conversations on the long poem
Canadian poets Ken Norris and Bruce Whiteman have devoted much of their poetic lives to the long poem. Norris’s Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century was published in twenty-two books between 1977 and 2005. Book I of Whiteman’s The Invisible World Is in Decline was published in 1984. The final book, Book IX, will be published in the spring of 2022 by ECW Press.
Part 1 of this conversation is devoted to the tradition of the Canadian long poem and its American and European influences. Part 2 will concentrate on Norris’s Report, while Part 3 will concern Whiteman’s Invisible World. Parts 2 and 3 will appear in future issues of periodicities.
KN: The long poem was everywhere in Canada in the mid-70s. Let’s start with that.
As a young poet in your twenties at the time, what was visible to you?
BW: In my twenties I was mostly in university: B.A. 1975, M.A. 1977, library degree 1979. But I was writing all that time, and reading. Most of what I was aware of then, as far as the long poem went, was the American tradition. I read Paterson in the early 1970s, as well as Pictures from Breughel, and worked on the Cantos and Olson’s Maximus Poems as part of my undergraduate and Masters work both. My M.A. thesis was on the voyage theme in the Cantos, what Pound, using a Greek word, called the periplum. My grad work was supervised by Marshall McLuhan, and he told me that Joyce parodied Pound’s obsession with the periplum by having Stephen Daedalus throw a “pair o’ plums” off some high point in Ulysses. But anyway, it was Pound and Williams and their lifelong dedications to the long poem that I was focussed on. I knew about Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger too, even in high school, through my brother, who was a student at Carleton of Robert Hogg’s, who’d studied in Buffalo with Creeley and written a dissertation on Olson. So the long poem was very much part of my education, though—no surprise here, given the times—I did not know much about Canadian literature then, much less about Dudek, with whom I assume your own preoccupations began?
KN: At university, I wasn’t reading American long poems like Paterson, The Cantos, or The Maximus Poems. Friends of mine were reading them, but I wasn’t. My ‘thing’ at the time was American fiction.
In my sophomore year (age 18) I did an English tutorial in Blake. For some reason I decided to read prophetic books like “The Book of Thel”, “America: A Prophecy,” and “The Four Zoas.” Lord knows what I made of that stuff. But having encountered Blake creating his own mythology, his own mythological characters, I think the saints of language seemed less outlandish to me when I started reading The Martyrology years later.
In my last two years of uni, I was paying attention to “The Waste Land” and Four Quartets. I was impressed by Eliot’s ability to make large cultural statements.
1975 was my first year back in Canada. I was a practicing poet, and I was starting to read Can Lit. I think the first long poem, or serial poem, that I read was Bowering’s Curious. I’d never read anything like it before.
And that was a big part of the long poem for me—the newness. The difference. What WAS this stuff?
I was supposed to be going into the Ph.D. program at York in the Fall, taking a graduate class in Canadian poetry with Frank Davey. So, in the summer of 1975, I started reading Collected Poems by Louis Dudek. It was on the reading list for Davey’s course. That’s when I first encountered Europe, En Mexico, Atlantis and Continuation. And, again, the newness and the difference that was there in this stuff wowed me. Because I hadn’t read The Cantos, I didn’t have a context to put a poem like Europe into. I didn’t know that it was Poundian, or that American poets like Cid Corman and Robert Creeley didn’t like it because they found it to be totally derivative of Pound. In this case, my ignorance was a blessing; I could just be stunned and startled by what I was reading.
The fragmentary nature of En Mexico intrigued me. And then Atlantis kind of combined the methods of Europe with the method of En Mexico. So I was really knocked out by Atlantis, and especially by the Epilogue, which I and bpNichol and Robin Blaser have all been fans of.
The last long poem that I read in 1975 that really made a dent in my consciousness was E.J. Pratt’s “The Great Feud.” I just couldn’t believe that a poem like this existed. On the one hand, it is far more traditional than Curious or Atlantis, in being a narrative poem. On the other hand, it was one of the most OUT THERE things I had ever read. What an imagination! What an insane story to be telling!
