I value concision. I have told myself this value is the reason that I often prefer shorter poems. And I have told myself this preference is the reason that I have tended to write poems under one page (~40 lines) in length. All that, however, is changing.
I now recognize that in my work I have had a tendency to want to end a poem after delivering a few good lines, to “look ahead” to the conclusion and shape the direction toward that end. Reading Marvin Bell’s “Dead Man” poems, which always appear in two parts, helped me recognize just how much can still be said even after the conclusion of the first part of a poem. In some ways, every poem could be said to be just the first part of a poem on that topic.
Reading other longer works has also helped me understand how I might go about resisting conclusions in the effort at arriving in more interesting poetic territory. Being halfway through my third semester in the Pacific University MFA program, I have now read over fifty books of poetry and poetry criticism in the last fifteen months of study. I have learned a lot. Perhaps more importantly, I have absorbed a lot, imbibing poetry as much as analyzing it, and letting it shape my aesthetics from the inside out.
Most recently, I have been reading David St. John’s Study For The World’s Body. I am struck by the success of his longer poems. Comparing his work to another poet whose longer poems I also admire, Li-Young Lee, has helped me to understand some of the qualities of longer poems which I hope to deploy in my own efforts at breaking the single-page barrier.
Foremost among them seems to be a tone that reflects confidence. This sense of confidence about the speaker, and by inference the author, helps me as a reader to give the author permission to dwell on unfolding details, provided they remain grounded in concrete images, interesting language, music, or other elements of good craft. Careful examination of details in this way produces the actual poetry, and gives a sense of focus and precision to the work, despite its length.
The stand-up comedian Billy Connolly is a master at delivering humor through seemingly endless digressions. When he finally comes back to the main topic, long since forgotten in the audience’s mind, he earns not only laughs but trust that he knew what he was doing all along. Good long poems can also function in this way–taking time to deliver poetry through the details, but retaining a sense of focus and direction all along.
In some ways, it seems to me that longer poems do not necessarily have to end on lines as spectacular as those required for the success of shorter poems. A rider who has hung on to a bucking stallion with dignity and tenacity need not necessarily dismount with great flourish to win cheers. The sustained quality and duration of the work is a feat in itself. Such feats I look forward to attempting in practice soon.
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4 Comments
I am intrigued that you’ve been trying to write longer works in the program; I have, too. When I started, I had, admittedly, two thirds of a novel tucked away somewhere, but I had mainly written a mass of microfictions and short shorts, and only a few things that broached the traditional lower bound of ’short story’. I found most of my stories, once I started to write in the program, hovering around 3000 words, 4000…the lower bound of some authorities’ “short story” standard.
I wanted to write longer stories, but I had a hard time articulating to others, let alone to myself, why I cared about an arbitrary standard like length, until I found an interview with Ron Carlson. It’s in the online features of the fabulous mag Quick Fiction (which I heartily recommend in its paper body as well) and in it he says “I also think that if you write stories for years, you do develop or sense a rhythm, and when I sensed that my stories were all rounding the corner at about four thousand words, I changed that rhythm.”
I didn’t want to write longer stories because I wasn’t proud of my short ones (which many of my friends and interlocutors assumed) or feared being judged against some imaginary standard of length or seriousness; I wanted to do it because it was a challenge, a way to stretch and develop my writing muscles. Because I’d have to have a different size of idea first.
And it is different; as different, almost, as the experience of writing those 4,000-worders was from my blythe little microfictions. As different as playing a concerto is from playing a little minuet. I feel stronger and bolder for having done it, and irrationally proud of my 28-page, 8,300-word story. I hope you find changing your rhythm and stretching your lines as rewarding as I did!
Thanks for your thoughtful encouragement, Felicity. As soon as I set this goal for myself, I immediately began procrastinating. Nobody inherently likes to exercise, but developing those “writing muscles” seems like a good next step.
Hi, Robert, it’s an interesting post. When I started writing poems, I was told to find the exact thing I wanted to say and say no more. My first poetry teacher was Paul Carroll who came out of the new critical tradition (wrote a terrific book of essays: Poem in its Skin), and that’s what he said.
We would bring our poems to the workshop, and he would look at them and point to a line or two and say, “That’s your poem. Cut out everything else!”
We all worked toward short and intense poems.
About ten years ago, I was writing a poem about my mom’s experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. She had been telling me all of these stories for the first time in her life, and I had pages of notes. I tried to get them all into one poem, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t get them there–not even one LONG poem.
That’s when I took the poem I had and choppped it up into 4 poems. It was a sort of mini-chapbook, and it worked.
I read the poem (My Mother Talks about the Slave Labor Camps) out loud at a reading and the way the poem built up really moved the audience. I never heard such nice things about my poems at a reading.
Since then, I’ve written 3 other long poetry sequences. The first two of these were nominated for Pushcarts, and the third was published as a chapbook and nominated by for a Pulitzer.
Now when I write, I get to the end of the poem, and I always ask myself, “What more can I say?”
Thanks for sharing your process, John.