[Solan]

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!"

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.


------------------
Svein Olav

.. another life

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

[Clive Watkins]

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

[Alder Ellis]

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).]

[Susan McLean]

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.

[VictoriaGaile]

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.

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

Victoria Gaile

[Bruce McBirney]

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").