Let's talk a little bit about the other aspects
of the long poem.
What is the shape of the long poem,
or the span of the long poem.
Usually it's a big subject, a large span.
There are poems of time, history, mythology.
These are the traditional ones.
Epic poems, The Iliad, Gilgamesh, the Rāmāyana.
Either they tell a history or a group of mythological tales.
There are poems of geography and adventure and ideals.
Poems about place.
Ideals can be short poems about place,
but some, they are kind of long.
There's a great, great poem [? Kālidāsa ?] in India.
It's a poem dedicated to a cloud.
And in it, the poet is talking to a cloud
as it is crossing all of India.
Tagore, the great poet of India, goes back and rewrites it.
And he said, oh, but you, great poet, you missed this,
and you missed that, and you--
And again, you are rewriting the old poem,
rewriting a new version.
There's a bit of nudging of the older version of the poem.
Kālidāsa or Kalibasa?
I'm sorry.
It's in my dissertation, but I'm forgetting.
It's been a while.
But there are so many.
We think of ideals as short poems,
but there are longer poems.
There's Georgics, which are poems
about farming and agriculture, but they're also
poems about place.
The Odyssey is a great poem of travel and adventure.
It is a [INAUDIBLE]
And Neruda wrote the great "Canto general,"
or "General Canto" or "Broad Canto," the great song.
And it is about Latin America.
It is a series-- and he thinks of it as a long poem,
even though it is made of parts.
And then we have the political and spiritual long poems.
"The Divine Comedy," "Paradise Lost," of course.
And to some extent, "The Faerie Queene"
is a highly adventurous, fantastic narrative.
But also there's one creature that
spits books, that vomits books.
I love that it's part of the [INAUDIBLE] one
of the greatest mythological creatures.
I [? love it. ?] But also, Spenser had a notion of it
during Elizabethan time, where he
thought that this would be a great educational tool
for the morality.
He felt like the morals of the nation needed to be corrected
by a fantastic journey.
These are the types of shapes.
"A large scope, the extensive reality
of life"-- which is a quote from [? Lukash, ?] but also applies
here--
"which requires, often, multiple points of view or various
experiences in times.
Which is what may distinguish it from the lyric."
The lyric, we get one poem, one point of view.
It's smaller.
But eventually, in the longer poem,
sustaining that single point of view is very difficult.
Or the narrative has to incorporate other experiences
and lives.
In "Paradise Lost," you have a single point of view.
But you think of the great speeches by Satan,
which are fantastic, which actually open up.
And some people say Lucifer is the hero of Paradise.
This is much more interesting.
That other point of view is opened up.
It is not necessarily one path through time,
or a continuous geography, but it
is made up of bridges between eras and locations,
or personal experiences and meditations,
to give that sense of movement and change
in a large, temporal, spatial, social, and spiritual,
psychological territory.
Some of the impetus of the long poem, something in the culture
is observed, and needs to be corrected.
It seems that there is something big
that one notices about one's surroundings.
Ultimately, the long poem is a social project.
It's not merely individual.
I'm going to talk about Wordsworth's "Prelude."
Wordsworth's "Prelude" is the history
of the growth of my own mind.
What's social about that?
Well, of course it is social.
The impetus is social.
Here's what he said.
"To show the divine sufficiency of the human mind
in its communion with nature."
That's what he said.
[? Let's ?] [? say ?] [INAUDIBLE]
Of course, the divine sufficiency of his mind,
of course--
[LAUGHING] --of Wordsworth's mind,
in its communion with human nature,
it's a great principle of romanticism.
But it is also the advent of secularism,
that the human mind, by itself, can
commune with nature and the world, and that suffices us.
That should suffice us.
His friend Coleridge-- they were good friends,
but then Wordsworth basically told Coleridge to let him be.
Coleridge wrote him, and they worked together on the Lyrical
Ballads, if you've known this book,
where you find some of Wordsworth's greatest poems,
and also Coleridge's.
I think the "Ancient Mariner" is in it.
It's a book of both of them, and great introductory essays.
A fantastic project.
They're working together.
Coleridge wrote in 1799 to Wordsworth,
"I am anxiously eager to have you steadily employed
on The Recluse."
