“Imma crack open / the mythology for u”: The Long Poem and American Poetics, 2008–2025
“But words
change n rules change”
—Tommy Pico, IRL (85)
It was an odd time to be reading long. Looking back, the last decade and a half can seem like an odd time to have been reading at all, given that a summary of those years resembles less a timeline of discrete events than a litany of violences, interconnected scenes of economic precarity, environmental catastrophe, political calamity, public health crisis, and genocide. But perhaps that’s precisely why we read, why we wrote and shared poems with abandon. “It is difficult / to get the news from poems,” William Carlos Williams once observed, “yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” [1] But what exactly is this lack the news portends and which poetry amends? Audre Lorde, in her famous essay on the topic, asserts the necessity of poetry “carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives” because it is how we survive and combat those “structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization.” [2] Although very different poets, both Williams and Lorde locate poetry’s power in its intersection with, but difference from, “the news”; poetry doesn’t reflect so much as refract the moment in which it’s written. [3] In trying to answer the question of what characterized American poetry and poetics of the last two decades, I sought to understand the ways in which poets explored the task of poetry in their work, how they braided aesthetic innovation with sociopolitical interrogation, how they used poetry’s “quality of light” (Lorde) to address or redress what we otherwise “lack” (Williams).
I’m interested here in the form known by the ambiguous name of “long poem,” a shapeshifting and heterogeneous thing definable only, perhaps, in terms of the perception that its (relatively and loosely defined) length is somehow involved with it not being a lyric poem. [4] While it would be misleading to posit an absolute division between long poem and lyric—especially when the former’s expansiveness often relies on agglutinating or scaling up lyric segments—the two forms are, speaking practically, partitioned from one another. Within the field shaped by this de facto binary, my choice to center the long poem may seem odd, or at least unlikely, because of the privileged place lyric occupied in poetry culture for the last decade plus. The 2010s were defined largely by the wars waged in and around New Lyric Studies, with principal texts like Jackson and Prins’ Lyric Theory Reader (2014) and Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015) driving much of the conversation. I won’t rehash that debate or its problems, [5] but will simply say that as a graduate student throughout the mid 2010s and early 2020s, lyric consumed considerable oxygen. Adjacent to the academy, the National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes awarded for poetry between 2008 and 2025 similarly displayed an overwhelming (though not exclusive) preference for lyric poems. Whether or not this partiality for lyric also maps what various other poetry constituencies actually wrote and read and loved is, of course, impossible to know (though, based solely on anecdote, I’m prepared to say it does).
And yet: many of the most popular, most lauded, and most dearly adored works of poetry in the last two decades were long poems. To cite just some of the best-known (and, selfishly, some of my favorite) long poems published between 2008–2025:
Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip (2008)
Nox by Anne Carson (2010)
Ossuaries by Dionne Brand (2010)
One with Others by C.D. Wright (2010)
“Our Andromeda” by Brenda Shaughnessy (2012)
Citizen by Claudia Rankine (2014)
“Voyage of the Sable Venus” by Robin Coste Lewis (2015)
The ‘Teebs tetralogy’ [IRL/Nature Poem/Junk/Feed] by Tommy Pico (2016-2019)
“Whereas” by Layli Long Soldier (2017)
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (2018)
feeld by Jos Charles (2018)
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo (2018)
“Be Recorder” by Carmen Giménez (2019)
while they sleep (under the bed is another country) by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera (2019)
Be Holding by Ross Gay (2020)
The Call-Out by Cat Fitzpatrick (2022)
West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal (2023)
Information Desk by Robyn Schiff (2023)
You’d be hard-pressed to find a reader of poetry who hasn’t read, or who wasn’t at least aware of, a handful of these works. But if the success of these long poems in a climate dominated by the lyric is perhaps a bit of a paradox, even more so is that the long poem’s exacting nature—demanding more time, more attention, more exertion from readers—places it at odds with everything about the larger culture of the ‘10s.