I was still a couple of years away from starting to write my own long poem, but as a reader doors were opening. My imagination was being stretched. And it was being stretched by the long poems of Can Lit.
BW: Well, you had advantages curriculum-wise that I lacked. I didn't even know about Dudek or Pratt during the time I was in school. Or most of CanLit, really. I never did take a course in CanLit. That’s rather shocking, but it’s the way it was. I started reading Canadian poetry entirely on my own. I was slow at my own tradition. I was writing in the 1970s and even published my first books at the end of that decade, but my poetry was entirely in the lyric mode. I was still enmeshed in the psychosexual trammels and loved Blake—since you mention him—more for the short poems than the big myth-making poems, the prophetic books, which I read but didn't really respond to, when I was an undergrad. I was more attracted to Keats. It would take a while before I came to feel the limitations of the lyric poem and set out deliberately to find another way. The long poem as a mode didn’t really begin for me until after 1980.
I will add, since you mention it, that “The Waste Land,” which I know was crucial for your own concerns, was the first real modern poem I was introduced to, by my brother, when I was in high school. He came home from university very excited by poetry, and insisted on reading Eliot with me, and that blew my mind at that time. My brother Neil was a master of the poem’s allusiveness, and I was shocked and amazed to learn how culturally rich a poem could be.
KN: It doesn’t seem to me that someone, just out of nowhere, would decide to write a long poem. In a way, writing a long poem is a response to other long poems. In mycase it started as a response to “The Waste Land.” Finding out that long poems ARE POSSIBLE triggers an interest in certain poets and readers. Would we come “to feel the limitations of the lyric poem” if we hadn’t been made aware that something else was possible? I think I just would have kept writing sonnet-based lyric poems, and then maybe ventured into tackling poems that were 40 lines long. But nothing as ambitious as a long poem. And then, when you start encountering more and more of them, they begin to suggest to you that there might be a boundless freedom that exists beyond the lyric poem.
I was reading Bowering, Dudek and Pratt, but it was Eliot who dragged me into the long poem business. In the first book of Report, I was talking back to ‘The Waste Land.’
BW: I know how important Eliot’s poem was to the first book of Report. I had Eliot too, but in a way I wasn’t even cognizant of its being a “long poem.” Not in the structural sense, or the sense of openness, or the sense of a poem that goes on for a long time. And it wasn't really the latter, was it? It had girth, certainly, and cultural aspirations way, way beyond the typical lyric poem, even something as dense and multiplicitous as a Keats ode. My infatuation with Eliot faded when I came to realize how emotionally stunted he was, or so I thought, and even with “The Waste Land” under my belt, and growing familiarity with Pound and Williams, I wasn't ready back then to abandon poetry's keen expressiveness emotionally. That still meant the personal lyric poem for me, until finally, well, it wore out and I knew I needed something grander, more capacious; and suddenly, those long poems I’d become familiar with seemed not just awesome (in the old sense!), but useful models in a general way.
KN: I think I’m inclined to agree that “The Waste Land” is grander than a Keats ode but isn’t quite yet a long poem as we have come to know them. For me, it was something of a summary statement about the first half of the twentieth century. If you wanted a short “report” there was “The Waste Land”. If you wanted the longer report, there was The Cantos, which I later read around in, when I was set on teaching Pound.
I had Vegetables and Under the Skin behind me when I wrote the first book of Report. So two years into being a published poet I started working in the long poem. They were everywhere around us. And by then I was studying with Dudek, who had gone ALL IN on the long poem around 1957. He’d disappeared from the anthologies because his mature work was all long poems. I took note of that and made sure to keep writing lyric poems.
So were your prime examples the American long poems you’ve mentioned: Paterson, The Cantos, and The Maximus Poems? I don’t know if I was working from examples or models—I was just aware that Dudek had gone all in on the long poem, and there were other kinds of long poems in Canada that were making the rounds. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Naked Poems. And of course The Martyrology. If I latched onto any of them as an example at that stage, it was The Martyrology.
