Early in my poetry apprenticeship, my teacher, Baron Wormser, pointed out a few of my habits to me. I retreated to glibness and fancy forms to avoid exploring content. I equated revision with radical cutting. I wrote by ear. This last habit, he said, was one he would never question . . . and he never did. From the beginning he trusted my ear, and that was what taught me to trust it. But the other two habits? He was merciless with them. He pushed me into physical language and away from received forms, telling me I shouldn't, for instance, write sonnets until I had a better notion of them as a container rather than a mask. He told me to stop reading and imitating writers such as William Carlos Williams until I had a stronger sense of my own voice and what I needed to say. Exquisite brevity wasn't necessarily concision. Sometimes it was murder. For the first time, I began to recognize that brevity might be forcing me away from exploration.
It was Baron who pushed me into writing my first long poems. I was, in those years, very aware of myself as a failed novelist. My assumption was that I had failed because I didn't have the stamina to crank out the requisite number of words, that I had some fatal misunderstanding of plot construction. It took me years to understand that my inability to write prose fiction had nothing to do with stamina or plot weaving. It had to do with how I was hearing and reacting to language.
Still, I was frightened at the idea of writing a long poem, and the fact that I was a worshipper of the past wasn't helping me. Milton and Keats and Homer lurked in the weeds. What did I have to say that they hadn't said already? In short, I was yellow-bellied: I paced back and forth on the edge of the cliff, winced at the depth of the chasm, invented a hundred reasons not to jump. You know what I mean. I expect you've spent some hard times on that cliff edge too.
But I was so lonely in the woods, with T away all day and two little boys to care for. I was desperate to become myself, whatever that self might be. I was desperate to make something. Working with Baron had opened a door into that unknown country. You could be a poet, he told me, and I clung to that hope. I could become a poet, but I was not a poet yet. And so I had to leap.
I know this all sounds like inflated melodramatic elegy, but I have always lived in a private world of emotional overexcitement. And oddly enough, writing my first long drafts showed me that this emotional overload could, in itself, be an essential driver of a poem. A long draft gave me, for the first time, room enough to feel. I was not cutting myself short. I had no goal, other than to keep opening, opening, opening.
I also began to see that these long drafts were giving me the chance to bring multiple parts of my private life together . . . my daily labor in woods, barn, house; the uproars of children and love; my deeply personal reading patterns; my landscape; my family past; my national shames and worries; my unwieldy terrors and longings.
Of course great short poems can also incorporate these matters. Yet for me, the spaciousness of long drafts became a web that not only linked disparate elements but also caught flies--unexpected strangers swarming up from my imagination.
What if Whitman had ended "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" after part 1? He would have possessed a brief and attractive poem-portrait. As a short poem, it's sweet and evocative and pleasant to read. But he didn't choose to stop. He kept pushing himself forward. "And yet," he murmured to himself. "And yet."
The long poem is an opportunity to say, "And yet," not just once, not just twice, but a dozen times, or more. "I am large, I contain multitudes," he declared in "Song of Myself." So am I. So are you. Writing a long poem is a way to explore our selves.
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My latest Poetry Kitchen offering is a two-weekend class on writing the long poem, with help from Whitman. If you've never written a long poem, if you're terrified of long forms, if you're an eager writer of long pieces, prose or poetry: this class is for you.