Despite my skepticism of the hyperbolic terms in which it’s discussed, it’s nevertheless true that smartphones and social media have fundamentally reshaped the post-Great Recession cultural landscape in the image of what is popularly known as the attention economy. Twitter functioned for much of the decade as something like a public square; cultural consumption became a matter of selecting one’s elective affinities on a handful of music and television streaming platforms; we exerted agency by upvoting or downvoting what the algorithm promoted, by following or unfollowing the accounts it promoted; dating became gamified; cryptocurrencies proliferated; AI became generative; the online/offline distinction was obviated. But the question raised by the modern American habitus is, however, not so much why anyone would continue to read or write poetry—from this vantage, the success of Instapoetry makes perfect sense, as do the debates about what that success did or didn’t indicate—but why there would be a desire for long poems in particular. [6]
All of this is but a cursory and slightly reductive preamble to say that the long poem is an unlikely figure to position as the heart of American poetics from 2008–2025. But the paradoxical, somewhat contrarian nature of the long poem, its too much-ness, may actually explain part of its appeal in the contemporary moment. Andrew Epstein, for instance, argues that the recent popularity of longform ‘project poems’ is part and parcel with the profusion of ‘everyday-life projects’ in the culture at large (e.g., YouTube vlogs, Instagram food diaries), except that the former “experiment with unusual, challenging new forms” in defiance of the latter, thus deploying the long poem as a “response, and even a method of resistance, to a culture gradually losing its capacity to pay attention.” [7] Rachel Blau DuPlessis goes one step further, suggesting that “a critical suspicion of culture and society as they now stand” is embedded in the very DNA of the contemporary long poem. [8] Without going quite so far, I would still offer that much of what readers (myself included) expect from a long poem in the twenty-first century is indeed what Adorno describes in his Aesthetic Theory: “a recollection of the possible with a critical edge against the real.” [9] The poems we love best, the poems that speak best to our moment, contain a grain of the unheimlich, are familiar and unfamiliar at once.
In order to begin investigating how and why the long poem has proved such a potent form in recent American poetry, I want to consider this grain in two particular works: IRL by Tommy Pico (2016) and “Voyage of the Sable Venus” (2015) by Robin Coste Lewis. While quite different from each other—one hypercontemporary and digital, the other transhistorical and archival—both poems constellate various styles, modes, and critical debates that preoccupied poetry culture at large during the last two decades, making them exceptional indices of the moment of their composition. But more than this, both IRL and “Voyage” tilt toward the epic, and in so doing, gesture toward the long poem’s significance. My discussion will focus on language, will suggest that language is in some sense Pico’s and Lewis’s subject. In their “nimble tug on the / tongue of the page” (Pico 22) they make of the long poem an “archeological practice” (Lewis 157), a form that documents, historicizes, contextualizes, interrogates, and reinvents the language. A form capable of transformation.
*
Tommy Pico’s IRL, as its fittingly ironic title suggests, takes place in the interstices of real life and life online, where any claim to parse digital from analog is specious at best. Although there’s a loose narrative frame, IRL’s structure is more nearly musical; certain themes recur but are transposed, reinvented, or reconfigured as we follow the zigzagging “thot process” (61) of our narrator Teebs. The poem opens with an invitation for a hookup—“I text Girard do / u wanna come / over?” (7)—and comes full circle ninety pages later at karaoke:
James
is finally following me
back on Insta so I take a
somewhat risque
selfie send it DM
n right after message
OOOPS! omg I
meant to send that
to someone else gosh
so embarrassed oops!
He responds w/
a pic of his computer
screen His phone #
on it so we
text n he’s like
come over n I’m like
do u have A/C he says
Yes n I just straight up
drop the mic
n Leave. (98)
Bookended by text messages and hookups, the poem’s milieu (likened by one critic to an online Frank O’Hara) [10] is largely (though not exclusively) urban and queer, a buzzing social world in which connection with others is refracted through multiple layers of technology, like James who responds to a DM with “a pic of his computer / screen His phone # / visible.” One important thread of the poem is, consequently, the ways in which we construct identity in the 21st century and the ways in which online modes of relation intersect with queerness and Indigeneity. [11] But I highlight the social-technological framing of IRL because it also signals the extent to which modern forms of communication inform Pico’s style. His linguistic acrobatics—it’s no accident the poem ends with a mic drop—are the product of a uniquely contemporary idiom fluent in “the stylistic and emotive elements of scrolling, posting, and texting,” an exemplar of the creative confluence of internet writing and traditional poetics in the 21st century. [12] Take for instance the way Pico threads poetic and texting language together in the following passage, riffing on a caustic couplet about modern solitude:
I am so good at being Alone.
All I need is my phone.
Subway, elevator drifting off
In a convo—no one really seems
to notice, occupied by their own
gleaming pod of longing.
I am the captain of my shit,
possessed by the spirit
of Instagram I am omnipotent
on Twitter on Blurb on Vine
[…]
A sun to fly towards iMean
Something to do: mimicry of
purpose. The injury
of hunger is: death. The word
of the day is: Gloze.
