news | Friday June 18, 2010

The Long Anti-lyrical Movement

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A review of a new book from Modjaji Books touches upon the tradition and rationale of the long poem in Canadian poetry:

Sharon Thesen argues in The New Long Poem Anthology (1991) that long poems ‘belong by practice and definition to what Ezra Pound called the “prose tradition” in poetry; that is, their tendency to a narrative sense of the passage of time drives them into history beyond the capacities and preoccupations of the lyric’. The latter statement is important. It is not that the long poem is necessarily anti-lyrical, but that its concerns cannot be satisfied by the single self-contained short poem.”

Read the review of Joan Metelerkamp’s Burnt Offering