We are pleased to announce the publication of Estill Pollock's poem, "Lesser Glory of the Snow" in Long Poem Magazine (London) in the journal's October issue. The poem, at nearly 250 lines, is from a new collection currently in development. For the editors, Pollock commented on the poem's themes and philsophical pedigree:
'My first modest collection, the pamphlet Metaphysical
Graffiti, was published decades ago in England, and I still think of myself
as a metaphysical poet. Each day I don the ritual headdress of dodo feathers,
rat skulls and ATARI gaming consoles, strapping it in place with the continuous
feed of early onset dementia test results. After that, anything is possible. ‘Lesser
Glory of the Snow’ is the opening movement of the book-length poem, Transition
States. The poem’s episodic stanzas bleed in and out of their respective
spaces seemingly at random, but in fact with conscious subterfuge, a willing
hostage to narrative anxiety, that from the disorder may be recognised poetry’s
sumptuous arc, its felicity and trigger. The poem is a meditation on the nature of time—the
all-devouring tenses that define our sense of place and inhabit our intuitions.
The seeming randomness of the writing is in fact a tooled exercise, where the
appearance of lines may be reminiscent of Beat poet Ed Sanders’ ‘freak-beams,’
but worked as closely as Argyll weave. Such jostling for attention is not an unfamiliar
concept. The later Victorian
writers noted the striking verbal effects obtained by the transposition of
words from one set of ideas to another, after the manner of Baudelaire’s theory
of correspondences, where by definition everything is the same as everything else.
Beneath quantum theory’s ever-decreasing circle of light, one might
labour over an obscure Latin text, but Botticelli requires no translation.'
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