To explain away.
Glowing gauze glozes the
etc. Weather.com says
stay inside forever, or
drop dead. We’ve ads
for you to click. You n me?
it’s going to take sooo long
for us to know each other
ten years. (32)
These lines make particularly effective use of what internet linguistic Gretchen McCulloch calls “typographical tone of voice” through abrupt juxtaposition, abbreviation, expressive lengthening (sooo), phrasal breaking, capitalization, and punning ‘typos’ (iMean). [13] But they also make effective use of conventional poetic tools like rhythm, alliteration, enjambment, direct address, register shifting, and the sonic play of assonance (note the long o sounds that run throughout). It’s not that poetry and internet writing are the same for Pico, but that both are expressive languages and aestheticized performances of the self, performances which—like the would-be Romantic poet “possessed by the spirit / of Instagram” and “omnipotent / on Twitter” who is left only a “mimicry of purpose”— frequently devolve into the ridiculous. Indeed, IRL demonstrates a very online sense of self-consciousness, routinely undercutting or ironizing the selves it puts forward. “What the hell do you expect?” Teebs asks a few pages later, “Emotional transparency? / What kind of artless / simpleton says what they / truly feel?” (36).
The internet’s impact on contemporary poetry cannot be understated, whether we consider its fostering of poetic genres and styles (e.g., Flarf or the Gurlesque), the formation of social infrastructure (e.g., Poetry Twitter, podcasts, virtual workshops), and fusions of genre and platform (e.g., Instapoetry). For Pico and the world of IRL, however, the merging of online and offline presents itself in the textual saturation of everyday life. “I see so much / text all day,” Teebs laments, “the door- / way of my memory / has shit typed / in Raleway all over it I / see fonts in my dreams” (23). IRL registers the textually-mediated texture of modern life in a number ways, not only by incorporating internet idioms but also in the use of section breaks stylized as the ellipsis ‘typing’ icon familiar to smartphone users, as if the poem were a lengthy in medias res text message unfurling on our phones. (In fact, the poem originated as a Tumblr post, and was deliberately composed to be so “extremely long so that it could overtake the entire feed”).[14]But if digital mimesis is part of the motivation for IRL’s expansiveness, it also motivates Pico to grapple with how and why to distinguish poetry from posting. Why should we "stop / fucking posting about” our lives and “save it / for a shitty poem like a normal / wretch” (14) when both seem equally absurd? So even as IRL’s verve depends on the collision of lyric language and digital diction, Pico ultimately holds out poetry as something different. What is it that sets poetry apart?
One way in which he answers this question is by shifting the poem toward the epic. Although Muse begins the poem as a pseudonym for the love interest—“This is my argument: Muse crashes into / the edge of my nights/isn’t crushing / doesn’t love me” (7)—it shapeshifts across the poem, a stand-in for various kinds of abstractions, ideals, and possibilities. Perhaps the most important of these is Privacy, as Pico elaborates during his most elaborate invocation of (the) Muse:
In an effort to connect,
fingers will click open
more and more tabs.
People say there are three
Muses or nine some-
times six or eight but
we’re friends now,
Imma crack open
the mythology for u—
Really there are four
states of Muse:
Solitude
Intimacy
Anonymity
Reserve (30)
The (ironized but not insincere) intimacy of the speaker’s address (“we’re friends now”) contrasts with the empty connection of “more and more tabs” proffered by the internet, aligning Muse and poetry. But the mythology Pico “crack[s] open” throughout IRL is not just an anatomy of privacy in the twenty-first century; more nearly, it’s a political history of privacy (“Muse is romanticized / by the idea of possession and lord / knows I can’t live unoccupied,” 31). This, too, is a matter of language, for there’s no kind of connection more dangerous than the false fantasy of inclusion:
I have the luxury
of speaking for my-
self. I becomes
medium. I recoil
at We: Now we
know; We feel love
when; We believed
the Earth was flat
until; We stir with
heavy feeling bc…
I wipe my muddy feet
on the loveseat of We
unless I’m talking
about you and me.
Kumeyaays knew
a rounded Earth based
on the curve of stars
or didn’t, I’ll never know.
It’s a dark part inside me.
