again the searching
out of strangers

with words that are back
like a predecessor evil

living obscurely in a corner
of some subtle mouth

ready to speak
without any reflection

so many pious ex-
communications

never able to satisfy
the fanatic ear

their words steal
into people’s houses

carry away the quiet
that nobody minds

another country
abused like a child

turning prayers
into oaths of allegiance

to a flag of sugar
and toothache

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 9 November 1663.

This week: the veil of the quotidian, a perfectly demotic raven, unborn stars, line breaks in the day, and much more. Enjoy.

Those mornings when I wake and everything feels metaphorical, in the sense I feel the connection, the similarity between each thing and another, see, as a matter of course how a chair is a kind of shoe, a rock is the cupped space a hand makes. Perhaps this is a continuation of a sleep state when the narrative of dream is able to draw into its current any thing viewed on its banks. Or it might be that some of the veil of the quotidian has been drawn back, the pataphysical separation of things, the pre-emptive division of the world into non-contiguous categories in order to enable our movement from one point A to another point B, rather than being pulled into spiritual or philosophical reverie by the vortical relationship of things.

Gary Barwin, Waking up metaphorical

Whew! And wahoo! Like many of you, I’m still absorbing the impact of this historic blue wave, and feeling some combination of elation, exhaustion and relief. It will take some time to clean up the mess this regime has made, and to build a more fair and functional system that works for all of us. Still, we are definitely on the right track now!

Through these difficult years, the day’s headlines have seemed to run on an infinite doom loop.

tipping Monday
out of the pill box
deep November

And while this historically cruel, corrupt and incompetent administration slides towards authoritarianism, making art sometimes feels pointless. But the saying, “Joy is an act of resistance” has guided me. And creating bright, beautiful art has been one way to light a spark in the darkness.

Since Tuesday night, I keep finding myself unconsciously letting out a long, deep breath. There is work ahead, but we can finally exhale. Congratulations to everyone who helped generate this blue tsunami, and thanks to all who were drops in the wave!

deep breathing
the shift from estar
to ser

Annette Makino, Exhaling after the elections

Tonight it’s all you can do
to keep from dissolving—the sight of people putting
their I Voted stickers on lampposts near where Alex
and Renee were murdered, the news of blue wins in near
every state. Someone you love telling you this is the first
time in years they did not wish, almost every minute,
to die.

Luisa A. Igloria, What’s Visible

After thirty-seven years in power, Robert Mugabe was ousted by a faction of the military and later died of advanced prostate cancer at the Gleneagles hospital in Singapore. When I learned he and his wife, Grace Mugabe, had been placed under house arrest, I flew to the capital, Harare.

If you’d asked me at the time—why is it you’re going to Zimbabwe?—I would’ve said that I wanted to learn from writers and artists and musicians. First, after decades of creating work that might speak truth to power while that power was actively suppressing the people (as well as their own imaginations within the artform), how would the fall of the dictator affect their creative work? And secondly, would they need to reinvent themselves, or learn who they are within their artform, now that they might not be creating work in direct relationship to the power structure of their country as they’d known if for much of their lives?

I landed in the capital in December of 2017 without knowing a single person in the entire country. As I booked the flights, I reached out to poets and friends who had contacts there—and this helped a great deal. Soon enough, I made my way under a canopy of poinciana and jacaranda trees in the Harare Gardens to a thatched roof lapa, where a session of the Zimbabwe Writers Association happened to be meeting. […]

I won’t name the writers and artists that offered me contextual insights into the political nature of their work, or how Mugabe’s rule had affected them. Why? When I asked them, several shared variations of this response: With the old leader gone, the system hadn’t changed; rather, everyone in the power structure simply moved up one rung on the ladder.

That leaves us with Emmerson Mnangagwa, the current president. He was already in charge by the time I’d landed in December, and now, as recently as July of 2026, he’s forced a constitutional amendment to extend his current rule (postponing the planned 2028 elections) to 2030. Even more alarming, direct elections have been abolished in Zimbabwe. Going forward, the president will be elected by a vote of the Senate and the National Assembly, rather than by a direct vote of the people. This is widely considered a constitutional coup, all of it done with pen and paper, under the guise of democratic legitimacy.

Again, I will not name the writers and artists who spoke with me about the politics of making in their society, but I will share that the transparent subtext of my own country seemed self-evident within my questions about power and authoritarian rule, the role of artists under structures designed to silence voices of dissent, the many ways that artists themselves might self-censor within these contexts, and more. In essence, I’d gone to Zimbabwe to consider how writers and artists might survive within my own country, given time, given a deepening authoritarian divide, given pressure from the despotic nature of power in its corrupted state.

Brian Turner, After the Fall of the Dictator

This Sunday morning, I’ll be leaving the Poetry in Aldeburgh Festival at the crack of dawn, because if you’re a brass bander you always have somewhere to be at 11am on Remembrance Sunday. Provided the M25 is kind to me, I’ll be standing on soggy leaves by the war memorial with the band. We’ll play the laminated hymns we always do, the principal cornet will play the Last Post and Reveille, sighing quietly with relief when he completes it clean, all the names on the stone will be read aloud and we’ll God-Save-the-King everyone home. This happens across the country, in tens of thousands of towns and villages simultaneously, and poetry is at its heart:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

And we do. Religion or politics aside, I’m someone who is immensely comforted by a ritual. I love a ceremony. I love a plaque. I love a memorial bench. I wish that more people could be honoured like this every year, that we knew more of their names: people caught up in recent conflicts, people who have been victims of discrimination, people who were just nice people. I’d like to stand on soggy leaves and hear their names and play brass band versions of songs they liked. I’d like little plaques on the handles of supermarket trolleys (for Doris, who always came in for corned beef on a Saturday morning). It would be the opposite of morbid, if you ask me. And there should be poems. Poems everywhere, because poems are for remembering.

This week’s book is an anthology that does just that: it charts the history of the 20th century through poems (The 20th Century in Poetry, Michael Hulse and Simon Ray, Ebury Press, 2011). It’s the size of a breeze block and it came to me as a gift from a lovely student of mine when she left the school. It’s an interesting book because it’s a history of the 20th century via poetry, NOT a history of 20th century poetry, so while there are a lot of famous poems in here, it doesn’t feel like they’ve felt the need to cram every famous poem in for the sake of it. Instead, they’ve chosen poems that specifically address things that happened in the 20th century, poems I would probably never have come across. It’s sobering to flick through, I’ll be honest. There is so much bloody war.

Nia Broomhall, Week 34: The 20th Century in Poetry

The main body of the protest was kettled for a couple of hours very close to my office; I could hear them singing (this video shows the group I could hear, and the very catchy song you suddenly hear everywhere). A few hours later I walked home down the street they’d been on for a while and, along with several less original bits of new graffiti, found this quotation of Victor Hugo, from his poem ‘Au Peuple’ (‘To the People’):

Voici le chacal sur ton seuil,
Voici les rats et les belettes,
Pourquoi t’es tu laissé lié de bandelettes?
ils te mordent dans ton cercueil.

Here is the jackal on your threshold
Here are the rats and here the weasels
Why did you let them bind you in grave-clothes?
They are biting you even in your coffin.

Hugo strongly opposed the military coup in 1851 by which the President Louis-Napoléon assumed absolute power and became Emperor Napoléon III. Hugo went into exile on Jersey and from there wrote a collection of political poems, Les Châtiments, excoriating those in power and calling upon the people to rise up. These lines come from the first stanza of one of these poems:

Partout pleurs, sanglots, cris funèbres.
Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres?
Je ne veux pas que tu sois mort.
Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres?
Ce n’est pas l’instant où l’on dort.
La pâle Liberté gît sanglante à ta porte.
Tu le sais, toi mort, elle est morte.
Voici le chacal sur ton seuil,
Voici les rats et les belettes,
Pourquoi t’es-tu laissé lier de bandelettes?
Ils te mordent dans ton cercueil!
De tous les peuples on prépare
 Le convoi… —
Lazare! Lazare! Lazare!
Lève-toi!

Everywhere tears, sobs, mourning cries.
Why are you sleeping in the darkness?
I do not want you to be dead.
Why are you sleeping in the darkness?
This is not the time for sleeping.
Pale Liberty lies bleeding at your door.
You know, dead yourself, that she is dead.
Here is the jackal on your threshold
Here are the rats and here the weasels
Why did you let them bind you in grave-clothes?
They are biting you even in your coffin!
From every people they are preparing
The funeral train —
Lazarus! Lazarus! Lazarus!
Rise up!

