When I was in graduate school, Galway Kinnell came to give a reading. His wonderful book Body Rags had just been published but instead of reading “The Bear” or “The Porcupine,” he chose to read a long poem, “The Last River,” which takes up the middle section of the book. About ten minutes into it, he paused, looked around the room with a pained expression, and said, “This isn’t a very good poem, is it?” Then he said, “But since I’ve gotten this far, I suppose I should finish it.”

Still, the last century did have some very good long poems and Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares is one. Others by Eliot, Pound, and Ginsberg are well known, and there were also significant long poems by H.D., William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and others. For Marvin Bell’s Craft of Poetry class, I wrote a term paper on Berryman’s book-length poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” and John Ashbery’s “The Skaters.”

In the Nineteenth Century, Longfellow’s hugely popular The Song of Hiawatha ran to over 5000 lines. Chances are you know a couple of them. “By the shore of Gitche Gumee,/ By the shining Big-Sea-Water” is the famous, much-parodied opening. The book sold over 50,000 copies and was widely translated. In our current literary culture, though, there isn’t much demand for long poems. Magazines, with limited space, are looking for one or two pagers so they can include more contributors, and, hopefully, draw more readers. Poetic sequences do provide an opportunity to expand beyond the short lyric and explore a wider range of experience, but what about the single poem extending over ten or twenty pages? Literary writing at that length seems to be dominated by short stories and creative non-fiction.

But I’ve always felt that one of the pleasures (demands?) of serious writing involves pushing yourself into unexplored territory and over the years I’ve written a number of longer poems. One, which appears in my collection Archives of the Air, describes an afternoon canoe trip with my family on the Chena River in Fairbanks. Another is a dramatic monologue exploring a shocking episode of cannibalism in colonial Australia. Each of these poems runs about 10 or 12 pages, but my longest long poem by far chalks in at around 40 pages, a different order of magnitude. How did it come about?

As with much of my writing, I wasn’t sure at first what I was getting myself into. The week-long raft trip the poem describes had taken place ten years before and wasn’t on my mind when I started. I was simply free associating and accumulating lines—15 or 20 lines a day. I was also reading translations of the Indian mystic poet Kabir and I sensed that he would fit into my writing in some way. When I’d written a few hundred lines, I realized that they were part of a single poem, but it was also clear to me that I would have to find some structuring element, a narrative line strong enough to carry the meditative and philosophical passages I’d already written. That’s when a line by Kabir about life being like a river sent me back to the raft trip and River of Light: A Conversation with Kabir found its shape. Luckily, I’d kept a journal on the trip and it brought back lots of details I might not otherwise have recalled.

In a prologue and ten sections, the poem wends its way down an unnamed wild river in south-central Alaska. It includes the sort of lyric reflections that such a float-trip encourages, but it also contains a bear attack, a life-threatening rapids run, and other quirks and surprises characteristic of such wilderness adventures. And in addition to the physical journey, River of Light becomes a spiritual journey as well. For this thread, Kabir serves as the narrator’s mentor. Of course this long-dead 15th century poet isn’t literally in the raft; rather the poem’s speaker (a fictionalized version of me) carries a volume of Kabir’s writings and engages in an internal dialogue with him.

Kabir speaks with great wit and authority and he’s not modest in his demands on his listeners:

Having slept for millions of years, he asks, isn’t it time to wake up? Just look around, he says. See this world for what it is: a foolish bag of tricks. Oh, friend, he observes, when you pack a loaded gun inside your brain, how can you ever find the peaceful path?

Kabir often speaks in riddles, but his core teaching is clear: organized religions are useless, and spiritual truth can only be found by looking deeply into yourself. Emerson considered him a forerunner of Transcendentalism and Thoreau refers to him admiringly in the Conclusion to Walden.

But the main structural element of my poem is the raft trip itself, as the river’s waves and currents influence the shaping and pacing of its lines, and the wildlife and scenery provide frequent surprises for the travelers. The physical and spiritual journeys are woven together and Kabir, who was a weaver by profession, is a welcome companion on the trip.

The best advice I can give to writers who want to try their hand at a long poem is keep going. You may not see the way ahead until you’ve written hundreds of lines, but at some point, if the poems is meant to be, you’ll find your way. Of course it helps to have a story in mind, but, as in my case, you don’t have to start with one. And if you do have a story to tell, it shouldn’t inhibit you from digressing and exploring.

Are there other approaches to the long poem beside story telling? Collage comes to mind, as in The Wasteland, and some of Ashbery’s long poems just seem to free associate. Pope wrote essays in verse. And then there’s Walt Whitman who did all of these things at once.