[…]
America
never intended for me to live
So the we never intended
to include me (69-70)
Privacy for Pico is not just generic solitude or anonymity, it’s this “luxury / of speaking for my- / self” that stands in opposition to the settler colonial we.Privacy, in other words, becomes also a matter of how the Kumeyaay poet of IRL navigates “the English fucking / language with its high / beams in my face” (14). “Language is living / history class,” he later notes, “conquest hardwired / into lingua franca” (26). The poem’s drift toward epic is thus a move away from the foundational fictions of America, a search for a new form with “No myth to speak / for us” (72), a form that draws on the Homeric epic but more nearly resembles the Kumeyaay “epic song cycles,” known as bird songs, that “narrate how we got / to the valley and what we passed / on our way” (84). [15] Whereas the poem begins hypercontemporary and digital, this ‘drift toward the epic’ re-invests in poetry as means for contextualizing the present within the longer arc of U.S. history and violence.
My dad grows
his hair long Black waves
cascade down his back b/c knives
crop the ceremony of his
mother’s hair at the NDN boarding
school I cut mine in mourning
for the old life but I grow
my poems long. A dark
reminder on white pages.
A new ceremony. (97)
By its end, IRL becomes a “monument” to the “knots [that] can’t be undone,” a way of “find[ing] beauty in the complication.” [16] The poem refuses resolution in favor of a “reminder,” stands “In-between / Kumeyaay and Brooklyn” and affirms the complicated beauty of Teebs’s existence, insisting that “that it has a word, / even if the word is lost / even if the word doesn’t exist,” a “throb of light inside me” (96).
*
Language is also living history for Robin Coste Lewis and her long poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus.” But in contrast to the free-wheeling verve of Pico’s feed-driven verse, Lewis turns to poetic constraint as a generative process, as she outlines in the poem’s Prologue:
What follows is a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present (35, emphasis added).
Lewis further describes the seven “formal rules” by which the poem was constructed, including the kinds of artworks permitted (“all those traditional mediums now recognized by the Western art-historical canon” as well as “other material and visual objects, such as combs, spoons, buckles, pans, knives, table legs”) as well as the ways in which titles could or couldn’t be modified (“no title could be broken or changed in any way” although grammar and punctuation could be modified). “Voyage” is thus not only a narrative poem, but a found poem as well as a monumental ekphrastic poem, an ekphrasis of an entire artistic tradition comprising not only artworks and objects but the “artists, curators, and art institutions” who are “complicit…in participating in—if not creating—th[e] history” Lewis narrates (35). At the same time, these formal constraints also raise, as she noted in a subsequent essay on the poem, philosophical questions about language’s performative character: “Is language really a textual code, or a visual one? Or is it both? Could a title perform like a painting? Is this a possible answer to that eternal unanswerable question: what is a poem?” (146).
“Voyage,” like IRL, is thus something of a metapoetic meditation, albeit in a vastly different register. Where Pico’s exuberant lyricism evidenced the influence of the digital, Lewis’s long poem reflects (and recalibrates) a constellation of quintessentially 21st century poetic trends—practices or modes variously described as archival, citational, conceptual, documental, or documentary—all of which engage in the (re)appropriation of linguistic material from other sources. [17] Furthermore, Lewis’s creative (re)arrangement of museographical text in stanzaic as well as concretic forms prompts a reading of the poem in relation to the aesthetics of twenty-first century visual poetics. [18] One rather bravura instance in which these tendencies coalesce is in “Notes,” a three and a half page list of all the institutions that (presumably) house the art referred to throughout “Voyage.” The location of these unconventional “notes” within the poem (rather than at the end of the book), combined without an obvious ordering logic, invites us to see the list as a poem; more nearly, it exemplifies the blurring of the boundary between title/image/citation, the same implicating of author/viewer/archive that lies at the heart of the project’s poetics.
Titles occupy a crucial place in Lewis’s textual interrogation because of their ability to provide “the most honest, simple, and accurate narrative of art,” and this investment not in the image but in “what the image is called” extends also to “Voyage” itself (145). The colon in the title of the poem’s first section—“The Ship’s Inventory:”—transforms it from description to performance; this section is not about the inventory of the “Four-Breasted Vessel” housing “the Four Quarters of // the World” (39), but is that very inventory:
Nude Iconologia Girl
with Red Flower Sisters
of the Boa Woman Flying a Butterfly.
Kite Empty
Chair Pocket
Book Girl
in Red Dress with Cats and Dog’s Devil.