Hugo, like Melville, had a gift for memorable invective, here combined with political urgency. (It’s only at the very end of the poem that he hears the distant hum of the people stirring at last to action.) But I was struck by the similarities between Hugo’s rousing call to arms and that of Fisher’s Satan, instigating civil war:

“Surgite Concordes Socii, coeptisque favete:
Ulteriùs pigeat, pigeat latuisse pudendo
Pulvere, & Ignotis animas traxisse tenebris.

“Rise up Allies of the Heart, continue what we have begun:
It would be more shameful, more shameful to have lain low in humiliating
Dust, and to have dragged our souls along in shadows of Obscurity.

Whether the cause be wicked or just, the call to arms is the same, and perhaps equally seductive.

There’s a topical resonance here too, intended or not. Hugo’s poem laments that the people — like Fisher’s Satan and his minions — are sleeping in the darkness, in the repeated line Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres? (‘Why are you sleeping in the darkness?). A common trope of Gunpowder Plot poems is of Jesuits (or the devil himself) putting on a disguise in order to infiltrate the corridors of power. One of the catchphrases of the current school protests in France, which you might have seen on placards in the news, is Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres. This means literally (but rather nonsensically) ‘In the name of Allah, it’s the darkness’; bismillah is an Arabic phrase that has entered French. It went viral after someone who was widely taken to be an undercover police officer making a risible attempt to imitate the speech patterns of young French men of North African descent in order to gain access to information about the school protests posted this phase in a school students’ Snapchat group (before following up “so when’s the blockade? please add me to the blockade group”). I think it’s unlikely that the hapless police officer was thinking of Hugo, but the student who wrote out voici le chacal to stir passers-by to action might have been remembering les ténèbres.

However inconvenient endless school closures may be, it is hard not to be moved by the energy, joy and determination of French children and students. I am repulsed by what feels now like a police state, with the threat of violence always close at hand. The way the riot police here are clothed makes them genuinely alarming at close quarters, but also easy to demonise: like Melville’s imaginary flocks of Jesuits, they all look the same. (The students often play the Imperial March from Star Wars at them.) A generation of young people are forming their political identity in relation to these (mostly) men in helmets, many of whom must have children of their own. You have to wonder, what is it like to be them?

Victoria Moul, Dans les ténèbres

In Minnesota, where I live, the law gives poll workers the overly dignified name of “election judges,” which is why the sequence that includes the poem below is called “Judgments.”

This year, I chickened out on serving as a poll worker: those fifteen-hour days are hard on my body. But I’ve served several times since first signing up in 2016, and while the job is usually uneventful, it can be challenging. Sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—duty requires that we tell a voter she’ll need to return with different documents in order to register and vote. Sometimes doing one’s duty gets a testy response. It can be hard.

But then there are reminders that voting itself is sometimes a difficult duty and privilege, as it was in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Thus this poem.

III. Afterword

Maybe it makes a difference. In that year
when a vast rage had torn the whole East Coast
to sodden shreds in late autumn, I slumped
at the stove in an election’s morning-after,
absently stirring breakfast. And my brain
snagged on the radio’s voice, the quiet story
telling how voters in a broken city
stood stoic in the day-devouring lines.
People with shattered homes, people exploring
the strange new depth of their old powerlessness,
shivered and shuffled toward their polling places
under a lead-white sky.

                                                      The voice signed off.
I wept in silence into my scrambled eggs.

(From “Judgments,” in the book In Code)

Maryann Corbett, Aftermath of a Different Election Day

We also had a bunch of literary shakeups this week, including the shuttering of Salon, which I remember reading in the early days of the internet, and which I was so proud to be published in, and even more to be listed as “best of 2020” in that publication. Soft Skull Press is disappearing. And the Poetry Foundation did layoffs this week and a huge redesign of its magazine, plus cancelling most of its local programming. Who do they think they are, Amazon? For a place that still has over 300 mill in the bank, it’s interesting to hear it’s shrinking staff. Is it also building a data center? Just kidding, I hope, Poetry. […]

Then we were surprised with the offer of tickets to the ballet to a spook-themed show I really wanted to see. (I mean, when someone offers you tickets to the ballet, or the opera, or a concert, you go, right? It’s a sign from the universe you should be going out into the world even after the Big Dark!)

So, Friday night we got dressed up, went out into the rain and traffic downtown to the PNB Ballet Company’s opening night for Ghost Stories, which is really a set of four smaller ballets.

The most grand of them is the final La Sonnambula​, with big costume numbers and grand music, but my favorite (probably not shocking to those who know me) was “The Raven,” an all-dance interpretation of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem with lush music from an obscure musician of the 1840s that captures the gothic drama of the piece. The dancer who played Poe did a great job, but the real standout dancer was The Raven, who has to stand perfectly still for long periods of time and then violently start flapping, attacking, emoting a perfectly demotic raven. Costumes and art were beautiful too. And in the last piece, a woman dancer literally picks up and carries out the main male dancer, who is supposed to be dead. Talk about back strength! 

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Surprises: Blue Waves, Ballet, and Literary Shakeups, and More

For a reading in an old church last weekend, I chose ghost poems. I’ve written a lot of them, even though I’m agnostic about ghosts. I feel certain lost loved ones hovering occasionally, or the versions of them preserved in my mind. I’ve had odd Ouija board experiences and heard strange voices seeming to whisper from the borders of sleep. Yet part of me rejects the idea as too awful. Certain politicians, well, if they’re doomed to haunt their ill-conceived ballrooms after death, fine. But most humans, after long difficult lives, deserve a better renovation: escape from suffering and worry.

Anyway, for the Samhain event, I read a few poems then sat down in a pew to listen to Jim Peterson. I’d recently read his new-ish book The Towheaded Stone Thrower, about the life and death of his wildly beloved wife, and it left a sort of halo around the world. The autumn seemed brighter and more beautiful, because he had reminded me that darkness was coming.

Then a shadow caught my eye. Something about its movement said cat. But I was in a deconsecrated little church in the woods, next to an old graveyard: no pets. I turned to look harder and glimpsed, more clearly, the fleeting shape of a tail.

My heart started pounding. My first, highly questionable reaction: I’d actually seen a ghost this time!

Then a living cat ducked under the pew in front of me, allowed me to pet its utterly real warm furry head, and drank from a cup of water I’d left on the floor.

More facts: two days later, amid a paperwork tsunami at work, the so-called blue tsunami hit. Even amid cheering news trickling in Tuesday evening, I’d gone to bed with a sense of doom, expecting to wake up to an enraged president bombing someone in vengeance. That specter hasn’t come to pass (yet?–the appointment of Stephen Miller is ominous). I’m sleeping a little better. Fear hasn’t vanished–hope for change is not yet actual improvement in people’s lives, which a disparate, feuding cast of Dems and independents may not be able to conjure–yet dread has ebbed to a more manageable wariness.

Lesley Wheeler, Cat ghosts and rock tripe

Shifty, the morning. We’ve fucked with time again, just as the day is shrinking, and I’m off kilter. Looked up in the morning sky in time to see a wide wave of small birds unroll, moving crosswise to the lowest clouds, which were moving faster than the higher clouds, which revealed some pale sky. Hard not to read signs and portents in all this change. But that’s just the human need to control things, right? Our need to know stuff ahead of time, what’s coming. We’re an anxious species. Jumpy as the rabbit who sometimes shows up in the backyard. Munch munch, then freeze, then leap off into the underbrush, or the squirrel, fervid, burying nuts in the flowerbox. Or is that just me? Who would know the future? Who would tattle? The little birds disappear into the distance. A breeze picks up and the brown smell of downed leaves and wet wood wanders past. If I and everything around me is the inevitable outcome of biological and physical functions, what could the future be but some kind of past? Still, I watch and listen. What should I be paying attention to? Is there something I should know? How should I be preparing myself? Here’s a little poem by Tomaž Šalamun, translated from Slovenian by the author himself and Michael Waltuch.

[untitled]

Tomaž Šalamun, tr. Tomaž Šalamun and Michael Waltuch

Little robin,
bones pinned to the cosmos.
Who whistles, who calls?

Marilyn McCabe, bones pinned to the cosmos

— I’ve been reading poems on happiness just now and it’s interesting how many have people splitting a sandwich, or a dessert, or sipping a coffee. It’s happiness in spite of, often.

— The poem by Raymond Carver is no exception, beginning, “So early it’s still almost dark out. / I’m near the window with coffee, / and the usual early morning stuff / that passes for thought.” (Continue reading).

— Before you die, you should know that Ilya Kaminsky’s doctors “have prescribed happiness.”

— The poet Maggie Smith has gifted up with a list of “poems that make you glad to be alive.” Down with that, yah. Fond of this one by Cameron Awkward-Rich.

