This book illuminates the role phenomenological philosophy has played in the composition of long poems in America. Since the mid-twentieth century, poetic experimentation has often articulated phenomenological themes of perception, being-in-the-world and intersubjectivity. The diverse group of poets explored in the bookâGeorge Oppen, Robin Blaser, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Nathaniel Mackey and Rachel Blau DuPlessisâhave all created extended poetic projects which are motivated by or in places touch upon ideas expressed in the phenomenological writings of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. In establishing the groundwork of this argument, this introduction will (1) address the problems of defining âthe long poemâ; (2) discuss recent critical approaches to long poems; (3) articulate the role of phenomenology in American poetics; and (4) explore the example offered by Charles Olsonâs phenomenological poetry; before (5) detailing the poets and long poems being explored in this book.
Defining the American Long Poem
In his 2010 essay âThe Longing of the Long Poemâ, Peter Middleton writes that the long poem âdoes not lend itself to definition, and frequently takes advantage of this absence of expectation of any defining characteristicâ (Middleton 2010). This âabsence of expectationâ attests to the vastly differing ways in which contemporary American poets have arrived at their models of poetic extension. George Oppen, for example, built his 40-part serial poem âOf Being Numerousâ (1968) from the initial experiment of âA Language of New Yorkâ (1965), expanding the themes of this earlier poem with further sections probing questions of being-among-others in post-war America. In another instance, Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian wrote their collaborative long poem Sight (1999) in a series of email and letter exchanges between 1992 and 1997, engaging in a call-and-response on themes of intersubjectivity and visual perception. In still another, Nathaniel Mackeyâs two ongoing intertwined long poems âMuâ and Song of the Andoumboulou (1985âpresent), have been progressing alongside one another for three decades, exploring the ways in which subjectivity is a fluid and ongoing exchange between self and world. Indeed, the wide variety of long poems which have been written since the 1950s in the work of The New York School, The San Francisco Renaissance, The Deep Image Poets, The Objectivists, The Black Mountain Poets, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets and many others speaks not only to the prevalence of the long poem as a literary activity but also to the diversity of approaches and procedures on display in late twentieth-century poetics. The ways in which poets arrive at their long poem forms is always an idiosyncratic processâand, for many writers of long poems, the ultimate âformâ their work takes is only realised once the labour has been completed.
As the well-populated critical discourse surrounding the long poem suggests, 1 this heterogeneity of forms makes seeking clear definition a difficult task. In a 2004 encyclopaedia entry, Burton Hatlen attempts to define it historically:
The long poem arrived in North America carrying a heavy weight of associations. The august lineage that passes from Homer through Virgil and Dante to Milton and Wordsworth has meant that whenever an American poet has chosen the long poem form, that choice has had cultural and even political implications. (2004, 489)
Hatlen describes the long poem as âarrivingâ from a European lineage of writers, before undergoing a transformation into a specifically American form in the work of writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Joel Barlow, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville in the nineteenth century. This account is largely corroborated by earlier works of criticism which trace a lineage from Whitman through to the twentieth century, such as Stephen Fenderâs The American Long Poem: An Annotated Selection (1977), Thomas Gardnerâs Discovering Ourselves in Whitman: The Contemporary American Long Poem (1989), M. L. Rosenthal and Sally Gallâs The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry (1983). In these definitions of the long poem, continuity between writers is emphasised over diversity of form. In this regard, Stephen Fender writes:
Even âopen-endedâ gives too restricted a sense of the long poem in the Whitman tradition. [âŠ] T.S Eliot, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams all belong to this tradition, whatever their differences. (1977, vii)
This argument is compelling in the sense that Whitmanâs iconoclastic Leaves of Grass (written and expanded on between 1855 and 1891) does have resonance with subsequent American long poems in its sheer size and scope. In particular, Whitmanâs model of a long poem which occupies several decades of composition is reflected in many subsequent works.
