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.

Furthermore, just as comedy has evolved from the vaudeville approach of getting up on stage and telling highly structured jokes with punch-lines to the much more elaborate and free-form modes of stand-up comedy today, so too has poetry evolved from proscribed forms into free verse. Yet this three-part experience: expectation, frustration and compensation–continues to exist in most modern poetic devices as well. It simply operates more subtly than “a man walked into a bar…” or rhyming couplets. Yet in poetry we do create, frustrate and compensate for our reader’s expectations constantly.

The difference between poetry and comedy lies partly in range and scope. Comedy typically only has one goal: laughter. Yet poetry can elicit a broad range of reactions. Furthermore, the scope of comedy is usually necessarily stretched. Exaggeration, the unexpected and the outlandish are endemic to comedy, whereas poetry that does the same often actually ends up comedic. So, the narrower scope–the less outlandish leaps in poetry–lend more range of expression.

That said, certain schools of contemporary poetics continue to push our tolerance for the distance between thoughts, the degree of cohesion–satisfaction of expectation–that we require of a poem. In the end, we still tell jokes and write formal verse. The age-old tricks still work. But this meta-trick, as it were, of pleasurably frustrating the mind, is an enduring characteristic of both poems and stand-up routines–so enduring, in fact, as to quite possibly be defining. What is poetry? Not quite getting what you want, and thereby getting something better, what Stephen Booth might call “understanding of something that remains something we do not understand.” How’s that for slant?