Sometime in the later 1980s I began to take an interest in writing some kind of long poem. I became absorbed in the Cantos, The Bridge, the Maximus Poems, Paterson. I can't remember when exactly that started. As I look back on it now though I think there were several motivations at play. On this blog I have been talking about "idiomatic communities": & perhaps some of my animus toward them is a result of my own difficulty in finding a style. I know that through the 80s and early 90s I was really struggling with a kind of imbalance between the voice & perspective I wanted to project, and the actual audience for my poetry. I would be writing "serious" poems which in the context of (little or no) audience sounded unintentionally comic. These "old" poems from Way Stations which I have been posting here, and the longer work I've been doing since the late 1990s, bracket a period in which I struggled to find a tone or level of address.

The first long poem I attempted was written in the context of a "book"-sequence of poems I was trying to do called Midwest Elegies (mostly published now in Way Stations). The "sequence" or book was an attempt to find a means to solve the difficulty mentioned above - to develop a consistent style through the thematic unity of a sequence. I was deeply absorbed in Yeats & the Arrowsmith translations of Montale in those days (Montale remains one of my absolute favorites). The long poem was called "Grain Elevator" and was a kind of dream-vision (if I can manage it, I will post it here).

So I think that one of the motivations that led me toward long poems was a sense of stylistic impasse, related to a sense of the social irrelevance of what I was doing. I was coming back to poetry, in the 1980s, after a period of local community organizing and political activism. The long poem seemed to offer some means to include more social reality in my writing. But I think a more positive motivation, as I read more long poems and more critical work on the subject (for example Michael Andre Bernstein's study "Tale of the Tribe"), was the sense of an opening, an opportunity. The US long poem seemed like unfinished business; that is, its practicioners had not been able to equal the older epics (Milton, Dante, etc) on their own (American) ground. And as I continued to read them I came to the conclusion that the works of Pound, Williams, Olson, Crane were offering versions of history & reality which - while fascinating and engaging and impressive on their own ground - did not represent my own perspective. They did not get history right, ultimately (the way I saw it as "right", of course). Doing a long poem began to feel like a real adventure.