I have read a few online poetry critiques where the critiquer says right off:

"I don't usually read poems this long, but..."

Should poets be concerned about the length of their poems even if they feel the quality is sustained throughout the duration?

I have read some great poems that were at least four pages long (Mark Doty comes to mind here).

I hate to think that people would be dismissive of work without reading it simply because it looks too long.

Should one avoid writing lengthy poems out of concern that the length will deter the reader from delving into it?

Christin

In a workshop you read differently; it is in many ways work to read in a workshop, because you are on the look-out for errors, things that could improve - and gems that need to be preserved. You don't read in quite the same way when you just read a poem for appreciation. So what people are saying when they state something about the length of your poem is that it seems you have requested a large amount of work from them.

Notice, though, that if the ball gets rolling by someone's first critique which states that he didn't find all too many nits, that allows later workshoppers to make a less thorough read and to just point out occasional errors and to look at the general picture. For my own part, I usually don't read long poems posted in a workshop until I've seen at least one crit of that kind. Part of it is also because I've seen too many N-page poems (mostly other places than the 'Sphere) where the writer clearly has put less work into than an honest poet does writing a sonnet.


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Svein Olav

.. another life

A long poem is a noble but difficult thing. Workshops tend to be hostile because it takes an extraordinary amount of time to critique one well, but don't let that stop you. I would say it is hard in the contempoarary world to imagine a good long poem that is not a narrative, but I suppose it could be possible...

no one has ever complained that a poem is too short.

Well, I have...but maybe I am the first. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

Christin

Dr. Johnson on Paradise Lost: "No man has ever complained that it was too short."

yup, that was what i was trying to remember...

A poem, to me, is not too long if it maintains my interest and everything it says is relevant to it's goal. And the last part's negotiable, as long as it maintains my interest. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

I wouldn't worry about length, just about saying what needs to be said without redundancy or rambling.

Jerry

Voltaire apologized about the length of a letter he wrote: "I'm sorry this is so long. I didn't have time to be brief."

>> Dr. Johnson on Paradise Lost: "No man has ever complained that it was too short." <<

A direct result of the pernicious practice of paying poets by the word. Originally, "Paradise Lost" was a haiku -- one of the earliest in the English language....

Satan, Adam, Eve,
what a hullaballoo! They
made a lot of fuss.

But when Milton was informed he would be paid a mere 12 pence for this monumental effort (@ 1 penny per word), he exclaimed, "Screw that, I'm writing a goddam epic!"

Ideally, poets would be paid to shut up, so that whatever they wrote would be deducted from their pay. The business of poetry would then resemble the business of life as conceptualized by the Greeks: "the only thing better than dying young is never to have been born at all."

But, seriously, the greatest poems in a tradition are always going to be long poems. The modernist preference for short lyrics is, in perspective, a concession to the necessarily fragmentary nature of modern experience. Pieces of an exploded puzzle.

Well, this post is already way too long...... the meter is running!

As a friend of mine said it: If there's a hell for funny people, you'll be burning long and well!

What I quoted from you must be the funniest thing said on the Internet this year.


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Svein Olav

.. another life

[This message has been edited by Solan (edited April 17, 2002).]

The modernist preference for short lyrics is, in perspective, a concession to the necessarily fragmentary nature of modern experience. Pieces of an exploded puzzle.


I sometimes think we overplay the idea that modern (modernist?) poets have a preference for short lyrics. A great deal (most?) of the poetry written in English in the past - say - four hundred years has amounted to "short lyrics" - or, to stretch things a little, meditative poems of around fifty or sixty lines. A long poem, as Michael Juster remarks further up this thread, is "a noble but difficult thing", and for this reason alone will always be a comparative rarity.

Also, the idea that "modern experience" has a "necessarily fragmentary nature" which somehow obliges poets to offer the "Pieces of an exploded puzzle" is also questionable. In every age, writers - all human beings - have made what sense they could of their experiences. Without, for example, the unquestioned and unquestionable props of established religion (I speak of the UK), men and women seek out other sources of meaning and coherence. Nor should we assume that people in the past did not find their experiences confusing or fragmentary: they did, and it is easy to show this. What is more, beneath what may appear to be their seamless surfaces, the "great" long poems of previous centuries (I would include the plays of Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries in this) often conceal - and sometimes imperfectly, at that - all manner of fault-lines and fragmentarinesses.

