I was so happy when Naugatuck River Review accepted my poem “The Widow Orders a Mai-Tai at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.” This journal specializes in narrative poetry. Their website defines their sense of what makes a “narrative poem.” They seek “poems that tell a story, or have a strong sense of story” within a compressed set of lines. They also seek a “strong emotional core and rich language.” In this issue, a collection of sixty poems by sixty diverse poets, this is, indeed, what I discovered. I was especially moved by–and inspired by–a Shakespearean sonnet called “Why I like metal detecting” by Di Slaney, a British poet, who creates a strong narrator within fourteen lines and uses the traditional turn to stunning effect. On the facing page, the poem by Geo. Staley of Portland, Oregon, called “Banking at 6 and 7”, was not in a conventional form, but it, too, used the last twenty syllables or so to invert expectations, and, in the case of this reader, caused tears of the best kind. Do take a look at this magazine, now in its 13th year, (copies can be ordered through the link above) if you are looking for a short poem with real narrative punch.

The majority of my work in poetry arises from my lived experience. Perhaps I could say it comes from the stories I tell about my own life, my own thoughts about the world. “The Widow Orders a Mai-Tai at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel”, however, (and the series it is part of) are pure fiction, with a central character who sprang full-blown onto the page. The only point of contact between life and art is that I did spend a memorable morning eating breakfast on the verandah of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel–a real-life location from the Roaring Twenties–on Waikiki Beach. I was happy to be there, not as a widow, but in the company of my husband, Tim.

This issue of Naugatuck River Review has helped me understand, in the most pleasurable way, what narrative poetry is and does (and clearly, it does not have to be fiction, as it happened to be in my case, to be a narrative!)

Happy reading and writing! Leslie