I've been much concerned in my own writing with the problem of the long
poem. So far I haven't gone beyond 420 lines, but I'm always being tempted
to by my interest in narrative (and arguably the dominance of other
narrative media tends to push the narrative poet towards the epic, which is
narrative with the sort of symbolic resonances that poetry can supply better
than anything else). Long poems do test the patience of contemporary
readers - but they've almost always been segmented into cantos or fits or
chapters. The trick, as far as the magazines are concerned, is to make them
modular, so that a section can stand more or less on its own, while still
contributing to the structure of the whole. If your epic can be divided in
this way, I suggest you send it to Michael Schmidt at PN Review - he has
always been prepared to publish longer work, and serialized Fredy Neptune
before it came out in book form.
By the way, I can only speak for the UK market, but I've been told that if
you call your work a long poem or epic or whatever, publishers aren't
interested, but if you call it a novel in verse they get quite enthusiastic.
Craig Raine's History the Home Movie was heavily marketed here - of course,
he's a very establishment figure, but he and Vikram Seth and others seem to
have made the genre almost fashionable, which maybe creates a little chink
for less well-known writers to take advantage of.
Best wishes
Matthew
-----Original Message-----
From: Ali Alizadeh <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 19 February 2001 07:07
Subject: The epic: pros and cons
>Dear all
>
>As I'm working on a PhD project which involves writing a self-styled
>contemporary epic of sorts, I thought to perhaps generate a discussion
>about the advantages and short-comings of this form within the group. The
>main advantage that the epic bears over just about any other form of
>writing is its primordial and prominent position in having shaped
>literature as we know it. If civilisation was formed around the great
>rivers of the middle-east, then literature came to existence as a result of
>the flourishing powers of the ancient epics e.g. Gilgamesh, stories of
>Innana, Mahabharatta, Illiad, etc. This historical prominence is also the
>epic's biggest disadvantage in contemporary writing due to the 'post'
>civilisation and anti-mythical stances of our popular/intellectual
>cultures. While the 'hero quest' may have enjoyed a revival thanks to
>psychoanalysis (Jung, Campbell, etc) in the past century, it has been
>strongly dismissed by the like of Jameson, Barthes and others who see
>mythology as a by-product of outdated modes of culture. The catch, of
>course, is that some of today's very contemporary poets such as Derek
>Walcott, Les Murray, Dorothy Porter, John Scott, Alan Wearne, only to name
>a few, haven't been able to resist the ambitions and grandeurs of long
>protagonist-driven narratives in poetry (which may or may not qualify as
>epics) and it is these works which have attracted the most attention to
>these writers. I'm interested in the current possibilities of the ancient
>form, but as I subscribe to Olson's view that "form is an extension of
>content" I wonder about the contents which are suitable for an epic
>treatment. In times when the only way for a younger poet to make an impact
>has been getting fairly short poems published in highly intellectual (read:
>anti-mythical) journals, am I deluded to be investing my energies into a
>work which can only be published as a dismembered body in a variety of
>potentially hostile journals before seeing the light of the day as an
>entire volume? And is there a way out of this maze?
>
>Ali Alizadeh
>
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