BW: I hadn’t yet encountered The Martyrology. So, yes, my examples were the American ones. Example is a more accurate word than model. I didn’t have anything like the cultural equipment necessary to embark on something like The Cantos or Maximus. But I wanted more range, more continuity, and a place in my poetry for whatever might become important to me beyond simple lyrical experience.
KN: As a reader, I would describe Canada in the mid-70s to the mid-80s as Long Poem Paradise. There was so much to read!
The best of the persona poems were probably The Collected Works of Billy The Kid and The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Some liked Sharon Thesen’s Confabulations. In the meditative long poem category there were the Dudek long poems Europe, En Mexico and Atlantis. Naked Poems was totally unique. Power Politics and Death of A Lady’s Man explored gender politics. Bowering and Davey explored the Tarot with Geneve and Arcana. George subverted autobiography with Autobiology. And then he rewrote Rilke in Kerrisdale Elegies. And then there’s stuff like Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies and Chris Dewdney’s The Natural History. My favorite Ondaatje book (is it a long poem?) (what is it exactly?) is Secular Love. And then there are the multi-book long poems Field Notes and The Martyrology. And that’s just a quick tour of the highlights. There were hundreds of long poems published between 1975 and 1985.
It was certainly possible for me to read The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Naked Poems without trying to rewrite them. I LOVE those books, but they don’t really appear as an influence in my own long poem. I’ve never taken on the persona poem. Maybe I’ve dabbled a little in erotica.
You and I have talked about this before. In Canada, there is the book-length long poem, and then there is the multi-book long poem. You and I both followed Nichol and Kroetsch into doing the multi-book long poem. That’s one way in which my long poem practice is quite different from Dudek’s. I don’t have anything that’s like Europe. But I DO have sections/books in Report that are like The Martyrology.
As a reader, I got a lot out of reading the long poem. It was certainly different from reading novels, and I think my love of fiction began to diminish as I became engaged with the long poem.
And as a writer—it’s one thing to think of yourself as a poet as you are writing a twelve-line poem. It’s a completely different idea of the poet you’re engaging when you decide to write a long poem for twenty-five years. You’re committing to the poetic project in a big way. As far as I was concerned, I was off following Wordsworth.
BW: Yes. I knew most of those books eventually. I even reviewed Death of a Lady's Man, and did what was the first interview with Chris Dewdney, I think, in Harvest, a little magazine that Cary Fagan and I did in the late 1970s, Cary mostly, with me as a coach on the sidelines. And I later wrote an essay on him, and an essay on Sharon Thesen too, including Confabulations. In a way it was through reviewing that I became more involved in Canadian poetry. I thank Jack David and Robert Lecker for that, as they supported me early on as a reviewer in Essays on Canadian Writing, where I first appeared, reviewing two Bowering books, in 1978. I knew nothing, but like many good reviewers, I used reviewing as a way to learn.
But let’s return for a moment to the examples I looked to. Wordsworth was the true grandparent, wasn’t he? You work from him in one of the later books of Report. My only little obeisance is a poem in Tablature, much later, that uses quotations from The Prelude (“The Wordsworth Thefts”). The Prelude is such a rich poem. There had been nothing like it before, and it is not only the originating long poem, but one that works from the lyrical impulse, or the autobiographical impulse, but turns it into something like an ancient epic poem but with a signature, huge in scale but intimate, rooted in Wordsworth’s childhood but incredibly sophisticated. I’m not sure that any of the American modernist long poem poets cared much about Wordsworth. Pound and Eliot might even have been quite sniffy about him. But he was a progenitor all the same.
And one poet whom we haven’t mentioned yet is Basil Bunting, and his long poem “Briggflatts.” Bunting read at Carleton University at the end of the 60s, when he was in North America and after, I think, the debacle of his teaching gig at U Vic, and I could have gone. But I didn’t, and I still regret not going to hear him. I drove to Ottawa during high school to hear Ed Dorn read and to hear Allen Ginsberg read. But I didn’t go for Basil Bunting. How stupid! But in any case I did read “Briggflatts” and thought it extraordinary, especially in musical terms, which were then and remain now important for my poetry, even my long poem in prose. If you listen to BB read some of “Briggflatts,” the musicality is just overwhelming.
