by Nerys Williams

from Poetry Wales, Autumn 2009

Writing 'long' poems in an age that has a capacious appetite for the image, a diminished attention span and a desire for the quick sound bite might seem counterintuitive, if not spectacularly naive. Turn to the guidelines of any poetry competition and you will find (more often than not) the restrictor: 'Judges will accept entries of poems of up to 40 lines'. Short poems valiantly secure a space for poetry in public spaces; Poems on the Underground, Metro, BART and DART offer a welcome imaginative respite to any traveller. But the poetry world is not full of master haiku writers; Zen brevity can quickly become anticipated Zen epiphany as the commuter minds the gap. Thankfully an alternate vein of poetry displays a need to challenge the perceived aesthetics of what is marketable or desirable. This is not to argue that this poetry operates somehow outside of culture. But the way poetry can respond to, incorporate or assimilate the world often aims to challenge market expectations and revive expectations.

We are perhaps most aware of a poem's longer ambition as the epic or as Ezra Pound (himself paraphrasing Rudyard Kipling) refers as 'the tale of the tribe'. Specific to Wales, the term epic may well remind one of the historical narrative accounts of Aneurin and Taliesin. In considering the twentieth-century longer poetic work there remains the modernist echo of a failure to achieve a poem of epic proportions. One need only consider Pound's cry in The Cantos 'I cannot make it cohere' (Canto CXV) or T.S. Eliot's marked psychological disconnect in The Waste Land: 'Nothing—I can connect nothing with nothing'. It might seem that the longer modern work is doomed to failure, fraught with ambitions which for a vein of Anglo-American modernism are complicated by specific political and cultural agendas. So is the long poem a monstrosity? Can the long poem be a test of the poet's sincerity and the reader's patience? Are long poems now anti-epics eschewing ideas of cultural programming for an embrace of failure, error and discontinuity? Why indeed do poets still bother writing long poems? America perhaps offers some clues if not answers, and here I want to map aspects of American twentieth century and contemporary poetic practice which provide some possibilities to the problems of the long poem.

The long poem has tended to be viewed as a narrative construction generated by the idealisation of an individual work. This reading of the extended poem would suggest that it is an anachronistic genre, largely unpalatable to the contemporary reader. But when we turn to longer modern works we are faced with texts which challenge quick or clean genre categories. Louis Zukofsky's lifework "A" could be read as partly a documentation of the depression in 1930s America, an interrogation of poetry's relationship to music, a study of homophonic translation, the relationship between poetry and daily life and the testimony of familial relationships, as well as offering a compendium of found materials, literary, political and philosophical reflections. "A'''s twenty-four sections, or books within a book, offer humorous and barbed vignettes which alter the tempo and orchestration of the work (the musical inflection here is deliberate since Zukofsky's key guide through his lifework is J.S. Bach). Take for example this wonderfully acerbic section from A-8 which includes a pompous correspondence from publisher to the poet:

Most honourable Sir
We perused your MS
with boundless delight. And
we hurry to swear by our ancestors
we have never read any other
that equals its mastery.
Were we to publish your work
we could never presume again on
our public and name to print books of a standard
not up to yours.
For we cannot imagine
that the next ten thousand years
will offer its ectype.
We must therefore refuse
your work that shines as it were in the sky
and beg you a thousand times
to pardon our fault
which impairs but our own offices.
                                    'Publishers'

This is a rejection slip of monumental intonation. Key to Zukofsky's long poem is the ideal of the book, the extended work which can enfold material without reducing the reader's awareness that here is work produced. His long poem in effect displays its own labour. It is also very easy to forget that Zukofsky's contemporary William Carlos Williams conceived many of his most anthologised poems ('The Red Wheel Barrow' and 'This is Just to Say' for example) as numbered elements of part of an extensive serial poem collected under the title Spring and All (1923).

