Robert Archambeau: Rhizomes and more

...You’re probably right about the trend toward book-length works in post-avant writing. I have nothing like actual data to work with, but that’s never stood in my way before, so let’s roll with the assumption that there is a trend toward book-length poems. I suspect you’re right for two reasons: an institutional one and another that has to do with the large-scale history of poetics. You really can’t underestimate the influence of that massive institutional edifice, the MFA program, on poetry nowadays. One of the things many people are encouraged to do in such programs is to write series of linked poems. I understand why: it’s a way to get students to stretch out beyond the short lyric, to explore a form or a topic, and to understand the architecture of a book. So that’s the institutional reason. The other reason is that our poetics have evolved to a point where we aren’t really asking for a very rigorous coordination of parts into a whole. That is, you no longer have to write with the kind of OCD level of attention to how your book-length project adds up to a whole in order to think of it as a single project. Milton would have died a little to think that a part of Paradise Lost had only an oblique connection to the unified whole, for example. But in our time, there is a strong sense that the truly sophisticated work eschews classical decorum, or even the kind of hidden unity behind a façade of fragments that we find in a poem like Eliot’s Waste Land. Some of this comes from the triumph of deconstruction and post-structuralism: after Derrida and company showed us all the fissures and disunities in the texts we’d thought of as whole, the goals of the Big Unified Work seemed less viable. And when Deleuze and Guattari described the rhizome as the form of our time, they authorized a lot of works in which various parts connected with each other somewhat haphazardly. So we see a lot of book-length poems where the bar for textual unity has been set fairly low. You can call it a book-length work if a lot of the parts only sort of connect. In a way, you could say what’s changed hasn’t been a matter of substance so much as it has been a matter of labeling. Wallace Stevens presented his first book, Harmonium, as a collection of individual poems. But those poems have enough by way of thematic and stylistic overlap that, had he been able to anachronistically appropriate Deleuze and Guattari’s language and called it a single, rhizomatic whole, no one now would bat an eye. Anyway, this movement toward big works that are really collections of linked fragments isn’t as new as we’d like to think. The roots of it go back at least as far as Poe’s essay “The Poetic Principle,” in which he argues that the unified long poem isn’t really possible....