"The Prelude," which is-- actually,
there's an Arabic book called Al Muqaddimah, which
means the prelude, meaning the poet, Ibn Khaldun,
back in the 12th or 13th century, wrote an introduction,
but then the introduction became the book.
Same thing with "The Prelude."
"The Prelude" was going to be the introduction
to The Recluse, and then it became the book.
And Wordsworth was a great poet from the late 18th century
till he died around 1850.
He was known as a great poet.
And "The Prelude" was not known.
After he died, people realized that, no, "The Prelude"
is his greatest book.
He died being a great poet, but he wasn't alive to receive--
he never published it.
His wife published it.
And I don't quite remember-- she is the one who
named it "The Prelude."
"The Prelude" was the introduction
to this great book, which is called The Recluse,
and here's what Coleridge tells us about this.
Ibn Khaldun also wanted to write a history of Africa, and so on,
but then he felt like he needed to understand
the social dynamics.
So he wrote The Muqaddimah, the introduction,
which ended up being really the first work of sociology.
Ibn Khaldun is Tunisian, but he worked in--
and that's lucky.
This is why people in the summer in these regions
are not that productive in the summer seasons.
This is why some people might like tyrannical regimes,
and they prefer them to others.
Sort of a real--
and he was also engaged not only politics,
but also work habits of people.
The dynamics of work, economy, and politics.
But he never wrote--
I don't think he ever wrote the history that he wanted
to write in the introduction.
The theory became more important.
After a long delay, this is what Coleridge
wrote Wordsworth in 1799.
"I'm anxiously eager to have you steadily employed
on The Recluse.
I wish you would write a poem in blank verse addressed to those
who, in the consequence of the complete failure
of the French Revolution, have thrown up
all hopes of amelioration of mankind,
and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness,
disguising the same under the soft titles
of domestic attachment and contempt
for visionary philosophies.
It would do great good, and might
form a part of The Recluse."
They had an agreement that there is something wrong in society.
The French Revolution--
I don't know if 1799--
I failed to check--
if by then, Napoleon had taken over.
But I think certainly Robespierre
had gotten into the scene, and chopped tons of heads.
The French Revolution has gone bad.
It's almost like the way the Arab Spring is happening now.
Because the French Revolution had failed,
many British intellectuals say, oh,
forget this Arab Spring, this French thing,
forget this revolution.
Let's just be-- it's almost like the counter-revolutionary
spirit that's dominating many Arab countries now.
Revolution, it's too violent, too many changes.
The radicals come in, they chop lots of heads.
Let's go back and live under a tyrannical king,
and let's give him more powers.
Coleridge, of course, said no, let's not accept this.
And they've thrown up all hopes of change of humankind,
and are sinking into the most--
into selfishness, and disguising their fluffy work with depth
and philosophical rigor.
They say, no, let's not do this.
Really fight this.
And let's-- why don't you write a great poem to fight all
of these things.
Even though it's a poem of the growth of his own mind,
there's a historical context, and there's
a social and philosophical mission
that's underlying all of this.
How is the long poem inspired?
How do the personal and impersonal cultural interact
in it?
It is often stimulated by a personal realization, ambition,
event, a given crisis.
I can attest to two of the great professors
here at the U of A, who've written long poems,
I think with great anxiety, about the future
of their daughter.
Correct?
[LAUGHTER]
Anxiety about your children can make you write poetry.
Long poetry.
[LAUGHTER]
And that's part of Tocqueville, is really
anxiety about the future.
Perhaps a more personal crisis, such as having
a child, or a death, or a loved one, but one that requires one
to look outwardly.
For Wordsworth, he went on to show--
or see if he personally--
actually, he wanted to write "The Prelude"
to see if he's fit to write poetry.
I'm going to write a great poem because I
want to know if I'm actually a good poet or not.
He never published it.
But in fact, it's almost like having an exercise
gym to really, really work out.
And then just go out and write a few literary poems.
Nobody would know that he had this great gym
and great coach in his house.
But it is part of the poetic ambition
throughout the [? long poem ?] and to address the subject.
You take up the long poem to challenge yourself,
and to show commitment to the ability to write poetry.
