I dislike characters, and the modern architecture of 'characterisation'. I'm also sceptical when people assert the presence of a 'speaker' in every poem.
Precisely because I feel that scepticism, I figured I'd benefit from writing something more characterful. The Mountain, After is, more-or-less, a dramatic monologue. Very crudely, that's a poem featuring:
- First-person speech wholly in one voice...
- addressed to one listener or several listeners who aren't the poem's actual audience/readership...
- and revealing as it goes on--often through slips and asides as much as through explicit statements--something of the speaker's inner life and circumstances.
The paradigmatic English example for many today is Browning's 'My Last Duchess', routinely tossed into teaching anthologies in part so that the idea of the dramatic monologue gets an airing.
The Mountain, After uses blank verse: a five-beat rising line (iambic pentameter) with neither regular rhyme nor regular alliteration. Unusually, in my writing, it contains no formal experiments, no breaks from this pattern. As in Deep-Step and Twice-Mortal, I sometimes let a Sievers D or E type half-line form the first two beats at the start of a line (see section 2 in this post).
What about (spits) content?
I was musing on one of the fruitful facets of the sword and sorcery tradition: the outsider status of its protagonists. What about, I thought, someone who's an insider until they aren't?
So I wrote a short story in which someone tells of that experience, while only half understanding it, to people of the new dispensation. That's The Mountain, After. I set it in the same universe as CWKB, though earlier in time.
Since this's me, as promised, there's also robot action.
I've just finished the first contiguous draft of The Mountain, After. It'll need some redrafting work.
I hope/plan to release both Deep-Step and Twice-Mortal and The Mountain, After within the next few months, probably quite close together, premiering both on Twitch as usual.