Narrative Poetry

I like the idea of using a narrative within my poetry. Of maybe using a narrative to link the poems together in some kind of sequence.

The poems that I have written so far this term are in a strongly female voice. They are about loss, fear and regret. About what happens in life - we get older, lose our parents, go in and out of relationships, get stressed out, cope, don't cope...

The charcter in my poems (who may not always be the same character but could be) suffers loss of a parent, she muses on difficult past relationships, she meets up with an old flame and this makes her feel regret about the past (the grass is always greener syndrome)and finally she starts losing the plot until she is driven to consider taking her own life. As the reder we don't know whether she actually did - this is left up to us to imagine. Personally I am torn between wanting an end to her unhappiness and wanting a fairytale happy ever after type ending where she has a sudden epiphany, realises how beautiful the world is and bounces back bigger and better etc. etc.

Narrative photography

I am beginning to feeel the stress and strain of too much work this term and blog entries have suffered as a consequence.

I am getting to grips with poetry, kind of ok with fiction, behind with critical studies (through no fault of my own) but floundering hopelessly in a visual sea with no life raft in sight.

The cause of my angst is a wooly brief that involves narrative and photography/film. It's not that I don't have ideas. I have plenty, too may in fact. Some of them too ambitious or big for me to realise. No, what I am struggling with is to bring narrative to my ideas. Why I don't know - it should be easy. Other people don't seem to have a problem with it. The trouble is that some of the ideas that I tried that did have narrative didn't work visually and the photos that I like best don't (for me) seem to fit into the narrative framework.

Help!