The URL I've given links to a blog that's certainly not mine, but it's something that I think you should take a look at. Poets crave inspiration from all areas and I think the link I'm offering will instigate that. At the very least, you will be shocked at and interested in what its author has to say. I've been reading your blog for a while and I think you would enjoy Play Crayon.
Josh, I can never quite decide if Bunting's "Brigflatts" is a long poem or not. It's usually thought of as one, but it has considerably less "length" than, say, the Cantos - though it is far longer than "The Waste Land." I guess it fits in to your discussion, though. Any thoughts on BB?
David, I'm not sure what you think should interest me about the blog you've linked to. It looks like an unfunny exercise in blackface minstrelsy.
Don, I've learned to think of "the long poem" as a highly elastic category, largely because that's how I've been taught to think about The Waste Land, which of course isn't terribly long. Briggflats certainly qualifies, and is another remarkable example of an individual's self-mapping, with an insistently local and Northrumbian frame overlaid with the more typically modernist, cosmopolitan references that he makes. That makes it maybe a better model going forward for similar projects. Plus of course it's utterly gorgeous--the most continually euphonious major long poem I can think of.
Sadly, I was first introduced to Bunting by August Kleinzahler at Stanford, in a class which seemed devoted to his demonstrating his contempt for creative writing in general and we students in particular. He loved Briggflats. It took me a long time to recognize the poem's wonderfulness, given the situation in which I first encountered it.
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