What is a long poem?

They come in a great variety of forms, obviously, but what interested me in the beginning was how its 20th-cent. American versions carried forward & revised the epic mode.

Northrop Frye wrote a useful summary of its generic attributes. Among them are the epic's encyclopedic & cosmogonic qualities, the aim to present an image of universality.

One of the contrasting or counterbalancing characteristics of 20th-cent. poetry, though, from Symbolism on, was a push toward aesthetic autonomy, self-sufficiency, singularity : the idiosyncratic charm of modernist poetry lies in its assertion of the humble-sturdy beauty of things in themselves, including poems-as-poems. The poem becomes a delightful & useless contraption, rather than a utilitarian medium for something else. This is a particularly American spin on the notion of "invention" - & it goes somewhat against the grain of America's own iron laws of practical & useful enterprise.

& I think this idiosyncratic autonomy is what differentiates my own poem (Forth of July), contra Jonathan, from the prosaic medium of traditionalist narrative long poems.

Forth of July, as a form of late modernist epic, presents an encyclopedic cosmogony of sorts; & I think this was probably the underlying motive propelling its construction. Moreover, it's a cosmogony founded on a strictly poetic equation. A better phrase for this would be "poetic axiom", or poetic given : which, in any realm other than poetry, would probably be considered a tautology. As Milton understood, the frame & plot of epic is built on its "argument"; but in the 20th century, the age of autonomy & self-reflexivity, art focused more than ever before on the notion that its best, perhaps only, "argument", is its ability simply to be : all the assertions and denials which proceed from that are merely corollaries of an irreducible & complex manifestation.

A tautology is a kind of "ring structure", the primordial form of traditional epic poetry; we might liken it also to Mandelstam's (contra Symbolism) "law of identity" : "A = A".

Readers may be surprised at how postmodernist my discourse here is tending. Yet this tautological law of identity is more radical than standard postmodernism allows. Underlying the law of identity is an assertion of unity and universality, ie, "A = A" includes the universe (whereas in postmodern thought, "all" is "nought", and identity is an illusion with totalitarian implications).

The fact that a contemporary long poem has an argument of any kind, no matter how obscured, confused, and tautological, points up a distinction between (at least one aspect of) modern & postmodern; the corollaries of an argument for "identity" (A = A) lead to unities of form & construction which postmodern literature denies. I think this distinction is part at least, of the challenge my poem offers to the contemporary climate.

But can I be more explicit about the argument underlying Forth of July? How is it a strictly "poetic axiom", a tautology?

The argument of Forth of July can be likened, with reservations, to the controversial "anthropic principle" in physics (itself a kind of tautology). The epic journey-story of narrator "Henry" - with the help of spirit-guide "Bluejay" and wisdom-spirit "Blackstone" - does three coordinated things simultaneously. It unveils the layered roots of desire motivating the experiences of personal history ("Henry's confessions"); it unveils the roots of local, national, & strictly literary history as a story of repressed & denied realities (Bluejay's "basement" narration of Rhode Island & United States from the perspective of a homeless black/native American crazed ghost of ambivalent sexual proclivities); and it asserts that global history itself pivots on a mysterious "intervention" in human time & affairs of a Word of Love, analogous to poetry itself.

In this third element lies the ring structure or tautological aspect of the epic argument. For if human time & history pivot or revolve on a Word of Love comprehended by humankind, then poetry is a manifestation or mimetic image of same. The "wildness" of poetry, the poetic license which spins objective realities into dream-speech & fiction, comes round again (the ultimate "ring structure"): turning, as Whitman knew, on the essential, the most fundamental purpose of speech in the first place : to build a home for human beings, through love-speech (mother-love, father-love) - to reconcile the child to the mortal world. Mandelstam called this "domestic hellenism".