[Quincy Lehr]

Jill--

I think the forty-pager is more or less complete, and I don't so much know if it's a gender thing so much as a matter of my own almost perverse levels of ambition... though that may have something to do with it. While I'd say that I know plenty of very accomplished poets of both genders, for reasons of broad socializations, us lot tend to be the heaven-stormers (Rick and Nemo both have forthcoming very long poems in book form), which certain (by no means all!) of the women have moments of self-doubt that are at times a bit baffling for the likes of me, revolving (if I may perhaps blithely psychologize) around seeming presumptuous, perhaps. "Who am I to win this contest/gain this praise/etc.?" I think we of the male persuasion tend to think, "Only runner-up? What the %#^&? And come on, that review was only two paragraphs! Why wasn't it four?" A greater degree of aggro is tolerated in men as a general rule, and it takes a certain degree of presumption, indeed aggressiveness (albeit non-violent--mostly) to do the poetry thing. You have to impose yourself on other people--a lot, jump around, and wave your arms.

A poem like my forty-pager, which is heavily allusive, with long individual sections, a large cast of characters, many of them major and relatively minor historical figures, often in fictitious situations, is an act of serious audacity, and in addition to having the inclination to write a single poem at such length, one has to assume:

1. That the subject matter is compelling enough to sustain the reader's attention.

2. That the obscure bits occur in writing that is sufficiently compelling that a reader will be interested in cracking the code a bit rather than abandoning the poem out of frustration.

3. That you have the chops to merge a great deal of highly disparate material into a coherent whole.

Assumes rather a lot, doesn't it?

Quincy

P.S.--Mary Meriam's writing a two hundred-line memoir piece in ottava rima at present, so my comments should be construed as guarded ones and for what they're worth. And we took a very good eight-pager off Rose at The Raintown. So women are doing the longer stuff. And Heimat, at roughly 1,500 lines, is three times as long as the next longest "long poem" in my body of work (that being "Time Zones"--500 lines and fifteen pages in the book).

P.P.S.--Having said that, the more I think about this, the more long poems by women are occurring to me, so I'm really starting to back away from the whole notion. Well, we all have the right to talk out of our a$$es a bit every now and anon.