— There is no guarantee of happiness. Never has been.

— Some might say the world has enough poems. I say the world needs more poems written by the light in your own skull. How about writing a poem about happiness?

Shawna Lemay, The Taste of Happiness

Mirage of Burning Things [by Ryan Di Francesco] feels like it was born out of a compulsion – a compulsion to notice, to put things on record. The poet-narrator moves through mostly urban environments, less flâneur-ing and more reportage on the fragility of modern life. A tumble of images follows us from page to page. Most of the poems are quite pared back in language and form, with little punctuation and short, staccato lines. […]

Insomnia stalks the collection, bringing a jaded and somewhat hallucinatory atmosphere at times. I particularly enjoyed the poem 3-5am. ‘Enjoyed’ is the wrong word, as the poem deals with some very difficult things. But Ryan has a wry humour that deftly punctures the relentlessness of things when a little levity is needed:

“You know, I have read poems in high-tier journals with whimsical lyric
turning insomnia into a pearl sky.
Those poems make me sick.”

There is tenderness to be found, too. In fact, there are two poems called Tenderness: Part 1 and Tenderness: Part 2. But, as ever, the white peonies of love and beauty co-exist with ugliness and decay. The closing poem, Animal Dreams of Other Animals, is an interesting one, as it leaves us with a note less of hope, than perhaps resignation. But maybe there is some comfort to be found in the idea that we are all animals, dreaming of a place of shelter.

Victoria Spires, Mirage of Burning Things

Twenty years ago, Hamish Ironside – freelance typesetter of poetry and academic books, and later to be the driving force behind publisher Boatwhistle Books – wrote a haiku a day and collated the best of them into his first collection, Our Sweet Little Time, published by Iron Press in 2009 (and available here). Here are a couple of my favourites from it:

at the book fair
Darth Vader
gets in everyone’s way

my daughter’s screaming
settled by footage
of war in Iraq

As both of these show, Ironside, like a contemporary Logan Pearsall Smith, has a gift for noticing small but quirky things, and for turning them into art: whereas the wording of the first one probably chose itself quite naturally, the choice of ‘settled’ in the second may have needed more thought and is inspired in how it enhances the irony.

Ironside repeated the one-a-day trick in 2017, resulting in a second collection published by Iron in 2018, Three Blue Beans in a Blue Bladder (available here). Again, here are two favourites of mine, both of which speak for themselves:

in her newsreading voice
she tells me someone’s selling my book
for a penny

all things must pass
including my copy of
All Things Must Pass

In the interests of transparency, I should disclose here that I provided some (fairly-limited) assistance in the editing process of both books.

Ironside has now completed the hat-trick, having written a haiku every day last year, a selection of which can be found in Down Falls the Lark (hereafter referred to as DFL), which is also available from the Iron Press website, here.

As you can see from the poems above, Ironside is best-known in the small pond (replete with frog) that is the English-language haiku world for his senryu; that’s to say haiku that are principally concerned with the foibles, frailties, confusions and contradictions of human behaviour, not least his own, and which are often very funny. His preoccupations are largely unchanged: the pitfalls of the day job (‘before I press send / I check the pronouns / for the fourth time’); passing observations of creatures, including humans, acting in unusual ways; jokes at his wife’s and his own expense; wry existential despair (‘in the middle of the night / I can’t help imagining / the unimaginable’); the parent–child relationship; the similarity of birds’ flight and other actions to other objects (‘pelican preening / unfolds itself / like a Swiss Army knife’); and – among all the levity and self-deprecation – the occasional humdinger of a poignant, heartfelt and resonant haiku.

Matthew Paul, On Hamish Ironside’s Down Falls the Lark

The poems of Sara Teasdale (1884–1933), as we’ve had ample opportunity to contemplate here, bear their freight of emotion beneath a skin thin to the point of translucency. Even joy, as in “A Winter Blue-Jay,” has its boundaries; beyond those boundaries lies grief. The beauty of the titular “Blue Squills” assails the senses as, almost, a form of pain. The love in “Summer Night, Riverside,” is no sooner experienced than lost. Even the consolation that “There Will Be Stars,” always and forever, fails to promise that anyone will be alive to see them.

In Today’s Poem, part of Teasdale’s 1926 collection Dark of the Moon, landscape — or rather, seascape — functions as subtext. In three tetrameter abcb quatrains, this brief lyric sketches physical detail, but also emotional undertone, to create a compressed drama of things that go unsaid. But then, those things hardly need saying, once the scene itself, as narrated by the first-person speaker, has fallen silent.

The first stanza might be the beginning of any nature poem narrated by an observer who might content him- or herself to remain outside a visual frame dominated by murmurations of migratory birds, whose presence on the sky overshadows the briefly mentioned dunes. With the synecdochical “wings” of line 3, the speaker in one rhetorical stroke reduces the birds to one great motion of leavetaking. These “wings” become a tide themselves, more real on the page than the actual sea, as they swirl away “[o]ver the dunes and out of sight.”

In Stanza 2, however, the seascape gains a human population, a “you” and a “me,” and with these two characters, a new level of clarity. We know now that the “I” is speaking, and that whatever this “I” narrates is meant as half a conversation, aimed at the “you” who might or might not answer. The second stanza, actually, poses a question for the “you”: Why did you bring me here? Or more precisely, Why did you bring me here NOW? And what is the here? What is the now? It’s the sea at ebb tide, the cold, uncongenial end of the year. Everything is departing: the sea, the birds, the time itself. Even the fish-hawk, there in its natural element, isn’t fishing, but “flying.” And why? Because “[n]othing is left,” that’s why. “Nothing is left but the old year dying.”

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Low Tide

The latest from Pennsylvania writer Kirsten Kaschock is the poetry title AutoPortrait (as flotsam) (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2026), following Unfathoms (Slope Editions, 2004), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press, 2011), WindowBoxing (Bloof Books, 2013) [see my review of such here], The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press/winner of AWP Donald Hall Prize, 2014), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press, 2017), and Explain This Corpse (Lynx House Press, 2020), with a further, Docenture: A Tale of Hue as Told by the Estate, forthcoming from South Indiana Review Press. As the back cover offers, this collection is arranged as a kind of gallery-walk response to the works of other artists (predominantly visual artists), as Kaschock offers individual responses across the lyric to works by Paul Gaugin, Alice Neel, Mark Rothko, Vincent Van Gogh, Joan Miro, Amadeo Modigliani, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Theo Jansen, Arthur Garfield Dove, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pablo Picasso, Jacob Lawrence, Sinead O’Connor, Michael Stipe, Paul Klee, Edvard Munch, Donovan, Eva Hesse, Berye Saar, Joan Mitchell, Lucille Clifton, Romaine Brooks, Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Chagall and Francisco Goya. “They will never know what not to do / with you. This is a layering,” she writes, to close the poem “Contingent,” citing Eva Hesse, “a vanish into / potential, a technique to impossibilize / biography. My material they may long to have // illuminated. But I am no monk, no man- / uscript. And within this doubt / no woman you cannot.”

Structured in three parts—“Maiden (woman),” “Daemon (bird)” and “Nomad (star,” each section holds a cluster of poems, offering her individual responses to specific artists, many of which then extend from that initial response as a kind of prompt into further exploration through memory, memoir and specific experiences. It is as though her poems responding to artists are utilized as touchpoints; offered as a way to jump further into and through specific subjects, memories or conversations. “What happens / happens because of the way light twists / as it filters in.” she writes, earlier in that same poem for/after Eva Hesse.

rob mclennan, Kirsten Kaschock, AutoPortrait (as flotsam)

I’m curious to hear about your career. What do/did you enjoy the most about your career? How has your career/past jobs influenced the way you live and write poetry?

My career was a way to engage with people and make my mortgage payments. In that way, it was a win-win. When I worked as a lawyer in Tokyo, the partners would help translate my haiku in Japanese. They encouraged me to send my haiku to the English-language newspapers published in Japan, most of which have a haiku column.

You have been a long-time haibun editor at Modern Haiku. What advice do you have for those who are new to writing haibun?

Modern Haiku, under editor exemplar Paul Miller, is a multifaceted journal which is known for its high-quality haiku, essays, art, book reviews, and haibun. We publish only a handful of haibun in each issue. It is a very high bar. My advice to those new to haibun is to read as many haibun published in Modern Haiku (and other high quality publications, including both haibun and literary journals), as possible. Don’t waste time on cover letters that list all your awards and publications. Just send your single best haibun. One other thing: if your haibun is AI produced or is plagiarized in whole or in part, things won’t go well for your submission. Similarly, try to get along with the editor. Don’t complain to the EIC (Editor-in-Chief) if your haibun doesn’t get picked. And remember to treat your editor as you would like to be treated, both privately and publicly. Give credit where credit is due. The relationship between haibun writer and haibun editor doesn’t end when one’s haibun is published. Currently, Modern Haiku nominates haibun for various awards, including Touchstone, Best Small Fictions, and the annual Red Moon Anthology.

