From the Editor

"The longer poem" is so seldom published that among the poets who responded enthusiastically to our call for submissions in this form, many asked if there was some mistake or misprint in our invitation.  To be sure, it was more difficult to read longer poems than the typical brief lyric or narrative, and more difficult to discuss them with our staff, and more difficult still to determine which examples of longer poems to present to our readers.

The designation "longer poem" does not constitute a technical form or definition.  In his essay, "The Dilemma of the Long Poem," critic and poet Dana Gioia defines the long poem as a book-length work; the poem of "middle length" as an extended work not long enough to fill a volume; and a "new-fangled form called the 'sequence' " as often "a group of short lyrics stuck together or an ode in the process of falling apart."  The seven examples of the longer poem presented in this issue of Natural Bridge encourage us to make certain claims on behalf of a poetry that is difficult to define.

Longer poems allow their authors, in addition to the lyrical and narrative component, alternatives to familiar or favorite perspectives.  A section of Mark Halperin's "Rembrandt's Prodigal Son" is called "Variant," and it permits Halperin more than a profound moment of identification with the prodigal in the famous painting.  By taking account of the weight of the white paint in one corner of the canvas, the variant perspective and the longer poem that contains it create a new opportunity for seeing.

"The theme is repeated/stressing a variant. . .Repeat/and repeat again," wrote William Carlos Williams in "The Orchestra."  A longer poem is that poem in which the poet finds a repeatable theme and returns to it as many times and in as many ways as possible while pursuing the span and design of the subject.  One good illustration of this is Rochelle Holt's "Seven Solutions to Surrender," whose aging speaker examines the impulse to die.  Holt reads the quotidian like a tarot deck, revealing how each day's demands -- remembering the obligation to drive with a friend to an appointment, for instance -- awaken a sufficient spark of spirit to argue against self-destruction.  When resolve, stubbornness, and refusal to relent no longer suffice, the speaker succumbs to a kind of death.  The repeated theme, concluded in the coda, reveals the secret to her survival.

Eric Pankey's always careful, always moving work is well represented by his longer poem, "The Grove."  Seven sacred sections attenuate the torment of a penitent who feels unworthy to mourn the death of both parents.  A grove transmutes the flame of their existence, but the poet persists, as Dante does, in his desire to speak to the absent souls.  The poem's beauty, which the poet compares to dross, means little when he invokes the mother's spirit, and she responds in words he cannot understand.  How can he help ask her about death; how can she not try to comfort him in her own enigmatic language?

Poetry should still be surprising, "news that stays news," as Pound said, and one such surprise among responses to our call for longer poems was the receipt of a war poem from a young poet.  The news from Desert Storm is as might be expected, but the freshness of reading the report of an unwilling soldier is as affecting as reading Isaac Rosenberg's "Dead Man's Dump" or Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est."  Briggs Seekins' plain-spoken "Miles of Arabian Sand" is perfectly pitched to its subject of the capture of an Iraqi boy soldier.  George Keithley's "A Cautionary Tour of the Cellar Chamber" depicts with historical verity the voice of a calm, exacting priest as he describes to Galileo the implements "of salvation" used to correct impious opinions; the priest's precise knowledge of human physical limits scares the astronomer and the reader alike.  Rebecca Dunham's task in "Rite of Spring" is to find an idiom for a contemporary event that had no warning but seems in its aftermath premonitory; the oblique details that attempt to but can't explain the shootings at Columbine High School are at times difficult to decipher, and for that they aptly portray puzzlement, digression, lack of accountability, and pointlessness.

The longer form, finally, is well suited to Christopher Buckley's extended meditation, "Poem Freely Accepted from the Polish," which begins and ends with the open arms of trees.  If the trees seem prayerful, complete, and content, the artist by comparison is moved to disaffection with a life devoted to poetry.  We are short-lived and unaccomplished compared to the trees' duration and beauty.  Perhaps the adequacy of a poet's lasting love much be measured by an awareness in autumn of "the afternoon rich with the apprehensions/of death in the castor bean."

This letter is now overlong, so it must go without saying that the remaining works in this issue not singled out by specific mention are no less pleasurable and significant than the remarkable longer poems introduced here.  We hope you will enjoy this issue and the ones planned for the near future.  With Number 6, devoted especially to the prose memoir, senior editor David Carkeet assumes the editorship of Natural Bridge.  The journal could not be in more capable hands.
 

—Steven Schreiner