Long Poem Magazine

Overview

Long Poem Magazine is a British literary journal, listed in this directory from London, England, devoted entirely to long poems and poetic sequences. Founded in 2008 and published twice a year, it exists because the long poem is a form most magazines cannot accommodate: journals with limited pages generally favour short lyrics, so extended work, sequences and book-length poems in progress struggle to find a home. Long Poem Magazine describes itself as unique in its field in being solely dedicated to the publication of long poems and sequences, and it aims to represent a diverse range of poets and poetic styles, in both traditional and innovative modes, including work in translation. Each poem it publishes is introduced not by the poet's biography but by the poet's own account of the process of writing it.

Founding and Editors

The National Poetry Library's listing dates the magazine's foundation to 2008, and its second issue appeared early the following year, following a successful inaugural launch. The early editorial team included Anna Robinson and John Haynes, who became consultant editor with the second issue. Linda Black joined the editorial team with Issue 2 and became the magazine's editor-in-chief, the constant presence in its history; by the time of the twentieth issue, in winter 2018, the editors who had carried the magazine were recorded as Anna Robinson, John Haynes, Anne Vaughan-Williams, Lucy Hamilton and Black herself. Claire Crowther co-edited the magazine with Black, stepping into the co-editor's role for Issue 20 after Hamilton's departure, and the National Poetry Library lists Black and Crowther as its editors. Black remains editor: she is a poet, visual artist and dyslexia specialist whose fifth collection appeared from Shearsman Books, and whose own work includes prose poetry, a form the magazine's openness to varied structures also welcomes.

The Case for the Long Poem

The magazine's founding argument is that length is not an indulgence but a distinct poetic resource. A long poem can sustain narrative, meditation, documentary material, multiple voices and changes of register in ways a single lyric page cannot, and sequences allow poets to build structures across many shorter units. Because mainstream journals rarely have room for such work, good long poems historically went unpublished or waited for book publication years later. By its twentieth issue the magazine had published 307 long poems, a body of work that would otherwise have had almost no periodical outlet in Britain, and its editor remarked that if another English-language journal devoted to the long poem existed, she had not found it. Each issue also carries a long essay by a practitioner of the form — Alfred Corn discussed the Western tradition of the long poem in Issue 2, and later essays came from poets including Vahni Capildeo and Tim Dooley — so that the magazine documents the theory of the form alongside examples of it.

Content of an Issue

A typical issue gathers long poems and sequences from different traditions and in a range of styles: lyric sequences, narrative poems, poems built from notes or scraps, poems fused from separate pieces, dialect poems and translations. The second issue alone contained a lyrical folktale in a Russian manner, two poems inspired by Japanese culture and history, two linked to troubadour France and the Occitan language, a poem set in Nigeria in the medieval French rondel form, a poem evolving from gravestone inscriptions in the poet's English village, and a poem emerging from extreme life crisis. More recent issues have ranged similarly widely, and the magazine has published a translation of an ancient Tamil hymn, a prose poem, a tribute to Mrs Beeton and a meditation on sleep, among much else. A hallmark of its house style is that each poet introduces their poem's process rather than their own biography, and these introductory notes are developed on the website in a series of articles called Poets and their Processes, in which contributors explain how their long poems came to be written. Kate Ling, for example, described her poem Photographs as a verse diary begun as a series of poems written over eight years.

Translation and International Range

Translation is a standing element of the magazine. Issue 5 was proud to include the first ever publication of Edwin Morgan's early verse translation of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian epic, a notable recovery of work by one of Scotland's greatest poets. Later issues have included Sarah Kersley's translation of the Brazilian poet Carlito Azevedo and Timothy Adès's rendering of Bertolt Brecht's animal poems, and the magazine states that most issues carry a share of translated poetry. Its contributors and subjects are international even where the work is written in English, and the magazine reports that it has grown in popularity throughout the world.

Launches and Community

The publication of each issue is marked by a launch event, held regularly at the Barbican Library in London, at which contributors read their work; the editor has written of the pleasure of hearing the poems come alive at these readings. Launches continued, after interruption by Covid, with Issue 29, and the launch of Issue 30 on 18 November 2023 at the Barbican Library brought together a large company of readers, including Simon Maddrell, Graham Mort, Katherine Pierpoint, Ian Seed, Robert Minhinnick and Peter Daniels, and featured Frances Presley's essay on the modernist long poem and feminist projects. The magazine's website hosts online texts of poems from previous issues alongside the Poets and their Processes articles, and it keeps a presence on Facebook and Twitter, extending the community formed at its launches.

Submissions

Long Poem Magazine invites submissions of long poems and sequences, and its editor advises prospective contributors to buy a copy of the magazine and to check the website for the current submission guidelines. Only two poems may be submitted at a time, and the most common fault in submissions is simply that a poem is too short: the magazine's whole purpose is to print work that exceeds the length other journals allow. It welcomes a variety of forms and traditions, is as interested in the traditional as in the innovative, and considers translations and dialect poems as part of its normal range.

Readership

The magazine's readers are poets who write at length, students and scholars of the long poem, and general readers of contemporary poetry willing to give time to extended work. Its feature essays and process notes make it a resource for creative writing teaching, since few publications document so consistently how long poems are actually made — how they are drafted, fused, revised and structured over months or years. The 307 long poems published by its twentieth issue amount, as its editor has noted, to a rich compendium of insights into how poets work, and that documentary value is a large part of the magazine's appeal to libraries and to the National Poetry Library, which lists it among British poetry magazines.

Place in British Poetry Publishing

Long Poem Magazine occupies a niche that no other British journal fills, and it has held that niche since 2008 with a twice-yearly rhythm, a stable editorial identity and a clear scholarly as well as creative purpose. In a magazine culture dominated by the short lyric, it stands as evidence that the long poem remains a living form, practised by contemporary poets in traditional, narrative, experimental and prose modes, and that a readership exists for a journal willing to give such poems the pages they need.