You co-authored Haibun: A Writer’s Guide with Rich Youmans and Lew Watts. What did you enjoy the most about working on this project?

It was wonderful to finally get the project up and running, which wouldn’t have been possible without my two co-authors. I had the publishing contract in my hands for a couple of years, but it was only when Lew and Rich came aboard that things coalesced. We each have our strengths and they came together, thanks in large part to an outline for the book Lew did early on. Rich and Lew really kept me on my toes! I love them both for their willingness to go above and beyond to make Haibun: A Writer’s Guide a resource with universal appeal. I would encourage anyone submitting haibun for publication to do a close read of our book.

Jacob D. Salzer, Roberta Beary

The narrator continues to wander and finds himself walking past an advertising hoarding, “The slogan: A home with no food/ Is no home to embrace” and reminds himself the advert isn’t targeted at him, “For I be the one who wanders/ I can survive the cold”. His wandering continues, waiting for the sun to come back, until he finds himself “Waiting for the sun to get its comeuppance” where he’s been awake all night and

“My arms are like octopus arms
My soul is a trash can overflowing
Because my body won’t go
To sleep I know it’s irrational
For one who’s been awake too long
The fear I’ll explode
This body, viscous flesh bomb”

That liminal state between awake and asleep  turns into a nightmare until,

“I’m awake
For a moment in time, I see you
Watching me from the foot of our bed
As golden morning light peeks in
I reach out to touch your hand and I’m not sure what I grab
And I explode
Again and again and again”

The sense of explosion recurs, however, this time it’s positive, bathed in sunlight so the sequence ends in love.

“Sun Come Back” lives up to its promise of a narrator journeying to find his way home. Elements of the journey are dream-like and other elements more rock solid. Ultimately, [Daniel] Newcomer posits that, even on a solo journey where the traveller is seeking themselves, we are seeking connection because that’s what makes us human. “Sun Comes Back” reflects that with its pared back, focused, plain-speaking vocabulary that eschews overly-poetic language in favour of seeking to connect with readers.

Emma Lee, “Sun Come Back” Daniel Newcomer (Resource Publications) – Book review

I spent the first half of the retreat obsessing over my Walt Whitman class for the Creative Retirement Institute. (Inspired by him, I confess to writing some “catalogues” of nature observations, including the miracle of six deer pecking along the shoreline like sanderlings.) Now that the class is behind me, I’m working on my new poetry manuscript, and reading books by local writers: The Light Between the Pines, a novel by Warren Read (which I recommend), and books by poet, poetry mentor, and therapist Joan Fiset. […]

Last month I attended the launch of Joan’s latest book, Unborn Stars. I brought it home, along with some other titles from Joan’s book table, and put them in my To-Be-Read pile. Not long after, while talking about books of “flash” fiction or nonfiction, my friend Andrea Lewis  recommended Now the Day Is Over. That title sounds familiar, I said. It’s the title of a  hymn, Andrea said. Not just that, I said, I think I own that book.

A local writer, Andrea told me. Joan Fiset.

I went home and began reading. Then I read the next book, Namesake, also flash non-fiction, then I read the two books of poems in my possession. In a nutshell, Now the Day Is Over is about Fiset’s father; Namesake, about her mother. Both delve into substance abuse and mental illness. Unborn Stars is about Fiset’s son and their delicate relationship. All of them interweave external, exquisitely detailed events with interior awareness, doubt, and a growing sense of dread. […]

Although Unborn Stars is better described as hybrid, and includes some longer, prose pieces, most of Fiset’s poems are short and imagistic. The science of protostars is a thread running through and pulling the sections together—”Luminous fragments / too tiny to gather or shape”—though the poems are as much about human grief as astronomy. Here’s one example:

Quickening

overgrown with weeds
a further silence
where the nest was

close to the water
I recall a first flutter
becoming you

—Joan Fiset

In her poem, “Grief,” she writes: “Grief // moves slowly through afternoon, stands / behind me as I wrap gifts // snow has fallen all day and will continue…” Exactly that. Quietly permeating every moment.

Bethany Reid, Back to Glen Cove

Nonsense is hard. Lewis Carroll wrote nonsense verse, and is famous for it, but his verse ‘has an idea behind it’; there is a perverse kind of sense, or a shadow of sense floating on a darkness void of meaning:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

[Marcel] Duchamp wanted none of that. He wrote his piece Rendezvous of Sunday, February 6, 1916, with ‘great pains’: “It took me at least two weeks to do it because I would immediately see some sense coming up, so I’d have to rewrite it.” To sweep away every speck of meaning was an exhausting enterprise. Here’s part of the result:

Afterward, seven or eight posts drink some consequences now appointed; not to be forgotten, between brackets, that without the économat then, with many a similar occasion, come back four times their enormous files.

Duchamp does not say (in the interview I’ve been quoting) what he aimed for, with all these renunciations. Skill, taste, sense—these had to go, but for what? Fun? The sake of something new? He thought they’d lead him astray, they were corrupt, not to be trusted, but what was the pure or perfect goal that could be reached once they had been, painfully, removed? Maybe it was a kind of freedom.

If not in his aims, at least in his methods, Duchamp is a strange echo of St. John Climacus’s advise to ascetics, in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, a 7th century treatise written for aspiring monks. Climacus tells the “athlete of Christ” of the need to learn obedience, which is “the tomb of the will.” One must become as a corpse, which “does not argue or reason as to what is good or what seems to be bad”:

Obedience is an abandonment of discernment in a wealth of discernment.

Abandonment of discernment: in a different domain, that’s what Duchamp wanted.

Brad Skow, Ascetics / Aesthetics

A book about faith is as much about “engagement with beauty, hope, doubt, and fear” as about belief (or not) in your god. Nowhere is the truth of this statement more evident than in A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith (Tupelo Press, 2014).

In their co-edited collection of interviews, which are presented in essay form, author and translator Ilya Kaminsky and novelist Katherine Towler share their conversations with 19 poets about the “difficult topic” of creating and sustaining a spiritual life that is not defined by the limits of being named Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant, “believer” or “atheist,” unaffiliated or “non-religious,” but by willingness to be, in the words of contributing poet Kazim Ali, “not certain” and ever-seeking. […]

The following brief quotes are intended to give readers some idea of the line of thinking of the interviewed poets, whose writing lives, it is clear, are bound to and animated by a connection to the spiritual or the divine that finds its most personal expression in language.

Carolyn Forche´ — “We are beings in process, in a deep spiritual process that we recognize and intuit and do not understand at all. . . If we live long enough, if we are given enough time on earth, we can live to see the spiritual potential of human beings. What else do we need? We’re in an incredible adventure here with God.” (p. 16)

Gerald Stern (1925-2022) — “ Poets — maybe all artists — get away from their own religious upbringing in order to arrive at a condition of faith.” (p. 21) “My faith is in existence.” (p. 26)

Kazim Ali — “Prayer is speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you’re allowed to be the most honest that you can be. . . Prayer is not a refuge of shelter, so much as it is an opening of arms, an acceptance into whatever storms exist in the world.” (pp. 41, 42)

Jane Hirshfield — “The only way we can know anything is with our own eyes and our own looking.” (p. 51)

Jericho Brown — “. . . poems ask us not to understand in the same way that we often find ourselves not comprehending the possibility of a God in this world.” (p. 89)

Li-Young Lee — “For me the question of what is poetry is very narrow, but then my definition of what is God is very wide.” (p. 130)

Alicia Ostriker — “Like other poets, I am often asked if I have a spiritual practice. Yes, writing is my spiritual practice. Ultimately, the words come from somewhere beyond myself. . . .” (p. 146)

Marilyn Nelson — “Surely everyone has a spiritual journey. . . Mine began with wonderment.” (p. 153)

Maureen Doallas, ‘A God in the House’

when i say “god”
i always mean the soil & sometimes
i mean the sky. i hope in my next life i get
to be at the purgatory of the food chain.
call me a decomposer. my friends
are isopods & earth worms. my friends
have eyes in the roofs of our mouths.

