Unlike novelists, poets tend to be content with miniscule accomplishments. I can easily spend a couple of hours tweaking the grammar of a three-line stanza and not even feel bad about wasting time. So you'd think that managing to write 25 first-draft lines in a single morning would make me ecstatically self-satisfied.

But when the poem is 10 pages long and counting, 25 lines feels like I've gone nowhere. And this, I'm noticing, is one of the many pitfalls of writing a long narrative poem. I suppose novelists deal every day with this drop-in-the-bucket feeling, but I'm finding it difficult to negotiate. On the one hand, I have to deal with the standard craft challenges of storytelling (plot, character, suspense, etc.), while meeting the it-never-gets-any-easier poetic challenge of transforming words and punctuation into sound and image. On the other hand, I have to deal with myself: the god in the machine who is dreadfully fallible and distracted and liable to lose interest in what I'm writing as soon as the going gets difficult. Doing the work while whipping myself to do the work wears me out. And anyway, who will read a 50-page poem? I'm trying very hard not to think about that question.