by Conor Mc Donnell
Bitten is not the same as eaten. Broken is not the same as worthless.
‘I think there is a particular kind of poet (again) who is bored by writing the small poems, year after year, and they hunger to do something different.’
In his recent essay, The Perils and Pleasures of the Canadian Long Poem, Chris Banks wrote about the possible motivations and tribulations of tackling the long poem both as writer and reader. As someone who is about to publish an 80-page long poem (What We Know So Far Is… with Wolsak & Wynn), maybe I’m as good as the next guy to talk about what goes into this kind of undertaking.
* Full Disclosure: Chris Banks very generously blurbed What We Know So Far Is… however, we have never held direct discussions about my book or the long poem as a topic, therefore, I do not feel there is a conflict of interest in submitting this essay to The Woodlot. Also, there are times where this essay disagrees with Chris’ and isn’t that what this is all about, the conversation? *
Motivation: Why did I write a long poem?
In the acknowledgements section of What We Know So Far Is…, I wrote:
‘…another example is the Hal Hartley film, Henry Fool, in which the Simon Grim character compulsively writes a long-poem that provokes visceral sometimes violent reactions from everyone who reads it. We never see or hear a single word of the poem but every time I sit down to write I am trying to create that exact poem for those exact reasons.’
This is true and untrue, which is not the same as honest / dishonest. I didn’t remember this motivation until I was well into my third or fourth draft of What We Know So Far Is… However, the first time I heard, then read, Howl, I knew I wanted to try that thing. I wasn’t a writer at the time, not even all that big into poetry, but I knew I wanted to pour everything into a piece of art that hit the earth like a meteor, rather than disappear into the ether. I wanted to say something that reflected the world I inhabit in a way that would register with others. This is why I always write poems that try to ‘say something’, and those poems stand side by side in books that also have something specific to say, i.e., a narrative, a theory, maybe even a story.
The earliest folder on my laptop that bears the name What We Know So Far Is… is from April 2021. A month earlier, Mansfield Press published my first collection of poems (Recovery Community), and I was deeply in the thick of writing my second collection, This Insistent List, (ThreadNeedle Publishing). At the time I had no idea my next project would be a long poem, I was just desperate to get that second book out of me and into the world to prove (to myself) the first was neither fluke nor favour.
That 2021 folder housed lots of vignettes & little stories I was telling myself at the time. When I look back through these now, those vignettes were not created as part of a single entity and less than 40% made it into the first draft I submitted to presses for publication. They were, however, created with a certain narrative in mind. Many online news outlets when breaking shocking stories such as school shootings will often contain the phrase ‘what we know so far is’. It bothers me still how this phrase is a lever or a tool to protect against inaccurate early reporting as justification for getting the news out as quickly as possible. There is no social value to breaking terrible news this early, and the only thing this type of reporting achieves is upping the sense of fear, helplessness and chaos. It induces a fresh anxiety in me every morning as the world finds something new to be outraged of or terrified about. In 2021-2022 I worried this was leading to an eventual inevitable apathy in me, a means to keep myself functional at work by ignoring what’s happening everywhere else. So, as I said, I began to collect little vignettes that bothered me, like:
Five kids rode their bikes into the woods, one didn’t come back, what we know so far is.
Etc.
Maybe 20% of that early April 2021 folder made it through to the final published book, including the story of the biking kids, but in a highly truncated mutated guise, i.e.,
In other news tonight: five kids biked to the woods to play at Stranger Things; one did not return. A single victim might mean anything but multiples point to white male until proven otherwise: Take the Hatter’s t away, a thirsty Hater takes his place:
Mutation: How did I begin?
Harking back to the opening quote from Banks’ essay, I can only speak for myself and say I was not ‘bored by writing the same small poems year after year’. I have not been at this very long. My first poems to be published were in 2015 (The Fiddlehead, thank you always), and I don’t think I have achieved anything like the level of craft to justify boredom. However, I am, and always have been, restless. I am always looking to break the rules. It was the same when I started playing guitar, I avoided ‘lessons’ like the plague, and refused to learn those college-party staples like Stairway to Heaven, Space Oddity, and Hotel California. I taught myself guitar from listening to The Cure, The Pixies, and New Order. From Day One I was writing my own songs. Similarly, from early days in poetry seminars and creative writing courses (in this case I did acquiesce to lessons), I was experimenting and writing longer pieces than 1-2 pages. I remember sitting at a Stuart Ross seminar in thrall to Annick MacAskill crafting a Fibonacci-sequence-based poem on the spot. When I see the phrase ‘what poetry can be’, I instead think, ‘what can be poetry’? It’s why my first chapbook with Anstruther Press was a vispo/concrete piece. But once people started referring to me as a concrete poet I distanced myself immediately: I am always trying to change. And yes, it’s exhausting.
I agree with Chris Banks that something has been in the air regarding the long poem in Canada.