House Door of No Return. Head-of-a-Girl-
In-the-Bedroom in the kitchen. (38)
These creatively punctuated, spaced, and enjambed tercets re-present the people and objects that are their subject to expose the simultaneous objectification (“Nude”) and aestheticization (“Iconologia”) of Black female bodies. The middle stanza exemplifies the need to attend to visual as well as verbal strategies of meaning-making throughout “Voyage” in order to fully account for how the “Empty // Pocket // Girl” and those like her are constructed by and through their representation. [19] Put differently, Lewis dials up the materialist and performative qualities of language in order to illustrate the “poetic force” of museography, a form of writing with “its own mode of image-making implicated in the production, preservation, and circulation of…discourses on Black femininity.” [20] While the degree of visual play varies throughout the poem, Lewis routinely draws a parallel between artistic materiality and the materiality of poetic language:
Detail
Of a
Balsarium
Glass Moss
Fragment
Untitled Gelatin
Silver Print
On Paper On
Stucco On Canvas
On Concrete (40)
Through enjambment, consonance (“glass moss”), and anaphora (“on”), Lewis draws attention to the “detail” and the “fragment,” the smallest units of language, as they operate “On Paper” just as much “On /Stucco On Canvas / On Concrete.” Language, in other words, is itself a medium of representation rather than any kind of neutral descriptor. The haunting image of the balsarium (sometimes called a lacrimarium, or ‘tear vessel’) here also emphasizes the affective poetics at stake in these material representations.
In her own commentary on “Voyage,” Lewis discusses this affective power under the rubric of beauty. For Lewis, Beauty names a visceral and embodied experience, a confrontation of the historical and ideological as well as the aesthetic and ethical. [21] “Beauty might be the greatest territory of all,” she told an interviewer, “that ultimate terrain over which we struggle because it’s about who and what gets to be cherished.” In contrast to ‘Pretty’ (which concerns “the male gaze, white consumption, objectification”), Beauty is “dark, complex, transformation…[the] experience is often unpleasant, or it is a journey, a quest.” [22] (This idea of a journey to or for Beauty, a motif echoed by the poem’s title and paratext, informs the poem’s structuring conceit, about which more in a moment). [23] The matter of beauty thus bears directly on poetry; the poem’s reparative ethos are coextensive with the aesthetic deconstruction achieved through Lewis’s poeticization of museal text. As Lucy K. Mensah summarizes, Lewis “render[s] museum writing hypervisible through its poeticization…[her] techniques call attention to how Black femininity as a texto-visual construct is not only produced through museum objects, but their attendant interpretative labels.” [24] Her poetic rearrangements routinely achieve an ekphrastic re-visioning of the art object through form, whether it be with the fracturing of enjambment:
Statuette of a Woman Reduced
To the Shape of a Flat Paddle
Statuette of a Black Slave Girl
Right Half of Body and Head Missing (43)
Or with spatialized verse and visual caesura:
water jar
bowl
ointment spoon
in the form of swimming
black girl
black girl
mirror
with handle
in the form of a carved standing
black girl (48)
black girl (48)
Or with cascading, anaphoric quatrains:
Girl Tending a Cow
Black Girl from the Cottingham Suite
Girl Writing a Letter
Girl in Partial Native Dress
With Ornaments:
Black Seeds Calla Lillies
Cyclamen Red
And Yellow Flowers (86)
While the particular formal shape changes throughout the poem’s journey from “Ancient Greece & Ancient Rome” (Catalog 1) to “The Present” (Catalog 8), Lewis consistently marshals local poetic effects of lineation, anaphora, enjambment, polysemy, and disjunctive syntax to contravene ut pictura poesis and expose the performative, not documental, character of artwork titles and museum descriptions. This is brought into especial relief by a concrete poem in Catalog II (“Ancient Egypt”) that examines the
head of a princess
with alterations
the small relief
a young gazelle
on the arm of a princess
the relief at bottom
a bull
( ially preserved )
is led
place
offering partly damaged
relief in the Center
the beautifully carved torso
The Queen, Who (58)
This poem visually and verbally puns on erasure—“ially preserved” is presumably a partial erasure of the phrase ‘partially preserved’—with the “partly damaged” artwork rendered in a ‘partly damaged’ concrete ekphrasis. It thus speaks not only to the objectification of Black femininity, but also the erasure of Black women and, by extension, Black literary and artistic traditions. Erasure, as Lewis notes in a talk on the subject, is the world’s oldest literary and cultural tradition, one fundamentally bound up with histories of race, gender, colonialism, and genocidal violence—though it also offers a means by which to document and resist such violence. [25] Indeed, there is a sense in which “Voyage of the Sable Venus” performs an erasure of Western art history, or an investigation into beauty’s entanglement with erasure.
