‘The Flicker, Not the Flame’: E. A. Robinson's Narrative Compression

Presenter : Brian Brodeur, Ph.D.  

Abstract 

Dr. Brodeur will present on one chapter from a book-length study of poetry criticism on which he is currently working. This project concerns a poetic genre largely ignored in recent decades: poems that tell stories through the dramatic immediacy, musicality, and unique pacing available only in lines of verse. In this manuscript, Dr. Brodeur examines shorter narrative poems of roughly two to twenty pages written within the last one hundred years by poets ranging from foundational figures such as E. A. Robinson (1869-1935), Robert Frost (1874-1963), and Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) to contemporary practitioners like Marilyn Nelson (1946), Cathy Park Hong (1976), and Ryan Wilson (1982). Such narratives are the poetic equivalent of the short story, the literary genre which is arguably American literature’s most distinctive contribution to world literature. Chapters from this project have been published or are forthcoming in such national literary journals as The Hopkins Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Writer’s Chronicle.  

Biographical Statement 

Brian Brodeur, Associate Professor of English, is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently Every Hour Is Late (2019) and the forthcoming Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), which won the twenty-second annual New Criterion Poetry Prize. Recent poems and literary criticism appear in The Gettysburg Review, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Southern Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Brodeur teaches creative writing and American literature at Indiana University East.