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International Conference:“The Modernist Long Poem and its Discontents”

École Normale Supérieure and New York University Paris, September 19 & 20, 2024
César E. Jumpa Sanchez et Barthélémy Rolland

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1The International Conference “The Modernist Long Poem and its Discontents” was organized by Richard Aldersley (NYU-Paris), Samantha Lemeunier (ENS-Ulm) and Mantra Mukim (CYU-Paris) and took place on September 19 & 20 at the École Normale Supérieure and New York University Paris. The gathering was made possible under the auspices of the Société d’Études Modernistes, the Modern and Contemporary Colloquium, and the CNRS. The participants, coming from different corners of the globe, shared a variety of perspectives and innovative reassessments of the classical conception of the “Long Poem” within the canonical modernist landscape. The idea of the long poem’s “fixity” was tackled during these two enriching days, and through thirty diverse artistic and critical approaches. These talks ranged from textual analyses of poems from precursors of modernist versification all the way to contemporary readings that assimilated those past acclaimed works. The content developed across the presentations allowed for a wider understanding of not only the evolving contexts and techniques of the long poem’s unfolding, which typically consisted of “formatting” a sizable set of verses into specific “lengths,” but also toward an unrestrained vision of that practice well past the end of the twentieth century, into our present-day world. As a result, the renewed poetic appreciations that each panel proposed were the background for the sometimes difficult, at times restless, but mostly thought-provoking accounts that contested the frontiers of an otherwise well-established compositional method.

2Virginia Jackson (UC Irvine) opened the conference days with a keynote lecture entitled “Impossible Poetry.” She offered a panorama of the history of poetry from Poe’s theorization and his treatment of the long poem to the theory of the lyric. Poetry became gradually associated with the lyric in different places and times. To her the process of “lyricization” has more to do with the writer’s characteristics, such as gender and race, rather than with the genre of the work. Thus, the American lyric pertains to a gendered and racialized history of the lyric. Focusing on Gwendolyn Brooks, she evidenced how the long modern poem serves as the medium for a black woman to express her discontent. Jackson argued that the posterity of the modernist long poem might lie in defying the canonical modernist long poems written by white men such as Pound, Eliot and Williams. The exploitation and redefinition of the traditional values associated with the traditional poetic patterns help to define the modernist long poem, which, in the end, escapes definition.

3The first panel, chaired by Richard Aldersley (NYU) focused on genre trouble regarding the modernist long poem. C. D. Blanton (UC Berkeley) reflected on the long poem’s quantity and quality in “Qualitative Epic.” Indeed, one of the long poem’s characteristics is its density, rather than its length. Studying Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” Blanton underlined the epic quality of the sonnet. To him, the qualitative epic has more to do with knowledge and conceptualisation, understood as the knowledge of what something means, than measure. An epic poem understands a totality and tries to break it thanks to its formal system. Thus, multiple layers of meaning stem from a complex web weaved within the poem. Echoing Blanton’s arguments, Xavier Kalck (Université de Lille) addressed the issue of classification in his paper “The Great American Long Poem: Indexing Song to Size.” He pointed out three main issues regarding the modernist long poem: its historical lineage, its national boundaries and its role as a teachable form for literary institutions. The epic belongs to the winners of a specific nation. However, the national identity and poetic forms grow unstable in the twentieth century. Paradoxically, what best defines the long poem is its never-ending process of self-definition. In the continuity of Xavier Kalck’s talk, Vladimir Lucien (NYU) also underlined the relationships between the modernist long poem and the epic. In his talk entitled “The Epic as ‘Long Documentarian Song’ & ‘Ongoing Answer’ in the Work of Kamau Brathwaite,” he examined Brathwaite’s methodology regarding poetry and spirituality. As he studied T.S. Eliot, Brathwaite transposes the dereliction of Europe to the Caribbean. The epic serves as an indicator of the journey both in material and spiritual terms. Brathwaite’s epics allowed him to look directly at the situation in the Caribbean and his own.

