As we began to assemble our winter issue, we were struck by the number of multipage poems we had recently selected for publication. Long poems ask a lot of the reader. Compared with the precision, compression, and lyric wholeness of the sonnet or the ode (forms more often featured in the limited space of little magazines), the long poem is accretive, even unwieldy. Yet the long poems we chose to include here all hold our attention, even as they seem particularly attuned to the tension between fragmentation and continuity—enjambment and duration—that characterizes so much of contemporary life: the feed, the grid, the infinite scroll.
Though all written in lineated verse, the poems in this folio demonstrate a great range of effects and approaches afforded by length. A long poem can deliver one propulsive narrative, like that which unspools in Paisley Rekdal’s “A Story About Power,” where the first period arrives in the poem’s 133rd line. Or the narrative can feel patchwork and serialized: “a little episodic,” to quote Emily Skillings, “like your story has been doled out / in segments on a conveyor belt, little taffy squirts of living.” This is the manner of Andrew Motion’s “Everything Always Going Away,” which leaps prismatically between remembered scenes from boarding school, and of John Okrent’s “My Heart and the Nonsense,” a thirteen-part poem about midlife—much of it in terza rima—whose tenth section we have included here.
Yet a long poem can also be something else altogether: a dramatic monologue, or a comedy routine, or a collage of many voices. In Skillings’s baroque character study “A Room in Dumb Bitchville,” a petulant narrator gives a guided tour of her private chambers. Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s “Cento for the Night I Tried Stand-Up” stitches together lines from more than fifty comedians into an extended (and hilarious) litany of confessions and boasts. By the end of this folio of long poems, we hope you’ll say to yourself, in the words of Debevec-McKenney’s bombastic chorus: “We’ve had a good time. / We’ve laughed a lot. / We’ve learned a little.”
—the editors
