Quite A Party

It was years ago, reading Stephen King's The Shining, that I first came across the story of the Donner Party. King was pretty sparing on the details, assuming his (American) readers would be familiar with the reference I suppose, but I gathered the story related to some fairly nauseating cannibalism in the snow out West, as it were. At the time I thought of finding out a bit more but never quite got round to it. Nowadays I'd probably nip to Wikipedia to satisfy my curiosity.

Anyway I finally got round to familiarising myself with the tale, but not through the Internet. No, I've been reading a very interesting narrative poem, a book-length piece, bit of an epic really, by one George Keithley, of whom I've never heard before. I think it was written around 1972, as that's when the copyright was recorded, and it came out in paperback in 1989 - title: The Donner Party. I got it through amazon.com, basically at a time a couple of years back when I was interested in modern narrative poems - there are more out there than you might think - and I've been very much enjoying it (reading it in tandem with the Garibaldi book of which I'm now onto the last 100 pages.)

The only thing is that I've been puzzling over the form Keithley uses and the principles underlying his verse. Okay, I'll come clean - I'm not quite sure exactly why this is poetry; it sometimes reads like prose for long stretches - and while this doesn't alter my enjoyment (it's a good story, well told) I'm intrigued as to what the writer thought he was up to, and whether I'm missing something. The poem is divided into three sections which are subdivided into books, or chapters, I guess, of unequal length, each one of these beginning and ending with a four-line stanza (I suppose you'd call it) with the rest of the chapter being made up of three-line stanzas. There doesn't seem to be any obvious common metre, though most lines seem to break down into three or two stresses with uneven numbers of unstressed syllables in between. Until yesterday I would also have said there wasn't any rhyme, but then poised at the beginning of the third and final section, with the grimness of the narrative gathering apace, I suddenly realised there were an awful lot of occasional rhymes dotted around the ends of lines, though in no obvious pattern, and even more (an awfuller lot, mayhap) of half rhymes. I was a bit embarrassed not to have been aware of this before and started to check earlier bits to see if this had been done consistently earlier. I'm still not sure it had. Unfortunately the checking sort of messed up the forward momentum of my reading and I'm beginning to wish I'd not noticed the rhymes at all and just got the story.

So now I'm trying to get back into the flow of the poem and thinking I might just re-read it straightaway with closer attention to issues of prosody, which actually will be no chore as it's such a fine piece and worth doing justice to.