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.)

A Pound of Modern Poetry

For those still lamenting that modern poetry doesn't rhyme and has no rhythm, they can find the reason in the ideas and work of Ezra Pound. Don't blame the man and his "madness" for everything; too much of what is coming out today comes from misunderstanding and misinterpreting his ideas.

Sure, you can blame him for the ubiquitious "free verse" that he promoted in English poetry. He and his bunch began that thing about presenting "images" to say things rather than using good old flowery words and phrases arranged in metronomic feet and all that good old stuff. Read Shakespeare's sonnets along side Pound's Cantos: you'll have no idea what he's on about.

But already in the first decades of the twentieth century, the times they were a-changing (sorry, Bob.) Literature and poetry in English were stuck in a Victorian rut; what was happening was happening in Europe: wars and rumours of war, but also slashing decisive movements in art and literature. With the influences of French symbolism in poetry, Impressionism and Cubism in art, and Dada in everything, Pound and others began to work the new ideas into the English language, shaping some to their own use and creating others. The "Imagists" and the writers reflecting the crumbling of society began a new look in literature and the understanding of it.

He encouraged and supported T. S. Eliot's poetry. Eliot's "The Wasteland" became the premier example of modernist poetry, using all the techniques and rationales the writers proclaimed. In the field of the novel, James Joyce worked these into Ullyses and later Finnegan's Wake.

Pound would use images to say only what they could. He used quotations in other languages, footnotes, other techniques foreign to poetry. He took these images and, instead of arranging them in nice orderly rows that fit together the way poetry had for ages, scattered them seemingly haphazardly on the page without any evident relationship. Instead of writing in accented feet, Pound wrote his phrases like musical phrases, holding true to a cadence and flow. What it ends up as seems to be an interlocking mass of words, hiding any sense and meaning.

But with a critical look, the jumble of stones, the collage of different ideas and phrases, become more that what is first apparent. They point at and even carry a beauty of their own. Words and phrases, ideas and concepts, they begin to connect, to form random patterns as if tossed for the I Ching. Perhaps this is partly due to Pound's study and work with traditional Chinese poetry.

Cadence and pattern. These become for Pound and the moderns the antidotes to stale phrases and metrics. And this is where today's poets make their mistakes. Free, they proclaim, is free from those old ideas and they leave it there. They forget to use the replacements. Their jumbles of words have no connections or no cadence. A framework must exist or all will be washed away to be forgotten. Those who count syllables may carry on for a time; they have established a pattern. However, unless that pattern is translated into a discernable cadence (which does happen in the best) such poems too become unmemorable. And unmemorable is not what a poem should be.