the poem as a river

The long poem has a somewhat singular history in Canadian literature. It proliferated among my generation of poets in the 70s and 80s, and Michael Ondaatje's and Sharon Thesen's anthologies of the Canadian long poem attest to its abundance. VIU's own student poet Délani Valin's Malahat Review prize-winning long poem "No Buffaloes" is evidence of its continuing popularity. 

There are several formal aspects of the long poem that have informed much of my own work. A major facet of its aesthetic is its resistance to closure, its desire not to end - the poem as a river. It also resists closure in the syntactic unity of the sentence, thus affording a variety of constructions we can also locate in another hybrid form, the prose poem. These elements have been a major attraction for me, particularly informed by the improvisational possibilities of making poetry like making jazz. 

- Fred Wah, from his 2017 VIU Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poets Lecture. As published in On My Way to Get a Pail of Water (Arbutus Editions/Gaspereau Press).