DuPlessis - Considering The Long Poem

Readings webjournal: Rachel Blau DuPlessis - Considering the long poem: genre problems
23/01/2011 10:28
Issue 4
Rachel Blau DuPlessis Considering the long poem:
genre problems
Will Rowe - Johan de Wit's
'Up To You Munro'
Johan de Wit - Statements
- Anything goes
Lawrence Upton - Bob
Cobbing: and the book as
medium; designs for poetry
Edmund Hardy - Pipes for
Cut Throats
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Rachel Blau DuPlessis - Considering the
long poem: genre problems
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Considering the long poem: genre

problems
- Rachel Blau DuPlessis
[This excerpt is taken from a longer paper, prepared for a
conference on the long poem
University of Sussex, Brighton, held May 16-17, 2008.]
Jenny Pike Cobbing - # 1
for Ron Silliman
David Annwn - Master of

the Five Dimensions: Alan
Halsey Nearing Sixty
Writing a long poem has an interwoven private and public
Esther Leslie - Lossless and

Found
- You could have fooled me
Elizabeth James - 'Our
violent times': reading
notes
Aodn McCardle - Lack Of
Control As A Condition Of
And In The Poem
- Everyone does it
Ian Heames - Ghost &
Other Sonnets
Peter Middleton - Twenty
Conjectures
Carol Watts - Only,
Document: Stephen
Ratcliffe's 'Real'
- That will be the day
(WFW)
Holly Pester - The Poetics
of Non-Belief
temporality. 1 Because of the number of variables set in play,

one has (as a producer) deeply to desire that kind of activity
in time. Its a kind of erotic charge as well as an ambition
both expressing excess and desirea longing and a sense of a
vow. That is, long poems are a passionate activity, working
inside time, constituted to engage various personal and
historical necessities via poesis. It isnt so much making a big
Thing, but entering into a continuing situation of
responsiveness, a compact with that desire. 2 It is a literary
desireand something larger. I take long poemsit is
virtually an unarguable assumption--to concern things that are
too large in relation to things that are too smallit is a work
about scale far beyond any humanist tempering. By too large I
mean the universe, the earth, our history and politics, the
sense of the past, and the more febrile sense of the future: in
short, plethora, hyper-stimulation, an overwhelmedness to
which one responds. Thus the long poem is a work of mastery
in which you submit to your own powerlessness (citing myself
in Blue Studios 240). The tension between control and out of
control is a condition of ones employment. It is solved for by
the praxes of the long poem (not ever resolved) in a variety of
ways. For me this was signaled by the title Drafts whose
generative provisionality and open-ended ethos allowed me to
begin and then to continue. In arguing that other long poems
are similarly constituted by an engagement with an ongoing
activity in time, I seem to be applying to all these poems my
sense of serialitys vectored, oblique argument and modular
construction posited as the central mode of modern, late
modern and contemporary practice. Seriality accounts for itself
by a heuristic sense of event-in-language that becomes a
rhythm of thought, accountability via accumulation. This
paper, then, expresses a modulation from the Poundean
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/readings/issues/issue4/duplessis_on_Consideringthelongpoemgenreproblems
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Luke Roberts - 'I like your

voice / Look where it's
come from': Call it Thought
by Stephen Rodefer
Related links
Upcomings
Links
Submissions, Replies, and
Contacting us
23/01/2011 10:28
mytho-informational model as the master genre of long poems

