The Long Poem

This meditation by a practitioner made after writing a “life-poem” covers such topics as defining the long poem and its processes; ending the long poem, or not; gender and genre (epic, lyric); the counterpoem; the poem as research; and issues around reading. The essay incorporates comments on poetics by other practitioners.

Many late modernist long poems are notoriously challenging to read. In this essay I ask whether difficulty is an integral feature of the long poem and discuss accounts and instances of poetic opacity in essays and poems by Édouard Glissant, Ann Lauterbach, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, Keston Sutherland, and others. I claim that poetic illegibility in these long poems is an instance of a widespread late modernist aesthetic of difficulty. This aesthetic works through embodied concepts of the fraught relations between known and unknown. 

I offer a reading of the long poems of two Expressionist Yiddish poets, Peretz Markish and Uri Tsevi Greenberg, according to which the long poem was used as a community-generating practice. Although this aspect of the long poem is recognized by scholars, it is rarely at the center of analysis. I draw attention to the Expressionist aesthetics of the long poem and demonstrate how Markish and Greenberg, through their use of shocking imagery and linguistic violence, created a model of a political community that served as a safe discursive space for the members of the lost generation of Yiddish modernism.

This essay explores the connection between war and the length of poems, reading the Anglo-American poetry of the twentieth century in the context of the world wars. The essay traces the changes in poetic length in Italian and Hebrew poetry, focusing on the long poems of Yehuda Amichai and finding a tendency to express war experiences in short verse. In Anglo-American poetry after World War I, Pound and Eliot form an influential poetic bloc defining length from The Waste Land and The Cantos. This Pound/Eliot complex comes undone as World War II ends, allowing for a regeneration of the long poem in the works of H.D., Zukofsky, Williams, Olson, Ginsberg, and others.

DEF starts from the seed of a sentence by Gottlob Frege: “On the introduction of a name for something simple, a definition is not possible; there is nothing for it but to lead the reader or hearer, by means of hints, to understand the words as is intended.” I replaced each word in Frege’s sentence with its dictionary definition. I then replaced each of the words in that new sentence with its dictionary definition, and so on. This procedure is an extended example of a proposal that Raymond Queneau called “definitional literature.” With a precedent in Stefan Themerson’s “semantic literature,” the form has previously been most fully exploited by Georges Perec and Marcel Bénabou. The excerpt published here is drawn from the fifth iteration of the process, using the Oxford English Dictionary. That entire fifth sentence is over forty-four thousand words long and—theoretically, if parsed in apposition—­grammatically correct.

Read the poem inside and watch Craig Dworkin reads it here. You may also watch an entire reading panel with Dworkin, Bob Perelman and Michael Golston held at Columbia University here.