KN: Did long poems confirm you in the faith of being a poet? I think that’s what happened with me. It’s like a door opened, out onto all of this esoteric research, and I realized that THAT was what I was really interested in. Dudek’s search for “what was real” made sense to me. The saints of language made sense to me. All the esoterica of the long poem made sense to me.
BW: Well, I don't think I’d talk about esoterica, but yes. Finding my way to my own long poem definitely confirmed my devotion to poetry and my self-identification as a poet. “Self-expression” and the psychotherapeutic value of writing poetry always struck me as a bit infantile. I wanted my own poetry, starting in the early 1980s, to be so much more than that. I didn’t have Louis as an interlocutor or cicerone, but I knew in my bones that the “search for what was real” was more, much more than merely expressing elements of my personality or even personhood, my private experience. If you read the very first poem in Book I of The Invisible World Is in Decline, you’ll understand that from the outset I am engaging with negative capability. And the prose poem form was a deliberate ordination. I wanted a poetry that would be less concerned with personal decisions, formally. Prose seemed to offer that, as it had for my heroes among the French poets—Bertrand, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont—whom I’d been reading since high school.
KN: The first long poems I read (Blake) were visionary and prophetic. So I was rather slow to warm up to them. And they were shortly followed by “The Waste Land,” which was visionary, prophetic and depressing. So this didn’t exactly seem like suitable terrain to twenty-year-old me. Twenty-five-year-old me needed a push from Dudek and from Can Lit to get going.
Later in life I got interested in Wordsworth and Byron. The Two-Part Prelude knocked my socks off. And Don Juan was the funniest thing I read in my fifties.
And then there’s Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”
The long poem of the 19th century is very different from the Modernist long poem, isn’t it? For one thing, it makes more sense. Those poems are coherent.
I think I went reaching back to the long poems of the 19th century, when I felt the need to be making sense. I think at one point you were reading Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.”
BW: I read “In Memoriam” just a few years ago and found the title for Book VIII of my long poem there (The Sad Mechanic Exercise). Book VIII engages with Ovid of the exile poems, and “In Memoriam” seemed to me almost like a cultural rhyme with Tristia. Loss, loneliness, lack of faith in any sort of future, etc.
It's true that earlier long poems are more coherent, starting with Homer and going all the way through Milton to Wordsworth, Whitman, et al—maybe excluding Browning! With the 20th-century works, disconnectedness becomes characteristic—obviously in Pound and Eliot, but even in Paterson and then on to Maximus and Duncan's two serial poems, not to mention minor projects like Armand Schwerner's The Tablets, if you remember that one. The poems reflect the general clandestine coherence of much 20h-century art, including painting and music. With music, you eventually get to a weird situation where a total surface incoherence or seeming randomness is actually extremely highly ordered. I'm thinking of Messiaen or Boulez here. Even Schoenberg, whose music strikes many listeners as simply discordant and disorganized--the twelve-tone works, I mean--is profoundly structured at almost every level.
KN: We were practicing poets when Michael Ondaatje’s Long Poem Anthology came out with Coach House in 1979. I had already written two books of Report. What do you remember about it?
Leon Surette, in Canadian Poetry, said “This is a welcome volume for teachers of Canadian poetry, for it brings together nine contemporary long poems, most of which are not available in the standard teaching anthologies.”
He also said “It is the Pound / Williams / Olson line that dominates the contemporary long poem.”
BW: I was aware of it, but my first professional job started that year, and my first child was born the following year. The first book of my own long poem was still five years away. So, honestly, it did not greatly impinge on me, though I should have been paying more attention.
What about you?
KN: Well, first let me comment on Surette’s concerns.
There’s an interest there (as there is with the later Long-Liners Conference) in getting the long poem onto the curriculum. That strikes me as an interesting cultural development.
