Allen Ginsberg told the story of his family’s laundry business in Newark, N.J. The family had immigrated from Russia during the pogroms of the 1880s.
The business model required a horse. The clean laundry went out to customers by horse and wagon. When Ginsberg’s grandfather Pincus was young, his job was to carry the laundry from the wagon to the customer’s door.
A horse was a big investment, and the family decided to buy from a fellow immigrant from the old country.
The first horse looked healthy but had epilepsy and died. The second refused to pull the wagon. It would lie down, rather than work.
The family feared ruin when it discovered, after money changed hands, that the third horse was blind. But the blind horse could hold the route in memory. The horse didn’t have to be told when to turn or stop.
Ginsberg’s point in telling the story is that all families have such stories. As they are told, generation after generation, all but the most telling details are lost. The story of a complex life is reduced almost to an abstraction.
Ginsberg thought Charles Reznikoff’s early poems were brilliant examples. Each was a sweeping novel told as a short narrative poem.
Reznikoff’s “She sat by the window,” which is about a woman facing an arranged marriage, is an example. It has setting, manners, character and a dramatic situation within a dozen lines.
Ginsberg recommended this exercise to his students:
• Make a list of 10 stories that were told by family members.
• See if you can turn them into short narratives, remembering William Carlos Williams’s maxim that one vivid phrase is better than pages of inert writing.
• Sources: “Allen Ginsberg with Marie Syrkin on Charles Reznikoff,” recorded July 2, 1987, is part of the Naropa University Digital Archives and is available here:
http://archives.naropa.edu/digital/collection/p16621coll1/id/2634/
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