McGrath - Nouns & verbs: new and selected poems

Rendering poetry in a digital format presents several challenges, just as its many forms continue to challenge the conventions of print. In print, however, a poem takes place within the static confines of a page, hewing as close as possible to the poets intent, whether its Walt Whitmans lines stretching to the margin like Route 66, or Robert Creeleys lines descending the page like a string tie. The printed poem has a physical shape, one defined by the negative space that surrounds ita space that is crafted by the broken lines of the poem. The line, as vital a formal and critical component of the form of a poem as metaphor, creates rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, tension, and so on. Reading poetry on a small device will not always deliver line breaks as the poet intendedwith the pressure the horizontal line brings to a poem, rather than the completion of the grammatical unit. The line, intended as a formal and critical component of the form of the poem, has been corrupted by breaking it where it was not meant to break, interrupting a number of important elements of the poetic structurerhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, and so on.

Its a little like a tightrope walker running out of rope before reaching the other side. There are limits to what can be done with long lines on digital screens. At some point, a line must break. If it has to break more than once or twice, it is no longer a poetic line, with the integrity that lineation demands. On smaller devices with enlarged type, a line break may not appear where its author intended, interrupting the unit of the line and its importance in the poems structure. We attempt to accommodate long lines with a hanging indentsimilar in fashion to the way Whitmans lines were treated in books whose margins could not honor his discursive length.

On your screen, a long line will break according to the space available, with the remainder of the line wrapping at an indent. This allows readers to retain control over the appearance of text on any device, while also indicating where the author intended the line to break. This may not be a perfect solution, as some readers initially may be confused. We have to accept, however, that we are creating poetry e-books in a world that is imperfect for themand we understand that to some degree the line may be compromised. Despite this, weve attempted to protect the integrity of the line, thus allowing readers of poetry to travel fully stocked with the poetry that needs to be with them. Dan Halpern, Publisher

To Daniel Halpern Poets may inhabit a realm of words, but they remain closet numerologists.

Perhaps its a vestigial memory of counting syllables in all those lines of iambic pentameter, but ten seems like a significant number, and so ten books feels like a milepost worth pausing beside, a place to assess, examine, parse, and reassemble. Thus this book, which surveys thirty-five years of writing (the most recent poems were written in 2016, the oldest in 1981), though only eight of my ten previous collections are actually represented here. Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition is a book-length poem that feels complete unto itself, while XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century is too recently published to need revisiting. Longer poems are simply harder to accommodate, and so The Bob Hope Poem is represented by only a single section, while works such as The Florida Poem and Dawn Notebook are absent altogether. The mandate of such a collection, as I see it, is to offer a hint of where you are going while charting the territory already explored. Accordingly, the first of this books five sections is composed of new poems, written over the past six or seven years, in a variety of shapes and sizes.

In the hopes of creating a book that harmonizes with, but does not echo, the originals, I have organized older poems by form rather than chronology: there are two sections of lyric poems, a lengthy set of prose poems, and a sequence of longer poems reconstituted as an episodic personal epic, An Odyssey of Appetite, which explores Americas limitless material and spiritual hungers. If anything has obsessed my creative impulse to date, surely it is this. There is also a scattering of uncollected poems, happy to have found a home at last. Nouns & Verbs is just that, I hopenot a greatest-hits collection but a new house sheltering some familiar residents, a book that stands on its own solid foundation, unbothered by a few termites in its beams or a little rain seeping in around the windows.