And then there’s his reading of the anthology which leads to his observation that “It is the Pound / Williams / Olson line that dominates the contemporary long poem.” There’s a seeming acceptance there of American influence on Canadian poetry, at a time when the value of “foreign influence” is still being debated. After globalization that debate is over, but that was still a hot debate in the late seventies and early eighties.
The Long Poem Anthology might have been a textbook for poets proposing to write long poems. It wasn’t that for you, and it wasn’t really that for me either. Perhaps in the Ondaatje edition, and in the two subsequent Thesen editions, it has mostly served as a teaching anthology. It’s hard to say.
The Long Poem Anthology (1979) presented nine contemporary long poems by nine Canadian poets: Robert Kroetsch, Stuart McKinnon, Daphne Marlatt, Don McKay, Robin Blaser, Frank Davey, George Bowering, Roy Kiyooka and bpNichol.
I had a copy of the anthology, but I think the only poem that I read IN the anthology was Blaser’s “The Moth Poem.” I’ve never read McKinnon’s The Intervals or McKay’s Long Sault. I read Bowering’s Allophanes as a Coach House book. I read Davey’s King of Swords as, I believe, a Talon book. I read extracts from Marlatt’s Steveston. I read the first six books of The Martyrology as they appeared. I’ve never read Kiyooka’s The Fontainbleu Dream Machine. And I read Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue in Field Notes.
So I read much of what Ondaatje anthologized—I just didn’t read it in the anthology.
The anthology was a significant gesture in focusing attention on the long poem in Canada. And the original anthology is somewhat obscured by the two editions of The New Long Poem Anthology, edited by Sharon Thesen, that followed it. Ondaatje anthologized bona-fide long poems. The poems he selected took up a lot of pages. One can perhaps argue with some of Thesen’s later selections, which move away from genuine lengthiness in a number of instances.
But, over time, perhaps the sense of what a long poem is, is changing. In her Introduction to the first edition of The New Long Poem Anthology, Thesen writes:
In some sense, all poets are composing the “long poem” of their writing lives; in another sense the “true” long poem would go on forever—or at least for the duration of the poet’s life.
There she seems to be signing on to the idea of the lifelong poem
Like Robert Kroetsch, you and I have both been interested in long poems that end, or that find completion. Neither one of us has written the lifelong poem. I wrote the twenty-five-year long poem that ended when the century ended. Dudek wrote Continuation for thirty plus years, but he completed it a year before he died. It’s hard to resist completing a poetical work. It’s hard to leave it open. Even Pound tries to fill in or suggest a possible ending to The Cantos with drafts and fragments.
BW: When New Directions published Drafts and Fragments, it was a pretty explicit avowal that Pound was unable to finish The Cantos, though I think the original plan was modeled on Dante: 100 cantos. Williams too, having presented Paterson as a long poem in five books, left parts of a Book 6 at his death. Olson actually did finish Maximus, though he expressed doubt about having done so, saying to someone, “I finished Max. I dunno. Maybe I blew it, finishing it,” or something along those lines. So the long poem poets are of mixed opinion about whether their poem is coterminous with their lives or meant to have an end before death supervenes.
Personally, I was open to my long poem continuing either to whatever point felt right, or to being left in medias res when I died. As it happens, Book IX just seemed like an end. It's not a particularly shapely end. Ten or twelve books would have been more conventional (The Pharsalia has ten, the Aeneid has twelve, etc. There's variety.) Despite those many times over the last forty years when the poem felt like a weight on my soul, I had no desire to kill it prematurely. In the event, it feels like a relief to have it done, though. I'm glad it didn’t just peter out, like its author will.
I'm pretty much at your side on The Long Poem Anthology. I read some of those works in different contexts, like the Blaser, the Bowering, etc. I even reviewed Allophanes and feel like I reviewed Field Notes too, though I’m not sure.