Here perhaps I stumble upon another possibility: the long poem as literally (to paraphrase Whitman) 'containing multitudes'. That is the long poem as a series of smaller poems. Central to this idea of a serial poem is a sense of accumulation, of the poem as units which though their separate elements reinforce an argument or position without insisting on the poem becoming mere rhetoric. An element of poetic writing which American poet George Oppen referred to as 'a discrete series'. His extended serial poem Of Being Numerous (1968) is perhaps the most famous reflection of how to address the public without assuming the directive of the rhetorician. In a way Oppen's poem is addressing the loss of the collective voice and the imprint of what he gestures to as the 'Occurrence, a part / Of an infinite series / shipwreck of the singular'. English-born Mina Loy's serial poem Love Songs to Joannes (1917) takes seriality as song and in this way the longer work becomes an aspectual response to sexuality, gender, experimentation and the delineation of desire. The first four sections of what would eventually emerge as a thirty-four song cycle were published in Others: A Magazine of the New Verse in 1915 to considerable critical outrage. As a result Loy's reputation was established in America before her arrival there in 1916. Alfred Kreymborg recalls that Loy's 'clinical frankness and sardonic conclusions wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation grammar, syntax and punctuation ... drove our critics into furious despair. The utter nonchalance in revealing the secret of sex was denounced as nothing less than lewd.'

The opening song has a grotesque, alluring and intricate beauty; one is reminded how Loy herself described her work: 'My book is wonderful—it frightens me'. Desire is presented as sonorous, elliptical and animalistic: 'Spawn of Fantasies / Silting the appraisable / Pig Cupid his rosy snout / Rooting erotic garbage / "Once upon a Time.''' Inverting any storybook expectations, Kreymborg asserts that for the critics of the time the key indignity of Love Songs to Joannes was its reduction of 'eroticism to the sty' and moreover 'to do so without verbs, sentences structure was even more offensive'. Loy's almost Sapphic song cycle refutes the need for narrative retelling and asserts that female desire is amorphous, challenging any sustained quest for form. Songs for Joannes contends in song eight: 'Come to me. There is something / I have got to tell you and I can't tell / Something taking shape / Something that has a new name / A new dimension / A new use / A new illusion'. Indeed one senses in Loy's cycle that the cryptic and elliptical are forms of hermetic protection, that disclosure is impossible. Read in this way the condensed pattern of Loy's songs become a ballast against instant interpretation, gratification and disposability. In song twenty-nine a desultory relationship between Darwinian thought and linguistic mastery is suggested:

Evolution    fall foul of
Sexual equality
Prettily miscalculate
Similitude

Unnatural selection
Breed such sons and daughters
As shall jibber at each other
Uninterpretable cryptograms

A poet from the San Francisco Bay Area, Robert Duncan offers us a further possibility of seriality itself as a long poem over a poet's career. During the course of his life Duncan developed a sequence of poems entitled Passages, some of which were numbered, spread across different volumes: Bending the Bow (1968), Ground Work I: Before the War (1984), and Ground Work II: in the Dark (1987). Readers are encouraged to understand Passages not only as a lifework, but also as a compendium of correspondences and exchanges with an imaginary literary community. The inclusiveness of Duncan's poetry enables the multiple voicing of enquiry and debate spanning literary, gnostic, historical and cultural sources. Passages becomes a space in which all the available voices interact as a rhetorical seance, a composition which Duncan termed 'grand collage'. Joseph Conte approaches Duncan's open field poetics as an 'infinite serial form', suggesting that the Passages sequence and their movement are limitless. While no evident hierarchy within Passages is asserted to voice, memory, history or culture, there is a struggle which is enacted in their procession and development, which can moreover be allied to Duncan's proposal that the quest for form is inherently one of conflict.

Turning to Bending the Bow 'Passages 24', which falls in those passages which Duncan identified as written 'of war', one can appreciate the dynamic of the work as a form of wandering momentum, roaming irregularly, and with no apparent itinerary. In Passages this serpentine wandering is used as a strategy to bypass the problems of an authoritative rhetorical performance. We are led into a literary mausoleum 'Down this dark corridor, "this passage," the poet reminds me.' Ideals of poetic mentorship are addressed:

and now that Eliot is dead, Williams and H.D. dead,
Ezra alone of my old masters, alive,     let me
          acknowledge Eliot was one of them,     I was
one of his,                  whose "History has many
          cunning passages, contrived corridors" (78)

The path or passage shown becomes an architectural site of literary history and a labyrinth of artistic dead ends. Passages indicate that the destination is unknown and moreover cannot be anticipated. Overall the propulsion of the Passages sequence exceeds the boundary of more than one volume of poetry to create an expansive and liberating site that is redeployed as an enabling form. As Duncan puts it in 'Often I am permitted to return to a Meadow' poetry creates a space that is 'a place of first permission, / everlasting omen of what is.'

