Rachel Zucker's Essay on Long Poems

Had been reading Rachel Zucker's essay on long poems. It made me think about my own poems in the way I haven't done before. I didn't set out wanting to write long poems, or poems with narratives. But my concerns, the materials I have been thinking about, kept pushing me towards narratives in poems. So, I am still trying to process two things that Zucker pointed out in her essay:

1. Long Poems Grapple With Narratives

2. Long Poems Grapple With Narrative But Are Not Prose

I think, I write longs poems, often with strong narrative content, because I want to see what happens when one explores an otherwise tangible story through the abstraction of poetic language. To me, that abstraction or non-mimetic, non-realist nature of poetic language opens up ways to explore the political content of a story I am narrating in the poem in a way I can never do within a short story. The non-realist language demands that I put more and more pressure on my capacity to go deeper, to explore the substance of a phenomenon without the imperatives of a strict plot-line or the need to "sound real."

But there is also something else. I began to explore narrative poems because I did want to move away from the overtly confessional tone of some of the contemporary women's poetry. And the fetishized "me-ism" of much of the body of alienationist verse. Having a specific character to write about, using she/he instead of I allows me to contextualize and historicize the persona I am writing about more. It also allows me to create a distance between the personal me and the persona I am writing about or through. This distance does let me think of the multi-layered nature of the interactions between the self and the social collectives much more. I mean, all experiences are personal in a way. So, to say I am writing about my personal experiences does not mean much to me. What is important to me is how do we understand that personal experience, contextualize it, place it within specific grids etc. That is, the work of theorization.

And, at the cost of incurring the wrath of lots of people I happen to know and love, let me just confess that poetry is a form of theorization for me.

At this point in my life, the material I am writing about, the experiences I am most concerned with, allows me to do that theorization better if I have a narrative, and use the messy structures of a long poem. Or so I think.