to a Creeleyesque or, better, Oppenesque notational, social
and secular proposal.
Ron Sillimans quasi-autobiographical, pragmatic narrative
from 1992 called I wanted to write sentences: Decision
Making in the American Longpoem parallels my finding here
by its emphasis on activity. 3 Writing a long poem for Silliman
is not a decision about length; it is a way of solving certain
problems. The length is extraneous. Working out a problem
(sentences for Silliman) is the trigger; some length is needed
to make the point. Thus length is a simple measure of and
statement of ambition in relation to a problem. To treat the
length of the long poem as epiphenomenal or a side product is
a counter-intuitive finding. I do not mean to gainsay length
in many ways it is the biggest thing one sees and experiences
as a reader. But length may simply be an effect of activity for
the writer, a choice first of activity, then of its sustaining. It is
activity that is the fundamental term; length is a result of
producing continuous (or continuities ofinterrupted
continuities of) intervention by commentary into ones culture
as constituted, in ones time as given. Length is simply a way
of wagering/ waging against and inside time. 4
Part I.
If the tension between control and out of control is solved for,
the solutions have been genres, or subgenres. Just for
starters, I want to suggest a taxonomy of twentieth century
Long Poemsor broaden Joseph Contes, starting implicitly
with Pound, Williams, Moore, Stein, Eliot, and H.D. 5 To say
most of these modern long poems are hetero-discursive and
hetero-generic is hardly to scratch the surfaceliterally
anything can be found in them: shifting voices, including the
polyvocal and multilingual, analytic claims, exorbitant
intertextual citation (from other poems but also from treatises,
scrapbooks, archives, documents), para-textual apparatuses
(notes, doubled narratives, glosses). In that zone, any textual
mark, glyph or signeven white spacemay be a plausible,
serious event. Often these poems point to paradigm-shattering
critical interpretations of ones culture, both in the sociohistorical and in the literary sense; they seek accountability,
analysis, resistance, even transformation. They might be
mythopoetic, of world-vast spiritual scope, an excoriation or a
satiric resistance to culture and society, a critique by
accumulation of evidence. Sometimes they manifest a
thaumaturgic function for the poem and its central subjectivity
the speaker claims some power of naming, curing,
envisioning a future, reinterpreting, mourning. Often such a
text reorganizes the library; it is a poem that deliberately,
nobly, even maliciously absorbs and transposes Great Works
of the past while adding its own reading list, including itself. 6
[In the genre identification line of thinking, there are now
the following categories. Most readers ought to be able to fill
in appropriate names. 1. Narrative/ Musical/ Mythic Works. 2.
Hyperspace Encyclopedic Epics 3. Works of Seriality 4. Odic
Logbooks of Continuance 5. New Realist Procedurals 6. Long
Poem as Essay or Conceptual Text. After several pages of
definition with examples, I go on:]
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If this or any taxonomy is good for nothing else, it makes