Robin Gow, supply chain issues

I’ve been in Banff, Alberta for a couple of weeks now: teaching, researching, listening. Every time I visit, I try to find a route I haven’t run or walked before. A few days ago, I struck out past the historic Cave & Basin site (home to lemon-seed sized endangered sinister snails) and ran to Sundance Canyon, along a snow-feathered trail. Apart from two ravens, I didn’t encounter another soul. This was something of a relief after days of rich conversation, artistic revelation.

I wanted to be a path-out-of-season, unvisited.

Whenever the programme for the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival gets underway, I begin to suffer from something I call ‘epiphany fatigue’. It is a great privilege to call oneself a sufferer. The panels and presentations and films are so numerous, so varied and thought-provoking I need a notebook next to me at all times. Each event tends to spark intense conversation from the attendees, a lithe and intent questioning after. I need space between things to take them in: little stanza breaks and line breaks in the day.

Yesterday’s epiphany-fest included data scientist, artist and climber Heather Dawe talking about her book ‘Think Again’. Heather’s latest work draws links between a career working with data and artificial intelligence and a lifetime spent moving through mountains. In it she explores her own understanding of intuition: what it is, where it comes from, and what is at stake as we hand more and more of our thinking to machines. How might we intervene in the human-AI relationship at this critical juncture?

Later in the day, I heard Gloria Dickie, Trina Moyles and Claire Cameron discuss their research on bears around the globe and bear-human coexistence, how the possibility of bear encounter can make us pay closer attention to the land. Things I wrote down in my notes included:

Do bears have ‘main character energy’?

Bears are a mirror species that complicate our lives.

A skinned bear looks a lot like a dead human.

To get to know a bear, you follow its stomach.

What I didn’t scribble down but logged fiercely in my brain was the discussion around misogyny in bear studies and bear biology, from one woman being described by a male scientist as a ‘bear groupie’ when doing fieldwork to the sexualization of women researching bears (Gloria Dickie was often asked if she was going to call her book Bear Naked. And that’s before we’ve even talked about the ‘Marian Engel effect’ – if you know you know, and if you don’t know, you must read her brilliant, uncanny ‘Bear’ novel immediately).

The panel was revelatory in its format too – no chairperson, just three women giving each other equal space, a perfect balance between structure and spontaneity, no talking over each other, no questions-that-aren’t-really-questions.

In Banff, I always roll into bed with my mind fizzing.

Helen Mort, Epiphany fatigue!

Last night I went to an interesting talk by Dr Kate Rhodes. She said that she wrote nothing but poems for a decade, getting poems shortlisted for the Bridport and Forward Prizes and having books published. She thought of a poem as “a bullet to the heart”, something that had to be written. Then she went on to write about 20 thrillers and YA novels, including 2 series. One of those novels was self-published because the publisher didn’t want to continue the series but she did. That novel got the best Goodreads reviews, she thought. She’s also ghosted books with non-disclosure agreements. It seems to me that she’s covered the spectrum of answers to the “Who do you write for?” question.

In Whom Should You Be Writing For? Yourself or Your Readers?, K.M. Weiland has “7 Reasons You Should Be Writing for Yourself” then “6 Reasons You Should Be Writing for Your Readers”. I think it’s quite possible for a writer to agree with all these reasons. She writes that “If you’re writing solely for yourself with no thought for the reader – or solely for the reader without tapping the purity and sincerity of your own artistic instincts – then your writing is bound to suffer”. All that sounds useful. Someone added a comment that first drafts were for the writer, and last drafts for the reader, which also makes sense to me.

I think the viewpoint I find difficult to agree with (I’ve seen it online) is that writing for oneself is free and pure, the only alternative being to write for the market. I think that even if you’re writing for yourself, there’s likely to be an implied audience and self-censorship, and your writing will be influenced by the styles you’ve read. I think one can write with others in mind without pandering to market forces. I think I most often write with readers of literary magazines in mind – me, friends, and people I’ve never met with similar interests to me.

Tim Love, Who do you write for?

I was on the verge of deleting this entire publication the other day: I felt it had served its purpose, and I am increasingly conscious of not wanting to leave the world strewn with my digital garbage. Too, I am deep in the unbelievably rapturous throes of another project that has retaught me how to really write, and my scratchings here feel vaguely embarrassing. But something told me to chill the fuck out and I am glad I listened, because this morning I couldn’t stop thinking of this poem, which is speaking to me in a way it has not in decades, and I wanted to share it with you. My Lynda Hull attachments are on display in the post below, which I wrote more than a year ago. I am not going to reread it. It feels like a lifetime ago, and I think, in some ways, it is.

This is the first poem in Hull’s first book, Ghost Money. It acts as a kind of prologue, so it’s set in italic with centred stanzas, and as far as I am concerned is the only acceptable example of the latter to have ever existed. (It’s also gonna display weirdly on your mobile device because of it; sorry about that.) Typing it out I noticed, for the first time, what a perfect pair it makes with “The Window,” the last poem in her last book.

It was the phrase “for they have carried you to this / wild incompletion” that suddenly rang like a bell in my noggin this morning and called me back to the book to read the whole thing. I have so much to say about that. For now I’ll only say: I am surprised by joy.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Spell for the Manufacture & Use of a Magic Carpet” by Lynda Hull

I told the dead about you, how you were saving all the broken things,
that’s what you called it. The fairy damaged in a storm, the plate,

slipping from my hand—Do you remember? We were washing dishes.
You fixed that plate. An antique window you wouldn’t let go of.
You found other uses. “Everything has a purpose,” you said.

Especially the little things, I added.

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 18”

Everything at the moment feels like a box-ticking exercise to get to a place I’m not even sure I want to go. My life is full of shoulds and have-tos and I feel their tug-of-war with my wants constantly. Even the cakes and now the salmon in the oven are things on a to-do list, I have to feed the kids and use up the apples from the garden. 

So I steal little things for myself, a poem written in a cafe on a wet Sunday with a big pot of tea, a game of 4 deck solitaire online between working on plans, not folding the laundry, but giving it to the kids to do and having rugby on as much as possible on the weekend. 

Mini-rebellions from being a mum, a professional and a student. I’d love to just be a writer again, but it’s just not possible. 

I see people on social media who are at residencies, travelling to or living in interesting places to write. Finland no longer seems like someplace interesting. It’s a have-to. 

I once had six months of just being a writer while I was on a bursary, over twenty years ago and it was so amazing. I’m jealous of others’ creative lives, but I have to accept the choices I’ve made and where I’ve ended up as a result. In Finland, fitting writing in the cracks of an over-stuffed life. 

I’ve been working on my Scots poem inspired by my Scotstober snippets. I’ve also had a couple of acceptances in the last few months though I’ve barely submitted to any journals or anthologies. Those should come to fruition by the end of the year. I need to record myself reading one of the poems. Not my favourite thing to do and with my students searching me up on the net for kicks, I’m wishing there was a way to do it without my face.

Gerry Stewart, Wasting Time in a Life Full of Have-Tos

Ok, why would these people contact me? Why would they want to push my book, of all books. Oh, yes, yes, they find the title interesting, the whole thing fascinating, a literary gem, blah, yes, blah. But so have others – and they haven’t asked me to join in a community and do interviews.

The idea of an interview confuses me anyway. I can just imagine it now. Along the lines of:

Interviewer: It’s an interesting title, Poems In The Key Of Aardvark. What made you choose it?
Me: Well, there’s a poem in the book called Poem In The Key Of Aardvark. So it kind of fitted. Or seemed to.
Interviewer: Yes, I read Poem In The Key Of Aardvark. It’s a strange poem. What inspired it?
Me: I don’t know.
Interviewer: There’s a whole range of different types of poem in the book, aren’t there? Did you set out to write a book like this?
Me: I don’t remember.
Interviewer: There seem to be so many different realities on offer in Poems In The Key Of Aardvark. Is this intentional?
Me: Well, there are so many different realities on offer in life. [This would be the most meaningful answer I could come up with and the sheer effort would reduce subsequent answers to ‘Maybe’ or ‘Probably’ or ‘I’ve forgotten’.

This is a fairly extreme stretch of imagination, of course. As stressful as I might find the moments leading up to it, if anyone were mad enough to want to interview me I would try harder than that. (A reading of one’s work or an interview on YouTube is obviously a perfectly valid idea in itself.)

Nevertheless the base rule is that chats with poets are usually about as insightful as chats with footballers at the end of a match. And about as relevant to normal life. I write the poems. Mostly I don’t know why. Mostly I forget them quite quickly. I suspect that only very rarely might I have anything interesting to say about them. And I suspect that the more co-operative I might try to be, the more confused – and confusing – I might become.