Finally, although the discussion of the poem tends to focus, as I’ve done, on local effects, it’s important not to forget Lewis’s claim in the Prologue that “Voyage” is a “narrative poem,” and one I would argue is geared towards the epic, even if unconventionally so. In her essay “Boarding the Sable Venus,” Lewis referred to the phrase ‘Voyage of the Sable Venus’—the title of a late 18th century engraving by Thomas Stothard and the source from which the poem takes its name—as “an epic written in one line,” an idea which appears to have influenced the narrative conceit of Lewis’s poem as a “voyaging through time and place” (145-147). We might also see her division of the poem into eight catalogs as invoking not only with ship inventories and museum catalogues, but also with the trope of the epic catalog. As for Pico, the epic mode correlates with a historiographical impulse. “History was the sea upon which I grew drunk,” Lewis writes, echoing Derek Walcott, adding that “Voyage is an autobiography where theI isn’t significant, isn’t the protagonist. Perhaps History is both hero and villain” (148-151). It’s fitting, then, that she characterizes her poetry as “an archeological practice without landscape or time” (157), for what else is “Voyage” but a transhistorical and transnational practice of recovery, an extended act of being-with that insists not only is there “Still: // Life” here (110), but that’s it’s beautiful?
*
So: why the long poem? Since the advent of modernism, the long poem has occupied a privileged place in the canon of American poetry. Much of it has to do with the conflation of the long poem with ‘the big poem,’ as Susan Stanford Friedman puts it, that long poems seem to possess a self-conscious sense of social, cultural, aesthetic, and/or political significance. For Friedman, the modern long poem gains its authority precisely because it descends from the classical epic (“which has a very big-long history of importance in Western culture”), and as such, they “assum[e] the authority of the dominant cultural discourse” and stand as “the preeminent poetic genre of the public sphere.” [26] The epic (and its kin, the long poem) is, in short, a hegemonic form. Susan Stewart argues similarly in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, where she pits the lyric poem against the epic, the “expression of the senses and emotions out of first-person experience” as a counter to “public representations of war and the expression of tribalism and nationalism.” Her point is as much ideological as it is poetic: “epic is the genre characterizing an archaic social order, an order organized hierarchically and maintained through warfare,” so that the social order changes, “the reified form can no longer readily be adapted to a changed consciousness.” [27] But if Friedman and Stewart are aesthetically and ideologically suspicious of the epic, it’s precisely the “reified” associations which make the epic-influenced long poem desirable for contemporary writers.
Lynn Keller, surveying the field in the late 1990s, observed that “among today’s long poems that might be considered epic, epic is being remade as the poems enact a search for structural and metaphysical principles and for histories and historiographies that can replace those of the traditional heroic narratives.” [28] To be clear, not all contemporary long poems seek to be, or to be read against, the epic. But for those that do, the cultural capital of the epic proves to be both aesthetically and politically productive. Evie Shockley’s study of 20th century epic poems by Black women in Renegade Poetics demonstrates how Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonya Sanchez, and Harryette Mullen “sought to achieve something with the epic it was not created to do,” crafting polyvocal poems that pursue liberatory poetic projects. [29] DuPlessis extends this to the genre of the long poem as a whole, suggesting that they evince “a critical suspicion of culture and society as they now stand” and thus “tend to the counterpoem or countermap.” [30] While I hesitate to label the long poem an inherently subversive form, it’s clear to me that the generic hybrid that is the contemporary long poem is, particularly when they invoke the epic modality, inclined to metafictionality, becoming, implicitly or explicitly, a meditation on what it means to write poetry here and now.
Again, not every long poem takes this tack. But many do, including a number of the poems I listed at the beginning of this essay. More importantly, both IRL and “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” as we’ve seen, intentionally signal their interest in engaging with this form. And while Pico and Lewis share a vision of the epic as a collective and oral practice, [31] I want to suggest that part of what distinguishes IRL and “Voyage” is their countermythological ethos. The work of these two poems is to “crack open / the mythology” of the present moment, or the dominant aesthetic, historical and political narratives (Pico 30). Countermythology is, in other words, a reckoning.
