Maximalist Poetry

To feel the head-in-a-whirl intoxication of the sublime, readers must submit to the temporal demands of a long poem, which run counter to the demands of a sound bite. You won’t experience the sublime by channel surfing through a book. And I can’t demonstrate exaltation with excerpts. The poem of the maximalist sublime creates a sense of plenitude and possibility by orchestrating extended buildups and tear-downs in your head. Which is to say: the sublime is not pithy. The sublime is not dainty. But patience—a virtue not encouraged by American culture—occasionally is rewarded by moments of odd, postmodern rapture.

Alice Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language (301-2).