ABSTRACT
First, Chapter 10 considers entries under narrative poetry in successive editions of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2nd 1974 to 4th 2012), which suggest an increasing but relatively untheorized interest. Rather than an opposition of ‘lyric’ and ‘narrative’, the relevance of J.T. Fraser’s model of different temporalities to both concepts is proposed and illustrated by a discussion of Samuel Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight (acknowledging Katherine Robinson’s exploration). Second, the chapter compares Marjorie Perloff’s discussion (1982) of poems by John Ashbery and others to this book’s discussion of novels by Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster, demonstrating that ‘postmodern’ poetry, like prose, invokes Fraser’s temporalities of the extended umwelt to be ‘meaningful’. Finally, the chapter makes a close study of the temporal texture of poems by two Australian poets, Louis Armand (a ‘postmodern narrative poem’) and Antigone Kefala (narrative ‘fragments’ of complex temporality).
