Sunday
My inbox contains a large debt of email. Apologies to anyone waiting for a response. You'll hear from me soon.
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I have a few job leads to follow-up on this week. One position pays crap, one pays well, and the other I won't know about until I talk to the agency tomorrow morning. The one that pays well was advertised on Craig's List by an agency with which I'm not yet registered. I'm going to register first thing in the morning. Keep your fingers crossed for me that the position actually exists. It's much like what I was doing in my last temp assignment (i.e. I'm qualified), but the pay is a few $$ per hour better.
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Worked on some poetry yesterday. I looked at all the unfinished poems I've written over the past 4-6 weeks and realized that they may not be failures after all. Rather, I think I've been writing a single, longer poem without knowing it. If these bits of writing work together the way I think they do, the piece comes in at about 200 lines so far, and could possibly go another 200. I've never attempted anything on this scale, but it makes sense that I'd be drawn to longer forms. It mirrors the how and what I've been reading lately.
For instance, Friday's one-day temp gig involved wo-manning a reception desk where the phone never rang and there was no other work to do. Since I belong to the Hart Crane school of poetry readers ("Thou canst read nothing except through appetite..."), I generally keep a few to five books on deck at any given time, leafing through what I've got until something absorbs me. It's all terribly undisciplined, but the upside is that I rarely tire of poetry, or hate it the way some poets and critics seem to. In any event, the poetry that hooked me Friday was James Schuyler's book A Few Days, and more specifically the 27-page title poem. After reading the first half of the collection, I spied the long piece at the end and skipped to it. While the shorter poems were not without their appeal, I got the biggest charge out of the longest one.
Then there are Anne Carson's book-length sequences, Josh Beckman's 1/4-book-length poems, Andy Mister's 5-part "Trapdoor Fucking Exit" which I re-read for maybe the sixth time yesterday (FREE & ONLINE at Reb's No Tell Motel, so what are you waiting for?). Speaking of which, I just ordered Mister's new chapbook from H_NGM_N. At $2 even I can afford to splurge. He's got to be one of the best bookless poets out there, which is a shame because I'd love to read more of his work.
I can't say why I prefer longer poems lately, because I haven't given it a great deal of thought. But my comment box is wide open to anyone with recommendations.
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Back to my own poem, I realized yesterday that I have an unfortunate tendency to...well, to get wrapped up in a certain silliness. I've never thought of myself as the sort of person who cracks a joke when things get emotionally uncomfortable, but I find myself doing just that when I'm writing poems. To date, maybe it's gone over a little too well in workshops and the like. I guess I want a teacher who's going to see through my bullshit and say, "This is mildly amusing, but what are you are avoiding here?" Because when I go back and read the poems with some remove, I often find they're less funny-poignant than plain superficial.
In any event, I'm just thinking out loud here. Thinking out loud and avoiding my dread to-do list.
Comments
Regarding long poems: two of the poets whose work has been most important to me for many years are Thomas McGrath and Sharon Doubiago, both of whom have written book-length poems in addition to more conventional shorter poems.
McGrath's epic poem "Letter to an Imaginary Friend," which he worked on for something like 30 years, was published in a (probably) definitive single-volume edition by Copper Canyon Press ca. 1998.
Doubiago's "Hard Country" (West End Press) is, essentially, a book-length narrative sequence of poems grouped in several sections; Doubiago herself has always referred to the book as an epic poem. Her book "South America, Mi Hija" (University of Pittsburgh Press) is a book-length poem about traveling in the Andes region with her teenage daughter sometime around 1978 or 1979.
The poetry of McGrath and Doubiago could probably, reasonably, be described as 20th century modernist on the whole, if such descriptions and categories have any use. I'm not often drawn to poetry with a post-modernish flavor, however a couple of poets who might lean that way and whose work I've been curious about are Kamau Brathwaite and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Both have published book-length works; I'm at a loss for titles off the top of my head but they could certainly be tracked down by Googling.
Posted by: Lyle Daggett | April 30, 2007 11:21 PM