KN: Yes—originally, The Cantos were intended to be 100 cantos, because there are a hundred cantos in The Divine Comedy. And then, because of some offbeat factor in numerology, Pound extended The Cantos out to 120 cantos. And then, because he was old and depressed, he couldn’t finish it. But he WANTED to finish it. He wanted it to be complete. And what’s there in Drafts and Fragments shows us that he wanted a conclusion, he wanted an ending. There are lines for Canto 120. He knew what he wanted to say at the end.
bpNichol always thought of The Martyrology as a lifelong poem. And maybe even imagined that there would be twenty-four books if he made it to the age of eighty. And that The Martyrology would end when he reached the outer limits of his life.
And then cancer cruelly intervened, and he died at a regrettably young age.
So there are nine completed books of The Martyrology. And the poem stopped, but remained open, with no real conclusion, because he died.
Pound had a sketch of how he wanted The Cantos to conclude. I’m pretty sure that bp felt like he was in the middle of The Martyrology. I don’t think he was thinking about how the poem was going to end at all. Like most people in their early forties, he was hoping for another forty years of life.
I wasn’t open to Report being a lifelong poem at all. I knew it was going to end in 2000 or 2001, and that I’d be fifty when I got out from under it. After I finished writing it I started reading Don Juan, which, at least to me, is pretty interesting. I went from writing this super-serious poem to reading this whacked-out long poem that is really a shaggy-dog story. Don Juan really welcomed me back to being a reader. It welcomed me back to the pleasures of the text.
I think it’s interesting that you imagined that The Invisible World Is in Decline might be a lifelong poem, but you exercised your option to complete it. As I said earlier, I think it is really hard to resist completing a poetical work. I knew that Report was twenty-two books and I had to squeeze them into twenty-five years. There was always “down time”—stretches of time when I just wasn’t working on a book of Report. And then another book would commence. But I had a sketch of the whole thing—I knew it was twenty-two books, and I knew that from fairly early on. I was absolutely delighted when the twenty-second book was written. I felt like I was getting out of jail. I was only fifty, and there was still time to do things, to engage the bucket list.
Getting to the end of this overview, there’s something I found in Dudek’s presentation at the Long-Liners Conference that I want to enter into evidence. In his remarks he said,
Thought is the crucial element in all significant poetry—not passion, not middle-class emotion—but thought.
I’m pleased to see him take a shot at “middle-class emotion,” but I don’t think I agree with this very much. “Thought is the crucial element in all significant poetry”—I don’t think so. And extending that to the long poem—I can see how, with the long poem, you can advance the argument that the poet is thinking with the poem—that’s what’s generating so many pages—but again, are long poems just long philosophical essays? I don’t think so. I don’t think that Report is 700+ pages of the poet thinking. I think poetic engagement INCLUDES thinking, but thinking and thought aren’t the entire process.
BW: Yes, I don’t think much of that quotation from Louis. First of all, I'm not sure that there is anything one can denominate a “middle-class emotion.” Are there upper-class emotions too? Blue collar emotions? Maybe Louis thought love and desire were middle class emotions. But that's rubbish, really. Emotions are pretty much universal. I suppose certain kinds of fear can be class-related--fear of the other, fear of insolvency, etc.—but that's an exception that proves the rule.
As for the importance of thought, sure. One of the reasons I took on my long poem and decided to make it a prose poem is that I was sure that those formal decisions would allow in more thought, more room to think in poetry. There are several announcements of that intention. Book III uses a quotation from Lucretius—now there is a poet and a long poem about which Louis’s dictum is correct--that says, take off the mask and the thing itself remains. And Book IV begins with a quotation from Merleau-Ponty to point out that that book is about light, not love or desire or death or any other deeply personal experience. (It was composed in the south of France, so light was an inescapable presence, as so many painters have demonstrated.)
But thought is only one aspect of poetry, or of the long poem. Emotion, music, observation, etc. all play a crucial role. And the advantage of the long poem is that you can explore all of these characteristically human ways of experiencing the world at length and in combination. As much as I had hoped when I started writing it that The Invisible World would stay away from the lyric impulses of my earlier poetry, they snuck back in when profound or even traumatic experiences inevitably happened to me, “the intimate moments I cannot live without,” as I called them in Book VI. Books VII and VIII are full of personal trauma. That’s the way life goes, and the poem follows.
