It was only yesterday I learned that Brenda Shaughnessy, one of my favorite contemporary poets, has a new collection out from Knopf, entitled The Octopus Museum. I’ve of course not read it yet (and knowing me I won’t actually get to it for another two years), but from what I can gather it’s a rather high-concept book: a dystopian future in which the world that humanity destroyed is now run by octopuses. Shaughnessy’s past collections have had strong motifs running through them—astronomy and tarot cards in Our Andromeda, ’80s synthpop in So Much Synth—but thisone sounds like it goes a level beyond that.
I have no idea how one would approach the substance of an octopus dystopia, but in an interview for Lit Hub with Peter Mishler, Shaughnessy does mention how she approaches the form of it. Mishler points out how The Octopus Museum features much longer lines than is typical of Shaughnessy’s poetry. As she explains, the longer lines are not the mere product of an evolution in her writing style, but a conscious decision related to the themes of her new collection:
Oh how I love a long prose line with no self-important line breaks! It just ends where the margin says it ends. These lyric-essay/prose-poem vignettes are the correct shape for the content—almost all rectangular, as if framed, teleological. There are some regular, stanza-ed poems in the book because they are relics: humans used to write poems in which they wasted space, breaking our lines as if it would buy us more time, give the illusion of freedom. The prose pieces say: this is data, utilitarian. It uses up all the space it’s been given; it doesn’t imagine any use for taking up extra space.
I find this perspective on line lengths fascinating, because it runs counter to my own preconceptions about them. In the best case scenario, a long prose line in poetry can have a certain ecstasy to it. Walt Whitman is the most obvious example, what with the chant-like style of poems such as “Song of Myself,” and the later poetry of Larry Levis accomplishes something similar through a whirlwind of ideas and images. But to me, long lines of poetry tend to be suspect; I take them as a sign that the poet has not been discriminating in their diction or judicious in their self-editing. Such lines waste space in a poem the same way empty soda cans and scratch paper waste space on my desk: their presence detracts from the value of their surroundings.
But, upon reflection, perhaps my stance on long lines would play right into the hands of the octopus overlords. When I think of a poem in a visual sense, I tend to discount the page from the picture, as though the text were floating outside of time and space (or, alternatively, on an infinite plane, which for present purposes might as well be the same thing). But on what grounds do I refuse to consider page space as a fundamental part of the poem? I might as well refuse to consider the environment as a central feature of my life. From this point of view, there is something obscenely decadent about using an entire sheet of paper to print a haiku. It’s like clear-cutting a forest to plant a few rose bushes. No matter how beautiful the buds are, the process which produced them hardly seems justified.
I have no idea whether The Octopus Museum takes full advantage of the thematic possibilities of the long line poetry, especially in relationship to its odd premise. But at the very least, I’m sure I’d appreciate a collection which so challenged my base assumptions regarding poetry. I still remember how Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, regardless of whether or not I actually enjoyed it, taught me that poetry can deliberately sound stilted and awkward and still be thought-provoking. Hopefully, when I actually read The Octopus Museum, I’ll have similar experience to that.
Thanks for reading, and for humoring me on what really amounts to speculation. If you’d rather read my thoughts on books that I’ve actually read (and who could blame you?), my most recent post was on the role of the Missionary in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, which you can check out here. In the meantime, what are your thoughts on long lines of poetry? Can you think of a book that challenged your understanding of how writing is supposed to work? Let me know down in the comments!
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