Within the broad range of current poetic practice, the long poem's appeal seems not to have diminished, and the form in its multiple adaptations continues to flourish. Again rather than relying upon a construction that organises the writing around the perceptions of a single speaker or coherent story, contemporary poets use a variety of formal strategies to sustain the momentum of the long poem. Frequently the extended poem is divided into a sequence of individual chapters, a numerical structure of short lyrics, irregular verse cycles or collage sequences. Also collaborative writing practices provide the possibility of adapting the long poem into an extended discussion between two or more poets. From one perspective the inclusiveness of the long poem enables a sustainable form of poetic thinking that shorter abbreviated individual lyrics cannot comfortably encompass. One might even be tempted to adopt Lyn Hejinian's suggestion that poetry is 'a language of inquiry.' The possibility of inclusiveness in the long poem can encourage an eclectic incorporation of fields as diverse as continental philosophy, linguistics, aesthetics, phenomenology, politics and psychology.

Juliana Spahr is a poet whose work frequently embraces found material and web based information for testing out political positions and responses. In her 'Poetics Statement' Spahr admits that she loves 'reading all those optimistic things that people say about poetry'. But far from offering defmitive solutions she finds that 'poetry doesn't really work that way for me. For me poetry is a troubled and troubling genre, full of desire and anger and support and protest, primarily useful because it helps me think ... My theory is that poetry helps me think because it is a genre that is so open right now. There are so many rules about how to write poetry, that there might as well be not any at all.' Spahr's collection this connection of everyone with lungs (2005) is a long poem divided into two sections simply entitled 'poem written after september 11 2001' and 'poem written from November 30 2002 to march 27 2003'. Inherent to Spahr's speculation is the pressure to give form to information regarding 9-11 and the war in Iraq. Her long poem creates a space of duration and process which moves it beyond the drive to epiphany. At points the extent of information is overwhelming and her work questions how can one formulate military topical knowledge to create connections with individual experience:

On this dark earth, some say the thing most lovely is the thirty thousand assault troops from Britain today joining the sixty two thousand from the US mobilized in the past ten days and further thousand from the US mobilized in the past ten days and a further sixty thousand from the US on their way.

On this black earth, over the coal-black earth, some say all of this and more.

But I say it's whatever you love best.

I say it is the persons you love.

Spahr's long poem develops to create an important human ecosystem and attempts to make relationships between poetic text, human body and world. This is in fact 'this connection' of everyone with lungs:

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands
and the space around the hands and the space of the room and
the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space
of the neighbourhoods nearby and the space of the nations and the      space
of the continents and the islands and the space of the oceans and the
space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphere in and out.

Poem written from November 30, 2002 to March 2003

The juxtaposition between information regarding military hardware and the human body creates a form of collective doubt which is yet hopeful of intervention and change. Her work attempts to address once more the problem poised by Oppen in the threat of the 'shipwreck of the singular'.