Bob Mee, ANOTHER LITERARY OFFER DROPS INTO THE IN-BOX…

The question you get asked the most when your book is on a shortlist is what does it mean to you to be on the shortlist? I think for lots of people this feels like a very easy question to answer. People say ‘It’s amazing’ or ‘I feel so lucky”. I feel those things as well, but when someone asks me that question, my mind spins off into other answers that are less easy to articulate clearly. I want to say it means both everything and nothing to me.

Being on a prize shortlist changes things externally, and winning one certainly does, and it might even change things internally for a while in terms of how you feel about the work – and that can be very seductive. But it runs out – and then you are left feeling how you always felt about yourself, about the work – and this is where the nothing comes in. I have to feel the way I feel about the work, despite what happens to it. And that still doesn’t say how I feel about it. […]

One of the things that winning a prize does, or what winning the Forward Prize did for me was to make it impossible to justify. I couldn’t say ‘yes, but it only happened because’ without insulting the judges and the rest of the shortlist. I couldn’t make an excuse or be self-deprecating. It is a gift – but it is a gift that I didn’t need to pick up and carry – it’s more like a bird that sits on your shoulder, but it’s more active than that – a bird that flies before me, a bird-shield I can hide behind. […]

When I won the Forward Prize, I wore a dress covered in birds. A few weeks later, someone sent me a painting of myself in that dress. It’s one of the few visual records I have of my outfit – I don’t know where the photos are from that night. Perhaps I didn’t take any. I still don’t know who sent that painting. It arrived on my desk at work without a note, and I still don’t know who sent it. I close my eyes, imagine one of the birds lifting away from my dress, taking on its own extraordinary life. […]

Imagine divorce as a body of water I am swimming through. Imagine the Eliot shortlist as a raft that I can use to get me through the year. I don’t think that is one of the things that people usually answer when they are asked how it feels. It’s a raft to get me through the rest of the year.

Kim Moore, On Friendship and Prizes

We spend a lot of time pathologizing and romanticizing the writer’s life—the writer we used to be, the writer we want to be. Maybe that is a sort of fuel. Or maybe it’s an albatross. Our lives change as we grow up. Our bodies change as we grow up. And our writing may change as we grow up. I think we ought to spend more time practicing empathy for our creative Creature selves—how we shift, adapt, and show up. Can we be every writer within us? Can that be enough?

In the writing workshop I’m guiding right now, I gave everyone an exercise: Write a beautiful poem just for the sake of it. Don’t worry about linearity, message, or sense, I told them. Just unravel into the meadow. Don’t question it. Be in the hugeness of it all.

I did my own assignment the other night. I did it in earnest. And it let me access a place inside me that felt luminous (numinous!) and familiar and messy. It didn’t cost me my marriage or my friendships or my reputation. I didn’t have to ruin anything. No devils, just a little darkness.

I’m her, I’m me, I’m all of us in here.

Lisa Marie Basile, When writing is like bloodletting a stone

I have never followed or for the most part particularly liked the music produced at Def Jam records, but I’m finding Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being to be a calming, Buddhist approach to living an imaginative life. It’s the kind of book I can read in short bits at a time; frankly, having studied creativity and Buddhism and the arts for many years, nothing in it is exactly new to me. Yet the book acts as reminder and affirmation, for which I’m grateful.

Reminder that with a little objective space between me and my life sometimes, I can be reminded of my perspective and think more kindly about others’ perspectives. Reminder that whatever my readers take from my work, however they interpret it, however they critique it, whatever does or does not resonate with them–the work remains my own expression. It’s the best I could do at the time.

Reminder that the work of creativity doesn’t have an end point. Well–death, I suppose, ends the individual body’s ability to create; but if there is work out there in the world (music, poems, novels, films, paintings, sculpture, and so on), the creative acts of the past can continue. They continue to offer perspective. They continue to invite interpretation and expression.

This sort of reminder is good when I’m involved in making an ephemeral and very limited set of objects, a poem series made into an artist book. It’s so minor in the scheme of US culture in the 21st century, and so very much an expression of my own thinking, about which a limited number of people can possibly care. Rubin says that doesn’t matter–the culture, the popularity, the quantity. [Interesting, coming from a guy who has clearly made considerable money, and helped musicians earn considerable fortunes as well, and who hangs out in Tuscany much of the year.] But I don’t discount his words. Certainly, if I had been writing to make an impact on culture, to be popular, or to make money, I’d have stopped long ago. So I keep working, all in the fullness of time.

Ann E. Michael, Kairos

The title of my poet-friend Robert van Vliet’s excellent book seems very apt, for poetry : Vessels. A poem is a sailing ship, each scribbled canvas-page pregnant with sea-wind. Words strain against the narrow ribs of rhyme, syntax, form – they would be going somewhere, as fast as they can.

But then perhaps the deeper secret of poetry’s power is : stasis. Not the sailboat, but the Chinese vase : Giorgio Morandi’s clay pots : the “Grecian urn”. Pure stillness at the center.

I’ve been writing poems for over 60 years. Many of these poems are in books. Books which are still in print. Nevertheless I can identify with that Distinguished Author Conrad Aiken : mentor of Malcolm Lowry, Poet Laureate of the State of Georgia – who late in life described himself as “the best-known unread poet of the twentieth century”. (I feel (un)seen, there.)

After a few decades, you have this curious sense of being systematically ignored. But then you think : That’s sour grapes. You’re just not that interesting. But then you think again : hopefully, because you have to have hope : underneath everything, the root cause is that primal stasis – silence, Holy Sabbath, rest note – which is true poetry.

Maybe. I really don’t know. All I do know is that apparently I’m like the loud Mississippi cicada – buzzing, droning, unmoving, one deep note (OM?), unceasingly. And also emerging from hibernation every 17 years.

Henry Gould, Same Old, Same Young

Something else that I enjoyed here was the love of language this poem embodies. Like an actor interrogating a script, or a therapist noting a client’s phrasing, the poem invites us to be curious about words. At the centre of the poem is that word attends, which feels exactly what the poem does itself – a conscious, step by step by step attending to the fabric of a word, the meanings and worlds half-hidden within its utterance.

 You’ll often hear poets talking about how a poem can surprise them in the writing. Similarly, as therapists, the destination is never fixed, the journey rarely clear, and typically littered with surprises. Such is the potency of language; far from a “code” or set of tools whose use we can master, working with words is almost like working with living, breathing creatures. They speak to us in ways we can’t always fully discern, shapeshifting in the hinterland between conscious and unconscious. Peopled and historied.

All therapists will recall moments when they have somehow landed on a particular phrase or metaphor that speaks to a client, which can almost seem to unlock something for them. In therapy, as in poetry, it seems to me, experimentation with words and language has the potential to change our relationship to our experiences, and with language itself. As Seamus Heaney put it, “If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way”.

Jonathan Totman, On Weariness and Wonder

This week I needed a poem for a thing, and I wasn’t sure whether I had already written something useful or not. This sent me searching through a variety of folders on my computer. As I was searching, I found a poem from 2023 called, THANKS FOR READING EMILY DICKINSON TO ME OVER THE INTERCOM AT PRICE CHOPPER. It’s one of those poems that wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t been scrolling social media at a particular time on a particular day, and I decided it would enjoy another outing of its own in this blog. It was a post from Rishi Dastidar that inspired the poem, and I rather like the fact that I can clearly remember writing it even if I had sort of forgotten it existed.

And this makes me think of the joy I get from setting down words. Often that joy is from setting down my own words, but I am also lucky enough to spend time at a Retirement Village setting down words with members of a poetry group there. A session there last week started with me reading back to them the group poem we had created for National Poetry Day on my previous visit. And the part that made my heart sing this time was that there was something palpable about the way the poem landed in the air around us as we listened to it again.

I love the solitary nature of poetry where I am reading silently to myself or being a member of a zoom room audience, but I also love poetry in different places.  It was my passion for poetry being out in the wild that spurred me on to find a place to be for National Poetry Day each year when I was no longer working in education. That’s how I found a seat in a comfortable chair at The Retirement Village. Prior to that, in 2023, I walked up and down my local high street asking people if they would like to hear a poem about conkers or a poem called Darling. (It was a 50:50 split.)

I still take poems to the local town on National Poetry Day. And recently it delighted me to discover that one of the people I gave a poem to now has it taped to the wall next to their work area. “Now I can read my poem whenever I want to,” she told me when she showed me where it was.

Sue Finch, THANKS FOR READING EMILY DICKINSON TO ME OVER THE INTERCOM AT PRICE CHOPPER

Thank goodness for a good election result. The whole planet can let out a shaky breath. It’s not solving everything by itself but at least it’s a good direction again, to build safety and justice, health and hope.