4Labelled “Dissent and Discontent,” the second panel, moderated by Julius Greve (University of Oldenburg), opened with the intervention of Ane Thon Knutsen (Oslo National Academy of The Arts) entitled “Parallax, Nancy Cunard and The Hours Press.” She established a link between gender issues and the modernist long poem. To her, the press was a progress of one’s own. The printing industry had no interest in artistic and experimental endeavours. Yet, both Woolf and Cunard refused the denunciation they faced as women writers and printers and sought for a relative gain of freedom. Cunard’s Parallax was rarely issued but she kept on publishing works she found experimental. Her printing experiments paralleled her poetic work. Juliette Bouanani (Université Paris Nanterre) also tackled gender issues in her paper “‘Faust’s female counterpart’: Lyn Hejinian’s Book of a Thousand Eyes (2012).” Drawing on the Arabian Nights, Hejinian’s “open text,” generative and in excess of ideas, hinges round a feminist exploration of the possibilities of poetic forms. The poem becomes a space of enquiry full of “epistemological suspense” where storytelling entails agency. Colin Vanderburg (NYU) explored Shapiro’s dissenting text, Essay on Rime, in “‘A Criticism-Ridden Art’: Karl Shapiro’s Polemic Epic.” This criticism in verse against critics enables Shapiro to join a lineage arguing for poetic decline, through the figure of the homo criticus. In fact, Shapiro produces a self-critical poetry, which remobilises the still-live questions of interpretive method.

5The geographical scale and outreach of the Long Poem was expanded on the third panel, aptly termed “Worldly Formations”, and it was chaired by Xavier Kalck. The first panelist was Anastasia Gladoshchuk (Université Grenoble-Alpes), who transported us across the Atlantic to reflect on the poetic work of a Mexican author in her paper: “Octavio Paz’s Sunstone and the Problem of Peripheral Modernity.” The matter at hand pertained to the plasticity of history amid Paz’s vast poetic landscape and the evocation of ancient Meso-American elements, such as the Aztec calendar, to engage in his assertion that “we are all living on the margin because there is no longer any center.” According to the author, the peripheral status of the (post) modern condition deemed his task in Sunstone as a synthesis of cultural experiences brought back home from an extended European sojourn, allowing him to condense and perceive the long poem as a spiral rather than a closed-off circle. Martina Morabito (University of Bologna and University of Siena) reflected on the apparent contradiction in Russian criticism: On the one hand, tremendous amounts of long poems were published, and, on the other, this form supposedly pertains to relics of the past. In “Aleksandr Blok’s Vozmedie: Discontent, Discord, Disease” she underlines Blok’s issues regarding the long form, a linear plot and his posterity. Indeed, this montage of modernist fragments evidences his obsession with length and measure as he wished to narrate the story of his family integrated into the story of Russia. However, he died before achieving his magnum opus, which only adds to the tragic tone that pervades his “poema.” The long poem, in a way, really is a token from the past. Josef Hrdlicka (Charles University, Prague) studied “The Modernist Long Poem in the Czech Context.” He laid emphasis on the fact that Czech poetry, between the wars, was highly receptive to external impulses. The Czech long poem has drawn inspiration from Apollinaire, Rilke and Eliot, thanks to translations in the 1930s, and has been marked by fragmentation, polyphony, and even an elegiac tone. The modernist long poem strayed away from the classic and romantic unique poem to a collection of overlapping poems without resolution.

