Hello world.
There is a permanence and an impermanence to place. We are born into an inherited space, previously occupied by other humans for centuries, other creatures for millennia, and we will hopefully pass on our space to others in a movement as cyclical as each Earth season. The space changes, but remains the same place and it’s with this thought in mind that we have created The Long Level — a literary journal that focuses on the poetry of place.
We seek strong poetry that speaks of places. This might be our relationship with places, the stories of places, or something else entirely. We are also not limited in reading about place, but have a strong bent in trying to understand our relationship to place. Authors at all stages of their publishing career are encouraged to submit to The Long Level. We are not concerned with the length of your publishing history, we are interested in your words and your ideas. Please consider submitting regardless of whether you have been published 1,000 times or never.
I’ve envisioned a journal in some form since I was a teenager and now, as the air has turned colder and the leaves have begun their descent, the time is here. Being a journal located in Upstate NY not far from the Erie canal, the banks of Lake Ontario, and the wild trees all around the Finger Lakes and making the announcement of the Long Level’s launch in the fall feels like it carries the extra weight of place.
The Long Level is named after what I find to be an evocative term used for the stretch of water on a canal between two locks where the water sits at a single, unbroken water level. There is no rising, no falling, and no machinery in view. When a boat is on a long level, it simply moves at a steady pace, quietly carried by the water. I hadn’t heard this term before I started researching potential names for this journal that could be tied to my specific place, Upstate New York, and found a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne describing the “Long Level” as a stretch of canal between Utica and Syracuse.
Hawthorne’s description of the area is a far bleaker “Northern Gothic” image than the one I know, but what the idea of the long level evokes for me is the notion of the constant stream of time. That long stretch of level water along which boats travel holds the same permanent impermanence of place I discussed earlier. Heraclitus said, “We both step and do not step into the same river, we both are and are not” and it’s the same for all the space we occupy now compared to those that were here before and those that will be here after. We have been here, together if not concurrently, and share in the same space from then, now, and tomorrow.
If you write this type of poetry, please consider submitting your work during our reading period from January 1 to April 30, 2027. If you find this type of work interesting, please consider following along with our blog, newsletter, and then reading The Long Level in June 2027.
Today at the Long Level, it’s a new morning.