The Personal Literary Narrative

Example of a personal literary narrative

My previous post, "Fully Empowered by Poetry," models a hybrid genre I wish for my students to imitate: the personal literary narrative.

This type of writing is a combination of three kinds of writing:

1. The personal essay
   It is framed as a personal narrative, and not as a detached academic analysis. It emphasizes individual perspective and attempts to convey the emotion of authentic, lived experience.
2. Literary criticism
   At the same time, integrated within this reflective piece, is literary analysis which fulfills the traditional function of literary criticism: it identifies and interprets both literary methods and themes -- form and content.
3. The blog post
   It has the casualness, brevity, and immediacy of online writing. It also is visually composed, with an accompanying image and text that is set off and spaced for easy consumption. This writing is also embedded in social media (links to the post were disseminated via Google+ and via Facebook, and these elicited immediate responses -- see below). 

Screenshot from my Google+ stream, showing quick response to post

Screenshot from my Facebook stream, showing responses
(see "likes" below)

Fully Empowered by Poetry

This is the story of the literary moment that changed me forever. And it centers on a single poem by Pablo Neruda that I stumbled across thirty years ago.

We will never have any memory of dying.

We were so patient
about our being, 
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,

I was 17, taking a college course over the summer at the University of Utah while still in high school. In the bookstore I came across Pablo Neruda's Fully Empowered (from his Plenos Poderes of 1962), a slim volume with the Spanish in a thin column on the left page and Alastair Reid's fine translation on the right. The first poem I opened to was called "Births" ("Nacimientos").

and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note -
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.

This poem cast a spell on me, starting off tamely enough as a kind of philosophical musing, taking us outside of time to a place where birth and death are somehow both nostalgically distanced and personally proximate.