how to write a long poem -- Post #1

 

How to Write a Long Poem

 

A long poem generally involves extended meditation on a topic or a theme. It often takes some time to write. Possibly years. It’s a big deal for your creative practice, if you undertake this kind of thing.  Many may mock this suggestion, but I think that sincerity counts for a lot in this work. I mean that it helps if what you’re writing is something you really mean, as opposed to being flippant or slight or smartarsed. (That doesn’t mean the work can’t be funny … or tragically sad, or both … or however you feel, or however you’d like it to be.)

 

One needn’t be daunted by the time frame aspect, because it’s possible to do more than one thing at a time (for instance, proverbially, to walk and chew gum.) The list of what else you could do while writing a long poem is doubtless much longer than the poem could be.

 

A long poem can consist of shorter ones, and conversely a long poem can spin off shorter ones along the way. No effort need be wasted. What you don’t end up using for your ‘finished product’ remains a quarry you can revert to for other projects later. A long poem needn’t ever be finished either, but it won’t exist at all if you don’t begin. (A note of caution here re the quarry though – there is a danger of creating a pile of bricks so high and precipitous that you’ll never be brave enough to return for your hard hat.)

 

The long form can provide a poet with the opportunity to see the object of a poem from a variety of perspectives – a series of takes. Think of Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. Not such a long poem, but it makes the point.

 

Taking all this into account, the project of making a long poem can be an important vehicle for personal growth, a corrective for black and white thinking, an encouragement to the nuanced view. The long poem is an extended opportunity to do what every poem, from a haiku up, needs to do – i.e. to surprise the reader by making us look again. And again. And again, perhaps.

 

The project in mind might be a poem of place, it might be a journey, it might tell a story (in either conventional or unconventional ways), it might be an argument in poetic form. 

 

A key question you need to ask yourself in setting out to write a long poem is – what – in the world or in your neighbourhood or in your life – demands your extended meditation (?) A world event or circumstance?  Something local?  The local as global? The global as just where we are?

 

As per the remark on sincerity above, it’s always best to give a rat’s about whatever you’re writing … as opposed to writing for the sake of writing or to pose as a writer for the adoring crowd (whatever social media may suggest, they tend to be thin on the ground!). The longer the envisaged work the more important it is that care is to the fore.

 

Other questions you might want to ask yourself at the outset are –

-          is the view of the long poem deep or broad, or both?

-          does the poem have particular formal (for instance, structural) characteristics?

-          does it involve several forms?

-          is it essentially narrative or conversational or lyrical or epigrammatic in style (or some combination of these? or something else?)

-          does it owe particular debts to other existing works or genres or styles (e.g. is it ekphrastic, is it ‘after’ someone or some particular poem; is it ‘in the style of…’)

 

But let’s just start out with one question –

What’s your poem about?

 

 

 

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In my next post in this series, I’ll gather together all of the long poems I’ve had placed or shortlisted in the Newcastle Poetry Prize over the last thirty years.  This will hopefully give you an idea of the range of topics I’ve managed to cover in poems, over that period, that were convincing to the judges in those years.