And what about the following poems, all composed in the past eighty years? (To tease, I omit the names of the authors and give the titles alphabetically.) All run to several pages, sometimes to scores of pages or whole volumes: "A Furnace", "A Letter from Li Po", "Anathémata", "Auroras of Autumn", "Autumn Journal", "Briggflatts", "Correspondences", "Funeral Music", "His Dog and His Pilgrim", "Idaho Out", "Implements in Their Places", "In Parentheses", "Lachrimae", "Mercian Hymns", "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction", "Paterson", "Preludes for Memnon", "The Cantos", "The Crystal", "The Donkey’s Ears", "The Four Quartets", "The Maximus Poems", "The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy", "The Sea and the Mirror", "The Sleeping Lord", "The Waste Land", "Time in the Rock", "Valhalla".

All of these long poems were conceived as integrated texts. Each writer adopted his or her own approach to sense-making. Fragmentariness on the page does not necessarily imply incoherence: even a fragmented account of experiences deemed by the writer to be fragmented may, by the miraculous "framing" of art, be rendered into aesthetic coherence. To quote anonymously again, our experiences may well seem fractured to us until we "mend them into art".

Anyway, to put it in less grandiose terms, I just wonder if we sometimes complain too much about these things!

Clive Watkins

Clive,

thanks for correcting my silly generalization which is indeed a dubious critical cliche.

I do think there is an element of truth in it, but it would take more than a sound-byte to work that out. Just as long poems don't fare well on these boards, neither do long arguments.

Anyway, here's my sound-byte genealogy of long poems:

Dante: fully integrated
Shakespeare: consciously disintegrating
Milton: wilfully integrated (religious tour-de-force in a secularizing age)
Eliot: juxtaposition of unintegrated, unintegratable fragments ("these fragments have I shored against my ruins")

Maybe the more telling distinction would be, not that between long & short poems, but that between narrative & lyric. "The Waste Land," I think Pound quipped, is "the longest lyric poem in the language" (or something like that).

>> Anyway, to put it in less grandiose terms, I just wonder if we sometimes complain too much about these things! <<

Hey, I ain't complaining, just wondering about our interesting situation. To be in a fragmented phase of a creative process is by no means necessarily a bad thing. It might be transitional to a higher-level integration. "solve et coagula" -- the alchemists' method -- is always the way.

>> In the world of forms Nature's "mode of operation" consists of a continuous rhythm of "dissolutions" and "coagulations," or of disintegrations and formations, so that the dissolution of any formal entity is but the preparation for a new conjunction between a forma and its materia. Nature acts like Penelope who, to rid herself of unworthy suitors, unwound at night the wedding garment which she had woven during the day. In this way too the alchemist works. Following the adage solve et coagula, he dissolves the imperfect coagulations of the soul, reduces the latter to its materia, and crystallizes it anew in a nobler form. << [Titus Burckhardt, "Alchemy"]

Seeing things as phases of a creative process rather than as ideological stakes in the ground is sometimes helpful.


[This message has been edited by AE (edited April 17, 2002).]

I wonder if the relative paucity of long poems in recent centuries isn't related to the rise of fiction as a different way of presenting massive, fully integrated interpretations of life. Readers are no longer used to reading stories told in verse (and, sadly, few of them do, unless they are assigned to read the poems for a class). Without an audience, how many poets will be tempted to write epics? Poetry has had to take over the one field that it does better than anything else can: the intense, condensed vision of life in language in which every word counts. Song is the only area that comes close, and it is arguably just poetry with music. I don't think short poetry is necessarily fragmented at all. A diamond is not fragmented just because it is cut into facets that reflect the light.

To move from discussion of the classics to discussion of the personal.. I wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience to mine. I've been writing poetry off and on for most of my life, but it is only within the past couple of years that anything longer than 50 lines or so has come from my pen.

I never consciously attempted to write longer poems. It just started to happen. I have considered it to be, perhaps, an indication that my voice is maturing. Or maybe I just have more to say. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

Anyway, I was just curious as to whether this is common.

Victoria Gaile

There's a place for both the long and the short, and sometimes a line or two can speak volumes in a way that is not at all fragmentary. "Paradise Lost" may be Milton's masterpiece, but he's reached a lot more people with "On His Blindness."

My two favorite poems by W.S. Merwin are his longest, "The Folding Cliffs" (a book-length epic set in 19th century Kauai) and his shortest, "Elegy" (which reads in its entirety: "Who would I show it to").