Welcome to Canto
The long poem
First, a reminder that Tiohtià:ke/Montréal is the unceded Indigenous lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka/Mohawk Nation. Tiohtià:ke is known as a gathering place for many First Nations, and the Kanien’kehá:ka are the custodians of this land. The long poem has deep roots in the oral storytelling practices of First Nations, and my continued gratitude goes out to the Kanien’kehá:ka for their generous teachings and knowledge-sharing, which have allowed me to truly care for the land I live and write on.
This is an era of shortened attention, headline bombardments, three-second videos, and mechanical interactions. It is also an era of violence and crises. The long poem is an act of resistance: it counters the contemporary speed at which we are brought to live our lives. It slows us down. It allows us the space and time to do what matters most: stop, observe, and love dearly the human and the more-than-human.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” was, as for many, the first long poem I encountered. At the time, it felt like a whole other world opening. The poem stood for much more than poetry alone. It offered transformation, it offered reflection, damage and growth, and all it asked in return was for your time. Eliot crafted a reciprocal relationship on the page: whatever you gained from the poem was equal to however much attention you gave it. How deliberate your approach. How eager you were to find an answer in the lines. Isn’t that how a relationship with anything else in the world should be?
There is much discussion in contemporary poetics about what kind of poetry is best equipped to tackle the crises of these times. Some will argue for the small, the lyric, the brief poem that will explode into a million thoughts if you—again—spend enough time with it. Others will root for the epic, the narrative, the experimental book-length poem that forces you to cease. The polemics are all so distorted and multifaceted, so delirious with angles, you simply can not occupy enough space with a short poem to create meaningful resistance.
I lean, ever so slightly, to the latter mode. The long poem. The book. Epics. But just slightly. There’s no point choosing sides when it comes to poetry, we’re all in the same, tiny, transparent little boat, thrown between gigantic waves of life. I just so happen to have an affinity for long poems.
And it so happens that there is no literary publication in Canada currently focused on long poems. I know poets write long poems: I find them in their books, I see rough drafts pass by workshops, hear readers quietly foreword their performance with declaration of a larger work-in-progress. And yet, right now, in Canada, the only opportunity to have your long poem published in a journal is if you are one of the two winners of The Malahat Review’s biannual Long Poem Prize. Or you can go the more challenging route of publishing a zine or a chapbook, both wonderful options, but both with their own limitations. The opportunities for long poems to exist and be widely distributed are few and far between.
I understand that. I work for yolk, one of those journals who will only accept six pages or less of poetry per submission. We can’t afford to give one poem ten percent or more of our page count. It wouldn’t make sense (and it would add even more strain on the dear editors who already go through hundreds and hundreds of pages of poetry).
But I also believe long poems deserve their place in the published world. Thus, Canto. It begins with an online publication, and I’ll gauge how much interest there truly is in publishing long poems. If I’m one of the few who will happily curl up with 25 pages of poetry, so be it, I will love every second. And if I find that the demand is there, that the world wants more long poetry in its midst, then we can start talking about printing some pages.
Until then, send me some poems. I’m eager to read them.
- Jeremy