By way of closing, I want to make two final suggestions. First, that the countermythological long poem is always self-consciously interested in language. Both IRL and “Voyage” are dazzling experiments in and with poetic language; they are also poems about the history and ideology of English. “The history of English is inextricably tied to the history of war, to the history of empire,” Lewis observes, “they cannot be separated—and hence our literature cannot be separated from these histories.” She adds that, as a consequence, many poets seek “to throw off and reinvent English simultaneously.” [32] Isn’t that exactly what we’ve seen in both poems, a wrestling with “the English fucking language” as a both a creative tool and the language of conquest, erasure, and exclusion? This is partly how I interpret Lewis’s idea of poetry as an “archaeological act,” that hers is an archaeology of English itself in which the past is linked inextricably to the present. Near the end of “Voyage,” a short (and seemingly-autobiographical) poem reads:
I send you these few lines in order
To bring you up
On what has been
Happening to me. (109, sic)
These two poems, “these few lines,” capture both “what has been” and “what has been / Happening,” the past perfect and the present progressive, registering that language is in part “what has been / Happening to me.” This emphasis is not incidental, but an essential means through which poets interrogate the major public myths—the stories, the images, the language—of the present, of documenting, refusing, and speaking back to this violence.
Second, that IRL and “Voyage” are thus exemplary poems of the last twenty years. Much of this essay has framed the two works within the context of American poetics. But the framing of the folio—American Poetry and Poetics 2008–2025—insinuates the category is as much a political one as a poetic one. And in this frame, too, Pico’s and Lewis’s long poems speak to the cultural moment within which they were composed. To return to where I began, no narrative of the last two decades is more significant than that of the interlinked struggles for racial, environmental, gender, and economic justice amidst the virulent xenophobia, toxic nationalism, populist rise of the postfascist New Right. From Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street to DACA and the Dreamers, #MeToo, and climate action, American culture at large has been defined since 2008 largely by activist social movements and demands to reckon, publicly and privately, with systemic, discursive, historical, and ongoing forms of violence and dispossession. Without reducing IRL and “Voyage” to this context, part of what makes them exemplary with regard to contemporary American poetry is that, as long poems, they speak to and about this cultural moment, challenging discourses of domination through their creative, critical, and countermythologizing poetics.
These two poems are, to borrow a phrase from Evie Shockley, constellations of rarities: multifaceted, polyvocal poems that refract the present and, in so doing, invite us to participate in imagining a better world here and now.
Notes
[1] Williams, “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower,” Collected Poems, Vol. II, edited by Christopher MacGowan (New Directions, 1988). 318.
[2] Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 2007), p. 39. While acknowledging the specific context of Lorde’s remarks, her ideas also resonate with a broader liberatory poetics.
[3] Jahan Ramazani argues in Poetry and Its Others (U of Chicago Press, 2013) that the news is one of the constitutive generic others of modern poetry, a form it both draws on and differentiates itself from. In a slightly different vein, Jeffrey Gray and Ann Keniston distinguish a kind of public poetry they call engaged poetry in their edited collection, The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st-Century American Poetry of Engagement (U of Michigan Press, 2016).
[4] Nearly all of the major studies of the long poem emphasize its “heterodiscursive and heterogeneric qualities” (23), as Rachel Blau DuPlessis puts it in A Long Essay on the Long Poem (U of Alabama Press, 2023). I treat “long poem” in this essay primarily as a readerly heuristic, a somewhat fluid and subjective category for poems that (in Stephanie Burt’s words) “use length as an aesthetic device.” See Burt, “On Long Poems,” The Yale Review, 1 April 2020. https://yalereview.org/article/long-poems
[5] For a summary, see Stephanie Burt’s “What Is This Thing Called Lyric?” Modern Philology 113.3 (2016): 422-440. For criticism of New Lyric Studies, particularly with regard race and nation, see Dorothy J. Wang, Thinking Its Prescence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford UP, 2014), Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), Sarah Dowling, Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood Under Settler Colonialism (Iowa UP, 2018), Jahan Ramazani,Poetry in a Global Age (Chicago UP, 2020), and Virginia Jackson, Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023).
[6] For introductory discussions of Instapoetry and its social contexts, see James Mackay and JuEunhae Knox’s new (and open-access!) edited collection, Reading #Instapoetry: A Poetics of Instagram (Bloomsbury, 2024).
[7] Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford UP, 2016), pp. 11-18.
[8] DuPlessis, A Long Essay on the Long Poem, p. 26.
[9] Quoted in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Verso, 1993), p. 38.
[10] Alan Gilbert, “Refusal to Settle: on Tommy Pico’s poetry.” Poetry Foundation, 1 December 2020. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/154634/refuse-to-settle
[11] See Arlie Alizzi, “’Don’t respond’: sexting and scrolling in First Nations’ queer literature,” AlterNative 20.2 (2024): 298-304; Will Clark, “Tommy Pico’s Fugitive Forms,” ASAP Journal 7.3 (2022): 523-549; and June Scudeler, “’You Can’t be an NDN in Today’s World’: Tommy Pico’s Queer NDN Epic Poems,” Transmotion 7.1 (2021): 158-196.