6The fourth panel of the day was labeled “Networks,” and its chair was Clément Oudart (Sorbonne Université). He introduced the first speaker Benjamin Paul (Boston University), whose paper “H.D.’s Trilogy: Towards an Inward Epic,” highlighted the poet’s bond between psychoanalytic practice and the construction of a “hallowing epic,” boosted by continuous inner exploration. By charting H.D.’s circumvention of language strictures, Benjamin indicated how the poems’ different narrative voices worked in tandem to plumb the depths of her visionary arrangements and create a fascinating work that embraced a current of spiritual realism. Soon after, the second panelist, Deven Philbrick (University of Michigan) delivered a talk titled “A Work of Enormous Dailiness: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ ‘Drafts’ as Process Feminism” in which the poet’s long-breadth, multi-year production of her 114 sections was reviewed as an imbricated procedure “intent on reconstructing the real.” This creative motion could also be seen as a “doubling of the unspeakable,” emphasizing the labor over the textual folds that in turn give shape to a personal language of its own rendering. Philbrick readily granted us a segue to DuPlessis’s keynote the day after. Baptiste Rembert (Sorbonne Université) was the last member of the panel with the presentation “Active Presence in Long Poems: Tommy Pico’s Poetics of Survivance.” Focusing on a contemporary, young author from a socio-ethnic minority, Rembert reviewed Pico’s poetic venture, which combined the drive to a non-conformist stance through a measure of indigenous endurance, thus contesting the mainstream narratives about the Native American subject. Taking on the “Teebs” posture as an alter-ego in his tetralogy IRL, Nature Poem, Junk and Feed, Pico boosted his ability to redefine one’s identity by the usage of contemporary online tools. These digital strategies, it was argued, pointed out the inevitability of confronting the modern generation’s penchant for scroll-pace poetry, its consumption and utility, to promote the culture of various minorities.

7Diane Drouin (Sorbonne Université) introduced the speakers of the fifth session called “Afterlives.” Celine Shanosky (Harvard University) offered a new “lyric reading” of Moore’s “Marriage” in “The Modernist Long Origin Story: Moore, Milton, and Lyric Reading.” Shanosky reads “Marriage” as a union of forms. Moore was indeed inspired by commonplace books and epics. However, a “lyric reading” foregrounds the gender dynamics at play in the poem. The modernist long poem is a tense site of confrontation between modes of origination. Moore’s modernist long poem could be read as an afterlife of the long poem as originated by Milton. Julius Greve (University of Oldenburg) focused on the future of the modernist long poem in a talk entitled “Hauntological Ventriloquism: Zong! and the Afterlives of the Modernist Long Poem.” The long poem speaks for those who cannot speak, i.e., the victims of the Zong Massacre. The poet serves as a vicarious speaker in a hauntological manner. The long poem is a “life-poem” (Rachel Blau DuPlessis) and a death-poem. It contributes to the duty of remembrance.

8On the next day, Mantra Mukim (CYU) chaired the sixth panel (“Genre Trouble II”). Corentin Jégou (Nantes Université) examined a puzzling literary object in his talk “Derek Walcott’s Omeros: The Long Poem as a Generic Laboratory.” Omeros is a laboratory where Walcott experiments with the blending of genres. The poem explores the semantic void between the epic and the novel, which could be an entry into the definition of the modernist long poem. Jégou underlines the tension between Walcott’s epic inspiration and the historical influence of the twentieth century. Genres should be considered in terms of flux instead of monolithic categories. Matilde Manara (ENS-ITEM) explored the challenge of the modernist long poem to articulate diegetic and epidictic elements in “The (Late) Modernist Long Poem between Diegesis and Epideixis: Elizabeth Bishop’s The Moose and In The Waiting Room”. Focusing on the lyric epiphanies in the poems, Manara underlines the poems’ goal to undermine the reader’s reading reflexes in terms of genre as it oscillates between diegesis and epideixis. Bishop’s poems aim to dramatize the gap between focus and narration, writing and voicing. Echoing reflections on voicing, Mae Losasso (University of Warwick) focused on “Breathwork: On Respiration, Labour, and Poetry.” To her, breathlessness is a condition of modernity that the long poem tries to tackle. Poetry figures in the space between breath and work. Drawing on late modernist Marxist poetics, Losasso argues that the long poem has seen a resurgence in our increasingly breathless cultural and historical moments. The long poem activates dissent, disillusionment and discontent.

