I think most people know what a biopic is. But have you ever heard of a biopoem?
The biopoem is the verse equivalent of a biopic. Here’s my own definition of a biopic:
A biopic is a feature-length film that tells the story of a real, famous person’s life, including the full arc of that individual’s story from youth to death.
To me, a biopoem also summarizes the life of a well-known person. But a biopoem is only one-to-four pages long.
Clearly, there’s a big difference between a biopic and a biopoem. A biopic takes somewhere between an hour and a half to three and a half hours to watch. That’s enough time to show many scenes from a lifetime. A poem, though, takes only several minutes to read. A biopoem is more like a quick drawing, a sketch that stretches across the fourth dimension, time.
The idea of a biopoem will be clearer if I give an example. One of my favorite biopoems is “Life and Times, Erik Satie,” by Jack Marshall.
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| Poet Jack Marshall (1936– ) |
“Life and Times: Erik Satie” doesn’t attempt to summarize an entire biography. Instead, Jack Marshall cherry-picks moments from Satie’s life that typify the composer’s temperament. One example is the comment Satie made to his friend Claude Debussy right after the debut performance of one of Debussy’s masterpieces:
After the premiere of “La Mer,” Satie murmured
“Cher ami, there was a little bit
between half past ten and a quarter to eleven, I thought,
terrific.”
This episode in the poem is not a fully described scene, though it does have an implied setting: presumably a concert hall in Paris, around 1900. Jack Marshall doesn’t bother to describe the setting, but lets the reader reconstruct it based on a few bits of information. But even that quick snapshot masterfully gives the reader a taste of Satie’s eccentricity, his wit, and also his exacting personality.
Another section of “Life and Times, Erik Satie” talks about the composer’s grooming habits:
… bathing, which he never did, but scrubbed
methodically—each week a different part—his body with pumice stone.
“It’s cleaner and goes further, dear lady, than soap.”
Here Jack Marshall tells us all we need to know about Satie’s antisocial but highly original character. And Satie’s biting sense of humor.
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| Composer Erik Satie |
Once, when a fee for music to accompany a sports illustration was refused
by the fur-coated hypochondriac Firebird, Stravinsky, as too low,
it was offered to Satie, who refused it
as too high. … In the end
Satie was pacified by a suitably low fee.
I love that last sentence! It communicates both the sadness and irony in Satie’s fate. Even though there’s never a dramatic dialogue in “Erik Satie, Life and Times,” unlike a biopic, readers end up satisfied by the end of the poem that they know what sets that composer apart from all others.
So, what can we learn about the successful biopoem from Jack Marshall’s work?
- The writer has to choose a subject who has a story, identity, or destiny unique enough that it can be distilled in a few pages.
- The poet has to be choosy about picking incidents or quotes from their subject’s life that spotlight that person’s individuality.
- The author has to keep the language taut, crisp, and imaginative at the same time.
- It works well to sprinkle in comedy and/or tragedy when jotting down a full life.
- It can be useful to use actual quotes in a biopoem, as long as they’re not already trite or well-known citations.
- The setting or context of an event can be inferred by the reader, with only a few hints from the poet.
I hope this brief summary of the brief biopoem will inspire others to attempt this genre. It might seem like a narrow space to cultivate, but there are delicious fruits to be grown there.
A few biopoems I greatly enjoy:
Jack Marshall: “Life and Times, Erik Satie” from Arriving on the Playing Fields of Paradise
Cornelius Eady, “Chuck Berry,” from The Autobiography of a Jukebox
Robert Penn Warren, “Homage to Theodore Dreiser,” from Selected Poems, 1923–1975
and may I recommend my own, “For Chaim Soutine,” from my book The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle
