The Modernist Long Poem Goes to the Movies

Here’s a preview of my new “Epic Encounters” essay on teaching the modernist long poem for Journal of Modern Literature (37.4). This Gladiator-inspired movie poster of Paterson, by Cory Hunter, is reproduced by permission. Two other students’ posters also appear in my essay.  -MB

It was one of those hallway remarks that stuck with me: “years ago someone taught a Forms course on the long poem for the MFA students.” The nostalgia for a grand past most struck me—an old course for an expired form, relevant now (it seemed) for the technical lessons it offered younger poets of shorter forms. As a scholar of modern and contemporary poetry, I saw a pedagogical challenge in the remark and its assumptions about collegiate millennials. Would a new course on the modernist long poem prove viable when many English majors had never even read The Waste Land? Would it prove an epic undertaking? Would students’ preference for the spectacular dimensions of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, 300, and other epic films interfere with or further their engagement with H.D.’s, William Carlos Williams’s and Derek Walcott’s epic poems? How might the American tendency toward all things supersized open new ways of thinking about overwrought aesthetics in poetry and film? Taking up the challenge, I designed a pedagogy for the modernist long poem that returns the form to its epic encounters with cinema.