''The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You'' is a 15,283-line
epic poem by the poet
Frank Stanford
Frank Stanford (born Francis Gildart Smith; August 1, 1948 – June 3, 1978) was an American poet. He is most known for his epic, ''The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You'' – a labyrinthine poem without stanzas or punctuation. In a ...
. First published in 1978 as a 542-page book,
[Stanford, Frank. ''The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You''. Fayetteville, AR: Mill Mountain/ Lost Roads nos. 7-12, 1977. .] the poem is visually characterized by its absence of stanzas (or any skipped horizontal spaces) and punctuation.
Stanford worked on the manuscript for many years (beginning as a teenager in the 1960s
[Ehrenreich, Ben]
"The Long Goodbye"
''The Poetry Foundation'', 2008. r possibly even before his teenage years[Stanford, Frank. "Letter to David Walker", February 12, 1974. ''The Alsop Review''.] prior to its publication — a joint-publication by Mill Mountain Press (Stanford's publisher throughout the early and mid-1970s) and
Lost Roads (Stanford's own press) — in 1978.
Though the copyright was registered in 1977, the volume was not released until after Stanford's death--as CD Wright notes in her introduction to the 2000 re-release. After being
out of print
__NOTOC__
An out-of-print (OOP) or out-of-commerce item or work is something that is no longer being published. The term applies to all types of printed matter, visual media, sound recordings, and video recordings. An out-of-print book is a book ...
for several years,
[Stanford, Frank. ''The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You'', preface. No place given: Lost Roads no. 50, 2000. .] the book was republished by Lost Roads (under succeeding editorship of
C.D. Wright and
Forrest Gander
Forrest Gander (born 1956) is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for ''Be With' ...
) in 2000; thi
second, corrected edition— 383 pages, equipped with line numbers — is in print, having been reprinted by the press in 2008. A common misconception is that the 15,283-line poem (as evident in the 2000 edition) was actually over 21,000 lines in the
first edition
The bibliographical definition of an edition includes all copies of a book printed from substantially the same setting of type, including all minor typographical variants.
First edition
According to the definition of ''edition'' above, a b ...
(which suggests that the two texts are actually different), but the seemingly longer line count in the 1978 edition is merely resultant of the paper's
octavo size, effecting many lengthy lines to be necessarily broken with indents employed.
Notes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You
1978 poems
Epic poems in English