What I hope is that locally, we come together for that shared purpose of exchanging ideas, whether in conversation or in zines, poems, weird art. I love a room of people who gather for mostly leftist aims. The small prophets of our time, instead of profits necessarily. Trade economy, giving your ideas a shot without quite so many intermediary agents. Author to author.

I like the openness of it. I also work well with constraints and deadlines. It’s good to have the Ottawa small press fair twice a year to corral my focus. To have an excuse to make, collaborate. Making is healthy more than consuming but we need to do both.

Some new poets like to llama and [ahem, excuse me auto-correct], like to la-la-la, and insist they don’t want to be influenced by others. I’m a big fan, me, of being influenced. I like to hear what others think and how. I like to be swayed, changed, engaged.

So Saturday is a blow out for that sort of thing. This Saturday afternoon the fair is back at the Tom Brown Arena, 141 Bayview Station Road, Ottawa, courtesy of our local super-connector, rob mclennan. […]

If you can come, do set aside a chunk of time, and take breaks, because there are lots of tables of goodies. And a free table to unload what needs new hands.

Pearl Pirie, All’s Fair, love not war

church without church
a plain little world

for all the eyes on nothing
a sermon about lack

making the story up
as we go

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 8 November 1663.

absent like a reason
to howl or not

no longer anger
is coming out

as cold in my head
as a small state

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 7 November 1663.

let it come out of the country
of pluck and patched people

a time to settle many things
one wondered to see

like the last season
of some tv show

how the body of the plot
is fallen to pieces

and the soul impeached
on her commodious peak

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 6 November 1663.

the one war
on the poor is here

we let that yesterday outlast
the reckoning of it

only contending with
the business of visions

to save some right to
my own little wish

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 5 November 1663.

my mouth is a part
of all I discover

thin as the thoughts
of a king of marmalade

in recovery from his poor
fat desires

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 4 November 1663.

the morning bridge
and the mist

they speak prettily
a language knowing

some cooler terms
in an old discourse

another look for air
in the history of a day

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 3 November 1663.

I walk off my coffee
on Nothing Street

the night coach
a box of light

doors happening
into high words

I follow whatever I see
of myself in sleep

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 2 November 1663.

This week: papery interlunations of literary history, the fading brightness of the dead, the weight of the sky, cows in the wilderness, and much more. Enjoy.

The young man leaps up.
We fully expect a gun
to come out of his case.

Bathed in the sunset,
he plays his violin.
Serene music lifts our spirits.

No longer haunted
by our tasks left half-completed,
we settle into the ride.

The train trundles north,
past urban blight and clogged rivers,
the skeletons of new condos straining to the sky.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poem for the Feast of All Souls

It’s just over five years since I started writing these weekly posts about poetry. I don’t plan ahead much in writing them, as I find the pieces that interest readers most seem to be those that emerge from following a stray observation or a chance connection. So it’s perhaps not a coincidence that I seem to keep coming back to the idea of the ghostly in the way I imagine poetry: as something glimpsed, half-hidden, haunting.

“Ghost words” was the term I used last year to describe a particular hallucinatory effect in The Waste Land — and searching back through the Some Flowers Soon archives makes me realise Eliot’s poem has often made me reach for my thermographic camera: Under London Bridge.

But I don’t think The Waste Land is uniquely ghostly in its qualities. One of my favourite definitions of poetry is from Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” (1821):

Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind

An “interlunation” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the period between the old and new moon; figurative a blank or dark interval” — which makes me think it has potential as an alternative term for “line-break”. The ghostliness of poetry is partly to do with the way that it works with the gaps between words, allowing hidden doors to creak open in language. But it is also to do with its aural spirit, its invisible life as meaningful sound that haunts the interlunations of our inner monologues.

I also think of poetry as haunting not only individuals but whole cultures, over centuries, disappearing and reappearing across the papery interlunations of literary history. 

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Haunting the Interlunations

Van Gogh’s severed ear wanders the countryside,
auditioning sunflowers for the perfect shade of yellow.
Beethoven’s ghost feels the underground rumble
and turns the earth’s rotation into a symphony.
Lorca catches the fascist bullets that murdered him
and forges them into diamonds for the oppressed.
Lovesick Mayakovsky, suicidal over a woman’s rejection,
finally gets it:
heartbreak hurts less when the masses adore you.
Hemingway plays his own extermination backward, 
watches the shotgun inhale, the bullet climb back into the barrel,
and finishes his sentence.

Rich Ferguson, The Shotgun Inhales

It’s late Autumn now, and in Herefordshire that means the orchards are being picked, there might be a first frost and the clocks have just gone back. It’s always a shock to find the evenings suddenly darker, and I have an urge to withdraw into the lamplight. Alone perhaps, but I don’t feel isolated. The streetlights are on, there are friends along the road.

1. A poem to enjoy – Thomas Hardy, During Wind and Rain (1917)

Hardy draws on the material he found in Some Recollections, the book he found ‘bound in brown paper, made from the pages of exercise books and stitched together with red thread.’ This home-made book was written without Hardy’s knowledge by his wife, Emma and he only discovered it after her death.

Each stanza shows a family scene full of life (singing, clearing the garden, taking breakfast outside, moving house), and each time Hardy turns to the refrain: ‘Ah, no; the years’.

The refrain is followed by one more line, each one worse than the last: the leaves, the storm birds, then the rose torn from the wall, then rain running down the carved names on the headstone. That build toward the grave drives the poem.

I love this poem because like all successful elegies, Hardy never refuses the happiness he records.

Adam Cairns, Three by One

Walking towards Halloween

Autumn arrived
with a good slapping
of wind and rain
but today the sky
is a perfect blue,
the sun a gift,
under which even
the Halloween decorations,
draped over doorways
and across gardens,
seem quite benign:
skeletons, giant spiders
and their webs, and, 
my favourite, this
shrouded creature
designed to scare us
to our own bones,
because, after all,
which one of us,
on one of those days,
hasn’t felt like rushing out
into the garden to have
a damn good scream.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Walking towards Halloween

In this poem, I wanted, like Yosa Buson, to strip away as much as possible, and that’s what I did. The writing is barely there, but is.

And there’s this: “There is a deep, communicative power in silence and what remains unexpressed.” Emerson

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 17”

This ongoing poem, like many of my ongoing poems, lives in hope. A new passage was written just this evening, on Halloween. Even John Keats popped in tonight, whose birthday was yesterday – holding out his dead hand, so to speak (actually a living hand). & reminded me of this sweet poem , delivered to me by seagull, from the Petersburg poet Elena Shvarts, back around 2003 (wherein kindling Keats appears once more).

But be that as it may, this poem (Grassland Jubilee) has its own promises to keep, so to speak, which I certainly hope it will do (in time). These things encrypted here are strummed upon in my previous (many) poems of the last 5 years – in Restoration Day, Green Radius, Parmenides in Minneapolis, Shield of Mnemosyne… Because we are facing life’s high meed right now : in a national, global, political, ethical, eschatological, or shall we say human sense…

Henry Gould, Grassland Jubilee, forthcoming (#11)

This year’s firework display for me was two rockets. One viewed from the M25, and one viewed from the M1. It was nice to see them as I travelled back North from a visit to Kent. I took sparklers with me for Hallowe’en/Bonfire Night wishes, but somehow we forgot to light them so now they will become Christmas or New Year wishes. Luckily we remembered to enjoy sharing time and chat and café visits!

There’s something about noticing the smell of the air at night at this time of year which signals the coming of Winter. It’s not always dependent on bonfire smoke mixing with the cold crisp air although that can be part of it, it’s something that seems to happen on cold clear nights as November opens. It was lovely to notice that very smell while waving goodbye to lovely friends before travelling the 300-mile journey back home. A definite contrast to breathing this morning’s air and a rather lovely one to note.

It’s not quite November cold here yet, but this poem sets down what the month may hold in store…

NOVEMBER COLD

November cold
is bone cold,
chalked moon cold.

November cold
clouds breath,
stencils ferns on glass.

November cold is fragile echoes
of clenched words,
it is spiked metal railings silvered.

November cold is
slippery white shine
grinning under shoes.

