Perhaps my favorite part of the sequence poem is how it can be de-centered from the subject.
In a chapbook published by Finishing Line I circled around the subject of the death of my dead friend's father, and the whole of it came together in pieces of the exterior (like a space formed by the negation of it). Similarly, I published a long poem in Permafrost that told a story in snippets while keeping the narrator deliberately not where the subject of the story lay, so that there was safety and juxtaposition when it was time to change tempo/subject/tone.
Right now I'm publishing drafts of a crown of sonnets on my substack, which isn't following a de-centered pattern and I kind of wished it was. It's been building to the 8th poem where a cataclysm will (hopefully) knock a new tone into the piece, and the last 6 sonnets will juxtapose the first 8. That's the hope.
Have a blast at your workshop! I'm bummed my Sundays don't offer me a chance to join. Thanks for this post.
I would love to be part of this class, to explore various points of ignition and trajectories for sequences, sonic palettes, sources of momentum. I don't yet know if I can...
I think it was Frank Sinatra who invented the concept album in the 50s, but the Beatles perfected the form. That’s probably a good analogy to a poem sequence. Their albums don’t depend on plot, just as, say, Spoon River doesn’t. That would probably be kind of boring, I think, and reduce some of the enjoyment of the songs (or poems) on their own.
Binge TV, in contrast, generally depends heavily on plot, which links episodes pretty tightly since viewers demand story progression. Some of that is historical, with episodes ending in plot cliffhangers so you come back (and watch next week’s commercials too).
Some shows feature deliberately decoupled “standalone” episodes, where you get a sense of completion in a single episode (X Files often did this), but the next episode always returns to the main plot.
We can enjoy a rewatch of a plot-dependent episode, but probably not if we haven’t seen the previous episodes. That’s not a requirement with a concept album, or a poem sequence, or Winesburg, Ohio, or maybe even something like Moby Dick, or even a baseball season. I see that as a limitation of binge TV, that a first watch still pretty much requires linear consumption.
“de-centered from the subject” “safety and juxtaposition” -- yes! Well said. Thanks for sharing these great examples.
Perhaps my favorite part of the sequence poem is how it can be de-centered from the subject.
In a chapbook published by Finishing Line I circled around the subject of the death of my dead friend's father, and the whole of it came together in pieces of the exterior (like a space formed by the negation of it). Similarly, I published a long poem in Permafrost that told a story in snippets while keeping the narrator deliberately not where the subject of the story lay, so that there was safety and juxtaposition when it was time to change tempo/subject/tone.
Right now I'm publishing drafts of a crown of sonnets on my substack, which isn't following a de-centered pattern and I kind of wished it was. It's been building to the 8th poem where a cataclysm will (hopefully) knock a new tone into the piece, and the last 6 sonnets will juxtapose the first 8. That's the hope.
Have a blast at your workshop! I'm bummed my Sundays don't offer me a chance to join. Thanks for this post.
I would love to be part of this class, to explore various points of ignition and trajectories for sequences, sonic palettes, sources of momentum. I don't yet know if I can...
I think it was Frank Sinatra who invented the concept album in the 50s, but the Beatles perfected the form. That’s probably a good analogy to a poem sequence. Their albums don’t depend on plot, just as, say, Spoon River doesn’t. That would probably be kind of boring, I think, and reduce some of the enjoyment of the songs (or poems) on their own.
Binge TV, in contrast, generally depends heavily on plot, which links episodes pretty tightly since viewers demand story progression. Some of that is historical, with episodes ending in plot cliffhangers so you come back (and watch next week’s commercials too).
Some shows feature deliberately decoupled “standalone” episodes, where you get a sense of completion in a single episode (X Files often did this), but the next episode always returns to the main plot.
We can enjoy a rewatch of a plot-dependent episode, but probably not if we haven’t seen the previous episodes. That’s not a requirement with a concept album, or a poem sequence, or Winesburg, Ohio, or maybe even something like Moby Dick, or even a baseball season. I see that as a limitation of binge TV, that a first watch still pretty much requires linear consumption.