've heard stories told, different from their own and yet, through the magic of identification, still in some sense theirs. One of them with an intricate hair-weave and West Indian voice turns to her friend wearing a paisley scarf and quotes a few lines from Hamlet, (his death scene, in which he makes this request to his friend Horatio): "Absent thee from felicity a while/And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my story." The friend nods and with a melancholy smile answers, "The rest is silence."