Announcing Irreantum 19.3 — Long Poetry

It’s a new issue of Irreantum and so here are some behind-the-scenes deets you won’t get from me anywhere else, oh readers of the AML blog.

Almost exactly eleven months ago, Stan Absher sent me a copy of a long poem he was working on, Nephi on the Tower. To be frank, I wasn’t thrilled to see it. Now I had to read it and, like most English-speaking citizens of the 21st century, I’m leery of long poems. But, as luck would have it, Nephi on the Tower was good. Really good. So good I almost forgot it still needed a couple drafts before I could even consider it and I almost tweeted out these lines:

history is God’s daughter
and He braids her hair
from innumerable strands.

I suggested a couple things as he struggled with the text and, with his permission, I sent it on to a couple other poets who I thought we like to see it and might provide helpful feedback.

One of these poets was James Goldberg who did provide feedback and, hello, was working on his own long poem—a take on The Waste Land that he intended to release on that poem’s centenerary, but hoped to publish elsewhere beforehand.

We now had two strong long poems that Irreantum was the natural home for, and James suggested a special long-poetry-themed issue, perhaps edited by Michael R. Collings.

For those with long memories, Michael was once Irreantum‘s poetry editor, back in the print era, and during his tenure, a special poetry issue was published. Part of that issue was a section on the Mormon epic, which included long poems—six in fact, including part of Michael’s miltonian The Nephiad. I recommend checking that collection out after this new issue has created in you an appetite for longer poetry.

Anyway, Michael said yes and out went a call for long poems. I chose optimism, but, really, I was unsure whether we would get any more submissions. And, if not, then I would have to decide it two poems, long or not, were enough for a single issue.

But the call went out and in came the poems.

I’ll let Michael’s introduction tell you more about what to expect from the individual works, but I will say that they are split between takes on famous old poems and not, formally composed and not. Follow Irreantum on Twitter or Facebook this week for poem-by-poem salespitches. But for now, why not just dig in and find what appeals to you?