enormously clear how much work there is to discuss under the
rubric of the modern and contemporary Anglophone long
poem. The more interesting question is whether this taxonomy
can possibly be plausible even if it is a little inexact. The
answer?maybe, but only as a pedagogic instrument. The
poems, angry as revenants, contestatory and explosive, are
already crawling, creeping, rising, and popping out of my boxlike, over-generalized categories, arguing and fulminating,
offering alternative ideas of what they are doing. (Some of the
poets, also, are still alive.) 7 For example, where does one
put Flow Chart? The solemn critical rectitude of some
division like this, the modal and generic definitions that keep
poems in category cannot ignore the facts that some works
disturb this taxonomy, and if anyone thinks too hard (which
you are undoubtedly doing right now), the whole schemata
goes up in smoke. Or the works are so richly pluralized that
neither the genre rubrics inside the long poem nor long
poem itself can be pinned down, even as a heuristic critical
act. Is this really such a bad thing?
Part II.
Im not straining to be Derridean here, but the essay (1979/
1980; rev. 1986) called The Law of Genre does shed a
pulsing strobe light on our proceedings, and quite dizzyingly. If
we believe Jacques Derrida, this attempt to define the long
poem can have only one finding. If ever there were a genre of
the modern and contemporary long poem as a law, that
law of genre has been mootedas is true of any genre,
according to the slidy sort of law illegally handed down in
Derridas essay. Any genre can only be self-different,
contaminated and parasitic (terms from Acts 227). Derrida: I
submit for your consideration the following hypothesis: a text
would not belong to any genre. Every text participates in one
or several genres, there is no genreless text, there is always a
genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to
belonging (Acts 230). This both giveth and taketh awayit
postulates genre and displaces its solidity at once by evoking
mobility (as well as, curiously, the agency of the text.). And
all this still in the eyes of the beholder, herself beholden to
tacit genre definitions that are also being undone and
surpassed even as they are postulated. Thus a given genre has
no borders as such, and the fact that no classificatory
boundary represents anything but an oversimplified but porous
bit of fencing or hedging (puns intended) is illustrated by my
taxonomic paragraphs above. But even in a more cunning
universe, to use a genrethe long poemor a historical entity
the 20th and 21st century long poemas a rubric with any
hopes of achieving a genre definition is a doomed undertaking,
doomed to be undermined by plethora simultaneous with
inadequacy. (The problem of control/out of control is here
transferred to reception from production.) A network of genre
relationships overcomes, even clogs any text, so all literature
becomes one extensive textual landscape, while the individual
text, if it has borders at all, is always just a feature in that
larger intertextual landscape. Or perhaps the text is always
mobile, in no one place in this landscape. These slides
between individual text and intertextuality are fundamental to
the literary act; the long poem may be the best symptom.
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Neither a long poem nor any other genre of any artwork can
ever belong to some pure version of genre, but only is able to
be articulated congruent with (not within) a genre because it
loops itself (slitheringly) into genre relationships with other
long poems. The only genre is then literature, or writing,
which is constantly in motion. That is, long poems gyre and
gambol in the wabe (along with everything else). Just as Stein
might be said always to have multiple subplots without there
ever being plot, so the long poem may be said to have
multiple genres without having a single genre. What long
modes do claim is the space-time to register and elaborate
multiple generic activities.
This statement by Derrida is a bit like what Smaro Kamboureli
has said in a necessarily more specific study: that the long
poem is a generic hybridit has (these are her terms) epic,
lyric, quest, documentary and conceptual elements in it. Well
why stop? (She stopped only because she was doing a
taxonomy of the Canadian long poem at a certain era; it
remains a very suggestive and pertinent book.) So there are
as many generic traces in a long poem as there are genres
one might consider. But if this is true of any genre, this
finding, though quite suggestive for the contemporary long
poem, cannot distinguish our genre particularly, except
perhaps by more intense hybridity because of length. If all
genres are, in Bakhtins terms, heteroglossic and
heterogeneric, in Derridas heterogeneous and hybrid, we
still dont have a definition. 8 Except to say these texts are
long, they long for themselves and have generally taken a lot
of time to do, even a lifetime, and a good deal of activity.
Should we still want a genre definition?
Maybe we can have a taxonomy but no final definition; this
endless putting in and taking out of category mimics the
endless cultural acts of the long poem itself: creolized,
inclusive, errant, omnivorous, palimpsestic, and over-written
with more writing.
So to return to this fools-rush-in analysis of Derrida, it is not
so much hybridity and the heterogeneric that are particularly
strikingwe already know this law of genre. The modern
long poem helped to invent that law as did the modern novel.
Indeed, in his analysis of the novel, Bakhtin tried vainly for a
binarist solidity, working to keep poetry in the monologic place
and failingin some measure precisely because the
resurgence of the long poem in modernism outran his
categories.
The more striking postulate in Derridas essay is that any
genre can only be constituted by existing alongside the
shadow of its opposite, only by presenting phantom
alternatives, only by articulating the markable presence of a
counter-law, or alternatives never totally swallowed up by
any crude majoritarian presentation of how long poem might
be defined (Acts 225). Its to Derridas second point, what I
am taking to be traces of its opposite, to which we might now
turn. By one calculus, this simply re-multiplies the notion of
generic plurality and is another way of stating this point. Yet
this statement is very peculiar and suggestive as Derrida turns
to a gender encounter to illustrate it. Genres mix the way the
two genders mixin a kind of odd couple or an odd
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marriage nonetheless heterosexual (Acts 224, 245). So the

