My very long poem, "Mr. Kowalski," will appear in the upcoming issue of the Beloit Poetry Journal. Although I used to sit on the editorial board of this journal, I've since received several rejections from the new contingent: the editors are a hard nut to crack, and acquaintances have as much trouble as strangers do. This is not at all a complaint; and in fact I feel better about the acceptance, knowing that the readers might just as easily have rejected the piece.

One thing has always been true about Beloit: the editors are open to long poems. Apparently in this forthcoming issue they will be featuring several of them, and so they have asked us to take part in an online forum about the place of the long poem in twenty-first-century literature. Because the group includes some fairly renowned poets, I'm honored and a bit flabbergasted.

I spent some time yesterday toying with various thoughts about the composition of the piece, about long poems in general, about narrative poetry, about the revisional variants in working with a long versus a short draft, and so on and so on. I always find it interesting to go back and think about how a poem came to be, but at the same time I am wary about assuming that my own private behaviors have anything much to do with "the place of the long poem in twenty-first-century literature." This is what I find impossible: to manufacture a statement of generality. Yet of course continuities exist, if only I knew what they were. In other words, I am looking forward to finding out how the other poets in the forum react to this assignment.