9The seventh panel was comprised of three scholars who expanded on the topic of “Dissent and Discontent” from the previous day. This session was chaired by Samantha Lemeunier (ENS-Ulm), who introduced the first speaker María Matilde Morales (Harvard University) along with her paper “The Socialist Long Poem: Versification and Montage in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s About That.” Matilde charted the Soviet poet’s early career, in addition to his escalating affiliation with the nascent USSR and revolutionary sentiment to bridge poetic expression with a strong political voice. Aside from stressing the “propagandistic factor” of his creation, her analysis evolved to a textual overview of About That and its innovative application of fragmented verse through a “stepladder technique”: an incorporation of pastiche taken from cinema and the plastic arts. The text showcased a scuffle generated by gendered pronoun usage, amplified by its notable fragmentation. Morales concluded by associating the poem to Pablo Neruda’s Canto General (1950), asserting the influence that social realism was to exert over the Latin American landscape during the second half of the last century. Next on the line-up was Charlotte Estrade (Université Paris Nanterre) who presented a paper by the title of “Joseph Moncure March’s The Set-Up: Visions and Revisions of a ‘Lost Classic.’” Drawing from different adaptations of this 1928 long poem and reiterating its status as an “outlier” in relation to the canonical works of high modernism, Estrade surveyed its thematic intertwining along questions of racial perception and the backdrop of violence that eventually led to its most recent reedition in 2022. Such concern transmitted by the author’s discontent for the socio-ethnic inequalities of the era has marked The Set-Up’s frame of reception, while boosting its ongoing appeal. As a long poem that establishes a dialogue with a slew of representative works in diverse artistic genres, it truly depicts the ins-and-outs of underground boxing across the twentieth century, as well as being enhanced by its new graphic novel format. The last panelist of the group was Valentina Mele (University of Leeds) with a paper called “The Long Poem as Receptacle of Voices: Jack Spicer’s The Heads of the Town up to Aether (1962)” that examined Spicer’s tripartite creation as a long meditation on Dante’s Commedia and its infusion with the spirit of the Berkeley Renaissance. Supporting her analysis on the poet’s lectures in The House that Jack Built, Mele elaborates on a resonance to the Italian wordsmith’s opus by means of a dictated poetry, whose emanation is a result of serial composition and a rendering of an overcrowding of voices into a polyphonic dimension, to conclude that the poetic effort is “to be carried out throughout all of life.”

10The eighth panel, chaired by Charlotte Estrade, assembled a set of speakers concerned once again with the topic of “Worldly Formations.” Its first presenter was Susan Harrow (University of Bristol), who delivered a paper titled “Reading in Revisionary Modernism: Apollinaire’s Singular ‘Song of the Poorly Loved,’” discussing this multifaceted poem’s importance as a foundational text of long-verse style, which “decentred hegemonic modernisms” and dissolved the normative distinction between Eastern & Western genres. The hints to classical tales weaved throughout, Harrow maintained, allow for a complex process of redistribution and employ translation as applying a form of translucency or hybridization to reconsider the connection of the Western canon to worldwide influences. Continuing the thread of French authors’ retrospective impact, Britton Edelen (Duke University) presented on “Vers Libre, Vers Epuisé: Rimbaud, Long Poetry, and the Rhythms of Modernity,” arguing for a shift in poetic receptivity going from the “tongue to the lung” inaugurated by “Mouvement” from Illuminations (1886). This brief 26-line composition was examined as the blueprint of procedural vers libre, scorning automaticity and demanding active reader participation through pneumatic exercise. Relying on a prefiguration to Bataille’s economic theory, Edelen pursued “Mouvement’s” notion of “poetry as a form of dépense,” accentuated by the surfacing of the metropolitan subject as an “overstimulated” filter to the experience of modernity. To close this edifying panel, Damien Maher (All Souls College, Oxford) offered the paper “Poiesis as Process: Francis Ponge’s Efforts to Come to Terms with Poetry.” The premise revolved around an analysis of Ponge’s “poetics of inventory,” most notably unravelled in 1947’s “Le Carnet du Bois de Pins,” which includes a series of reflections, reformulations and variations on a drive to portray poiesis. This work is situated, as the author labelled it: “at the crossroads of the essay and the poem,” which entailed a renewed appreciation for the ever-fluctuating process of artistic creation. Maher’s talk (enhanced through a projection of Hasegawa Tōhaku’s ‘Pine Trees’ screen) ultimately reminded the reader how this sort of outlet for expression could materialize such discrepancies between words and objects.

