Narrative Poetry: The Story in the Verse

Narrative poetry is the art of storytelling carried through rhythm and line. Unlike purely lyrical verse, which often lingers in emotion or image, narrative poetry has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is a story you can follow, but one told with music, precision, and voice.

Langston Hughes’ The Negro Speaks of Rivers shows how a single poem can tell not only one person’s journey but also the collective story of a people through the image of ancient waters. Gwendolyn Brooks’ The Anniad transforms the epic form into the struggles and triumphs of a young Black woman. Both demonstrate that poetry can carry the intimacy of personal voice while holding the weight of history.

What makes narrative poetry powerful is its ability to weave character, setting, and action while still keeping the rhythm alive. The verse becomes the vessel, moving the story forward, sometimes quickly, sometimes pausing on a single detail.

Narrative poetry reminds us that poems are not limited to fragments of feeling. They can hold entire worlds, speaking with the same strength and scope as novels and plays.

Book Review: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Riot

When Gwendolyn Brooks released Riot in 1969, America was already burning. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the year before had sparked uprisings across the country, including in Brooks’s home city of Chicago. Out of that fire came this slim but electrifying volume, a work that proves poetry can be both literature and weapon.

A Poem That Refuses Neutrality

At its heart, Riot is a long poem in three sections. It opens with the image of John Cabot, a white businessman “out of Wilmette,” who feels nothing but fear and disgust as he witnesses the uprisings in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods. Cabot represents a comfortable, complacent America suddenly forced to confront its own fractures. Brooks does not soften her gaze. The language is sharp, bitter, and unflinching.

In the second and third sections, Brooks pivots to the voices of Black Chicago itself. The poem moves with heat and rhythm, capturing both the chaos and the dignity of rebellion. Brooks refuses to reduce the uprisings to “crime” or “lawlessness.” Instead, she frames them as the inevitable eruption of a community pushed past endurance.

Form and Fire

Brooks’s craft in Riot is as striking as its politics. The poem shifts registers constantly, from biblical allusions to jazz-like riffs, from clipped modernist lines to passages that read almost like sermons. This movement mirrors the unrest itself: unpredictable, disorienting, but purposeful.

What stands out is how Brooks uses language to collapse distance between speaker and reader. The poem does not allow you to stay safe on the sidelines. You are inside it, pushed to choose where you stand.

More than fifty years later, Riot feels eerily contemporary. Its exploration of racial inequality, fear, and resistance could just as easily describe Ferguson, Minneapolis, or Philadelphia. Brooks foresaw the way America would continue to recycle its conflicts, and she put that cycle into words with devastating clarity.

This is not a comfortable book. It is not meant to be. But it is a necessary one, a reminder that poetry can confront power as directly as any protest sign, and that sometimes art’s role is not to soothe, but to unsettle.

Riot is both a time capsule and a live wire. It captures the rage and urgency of 1968 while continuing to speak to readers navigating protest and resistance today. For anyone who doubts poetry’s relevance in moments of crisis, Brooks’s Riot is the perfect corrective.