The Long Poem

As happens as often as not, this musing came out of an adventure with used books. No matter where I am, I will usually make time to browse through any books around, be they new or used. This time I was snuffling about in the various materials available at a local used book store. The treasure I found for myself was a copy, in good condition, of a poem by Joy Kogawa as illustrated by Lilian Broca called A Song of Lilith.
I knew and admired Kogawa's poetry long before she became an award-winning novelist, but I had not read or even seen this work. It seems that Broca had produced a series of works dealing with the mythical "first wife" of Adam; friends who are classical musicians suggested she find a composer, a writer, and a number of actors and musicians to present a concert/performance around the pieces. Kogawa was the writer brought in. This is part of the multi-disciplinary result.

What attracted me was the label poem, the singular, on a full size book. The work consists of seven sections, with more subsections. Then I looked at my own work and again wondered at the difference between a collection and a long poem.

Remember, the earliest of our poems are long ones, the epic poetry of Greece and Rome and the great works in English like Beowulf and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The tradition continued through Milton to Whitman and Hart Crane. Even early Canadian poetry has its examples.

So what constitutes a long poem, as compared to a collection of poems? First of course is its length - but not simply its length. The length should be so integral the the poem could not be and say what it does in any other form. Second is the unity of the material. Like Kogawa's poem, all segments (if the poem is divided into such) should flow from and into a common idea.

This brought me to consider my own works. I have a long poem, Garden Concert, which falls easily into these parameters: it is self-contained, all segments are variations on one theme. But I also have a small book consisting of thirteen pieces which I consider a "sequence" rather than a long poem. Even though it is partially narrative and deals with the same specific idea, there is a plurality of voices and time is fragmented enough that I'm not comfortable considering it as a whole although something like Eliot's The Waste Land is. And then again I have a long, book-length collection of short poems which I sometimes tend to see as one extended poem. Ezra Pound spoke about the long poem as an "expression of the tribe" in regards to his Cantos, and my We Measure Our Time In Coffee Cups would fit as a voice of the "Tim Hortons" tribe.

So it's good to see the long poem holding its own. Its problem seems to be finding a place for publication. Perhaps a multi-media approach, as illustrated by, as performed by, or again as narration for film ... (something I hope to be working toward soon.)

Show or Tell

I'm somewhat confused by what I did here the other day. I posted a haiku that seemed illustrative of a photo I had taken. I felt so proud of joining illustrations with haiku that I did it again. And again. And again.

Then the question of show/tell rose again and I began to doubt my actions. Do the illustrations add to the poems or do they invalidate the reader's vision and impose mine? The Japanese masters sometimes accompanied haiku with brush stroke ink drawings; suggestive material rather than the graphic items used with mine. The question again, do the photographs tell?

Sometimes it seems necessary to connect a graphic with a poem. A friend told me how he and his wife, a painter, would sometimes picnic at out-of-the-way places; afterward she would paint and he would compose poems. Many times, he said, the painting and the poem seemed to belong together; they were expressions of the same experience embodied in different media.

I know what he meant. It happens for me, sometimes, when I'm moved to write a response to a work of art. If the artwork touches me, resonates with me, satisfying things can happen. Often the two seem to work better in each other's presence: what would this poem be without the sculpture?

INNOCENCE

Undisturbed
and filled with self-assurance,
she combs her hair.


She sits amorphous
with the innocent guise of a child.
A woman’s shape is still obscured
in the thickness of her waist,
the solidity of her unformed hips,
the soft fat on her rib cage.


Affirmation of femininity
is already evident in the energies
flowing through arms and hair,
the slow twist of the torso.
There is grace in the curve of her neck;
in her thighs, the promise of power.


Oh, could we but capture
that timeless innocence forever,
hold it in bronze.




(both poem and image are copyrighted to the respective artists)


Well, I guess that answers no question. Maybe there is no answer. Maybe the question is often irrelevant.

It just goes to show ...