[12] Alizzi, “’Don’t Respond,” 302.
[13] See McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead, 2019).
[14] Rich Smith, “Tommy Pico’s IRL is Better than the Internet.” The Stranger, July 26, 2016.
[15] As Pico told an interviewer, “my precedent for writing book-length poems are these indigenous song cycles called ‘bird songs.’ Some of my first memories are listening to my father and other people singing them. They’re just like epic poems that talk about how people made it into the valley, like travel logs.” See “On not wasting my time,” The Creative Independent, 23 May 2019. https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-tommy-pico-on-not-wasting-any-time/
[16] “In Their Own Words: Tommy Pico on IRL,” Poetry Society of America, n.d. https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/in-their-own-words/tommy-pico-on-an-excerpt-from-irl
[17] Laura Vrana, “‘An experiment in archive’: Robin Coste Lewis's "Voyage of the Sable Venus" and Contemporary Black Female Poets' Conceptual Epistemologies,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 40.1 (2021): 69-93. For writings of/on these poetic practices, see Robert Fritterman and Vanessa Place, Notes on Conceptualisms (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009); Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (University of Chicago Press, 2010); Craig Dworkin’s essay “The Fate of Echo” in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern UP, 2011); the essays by Joseph Harrington and Jeffrey Gray in The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st Century of Engagement (2013); Philip Metres, “(More) News from Poems,” Kenyon Review, Vol. XL, No. 2, Mar/April 2018; and Michael Leong, Contested Documents: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (U of Iowa Press, 2020). For critique of conceptual poetics relevant to “Voyage,” see Evie Shockley, “Is Zong! conceptual poetry? Yes, it isn’t,” Jacket2,17 September 2013 and Cathy Park Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” Lana Turner 7 (2014).
[18] Elizabeth Frost broadly defines visual poetics as “writing that explores the materiality of the word, page, or screen. Combining text with image and/or highlighting the materiality of the medium, visual poetics privilege acts of seeing in acts of reading.” See Frost, “Visual Poetics” in A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry, edited by Linda Kinnahan (Cambridge UP, 2016).
[19] Claire Grandy likens the techniques of “Voyage” to captioning and photography, suggesting that “Lewis’s work…reorient[s] our attention to what is already seen, to what, in fact, constitutes perception” and thus “theoriz[es] our very frameworks of visibility.” Grandy, “Poetics of the Record: Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus,” Criticism 62.4 (2020), p. 530.
[20] Lucy K. Mensah, “Black Feminist Museographical Poetics in “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 26.1 (2024), p. 60.
[21] As Matthew Scully puts it in his account of the horrible beauty in the poem, “Lewis articulates the conjunction of the beautiful and the horrible as a conjunction of the aesthetic and the historical, which produces a disjunctive and dissensual experience for the
perceiving subject” (np). See Scully, “Horrible Beauty: Robin Coste Lewis’s Black Aesthetic Practice,” Postmodern Culture 32.2 (2022).
[22] Lewis, “Black Joy is My Primary Aesthetic,” Interview by Claire Schwartz, Lithub, 14 November 2016, https://lithub.com/robin-coste-lewis-black-joy-is-my-primary-aesthetic/
[23] The poem’s epigraph from Reginald Shepherd is “And never to forget beauty / however strange or difficult” and the book’s dedication reads “for Beauty.”
[24] Mensah, “Black Feminist Museographical Poetics,” pp. 67-68.
[25] Lewis, “The Race Within Erasure,” talk presented by Literary Arts, 25 February 2016. Audio available here.
[26] Friedman, “When a ‘Long’ Poem is a ‘Big’ Poem: Self-Authorizing Strategies in Women’s Twentieth-Century ‘Long Poems’,” Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, edited by Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber (Cornell UP, 1997), p.15.
[27] Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (U of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 296-299.
[28] Keller, Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women (U of Chicago Press, 1997), p.8
[29] Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U of Iowa Press, 2011), pp.16-17.
[30] DuPlessis, A Long Essay on the Long Poem, p. 26.
[31] See Pico, “On not wasting my time” and Lewis, “Black Joy is My Primary Aesthetic.”
[32] Lewis, “The Race Within Erasure.”
