On Tuesday, I noted my confusion as to whether Thom Donovan’s “towards 24 Stills” in Kiosk no. 1 should be read as a complete work or as an excerpt. In a footnote, I suggested that such confusion wasn’t restricted to just Donovan’s work or to my own experience as a reader. Mulling it over further in the days since, I have been reminded of A Technographic Typography, a poem reportedly of more than 800 pages that was being produced by Thomas Meyer back in the 1960s when he was still a student at Bard.* Anyone who has read the crisp, clean, short work of Tom’s mature poetry in books such as At Dusk Iridescent (Jargon, 1999) will find it hard to believe that there was once was a sprawling, potentially endless text, even if, line by line, it showed that same attentive care for craft that has become Meyer’s signature. In somewhat parallel fashion, the teenager who was the late Frank Stanford completed the 15,283 line The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You – nearly five times the length, say, of Beowulf – went off to college & transformed into a writer of much tamer short poems by the time he put a gun to his head at the age of 29. At some point during each of their careers, both Meyers & Stanford appear to have shifted their idea of the scope of a poem.

I on the other hand seem to have gone in the opposite direction. Before I wrote the booklength prose poem Ketjak, let alone Tjanting or the on-going Alphabet (800 pages in manuscript & counting), I published nox with Burning Deck in 1974, a collection of 60 poems that use a total of 135 words. Here is the only poem in nox that stretches out to four lines:

cabin

quilt

river

latch

More typical are:

ease

awes

Or:

bolism

Because nox is set in a series of fifteen quadrants, four poems to a page, I’ve heard some readers report that they could not tell if each page was one poem or even if the book was a single work. It’s not an unfair question, even if an answer in the negative seems transparently obvious to me.

This question of scope or scale is not precisely the same as the question of when (or how) a poem ends, although I sense that the two are closely intertwined. The problem of endings, of closure, is even more complex & difficult than that bit of magic through which a poem begins. That fact alone accounts for any number of phenomena, including the trouble readers, myself included, have deciding what the boundaries of a given text might be.

At one level, one of, & perhaps the, strongest attraction of closed forms in poetry lies not simply in the pale pleasures of pattern recognition (real though they may be), but in the fact that the end point is déjà toujours determined before a single letter has been committed to paper. Since the poet knows in advance where he or she is going – on a journey of three or fourteen or however many lines – the opportunities for getting lost along the way are proportionately fewer. Conversely, the old creative writing school saw that a novel is a “long fictional prose work with a flaw,” all but acknowledges that a major engine of flawedness is precisely the difficulty of locating the right end-point for an indeterminate work, a potential problem that it shares with all poetry that is not defined in advanced by a fixed form. More than one long poem has been started only to disappear into in an inconclusive never quite finished state: Leaves of Grass, The Cantos, Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading, & the long untitled prose work from which Clark Coolidge managed to rescue “Weathers” all demonstrate aspects of this issue. Only Celia Zukofsky’s grafted-on “A”-24 spares her husband’s epic that same fate.

The question of size or scope impacts poems in all sorts of ways. Lines, sentence, even individual words near the beginning or end carry a different sense of position than those that appear to float “freely” in the middle. Indeed, one of the most interesting moments in any poem, especially when one is reading a text on paper, is that transition that occurs into an ending of the text, the moment at which the logic of each word is dictated by how it will set up the final phrase. It can occur in the last line or stanza, or even several pages from the end, but you can almost always find it if you look closely. A poet such as David Ignatow made a minor art form just out of this moment, the twist into the conclusion – in some instances, it’s the only thing happening in the poem.

An inverse transition occurs near the start of a text, as it shifts from “setting out” to “settling in,” but I think the reader is less apt to recognize its presence as the sense of anticipation is quite different: it occurs at a point when the range of reference in a text is still opening up. Most often it arrives at that exact moment when the reader recognizes just how far & wide the text itself can go. At the far end of the text, just the opposite occurs: possibilities are progressively stripped away until the poem arrives at an instant that is (or should be) unavoidable. I would argue that these moments are as true for haiku as for epics. In this sense, even the one-letter poems of Joyce Holland’s Alphabet Anthology (Iowa City: X Press, 1973)** have a beginning, middle & end.

These are not the only changes that take place when works are exceprted. Part : whole relations become entirely invisible. But it’s just these transitional cues that are blurred whenever poems appear only in part. Sometimes – though not always – other language in the excerpted text takes over the role, assigned to it as much by a reader’s intuition as by the text itself, surrogate transitions specific to the local occasion.

Thinking about it, it seems entirely possible that neither Stanford or Meyer did change their sense of completeness when they shifted away from the epic-length projects of their youth. In Meyer’s case especially, it may have been that he wanted (or even needed) at that point to compose without the necessity of such closure. I know in my own case that the transition from the microwriting of nox to book-length projects, such as Ketjak, proceeded very quickly. At the time it seemed that I was merely focusing in on the smallest elements in the writing, without which I could not have attempted anything on a larger scale, although in some very clear way in my head, I knew that I was a writer of long poems almost a decade before I sat down & started to write one.

* I would scarcely believe my own memory in this if I had not published “Fragment from Graph 42” in Tottels 4 back in July 1971. The engineering vocabulary, in both the work’s title and segmentation, is another radical difference from Meyer’s later poetry.

** Joyce Holland is, or was, Dave Morice.