11After a short intermission, Rachel Blau DuPlessis delivered a magisterial keynote lecture before the conference’s last panel. Her address, entitled “Difficult Bliss: An Autobiography of a Practice,” in many ways recaptured the arguments proposed by many of the previous participants. Outlining the context from her recent A Long Essay on the Long Poem (2023), DuPlessis surveyed the procedures she undertook in “Drafts,” a lyric and timeless project, bound in a personal-historical dynamic that features a cluttering of genres. Despite the volume having “no trajectory as a whole,” the grid arrangement she developed for the 114 drafts exuded an energy of proliferation, with a numerological touch, so as to respond to these persistent interrogations: “When is enough, when is it too long?”. Furthermore, “is the poet trapped by the (long) poem?”. Utilizing the concept of a “seed poem,” the author emphasizes a self-generative, feminist poetic enterprise. Through a series of accumulative textual positionings, these drafts “are allowed to push and pull” to finally metaphorize the erotic, “modular and organic” project and attain their blissful consolidation.

12The final session of the conference days, entitled “Afterlives II” was chaired by Yasna Bozhkova (Université Paris Nanterre). Heidi Hartwig (Central Connecticut State) focused on the ambiguous relationship between the sacred and the secular in “‘To make things sub specie aeternitatis’: The Postsecular Poetics of David Jones’s The Anathemata.” To her, the protean form of the long poem bridges the sacred and the secular since The Anathemata serves a modern version of the tradition that articulates non-Christian myths into Christianity. The inextricable relationship between the vernacular and the non-vernacular, the discursive footnotes and the multi-faceted interplays, show how Jones uncovers complex interactions between secularist and religious discourses. Motonori Sato (Keio University) introduced us to Junzaburo Nishiwaki in “Invention of the Modernist Long Poem in Japan: Nishiwaki’s Engagement with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in Lost Time.” Sato argued that Nishiwaki’s “trans-modernism” is marked by both break and continuity, especially in regard to Eliot. A deep, although belated, understanding of Western modernism resulted in the first modernist long poem in Japan, a culture that traditionally prefers short poems. The last paper was offered by Siting Yang (Harvard University) and entitled “The Post-mortem Long Poem: After Nature and the Biographistic Afterlife of Modernism.” She studied a biographical prose poem in which matters of historical and epic grandness interlock with matters of a lyric voice. Sebald’s long poem reflects on the modernist long poem’s forms and techniques against historicity. His trans-historical treatment of a natural history of destruction enhances the tragic tone that pervades what becomes the open site for an anthropology of cultural memory.

13This two-day conference proved to be an informative and vibrant event, with many questions raised in between each panel that made participants ponder on the viability and permanence of the Long Poem in the Modernist context. A wide-ranging scope of inventive timeframes was projected, which included nineteenth-century precursors all the way to our present day long-form creators. Furthermore, out of the diverse list of authors appraised regarding the textual extension of their works, an awareness of a far-reaching endeavor arose, in a sense inexhaustible, making the issue of discontent a common factor to many of these poems’ inherent malleability. Nonetheless, in the end participants were content and willing to lengthen the discussions toward more opportunities to reassemble in the future.

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César E. Jumpa Sanchez et Barthélémy Rolland, « International Conference:“The Modernist Long Poem and its Discontents” »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 09 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/24287 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/134h3

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César E. Jumpa Sanchez

Université Paris Nanterre, CREA

Barthélémy Rolland

Sorbonne Université

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