The long biography of the poem

Contemporary poetry has to contend with many kinds of distance between composition and reception. The diversity of venues for poetry has enormously increased along with the sheer numbers of readers, readings, publications and critical responses, and the time-scale in which these responses accumulate has greatly accelerated. Distance as a density of reception is also produced by public culture, by the institutions of education and the economies of cultural capital, by the legitimating institutions of knowledge such as institutional science, and the political maneuverings of public spheres and their counter-public spheres. Contemporary lyric poetry can either treat these distance as obstacles to be overcome or as a field to be celebrated and incorporated into the frameworks of textual production. The essay argues that many developments in contemporary poetic form are poets responses to this condition, and that we therefore need to rethink what we mean by close reading in this context.Close reading needs to consider the implications of what is called here the long biography of the poem, borrowing the concept from recent theories of the changing status of the commodity. A poem by Frank O'Hara, "Ave Maria" is discussed in detail as an instance of the way poets can treat distance as part of the material of composition, and later critical readers can trace the emergence of poetic meaning within the long biography.