rigidand mocked--law (genres dont mix) and the counterlaw (genres definitely mix) are mapped on gender difference
(Acts 245); the result is a peculiar proof that law itself is a
kind of madness. I will stop before I drive off the edge of this.
In this odd genre-marriage, of course there will be male and
female. Thats female as omnivorously a world, inclusive,
satiric of all reasonable taxonomies, her boundary-lessness
facilitating a conception of total plethora and plurality (Acts
252). We have seen this kind of female figure before. It is the
generative Magna Mater in which everything, through which
everything, a law beyond lawwayward, imperious, moody,
quixotic, insatiable and demanding. In shorta
female/feminine forcenot a female person, but a female
element or Platonic idea nonetheless appointed with all the
embonpoint of 6000 years of patriarchal use (Acts 247). This
powerful female force mockingly plays with any male author
by letting herself be cited by him although she always
exceeds him in disseminal polysemy (Acts 249), itself an
androgynous phrase in English.
Female authorship being undiscussed, we do not know about
its relationship to this allegorized female force. I and my
fellow female citizens are driving with neither map nor the
compass of theoryyet again. Ah well. Either we have been
erased or freed totally. What is the look of the erased and
liberated? It is the blankest of double absences. Perhaps I
shouldnt say another word. Just white space.
No such luck. The startling evocation of gender in the middle
of The Law of Genre is peculiar in its trace of binarist
thought, no matter what Derrida does in queering and
critiquing. The pun in French on genre makes the
genders/genres pass into each other, a generative mixing of
genders and genres apparently answering the madness of
polarized genders (and rigidly distinct genres)extreme
sexual difference and presumably immobile literary kinds
(Acts 245). Yet at the same time that he tries really to float in
the ocean of permanent negativity, in uncertainty, in
situational shifts, Derrida does half-hold onto the life jacket of
conventional gender notions. After all, plethora is only
gendered because Blanchot (in the rcit that Derrida glosses,
one satirically practicing all genres [252]) and the French
language both gender it. Its a situational argument. But is it
strategic?
Why should concepts of the female get mixed up in the
business of defining something (genre) that is, in the main,
gender neutral? 9 If one wants enfoldingand I dowhy go
through binary genders and (mostly) heterosexuality to get it?
(fold in Acts 235). However, with the Big Female hovering
even as imported from Blanchot, its as if this essay has it
both ways. [Even though I have launched an appeal against
this law of genre, it was she who turned my appeal into a
confirmation of her own glory (Acts 250). Its all her fault.
hmmm.] It is true that laws of genre seduce even when one
resists their blandishments. Its true that the subversion of
any text needs the law in order to take place (Acts 240).
However, this fact might lead to an argument for activities:
writing, propulsion and claim, but not for law in the
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feminine (Acts 247), even if that phrase is dissolved