The plurality of forms Spahr hints at as necessary to our understanding of what 'poetry' now means is important to approaching the formal ambitions of some recent poetry. There are generative and procedural longer works such as Lyn Hejinian's autobiography/prose poem My Life (1987) which follows a strict pattern. Written initially at the age of thirty-seven, the original volume contained thirty seven sections each thirty seven lines long. Hejinian considers it as an ongoing work and as a consequence when the volume was republished eight years later she extended each of the original sections by eight lines, adding a further eight new sections. Laynie Browne's collection Daily Sonnets (2007) presents a dialogue with earlier twentieth century experimentations with the sonnet form (such as Ted Berrigan's sonnet sequences). In Browne's words her one hundred and fifty approach 'all mental states, traps, games and assemblages. My sonnets are an approachable unruly gathering. What the poems have in common is that they practice permeability'. Browne importantly suggests that while retaining a distinct lineated form there exists an interdependence between the sonnets; here we are perhaps not far from the architectural ambition inherent in Duncan's Passages. As a busy mother of two the warping of the fourteen-lined cell provides a liberation in the mapping out of duration and the everyday. Her titles alone suggest this fracturing of the sonnet form: 'Half Sonnet +1', 'Two fourteenths Sonnet' and 'After-Shower Sonnet'. The world of the kindergarten humorously informs the making of the poetry—take for example the questioning in Sonnet 25: 'Why do I require these sudden / Tablets of concentration / She made poetry sound like a playdate / Squeezing her wrought hands'. Browne adds in her afterward to the book that 'I think of the modern sonnet as an increment of time within a frame. Something that often physically fits into a little rectangle (but not in thought) ... this book is an invitation'.

Hejinian's distinction between the epic and saga enables us to approach the tensions inherent in writing long poems. She asserts that while 'the goals of the epic and the saga modes are not always mutually exclusive what's at stake for the epic is its culture's story of itself, its explanatory and enabling narrative "the tale of the tribe.'" By contrast Hejinian adds that 'the aims of a saga are less easily summarised except negatively: in being about genealogy (the spread of generations and their interactions and dispersal) rather than lineage (the validation of inherited rights or proof or lack thereof) it has multiple focal points' (in the 2008 collective autobiography The Grand Piano: Part 6). This indication of multiple points of view in time, even disagreements or contrariness in the saga, is a useful approach to our final example of contemporary long poem practice—the collaborative work.

The collaborative poem is an inclusive form that provides an expansive canvas for witty and philosophical meditations upon everyday events. Multi-authored long poems allow the writers to make comparisons, creating a dialogue with other writers and responding to other readings. Contesting voices provoke humorous disagreements that in turn animate the texture of the investigation. Formulations of life histories, memory and the representation of perception can be addressed and collaboration often creates a site of transgression, questions ideas of assimilation even also as basic as a creative kick start. One could gesture to collaboration as correspondence, letters between poets, work that is epistolary and concerning exchange of ideas. These points of agreement, context and companionship come into a further perspective in Leslie Scalapino and Hejinian's collaboration Sight (1999).

The volume works as a site of accretion—ideas of distillation, exchange and engagement dominate as well as questions posed by one poet to the other. Hejinian and Scalapino's introduction gives a full claim to the aims of the co-authored work generally interested in 'how experience happens'. By focusing on sight both poets question concepts of seeing in the world, ideas of participation, acknowledgement and the process of description. The signing of individual sections throughout the volume in sequence promotes the idea that Sight is a 'dialogic work.' As a project, it was enacted by fax and though there were some strategies of editing overall, Scalapino adds: 'Both of us noticed that, in trying to pick up on what the other was doing in the last instalment, we would tend to take hold of it, repeat it in some way, then make a statement about it that would sometimes sound pretentious, as if we were giving a conclusion or disagreeing with the other person in a dogmatic manner.'

Through their long poems and extended works American poets offer a further interpretation and even transgression of epic ideals in poetic writing. This broad category of poetry written under the aegis of the 'long poem' is not necessarily an alternative to lyricism but a supplement to its representations of dailiness, desire and politics. The long poem provides a venue for an extended examination of how, as William Carlos Williams proposed 'a poet thinks with his poem'. Moreover this extended opportunity offers another perspective on ideas of poetic knowledge. As the UK poet Allen Fisher suggests in his extended work Brixton Fractals (1985), poetry often acts by recombining information and making linkages between forms which may at first seem failing structures:

My knowledge of the world exists validly only in the moment
when I am transforming it ... Discontinuities, wave breaks, cell
divisions, collapsed structures, boundaries between tissue kinds:
where inner workings are unknown the only reliable
participations are imaginative.

About the Author
Nerys Williams lectures at University College Dublin. She is the author of Reading Error, a book on contemporary American poetics.

Poetry Wales
Bridgend, Wales

Editor: Zoë Skoulding