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Long Poems
by Allan HaslindsDave Morris brought up a point in the general forum under the title "Longer works lack recognition". He mentioned that longer poem never seem to make it to Poem of the Day. Although I've seen a few long pieces make it to that spot, yeah, I think he's right. Pieces over a screen and a half in length, about 50 lines of so, just don't do very well recognition-wise. Why not?
Well, there are two parts to my answer. One is about poems and reading poems, and one is about poets and writing poems. The first part isn't that complex or contraversial:
When a long poem isn't that good, often it doesn't get read all the way through.
That make sense doesn't it? If you're reading through a piece and after 20 lines you think it's fairly good, if you have 5 lines left, you'll probably finish it. But what if it heads off for another 5 screens? Be honest. You start thinking "Hmmm, is it that good?" You could take this as some scathing indictment on attention spans or "the modern societal ethic of instant gratification" I suppose, but to me it's just return-on-investment. Reading a piece takes some amount of effort. You hope to get enough out of the piece to make it worth the effort put in. Longer pieces or denser, more intellectual pieces, pieces with difficult language or pieces with hard to understand imagery... they take more effort, so unless they return more... well, it might be more rewarding to find a different poem.
That was the part that of my answer that probably won't get me in too much trouble. The second part of my answer is this:
Long poems don't tend to be as good.
Yeah, I knew that was gonna get me in trouble, but hear me out-- I've thought a lot about this. All poetic forms are hard to do really well, but long piece present a very specific set of problems.
First, long poems attract the poet who doesn't know how to part with his own "precious clutter". Come on, if you've written a poem, you know what I mean. You write a line and you really like it. Like it so much that even if it doesn't work real well in context or isn't perfect, you just can't bear to get rid of it. It's precious! Fine, but it's also clutter! If you're worrying about your line count or the compactness of your piece, even precious clutter is likely to get swept up eventually. Long poems... well, I'm never so tidy as when I have very little space to work in.
B) Long poems need to be more accessible than short poems and most poets are don't write accessibly enough in the first place to hack it. What do I mean "accessible?" Well, you write poems using images and metaphor to describe something going on inside your head or your heart, trying to convey what you think and feel. "Waaaait a minute.... " you say. "You mean that I'm trying to communicate nebulous and sometimes abstract concepts that are deeply personal to me... which take place in my mind, my body, and soul and not the reader's, and I'm using indirect, figurative language full of analogy to do it?" Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
"Accessible" means that its easy for the reader to take in that language and feel what you're saying. Think of it this way: You're giving the reader a bunch of stuff (phrases and images and rhythm patterns and odd spellings and line breaks and various other clues) and they have to put them together into an experience, like they might take puzzle pieces and make a picture. But they've never seen the picture. Sure, when you read it you understand it. But you wrote it. You know what it's supposed to be already. You've seen the picture. Accessible is how easy it is to find pieces that fit together.
Long poems tend to correspond to bigger puzzles. Fitting individual pieces together isn't any harder, so it's just as accessible. But think about how many more pieces you need to put together to guess what the picture is gonna be. If you want to show the reader the picture, you gotta either make it more clear how two pieces fit together, or you need bigger pieces! (Remember those kid's puzzles?) So it's not accessible enough!
3) You really don't have that much time to get going with the action. If you haven't engaged the reader, made him feel something of what you're doing by line 20, it's all over. Remember all the geneology in Genesis, right after Cain gets the boot? Tell me you weren't like "Enough with the begots already! When's it gonna start to rain?" But the Gideons were smart and put the apple stuff up front, so you're willing to wade through a chapter of geneology by then. You gotta grab the reader, is all I'm saying. In short poems, that's not a problem.
And that's it. I think we tend to overlook that being a reasonably good poet doesn't make us good enough to make a long poem that's going to get recognition compared to short poems. It's like Olympic diving. It's easier to get good judge awards on a forward dive than it is a on a reverse 2 ½ somersault with 1 ½ twists in pike position. And poetry doesn't have a difficulty multiplier!
-Alan
I'd like to take a moment to link to some of the better long pieces I've found on PPS.
02/22/2004 Posted on 02/22/2004
Copyright © 2024 Allan Haslinds
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