To George D. Melvin: A Book of Poems, Monologues, and Short Stories

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A brief introduction to the works of Amy Levy

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He is the E. Pratt professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. Click here to submit your entry to the Long Poem Prize. As an emerging poet, I find I get this sinking feeling when a poem of mine becomes what one could call a "long poem.

I've actually been advised not to write them because they're almost impossible to publish. Having recently had your long poem "Othello: John, that's a great question. My first long—or longer—poem publication was also my first poem publication: Instead of celebrating the coming year by going out and partying "like it was " , I sat up many hours in my maternal grandmother's kitchen, in Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia, and wrote the poem, which was, in itself, a synthesis of all the African-American Black Arts—and European surrealist—poems that I'd been reading as I began writing poetry when I was 16, in The poem takes up about 3 pages in most printings of it, and was first published in Caribe , a now-defunct, African-Caribbean-Canadian, literary journal.

I think I was drawn to write it because of the example of Ezra Pound's The Cantos , which I'd read snatches of as a teen. In looking at your long poem "Othello: By Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade," which draws on Shakespeare as well as the Marquis de Sade, alongside your book Traverse an autobiographical sequence of what you dub "rap sonnets" , it's clear that you're very interested in the literary tradition.

In Traverse , for instance, besides mentioning many writers like Shelley and Baldwin and Pound and re-tooling the sonnet, you use the archaic medieval, I believe? What does being a writer mean to you in terms of responding—either as a devotee or a combatant—to the literary tradition?

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Not only did it teach me the blank verse line and form, it also made me think—like poets of yore—of some nouns, abstract especially, as deserving the exoticization of an initial majuscule letter and italic slants. In your poem "Othello" you use a great deal of explicit language and imagery, and while the majority of this language is natural when writing in Sade's voice, the autobiographical voice in Traverse certainly doesn't shy away from what some readers could call "vulgar" or "unpoetic" language.

My favourite—due to a love of Chaucer—is your use of the Middle English "queynte" in the first sonnet. What I like best in Traverse particularly is the way the diction moves from "high to low. Do you think a poet's job is to make language roil and clash like this? Might there perhaps be as much poesy in the Urban Dictionary as the Oxford English? John, thanks for noticing my Africadian—African-Nova Scotian—tendency to exploit all of my linguistic heritages as much as possible: I like to think of myself as possessing—or being able to access—a medley of dictions, to conjoin the highfalutin and the low-down, the classical and the grungy, the educated voice and the lover's moans.

As a double-agent, in that I write fiction as well as poetry, I'm curious about your thoughts on the difference between the long poem and the novel compared to their shorter sisters the not-long poem and the short story. Many fiction writers have issues with writing the short story because they feel it's much more rigorous and technically demanding than the novel—which, as a sort of marathon, allows and almost demands some looseness.

A brief introduction to the works of Amy Levy

When it comes to the long poem versus the not-long poem, I personally feel the opposite. I feel like the density of the long poem's demands are almost identical to those of the shorter poem while it does seem capable of focusing on several main subjects, like the novel. Being yourself a poet who has come over to the dark side, having written the novel George and Rue, I'm curious: This question is august, gargantuan, impossible….

I've also just published the first half at pages of my first book of my epic trilogy, Canticles. Canticles I mmxvi and mmxvii is a plus-page epic of lyric pieces, but I still claim it as being an epic because my study of the form tells me that the epic can be any longer-poem or set of poems as in Pound's Cantos that is a narrative or the worrying of a theme, a thesis….

The shorter lyric poem is essentially a monologue or a solo-voiced song on one dominant mood or setting though Lord Tennyson's Maud , might best be read as a long lyric with short lyric interludes. The short story is usually built around a moment or instant of epiphany, which is not necessarily akin to a climax in a novel, nor are such moments of supposed resolution essential to the narrative lyric suite.