(deconstructed) until it means no law at all.
For really, it does appear as if Derrida is talking here (and just
about everywhere else in his oeuvre) about desire, passionate
activity, and enfolding of the kind that I was trying to
articulate; yet because of other ideological tugs, this
magnetism gets imagined as female-y or feminine in a
heterosexual economy. By the end of the essay, one does
separate desire from the more scelerotic, if important, sexgender ideas that undergird it, but to me, at any rate, the
tinge of commonplace binaries remains.
If, conversely, we believe Edgar Allen Poe, this question of
defining the long poem can only have another finding. A long
poem is impossible. It does not exist (Poe 88). It is "simply
a flat contradiction in terms" (88). It cant be a poem if its
long. The intensity of poetry as a yearning artifact seems to be
at odds with the scale of the long poem. This is logical in its
own obsessive terms; Poe bases himself on a sense of how
much excitement a reader can stand; this leads to many
scientistic rules and assumptions about readership and poetry,
rules couched universally, but that nonetheless offer amusing
data for the historical reconstruction of reader behavior. A
poem should be (rule) consumed in one sitting, and the exact
budget (rule) of soul-elevating emotion and visceral intensity
cannot be sustained (rule) for more thanhe is wonderfully
exact about attention span(rule) one half hour. So the
situation of poetry conceptually deliquesces into the longish
lyric as the master genre. The impossibility of the long poem
was based on a particularly rigid sense of what attention
meant. It was like Aristotle on dramaanything too long
disobeyed the unities of time/place (one sitting to consume)
and of intention or focus (one impact, no change-ups, just
greater intensity to climax). So a poem was reasonably short,
focused, to be read in one sitting, emotionally, viscerally
intense. 10
And for Poe, like Derrida (via Blanchot), the female figure (a
slightly different female figure) has a good deal of motivating
status, since, all mixed in with his sense of genre, Poe offers,
in a related essay, a triumphalist analysis of poetrys most
crucial topos. Which goes something like thisyou know where
I am goingsince melancholy sublimity is the keenest
emotion, and death occasions it, since a poems goal is to
embody beauty, and women exemplify the beautiful, it follows
arithmetically that the death, then, of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world (Poe
144). 11 One must then have enough dead women to go
around; I suppose they cant really be reused. While I believe
writing often does come from a pre-dead yet posthumous
voice, and while I believe, to modify Wallace Stevens, that
death is the mother of vinegar (that oozy, gelatinous blob at
the bottom of the bottle), while sometimes I can believe in the
beautiful, still no matter how I slice it, the thought that your/
or male poetic culture depends on my death is unpalatable in
the extreme. 12 It certainly makes one want to give up poetry
if that is what a poetical topic is!
Between Derrida and Poe, the inspiration is either an allegory
of Law in the feminine so intense and seductive (and powerful)
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that it makes the man give up his own theoretical point, to

gain in compensation the role of her worshipper. Or inspiration
is a female figure so immobilized and exciting (and powerful,
because dead) that it makes a man sustain his career as her
worshipper.
Turning back to the question under discussion, between
Derrida and Poe, the long poem is squeezed from both sides
made differently problematic; in one case from sheer plethora
of all genres diffusing any sense of a particular genre, in the
other case as a category mistake; if its not intense, its not
poetry.
Yet a key counter-law plays a forensic role for both. From
Derrida one might mark the presence of the short poem as the
main counter-law among a plurality of hybrid and multiple
genre allusions for the long poem. Poe simply erases the long
poem in favor of the exacting temporality of lyric/short poem.
So what shall we do with this mixed-up idea? We could reject
it, along with its monstrous female motivators. Or we could
acknowledge it, and see where it takes us. We could throw
away the gender surround, and take the meat, praying that
the meat of this nut is not organically and ideologically related
to this lurid encasing shell of gender materials. (This double
gesture is a familiar one in the feminist repertoire.) So we
could say that the lyric/short poem haunts the long poem even
as the long poem surrounds it, trumps it, smashes it, and
envelops it. Even when it is made to disappear, or to become
untenable, perhaps the ghost of lyric/shortness does variously
haunt the long poem. I wouldnt have expected me to say this
I have sometimes considered the long poem with a
particularself-enablingtendentiousness only as it resists
lyric, and precisely for my own lurid gender reasons,
although I also have stated this trumping/enveloping notion.
13
But suppose one saw not so much a rejection or resistance,

but a digestive absorption of the lyric/short poem into a
further Otherness. So lets see what happens with this
possibility.
Bibliography, Critical works cited.

Alderman, Nigel, Introduction. Pocket Epics: British Poetry
after Modernism. Ed. Nigel Alderman and C.D. Blanton. The
Yale Journal of Criticism 13.1 (Spring 2000): 1-2.
Bakhtin, M.M. from The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. ed
Michael Holquist, trans Caryl Emerson and Holquist. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981. The section called Discourse
in Poetry and discourse in the Novel. 275-300.
Baker, Peter. Obdurate Brilliance: Exteriority and the Modern
Long Poem. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991.
Conte, Joseph. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern
Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
-----. "Seriality and the Contemporary Long Poem."
Sagetrieb 11.1-2 (1992): 35-45.
Derrida, Jacques. The Law of Genre (1979, trans. 1980).
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Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge. NY: Routledge,