But it is also impersonal.
How did we get to be how we ended up being?
How did I end up being who I am, but also an awareness
of a collective experience.
It's not written out of only personal memory, but also
cultural memory, a term I found in the work
of our friend, Eleanor Wilner, who, by the way,
does not write long poems, as far as I know of her work.
Here's what she said.
"Cultural memory.
I think I first encountered this formulation from the Russian
poet Osip Mandelstam, who is reported as saying,
'I have no personal memory, only a cultural memory.'
He meant as a poet, I assume.
I remember reading this with an enormous sense of relief,
as this was precisely my own experience.
So much of the past cried out for utterance, especially all
that had been silent or silenced.
In order to validate my experience of poetic vision,
and looking at new visions to understand their sources,
I saw the way in which collective vision always
began with a communal crisis and an individual, who, in essence,
dreamed for the community."
The poet, in my vision of working on the long poem,
is an individual who dreamed for the community.
And that's, in many ways, different.
I think a lyric poet can dream for the community,
as certainly she did.
But I think, in some ways, the long poem is an assumption,
is the poet assuming the role of a person
who is dreaming for the community.
A search for the magnitude of the crisis, and for one's
position in the crisis.
I think this awareness, while it does not necessarily
lead to the creation of long poems,
it is an engine of creation that is
essential to enable the writer to write
a poem of a large scope.
There are two ideas I want to throw in here.
Actually, two books that are useful.
One is Peter Baker, Obdurate Brilliance:
Exteriority and the Modern Long Poem.
And I think it's a good book, even though it
received some bad reviews.
Baker argues the modern and postmodern poet,
he turns outward, toward the experience of others,
and deliberately emphasizes an inner or personal life.
That happens to be more so in the longer poem.
It seems to be that's what the long poem is,
is not to write about oneself, but to assume other self,
to exercise the limits of their selves,
to also discuss the [? network ?] [? selves. ?]
Deliberately turned the notion of the lyric speaker inside
out, in order to establish a new kind of text production based
on exteriority.
Exteriority is a term that he takes from Levinas.
And he adapts-- and it means or implies
an ethical stance that is open to the address of the truly
other.
Exteriority is to position yourself
in a way to take in the other in an attempt
to resist normal speech habits, if you will,
and normal discursive practices, and being
able to undermine some social institutions
and ideological structures that undermine our ability
to connect with others.
Meaning, you really want to bust through whatever the self is,
and the long poem is a place where that happens.
Baker, he breaks down the normal discourse
in the traditional romantic identification of the poet
speaker-- this is what happens in the long poem--
with the poet author leading awareness
of the otherness of others.
M.L. Rosenthal and Sally Gall discuss the poetic sequence,
not so much the long poem.
And they're saying, well, there's the long poem,
but maybe it's really made up of sequences.
And actually, Edgar Allan Poe, he talks about "Paradise Lost,"
it's not a poem.
It's just a lot of really little bits and bits.
Some of it is poetry, a lot of it is fluff.
It should have been better if just the poetry by itself.
This is what Poe thought.
"The poetic sequence, then, has become"--
this is what they argue, that M.L. Rosenthal--
"The poetic sequence is the principal genre
of modern poetry, the decisive form toward which
modern poetry has tended."
Meaning that the big changes, if you will, in modern poetry,
did not come through the single poems,
but they came with the longer poems.
Maybe "Waste Land."
"It is the long poem, or, really,
sequence of poems, successions, interruptions, and collage,
that has characterized modern poetry."
But then the question is how long to sustain the intensity,
a poetic intensity.
And do you do it by juxtaposing this to this to this,
or do you create a unity, necessarily, to create links,
or have no links between the pieces.
So not continuous narration, nor necessarily
develop [INAUDIBLE].
Meaning that a poem is not one story,
nor is it like an essay, time to argue a certain point.
It is-- this is one definition they give--
a progression of specific qualities and intensities
of emotionally- and sensually-charged awareness.
A lot of multi-syllabic words.
I'm going to say this until you memorize it.
The long poem-- and they're really thinking about, maybe,
"The Waste Land"-- a progression of specific qualities
and intensities of emotionally- and sensually-charged
awareness.