In 2021, I devoured Jason Guriel’s Forgotten Work and was dazzled by the possibilities. Other poets I read that year were Kate Sutherland, Roxanna Bennett, Hanif Abdurraqib, Kahlil Gibran, Joe Brainerd’s I Remember, and lots by the Belfast poet, Ciaràn Carson. Around this time, I showed Jim Johnstone my first foray into the nameless vignettes and amongst his always generous encouragement he suggested I might think of these as parts of a longer piece. My first two collections (both edited by Johnstone) contained longish poems; We are Shine (Long Con Mag) is a complete experience of the film, The Shining. Written as Greek Chorus, it takes some eight minutes to read aloud in full. Similarly, Hymns to the Burned and Drowned (from This Insistent List), is a multi-voce eight-page poem. So, at Jim’s innocent suggestion, I set to ‘fleshing out’ my long poem for which there was no initial uniting theme or overriding narrative.
Enter Paul Vermeersch.
Multiplication: How (Why) did I keep going?
In his capacity as editor of BuckRider Books for Wolsak & Wynn, Paul Vermeersch read my submission from the slush-pile and asked for a meeting. At that meeting he did not say ‘we are publishing your book’, but he did make four or five extremely focused suggestions; e.g., one was, ‘if you see five or six successive words that you think you’ve seen or read before, change it.’ He set some rules: the poem would benefit from looking more uniform on the page, pick a structure and stick with it; there needed to be room for both writer and reader to catch a breath as there is a big difference between being breathless from language and being out of breath from the sheer effort of trying to keep up. Chris Banks addressed something similar:
‘…the long poem is in it for the long haul; readers not necessarily so much. So why write the long poem if the chance of failure, or being misunderstood or – gasp –maybe not read all the way through is so high?’
Jacob MacArthur Mooney inadvertently answered Chris’ question when he blurbed What We Know So Far Is… as
‘…a book that poses ample questions, and while the answers are elusive, it is positively giddy about the chase.’
And I was giddy! Paul Vermeersch set some ground rules which I almost immediately broke. I dove headlong into a sea of language, mutations, memes, wordplay, Irish vocabulary and historical disasters and thrashed about for a year and a half. Paul had long since accepted the book for publication but I kept hammering away because the launch was some two years away. I read Paradise Lost, The Oddysey, and, most importantly, Ciaràn Carson’s translations of Dante’s Inferno, and the old Irish epic song, The Tàin.
I threw everything I had into the grinder throughout 2022 but then, in 2023, my mental health came under severe threat from work-based stress, venlafaxine toxicity (otherwise known as Serotonin Syndrome), and a devastating diagnosis for my brother’s wife in Dublin.
Slowly, I imperceptibly shaded from giddy to unhinged. The poem was all that made sense to me because the poem was all about everyone everywhere everything all at once. Banks writes that the long poem must be concerned with its own utility but my concern was one of futility:
who will read this, why am I wasting time on this when people I love are dying?
Why when my brother texts me his broken heart am I writing lines like,
‘On the under-side of the world my day is neatly tucked away.’
For the last three to four months of 2024 I was not at all well. I was carefully weaned off an anti-anxiety medication that had accumulated to toxic levels but could not take any other meds in its place. For a while I felt fine, better even, but then in early 2025, my brother’s wife Patrice died. She would have turned 40 a few weeks ago. She is one of the four Valkyries to whom What We Know So Far Is… is dedicated.
This book, this long poem, is about the world, not my world as I see it, but the world as I felt it for three years. In This Insistent List, I stripped the physician of the future of technology, status and social standing (much like Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later). In What We Know So Far Is… I tried to diagnose, examine and scry my world with all that I had left, language. I worried at times I was losing my grip on sanity: grief, insomnia, anxiety and drug toxicity will do that to a man. I held on desperately, withdrew from social media and society, I had three lifelines:
my wife, my work (day-job), my writing. That’s how (and why) I kept going.
Manifestation: How did I know it was done?
I was terrified it would never be ‘done’. I hated the penultimate draft (62 pages), got excited about the final draft (80 pages), then panicked I hadn’t ‘pulled it off’ a few days later. I wondered what you call a palimpsest in reverse as I tried to retrieve / revisit a ‘better’ version of the poem long since buried under layers of bullshit. I lost sleep thinking…
‘How am I going to read this in public?’
‘Will individual parts make sense when removed from the whole?’
‘If I read this at Poetry Weekend are people going to laugh at me?’
I only knew it was done when I first saw the cover for the book! Seeing Kilby Smith McGregor’s gorgeous cover design was like wrapping a screaming newborn in a beautiful quilt: all I needed was a good swaddling. Kilby’s and Ashley Hisson’s work on book design and copy edit suddenly made my work … readable to me again. I could see the breaks, I could hear the beats, I could breast the breathless sprints, because they saw them too while working on the layout. I appreciated parts I knew I could read in public, while others would remain just for me and reader alone.
And, most importantly, I felt different now, better, calmer, perversely safer in the world for pulling this leviathan out of me. I would probably go through it all again because at times I still don’t believe that I / we actually pulled this off. Thanks to all @W&W.
– Conor Mc Donnell, Toronto, October 6th 2025.
The Woodlot 