1992.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural
Work. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.
Kamboureli, Smaro. On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary
Canadian Long Poem.
Poe. Edgar Allan. Poems and Essays on Poetry. Ed. C.H.
Sisson. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Silliman, Ron. "I Wanted to Write Sentences: Decision Making
in the American Longpoem." Sagetrieb 11.1-2 (1992): 11-20.
-----. As to Violin Music: Time in the Longpoem. (April
2005). http://www.jacketmagazine.com/27/silliman.html
Accessed May 3, 2008.
Notes.
1
What people might say about writing one could seriously

differ depending on what stage of the process one is in, a fact
that should indicate that at least part of the writing is invested
in an activity that continues over time, The more one has of
that poem, the more it seems as if your poem is your mission
in life. So somehow, it appears a person doesnt begin one
without some intuition that this might be so.
2
Silliman curiously and interestingly argues that length is

almost a side product of other forces (I Wanted to Write).
3
The Williams line I wanted to both in Suite, and as the

title of a book of interviews. Silliman, incidentally, loses the
space between the adjective long and the word poem as his
generic markerit has the effect of holding the concepts
together as a noun, almost making this another genre term.
4
See Silliman on time in the longpoem.
This must be noted as related to Joseph Contes Unending

Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry, mainly by agreeing
with its emphasis on the serial and the procedural, but
expanding (and renaming) some of his categories. Of course,
there are genres that I wont even mention, suggestive
categories like epyllion (mini-epicbut with more love interest
could this be Helen in Egypt, could this be Song of the
Andoumboulou?) or what Nigel Armstrong has called pocket
epicsomething saturated in locale and materials of local
culturehe is interested in some category for British poems
and I will be discretely silent on that point only to remark that
Dell Olsens riotous satiric/serious sacking of Charles Olson
that begins I mini Mouse is a recent version of this interest.
6
Not only a text that needs a library, indeed, it is a text that

is a librarya text itself indebted to, synthetic of, and
burrowing through a pile of archival and literary materials,
often ones self-declared as vital. This is as true of Eliots The
Waste Land and Zukofskys A as it is of later works like
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Gwendolyn Brooks Annie Allen and Susan Howes The

Liberties. As I have found with Drafts, the creation of
intertextual networks of relationships with other poems, sets
challenges, bites down on culture as given, and enjoys culture
coming back to bite back. A very engorging literary eroticism,
I might add, with a good dollop of aggression.
7
Given that most of my examples come from the dark side

of the force (post-avant), and dont mention e.g. James Merrill
or Sharon Doubiagoif nothing else the necessity of this
Sussex conference is patent if only to try to get a handle on
some of this. One feature, any individual long poem, and
modern/contemporary long poems as a group show
changeablityeven by one person, the poem over time reveals
a multiplicity of modes and generic aims. Particularly over the
course of the writing of a long poem, one genre can grow in
importance (like pastoral for WCW in Paterson, elegy for
Pound in the Pisan Cantos). Given that some of the generic
markers could be modally contradictorye.g. domesticated
ode; realist sublime, any rubric that points to a hetero-generic
quality is better than another rubric. Some of these rubrics for
and about the long poem might be anthology, encyclopedia,
archive, notes, collage, and the word Book as a quasimystical term.
8
Everything is mixed, a necessary heterogeneity or hybridity,

a principle of contamination, a law of impurity (62 and
Derrida, Acts 227 )
9
To review, Derrida modulates to male and female because of

something particular: genre in his language does not just
mean literary kind, nor only artistic style or manner, but also
gender, grammatical and human gender. This complex creates
a suggestive arena for the question of the long poem, despite
the fact that gender and genre are simply etymologically
related in English and are not, as in French, the same word.
Thereupon Derrida proposes a very queer turn, which is that
genders/genres pass into each otherand this is his answer to
the madness of sexual difference which I take to mean the
madness of polarized, legally uneven, and more powerful vs.
less powerful genders. (Acts 245) But he accomplishes this via
his deconstructive explication of a rcit by Blanchot which
figures the feminine, the female as indicating the lawback to
a kind of polarizing us-vs-them, and one counterintuitive at
that. And even though Derrida states that it would be folly to
draw any sort of general conclusion here, (and thank
goodness for that) (Acts 252), there is something fascinating
about his coat-tailing on Blanchots insistence on a particular
female figure in a text who is the law, yet escapes the law.
10
The opposite situation exists too; there can be a poem too