A progression of specific qualities and intensities
of emotionally- and sensually-charged awareness.
Very dense.
You and I talked about "The Waste Land,"
how it was the model for the long poem,
and what the poet-- what poetry can do.
Conrad Aiken describes "The Waste Land"
as, "The poem must be taken as a brilliant kaleidoscopic
confusion, as a series of sharp, discrete, slightly
related perceptions and feelings, dramatically
and lyrically presented, and violently juxtaposed,
for effect of dissonance, so as to give us
an impression of an intensely modern, intensely
literary consciousness, which perceives itself to be not
a unit, but a chance, correlation,
or conglomeration of mutually discolorative fragments."
[LAUGHING]
Essentially, not a unit, but sequences of intense moments.
You don't know what he's talking about.
But you know it because you are watching
a lot of things, video, a lot of stuff,
and it is very intense and fragmented,
and it is a presentation.
You're watching a lot of short, precise, video jumps
from one thing to another.
I used to notice this in music videos when MTV came out,
long before you guys were even born, some of you.
It's very sharp cuts.
Bum-ba-duh-duh-duh.
The music is keeping you together.
You're really listening for the music,
but you're also watching.
But the story emerges, or you fill in the story.
Well, MTV, with music videos, they didn't invent the wheel.
They benefited from this whole modernist practice.
While Eliot was doing this, Sergei Eisenstein
discovered that you don't need to put a camera in front
of a drama and [INAUDIBLE].
The camera is actually this roll,
and you can cut, and slice, and move the camera close.
And he discovered that the work of cinema
is not the linear continuity of the story,
but it is the intensifying of the emotions in the story.
Even though time and stories do not move,
you can still intensify the experiences
by the intensities of the images you are presented.
All of that stuff was funneled and made much easier
to appreciate.
After Eisenstein, they recycle.
Psycho, the blood on the water.
There's no-- do you see a knife in Psycho?
You don't see the knife going into her,
and there's that [KNIFE STABBING SOUND EFFECTS]
Intensity, there's not--
you could take that out, and--
there's the readiness for the story.
It is within the context.
But if you take that sequence out by itself,
it's an intensity that is reliant, not so much
on what had come before, what it comes after,
but of the intense emotions that are presented by each image,
and by the way the images collide into each other.
As soon as one is settled in, another one pushes out,
almost claims a different kind of emotion.
It's these sharp turns of emotion that--
If you think of these water slides, where you go up.
But imagine one that's really awful, that's really scary.
Imagine it's from a really high mountain,
and it's going to spin you, and so on.
So in a sense, it's that vertigo,
to use another Hitchcockian term, where
it is in many intense emotions, but the story
is not necessarily the part that's
causing you that emotion.
It's this presentation of images.
What else?
We leave Conrad Aiken.
He's really multi-syllabic.
[INAUDIBLE] And finally, this is what Rosenfeld and Gall say.
"Any lyrically-informed work of some length and substance
is, fundamentally, a chaos of intimate notations and scenes,
brought together in a tangle of small effects."
It's a chaos of scenes, but each one of them has a, maybe,
diverse effect.
It's a multiplicity of intense divergent emotions.
"At the same time, however, it is magnetized into structure
by its points of highest intensity,
and by its ordering in time, the literal succession
of its tonalities."
Meaning, there's a lot of manipulation going on.
That things are ordered in such a way as to create lulls,
as to present things that you will
feel that you are in a different place, or moving from one thing
to another.
The movement is not a continuous movement
along a certain narrative.
It is a sense of displacement, but also
awareness that you have moved.
Suddenly you find yourself in a different place.
You are not in a different chapter,
but you're clearly in a different mode
of thinking and feeling.
And your emotional memory becomes the story.
I was feeling this and addressing these thoughts when
I was here, and now I've moved.
And your ability to negotiate these gaps and these jumps
is your work, it becomes--
The reading of the text becomes the history of your own change
and changing emotions.
It is you as, if you will, the reader,
and the perceiver, that are creating.
It's the history of your responses to these changes,
rather than necessarily what you're being told and offered.
It's not put in your mouth.
You pick it up.