The Concept of Clunky Narratives
A clunky narrative is one that intentionally shows its seams. The line doesn’t quite scan, the register shifts mid-stanza, or a traditional form gets forcefully stretched around a subject it was never originally built to hold. While conventional editing structures try to smooth that friction away, Skendong Poetry intentionally keeps it in.
That is a deliberate creative bet, not an accident. Fluency can easily flatten a poem—it lets a reader glide right past the hard, jagged edges of a subject instead of forcing them to stumble and take notice. A sudden jump-cut line, an awkward rhyme, or a register that lurches violently from biblical prophecy to a bitcoin joke are not failures of control. They are the exact friction points where the poem forces you to slow down and actively look at what it is doing.
Where it Comes From
This clunkiness is never uniform; the register is chosen per poem to leave the underlying machinery visible. In “Firewave,” the text tightens into a villanelle, circling its environmental crisis until the repetitive form itself collapses at the end under the sheer weight of destruction. In contrast, a piece on gentrification like “Erst” stays loose and observational, stepping aside to let the items on a local restaurant menu do the arguing. In “The Bad Sentient,” exploring a rogue AI, the text pivots entirely into a sharp, comic sonnet because the digital news cycle is already halfway to farce.
Poet, critic, and translator Jeffrey Wainwright recognizes this specific trajectory, noting that the success of the narrative method relies on how the clunky difficulty of the verse is balanced by a sparky, jump-cut delivery. It relies on a quick-footed structure that embraces disruption as its primary creative identity.
What It Is Not
This approach is not sloppiness dressed up in a fancy name. A clunky narrative must actively earn its friction—an awkward line has to achieve something a smooth, predictable one couldn’t, or it is simply a bad line. The true test of the work is never “does this feel unpolished,” but rather “does that lack of polish carry actual intellectual weight.”
Why It Matters Here
Manchester’s own modern poetry tradition—shaped by the Manchester Writing School and figures like Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy—has never been precious about allowing blunt, plain speech to disrupt a poem. Clunky narratives extend that lineage into the digital age.
This is storytelling reimagined as a space of transformation. It is writing that explicitly refuses to pretend that the world it describes—whether dealing with localized AI anxieties, a canal-side wine bar in Ancoats, or a tragic headline out of Gaza—is any tidier, cleaner, or more resolved than it actually is.