In contrast to this positioning of Whitman as the inaugural figure of the long poem in America, however, some critics have sought to define the American long poem in relation to historical periods of intense literary experimentation. During the Modernist period, the long poem became rife with mythic anchoring, intertextuality and an emphasis on fragmentation and scale. 2 For example, Brian McHaleâs The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodern Long Poems argues that âthe long poem is a âmodernist inventionââ (2004, 3). In a similar line of argument, Margaret Dickieâs On the Modernist Long Poem (1986) suggests that this distinct Modernist variant of the long poem is inaugurated in the works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. Dickie describes Modernismâs relation to the long poem as âa new experiment not only with form but also with poetry as a public language. [âŠ] Openly didactic, the poets set out to teach not necessarily difficult lessons, but simple precepts that required new and complex forms of expression responsive to the conditions of the modern worldâ (1986, 8). Defining the long poem as a modernist invention, however, risks overlooking the influence of earlier writers whilst delimiting the work of subsequent figures in making the form their own. What is at stake here is not fixing the long poem as a form to the notion of high modernist stylistic decisions. Indeed, many writers of long poems have far more humble ambitions than open didacticismâfor example, throughout George Oppenâs career, he displayed suspicion towards Ezra Poundâs egoistic and didactic use of poetry, which he felt should not be used to âprescribe an opinion or idea, but to record the process of thinking itâ (Oppen 2007, 20). Many subsequent examples have centred on an ambition to record the process of thinkingâand still others seem to find their âcentreâ in the process of composition itself. Again, this is not to dismiss Dickieâs important work in coming to terms with Modernist long poems, but rather to suggest that arresting the âlong poemâ form as belonging to any single historical period is an unnecessary restriction to place on the diversity of forms and procedures on display in American poetics.
In response to such accounts, more recent criticism of the American long poem has stated the need for less intense focus on the act of definition itself. Figures such as Joseph Conte, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Peter Middleton, Peter Baker, Lynn Keller and Paul Jaussen have emphasised the overwhelming heterogeneity of the contemporary long poem form in favour of seeking to define it or locate it within an historical moment. Joseph Conte, for example, argues in his 1992 article âSeriality and the Contemporary Long Poemâ that the problem of definition lies in the misdirection intrinsic in the term âLong Poemâ itself. He suggests that the difficulty is located âin the apprehension that the term âlong poemâ refers only to volume, and says nothing about the form or the content of the workâ (1992, 35). Conte gestures at the fact that the quantities involved in long poems differ so vastly from work to work that the measure of length itself is only a small part of what constitutes a âlong poemâ. In a similar fashion, Peter Middleton, in his essay âThe Longing of the Long Poemâ, displays suspicion towards what the phrase âlong poemâ might signify:
What significance does the adjective âlongâ carry when we talk about the long poem? Is it literal or metaphorical, or a more or less implicit proper name (a disavowed categorisation that really means âModernistâ or âworld-encompassingâ)?; and whichever of these best describes the work of this measure, is it then a value [âŠ] or a category [âŠ] or a metonym for some extended poetic theory? (Middleton 2010)
Middletonâs range of associations here gestures at both the indeterminacy of the term and some possible ways of entry into the meaning of poetic âlengthâ. In contemporary long poems, length is a measure not only of page or line number but of scope, capacity, space, range and duration. These varieties of extension are conditions of the long poem by virtue of the sustained attention involved in both writing and reading them. Middleton emphasises the fact that the long poem always involves a process of coming to terms with the specific work in question, attending to its minute details and its wider structural organisation.
It is important to recognise, however, that Conte and Middleton are not claiming that the contemporary American long poem isnât indebted in various ways to, for example, Walt Whitman or the Modernist writers. Their accounts, however, suggest that neither of these narratives can fully explain the sheer diversity and variation involved in the writing of long poems in the late twentieth century. For these critics, the long poem is first and foremost an activity. In her 2004 lecture âConsidering the Long Poem: Genre Problemsâ, poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that any such attempt to rigidly classify the long poem is âdoomedâ. She writes:
to use a genreâ The Long Poemâ or a historical entityâ âthe 20th or 21st century long poemââwith any hopes of achieving a genre definition is a doomed ...