Story Telling

Write a poem which satisfies the following criteria:

1. The poem is in the past tense.
2. The poem is no more than thirty lines in length.
3. The poem is in the third person, about somebody (a protagonist) other than yourself, somebody colorful and vivid enough to make for interesting reading. The protagonist should be nonfictional (You might select one of the more eccentric people you remember from high school) unless you can, as Louis Simpson does in the poem "Caviar At the Funeral," create a convincing fictional character.
4. The poem should not be end-rhymed.
5. The title of the poem should be the name of the protagonist.
6. The main body of the poem should present a scene (as in a movie) dramatizing a telling incident in the life of the protagonist. The scene might well center around some kind of initiation experience, certainly around some experience from which the protagonist learned something important about himself/herself, about the people around him/her, or about both. (Experiences which resulted in disillusionment are often particularly suitable for such ultra-short stories.)
7. The background of the main character or characters should be sketched in my means of digressions.
8. The scene should show the protagonist faced with a situation in which he/she must make a decision.
9. From the decision which the protagonist makes, the reader should gain some insight into the protagonist.
10. From the way in which the author presents the scene, the reader should get a sense of the author's judgment of the character.
11. This judgment should be very tactfully suggested, by innuendo, through hints and through the author's tone of voice., not blatantly stated.
12. Though told with great economy, the story should contain enough physical details and images to enable the reader to vividly picture the story's central theme.