short, too slight and epigrammatic (Poe 90). Poe might have
sounded as if he were laying down the law for all time, but Poe
makes a principle from his own "fancy" for "some few of those
minor English or American poems which best suit my own
taste" (88). Poes proud refusal of the possibility of the long
seems based in a literary historical debate with the flaccid
nationalist epics of his time. Like most rules, its part of a
historical situation, impermanent, situated, and not a norm
like a fixed star. One sympathizes, given what he is
responding to in the way of American poems: the early 19th
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century epic is nationalist, aggrandizing, didactic, and a bit

historically faked, a Potemkin village of epic poetry. Poe
claimed no alternative to this mode in poetry other than the
lyric (yet he actually invented another alternativethe prose
poemwhat is UP with him?). Curiously, Poes very interest in
intense effect could lead to something like Mallarms Book. Or
at the very least the use of that term (itself idealizing and
evanescent) as the genre, rather than epic, breaks the
question of length open, by offering series, long poem, booklength works, as well as epic as some appropriate genre
terms.
11
The gentlemen of the jury should, however, be informed

that these comments come from two different essays by Poe:
The Poetic Principle and The Philosophy of Composition.
12
I think it was Meret Oppenheim who has a photo of herself--she was a dishas a dish. On a platter, covered with fruits
and veggies, I believe, served up to be eaten. As a satire on
culture, this goes pretty far. Perhaps, however, she should
have been more clearly indicated as dead.
13
In thatalthough not because of Peter Bakerone might

say I was stating what he said in Obdurate Brilliance about the
long poemopposing its exteriority to the lyrics
interiority; he argues that a resistance to the lyric is
expressed in long poems by denial or rejection of interiority or
the lyric subject, itself postulated as unified and in contrast is
based on split subjectivity.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Readings webjournal, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street,

London WC1E 7HX. email: estaphin@gmail.com or
redochre.aodan@gmail.com or phugill@mac.com
Last modified on: 03 March 2009
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DuPlessis - Considering The Long Poem

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Readings webjournal: Rachel Blau DuPlessis - Considering the long poem: genre problems

Readings home / Issues / Issue 4 /

Considering the long poem: genre

Jenny Pike Cobbing - # 1

for Ron Silliman

David Annwn - Master of

Writing a long poem has an interwoven private and public

Esther Leslie - Lossless and

temporality. 1 Because of the number of variables set in play,

Luke Roberts - 'I like your

mytho-informational model as the master genre of long poems

If this or any taxonomy is good for nothing else, it makes

marriage nonetheless heterosexual (Acts 224, 245). So the

feminine (Acts 247), even if that phrase is dissolved

that it makes the man give up his own theoretical point, to

But suppose one saw not so much a rejection or resistance,

Bibliography, Critical works cited.

Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge. NY: Routledge,

What people might say about writing one could seriously

Silliman curiously and interestingly argues that length is

The Williams line I wanted to both in Suite, and as the

See Silliman on time in the longpoem.

This must be noted as related to Joseph Contes Unending

Not only a text that needs a library, indeed, it is a text that

Gwendolyn Brooks Annie Allen and Susan Howes The

Given that most of my examples come from the dark side

Everything is mixed, a necessary heterogeneity or hybridity,

To review, Derrida modulates to male and female because of

The opposite situation exists too; there can be a poem too

century epic is nationalist, aggrandizing, didactic, and a bit

The gentlemen of the jury should, however, be informed

In thatalthough not because of Peter Bakerone might

Readings webjournal, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street,

Last modified on: 03 March 2009

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