The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You

Infobox Book
name= The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You


author= Frank Stanford
country= United States
language= English
genre= Epic poetry
publisher= Mill Mountain Press & Lost Roads
release_date= 1977
pages= 542 pp (1st), 383 pp (2nd)
isbn= ISBN 0918786134 (1st), ISBN 0918786509 (2nd)
preceded_by= Constant Stranger (1976)
followed_by= Crib Death (1978)

"The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You" is a 15,283-line epic poem by the poet Frank Stanford. First published in 1977 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. ISBN 0-918786-13-4.] the poem is visually characterized by its absence of stanzas (or any skipped horizontal spaces) and punctuation and is recognized as a complex, unusual work — at once both highly humorous and tragically beautiful.

Stanford worked on the manuscript for many years (beginning as a teenager in the 1960sEhrenreich, Ben. [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=181083 "The Long Goodbye"] , "The Poetry Foundation", 2008.] [or possibly even before his teenage years] )Stanford, Frank. [http://www.alsopreview.com/thecollections/stanford/Essays/david1.html "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 1977. After being out of print for several years,Stanford, Frank. "The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You", preface. No place given: Lost Roads no. 50, 2000. ISBN 9780918786500.] the book was republished by Lost Roads (under succeeding editorship of C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander) in 2000; this [http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Literary_Arts/projects/road/stanford 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 (which suggests that the two texts are actually different), but the seemingly longer line count in the 1977 edition is merely resultant of the paper's octavo size, effecting many lengthy lines to be necessarily broken with indents employed.

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