We (Tony & Lisa) met Barbara Henning and Lewis Warsh when we were students in the MFA program at Long Island University in the 2010s. Part of what excited us about the program was the focus on small press publishing and building a poetry community. This way of being a poet, which Barbara and Lewis had practiced and lived (with Angel Hair, United Artists Books, Belladonna, Long News, etc.) inspired many of us to create our own small magazines and to publish our friends and ourselves alongside more established older poets whose work we admired. 

“A poet is just a person in a room,” Lewis said about soliciting poets we didn’t know for work. A spirit of “do it and see what happens” invited us into this world. When we picked up that spirit, we were carrying on a tradition and making connections to earlier generations of poets. We were also continuing the circuit of connections to younger poets writing in the present, and outward to the poetry communities to come. 

One day during an H.D. reading group that Barbara had convened in her apartment, she suggested we make a poetry magazine. In 1991, Lewis had encouraged Barbara to start Long News: In the Short Century, then he became a contributing editor. After looking through back issues of Long News for inspiration, we decided to reincarnate the magazine as Long News: Poetry & Poetics, and to carry forward the original intention—to publish poetry as “news that stays news,” focusing on the breadth of styles embodied by off-center poetry and the many New York Schools.

—Lisa Rogal & Tony Iantosca