What is the difference between a serial poem and a long poem?
serial vs long poem
5 responses to “serial vs long poem”
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The first keeps coming back like a garden rabbit or M*A*S*H rerun and the latter flows on & on? Like a toilet paper roll?
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I think a serial poem is sort of like a cliffhanger. Except you … could probably read it all at once depending on how it’s published. A long poem’s just, well, you know.
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Here’s something to chew on from the introduction to Joseph Conte’s “Unending Design: The Forms of Post-Modern Poetry,” in which he differentiates the serial form from the long poem, which he refers to as a procedural form:“…postmodern artists consider human orders to be arbitrary and occasional, and they are rather skeptical regarding any claims that such orders are endorsed by anything beyond our own immediate political, eithical, or utilitarian convenience. Among the poets of my own discussion, the active responses to this condition can be sorted into two distinct but complimentary types: either they make (in Robert Creeley’s words) a ‘quick graph’ of the acknowledged disorder as it occurs; or they enlist an admittedly arbitrary and personal order as mediation between the mind and its environs. One creates a somewhat desultory topological map of the ‘ground’ of existence; the other produces a grid transparently superimposed upon — and as easily lifted from — existence. The one describes the process of seriality; the other declares the product of proceduralism.”
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Chris,I think my Resident Alien project might fit into the serial form, but then again book two does have an artificial superimposed narrative of kings (not so much desultory). But if Conte is suggesting a kind of formal structure in the case of the long poem, then my Resident Alien project is not a long poem. The orbiting of kings in RA is more a process with recurring obsessions rather than a formal procedure.I do like serial with all its suggestions of tv and comics and soap and breakfast etc.thanks for the responses on this. I like to have a wee bit of a map of where I might head.head as a verb, hm . . .
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Never Mind the Beasts 
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