The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You
Encyclopedia
The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You is a 15,283-line epic poem by the poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 Frank Stanford
Frank Stanford
Frank Stanford was a prolific American poet. He is most known for his epic, The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You— a labyrinthine, highly lexical book absent stanzas and punctuation...

. First published in 1977 as a 542-page book, 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 1960s [or possibly even before his teenage years]) prior to its publication — a joint-publication by Mill Mountain Press (Stanford's publisher throughout the early and mid-1970s) and Lost Roads
Lost Roads Publishers
Lost Roads is a small press founded in 1976 in Arkansas by poet Frank Stanford. Its stated mission is to publish essential books in contemporary literature. After Stanford's death in 1978, editorship was assumed by poet C. D. Wright, whose book, Room Rented By A Single Woman , had been the press'...

 (Stanford's own press) — in 1977. After being out of print
Out of print
Out of print refers to an item, typically a book , but can include any print or visual media or sound recording, that is in the state of no longer being published....

 for several years, the book was republished by Lost Roads (under succeeding editorship of C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander
Forrest Gander
Forrest Gander is an American poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and translator.Born in the Mojave Desert, he was raised in Virginia where he attended The College of William and Mary, majoring in geology, a subject referenced frequently in both his poems and essays. He received an M.A...

) in 2000; this 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
Octavo (book)
Octavo is a technical term describing the format of a book, which refers to the size of leaves produced from folding a full sheet of paper on which multiple pages of text were printed to form the individual sections of a book...

size, effecting many lengthy lines to be necessarily broken with indents employed.
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