The hardest thing with singing for a lyric poem is to write--
embark on the long poem.
And because if there's any narrative for the lyric
poet in the long poem, it's usually
of the most diluted sort.
Mm-hmm.
And you've got this wonderful new long poem pattern.
What's your relationship with that type?
Well, I think--
How to sustain it?
Yeah, I taught a seminar on the long poem.
I continue to teach it, not every year
but every year or two.
And in teaching that seminar, I would usually
teach a book a week.
And I would change the list almost every time.
And the more I read of contemporary long poems--
these were all poems published in English in the last decade--
the more interested I became in extending myself in that way.
And even if a structure is very transparent,
like even if it's formulaic, I always
have a hard time actually seeing it.
And so I can watch the same movie, almost, over and over
and still not know what's going to happen.
And--
[LAUGHTER]
--so finding a structure had to be my --
it had to be my own process, my own sort of detective story.
And in that particular work--
I had written one book-length poem
before that called Just Whistle, and I couldn't tell you
how I wrote that book now.
I can still remember how I did Deepstep.
And I knew that-- and I don't know why I knew,
but I knew that I wanted to write in sentences.
And then after I had filled my notebook,
I started working on my sentences.
I didn't know that I wanted to exactly braid or weave
the material, but that's what I ended up doing.
And then I put the pages that I had
done on the wall in columns.
And then I wrote paragraphs of prose pieces
as interstitial pieces so that the columns
would speak to each other.
And then it ended up being this sort
of multifocal conversation.
And it stayed very conversational, you know,
this--
But there's a delirium sort of thing
that seems to push in through it.
That's the lyric--
Yeah.
--part of it?
Yeah.
And I just don't even know if I could do it again.
I mean, that was--
What have you used for examples in the classes
of your relatively recent long poem?
I started the course because I was a great--
well, I don't even know what the appropriate word
is-- but out of love for the work of Frank Stanford.
And he had a 542-page poem called "Battlefield
Where the Moon Says I Love You."
And so I wanted to teach that.
I wanted to introduce it to people in the Deep North
and say, look, there's this language coming out
of this guy's toe jam, and this-- is you should read this.
It was just an occasion.
Uh-huh?
Excuse me, but did you ever live in New Orleans?
No, but I visited New Orleans a lot.
I even visited New Orleans this summer.
Did you live in Seattle?
No, but I've visited Seattle only recently, last year.
And the reason I'm asking is I'm not
sure I have the right Carolyn.
Oh, you don't.
[LAUGHTER]
I know that.
Eh--
You're not Carolyn Wright.
Well, I am Carolyn Wright.
But I'm not the Carolyn Wright you're
thinking of who lived in New Orleans with every job,
and went to India and blah, blah, blah.
No.
OK.
You understand what I just--
I didn't exactly understand.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
You're not the first person to make that mistake.
Could you talk about some more of the books that you taught,
the long-form poems and why you admired them?
Yeah, well, I was going to first answer Sue's question
about poems that I had taught.
"The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You"
is a starting point.
And I taught Bernadette Mayer's "Midwinter Day,"
which I think is a very beautiful book,
and it's back in print.
And even though she writes a lot of very raw material
and unimproved poetry, this is very architectural work.
And I have also used her book Utopia,
which is not very architectural, much more of a scrapbook.
And I've used Jacques Roubaud's "Some Thing Black," which
is quite beautiful.
Very straight poem, very beautiful
and intelligent on his wife's dearth.
And, Linda, I've used Ron Silliman's Tjanting,
which has always been one of my favorites of his books.
And he's written lots of good long poems.
He can't shut up.
So he's got scads of those to choose from.
I could call on one or two others,
but that's the one I seem to gravitate to.
And Sharon Doubiago's "Hard Country," and what--
I always forget this list when someone asks me,
because, by now, there are probably
about 80 different book-length poems that I've taught.
So I'll think of some more names later.