Book Lists

Brick Books and the Long Poem

Brick Books celebrates poetry all year long. But April is National Poetry Month so I thought I would create one more list for you - this time it's long poems. Stan Dragland, co-founder of Brick Books, wrote in 2003 when we compiled a list of our titles that we consider to be "long poems" - "A long poem, at least in Canada, is a book of poems, or poems and material in other forms, that has some sort of overall unity, sometimes narrative, sometimes something else. It's a pretty elastic category." "Long poems belong by practice and definition to what Ezra Pound called the 'prose tradition' in poetry; that is, their tendency to a narrative sense of the passage of time drives them by and into history beyond the capacities and preoccupations of the lyric." Sharon Thesen, "Introduction," The New Long Poem Anthology. Updated May 6, 2018

by Kitty Lewis