Poetry shakes up language. For one thing, the basic poetic act is to break the sentence or arrange it in such a way that it does not link together normally with other sentences. Tim Liardet, introducing his poem ‘from The Eighty-Seven Deaths of Petrarch’, says: ‘The break-up of the line creates an energy field that searches for reconciliation, but finds only its own breakages.’ A broken language also forces the reader to consider new ways of thinking, deeper ways to feel. As Eliza O’Toole writes it in ‘Brought To Grass, Or Standing By Windows Looking At Walls’, her poetry is ‘Where wild things thrive, where words are stoned, cant of the wind in woodland edges, a turbulence of hares.’
In Long Poem Magazine, we are interested in the way these breakages form and reform into the final extraordinary language of the long poem, so we ask every contributor to write two hundred and fifty words explaining their process in building their long poem. It is a hallmark of our journal but many poets find this tricky. Writing a poem can feel magical; it can seem to be out of your control. Mary Shackle Wilson writes of her title image ( ( (.) ) ): ‘I wanted to find a form that could suspend my thoughts like a three-dimensional mobile with a radiating pendant at its heart, thereby creating inter-connected reflections over sympathetic but distinct time-frames.’
Form, beginning with the line break, is the way a poet can hold on without the slipping out of control that enables a poem to be born. This process is not only technical but emotional as Chrissy Williams explains, referring to James Schuyler’s poetry: ‘Schuyler’s radical line breaks gave me the exhilaration I needed.’ Exhilaration is mentioned by Toby Martines de las Rivas in his introduction to his poem ‘High Phase / 23 Players’. He adds ‘Something that interested me while I was writing it is that very disconnected phrases suddenly appeared on the page, like the lines; ‘I will write /MACHINEPSALMS’ …and then I did go on to write those texts.’
The long poem is a vehicle that allows a variety of ideas and/or forms aboard a single journey. Juha Virtanen explains: ‘[Since 2014] I have primarily written my poetry in sequences, series, and other longer forms, as containers that do not contain too rigidly and instead allow for a progression of thoughts across connections, tensions and oppositions over a sustained period. Like restlessness, or multitudes.’ He goes on to explain: ‘…the interrogative process of ‘Oscillation Dust 3’ does not rest on a single site-specific location but instead continues to wander, both geographically and temporally. The lighthouse, in this sense, serves as the first nodal point in a set of coordinates that are extended and re-intersected by each subsequent component.’
The aspect of a poem that is most intriguing is the sense that it is utterly truthful and yet easily and perhaps always fictional. As Mark Byers notes: ‘the instability … between scientific exactitude and imaginative fashioning seems a live problem of literary practice and ethics again today in the context of mass extinction and climate breakdown.’ Is there a porous boundary here? Or simply poetic practice? The introductions to our poems hold some clues.
Claire Crowther