Sue Finch, NEW PHOTO

The other night, at a reading, I sat next to a young poet who has accrued almost a quarter of a million followers on Instagram and most of you probably won’t have heard of him. Like the man once said, being famous on Instagram is like being rich with Monopoly money. We know our digital avatars are not a true reflection of our talent and popularity on these channels doesn’t suggest any merit beyond the ability to post likeable content. But who wants to hear from a poet who has just three friends on Facebook? Genius or not, two likes on an Instagram post puts you in the loser bracket not in the niche artiste camp. […]

The other week I gave a walking performance of my poem My Name Is Swan from the Swan pub next door to Shakespeare’s Globe, across the Thames to St Paul’s. It was awful weather, the rain lashed down and unsurprisingly, no one turned up. A crowd in cagoules emptied into the streets from the theatre as I set off howling my poem to no one but the wind and the river. And it felt mad. And it felt magnificent. And it was tragic and it was insanely heroic all at once. I longed for a quarter of a million followers to live-stream my reading to and yet I was thrilled by the singular anonymity of this solitary soliloquy. And then I got a call from the BBC.

It’s hard to measure what size audience I was broadcasting to when I took up the Friday afternoon Poetry Corner slot on BBC Radio London. The station has a daily listenership of between 50,000 and 100,000 people and I think I read well enough, came across as competent and confident and I thought Don would probably be smiling from wherever eternity had taken him to. A friend called me, someone who loyally listens to my woes and complaints about engagement. He was impressed and said, “I imagine your optics are soaring.” I checked my website stats. A huge spike when I posted online about my appearance and then a drop off before I actually went live. The notification had brought more attention than the show itself. The announcement had become the event.

The day after the broadcast I gave another walking performance, meeting at the birthplace of John Keats, the pub previously known as the Swan and Hoop and I braced myself for another lonely poetry walk. And then out of the shadows my audience stepped forward.

It wasn’t a large crowd. It wasn’t a small crowd. It was an audience of just one. A singular Keats enthusiast who’d come to celebrate the poet’s birthday. And we drank apple juice in the sun outside the pub that Keats was born above and then we walked along London Wall and I performed to the weekend streets. And my unique audience listened, seriously, attentively, at times a little nervously and when I was done I parted company with my audience of one. But something significant had happened, a shift that can only be measured in poetics: I had jumped from nothing into numbers. And this, this is the greatest leap of them all.

Jan Noble, Nº88 The photo my agent didn’t want you to see

For All Souls’ Day a haiku by our November poet Ian Storr from his new collection Late Light, with Alba Publishing.

Orkney graveside
lost in a hail wind
the shouted committal

Fokkina McDonnell, All Souls’ Day – haiku

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of Forty-One Jane Doe‘s by Carrie Olivia Adams, which originally came with a DVD of short films back in 2013—which I did not get but sure seems like a cool extra, especially considering the tone and subject matter of the book, which I would call “Film Noir” poetry. (Another book in this kind of genre might be Karynna McGlynn’s I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, from 2009 from Sarabande Books.)

In this book, the poems in which sometimes a “Jane” is the speaker, sometimes a detective is speaking, and always addressing a nebulous you that might be the other Jane Doe’s? For those not acquainted with the terms, when police find an unidentified female corpse, it is often labelled “Jane Doe.” This use of Jane Doe draws to mind serial killer victims, nameless runaways, and other tragic figures often at the center of crime shows and film noir. The book’s nine sections, with titles like “Mystery Story,” “Intermissions with Aviators,” “Intermissions with Scientists,” are all seemingly trying to identify and/or learn the origin of the Jane Doe’s. The writer never really satisfied our curiosity, although I wonder if the missing short films would give us more hints? But the mood of the book cuts through, spooky, sneaky, sullen, shattered; women challenge both the men who investigate and measure their disappearances, and the ones who caused them. This was a great “mood read” for Halloween, I have to say. Carrie Olivia Adams is also pretty accomplished as she’s poetry editor for Black Ocean Press, works in PR for University of Chicago Press, and is the author of a number of chapbooks and a total of five poetry books. I am lucky to have found this book after some 13 years, because it is one of my favorite reads this year. It is weird how poetry books can slip through the cracks and end up in your hands at the right time.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Halloween, Feeling My Way to the Future, Film Noir Poetry

Following this initial meeting, the poem leads us to infer a certain post-war optimism, but it is doomed by an inevitable failure to live up to its own promise amidst 20th-century horrors. There are striking contrasts between life’s sweeter moments, filled with the arrival of “children and seashore days,” and a domestic happiness threatened by “men in black shadows, a 3 AM / pounding-on-the-door-raid” and bittersweet divorce.

Even the stubborn determination that “We shall overcome / someday they said, / with cars, TVs, and American dreams” is unable to ward off the eventual disillusionment with society.

And yet, it is within poetry’s power to reimagine…

The poem’s final stanzas suggest that maybe this life is not the full story, after all. There is something beyond our material existence:

still, they were pages bound in a book,
the marginalia and notes
all part of the same story,

stitched together with invisible thread;

he lived hemmed in her mind’s seams, hung
on memory crossbeams, on lines
remembered and words unspoken
not in this life, not anymore,

but I like to think,
they’re together now,

somewhere in time
walking hand-in-hand
across an endless beach.

(’At the Corner of First and Always’)

Within the grounded realm that we inhabit each day, there may be clues to this other world. In another tender poem, Merril [D. Smith] writes that “Potato latkes fry with sizzles and pops, / percussion to the song of laughter—and in the small house’s / dark corners, the ghosts of ancestors tap their feet and smile.” (’Echoes’)

Jenevieve Carlyn, “Birds Sing the Harmonies of Stars”: Reading Merril D. Smith’s poetry collection, Held Inside the Folds of Time

The falling-off of autumn finds its expression in the days of the dead that come at the end of October and the beginning of November. Or maybe that’s better put the other way around: The season finds its corollary, its physical manifestation of the deeper spiritual truth, in the leaves that flash in one last bright color, then turn to brown and leafmeal on the ground.

And here on All Souls Day, I find my mind coming back to this poem, “They are all Gone into the World of Light,” by Henry Vaughan (1621–1695). Generally, I’m not much drawn by Vaughan. He lacks, for me, the phenomenology that Thomas Traherne brings to human perception, or George Herbert’s inspired willingness to be simple (though Vaughan describes himself as a disciple of that “blessed man,” Herbert). But . . . Vaughan’s “They are all Gone into the World of Light” has some deep turn from grief to faith, from the brightness of memory to the brightness of heaven, that speaks to us in a way we need as we contemplate the dead on All Souls Day.

Published in the 1655 second part of Vaughan’s collection Silex Scintillans, the poem consists of ten quatrains, rhymed abab and built from three line lengths: 5-4-5-3, five feet in the first and third lines, four in the second, and three in the fourth. The poem has some good lines: “I see them walking in an air of glory, / Whose light doth trample on my days,” and the famous first line. But the drive of the poem lies in its argument.

The key is its use of light as a metaphor and explanation. The poem opens with the grief-trope of abandonment: “They are all gone into the world of light! / And I alone sit ling’ring here.” The dead inhabit “the world of light.” Their memory “is fair and bright,” and “glows and glitters.” They walk “in an air of glory,” while the speaker lives in “dull and hoary” time, “Mere glimmering and decays.”

Grief inverts the world: the absent thing more substantial than present things, the ghost made real and reality made ghostly. For the grieving Vaughan, memory is still illuminated, even if it be only like the afterglow of sunset behind a hill:

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest,
After the sun’s remove.

And yet, the fading brightness of the dead in memory provides an image of Heaven. Or, even more, an actual presage of the afterlife, the “world of light” transformed from the contents of memory to the population of Heaven. Immediately after being crushed by grief — “I see them walking in an air of glory, / Whose light doth trample on my days” — Vaughan turns in the fourth stanza to apostrophize the virtues of hope and humility:

O holy Hope! and high Humility,
High as the heavens above!
These are your walks, and you have show’d them me
To kindle my cold love.

Were that not enough, he turns in the fifth stanza to apostrophize death: “Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just, / Shining nowhere, but in the dark.” Death is not the background of darkness into which gradually fade the lights of those who have died. It is instead the condition of the lights themselves, presaging Heaven.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: They are all Gone into the World of Light

I have a few friends who are religious, that is, who take their commitment to their religious teachings seriously. One is studying for lay ministry. In response to the entrance committee’s question about when she “heard her calling,” she said that she didn’t “hear a calling,” but that when she asked her god what she should do, the answer was always “Help,” and she did: the hungry, the dying. One friend told me he strived “to be the face and hands of Jesus in the world.” He assists immigrants, the elderly. I find their commitment profound. More profound than my vague intention to be kind, or kind-ish, to be a good person, or good-ish. I think about the men of my friend’s synagogue, who would volunteer on Christmas for the dispatchers at the fire station, police station, emergency services, whatever they could do as civilians so the Christmas-celebrators there could have an evening with their families. It interests me, this level of taking seriously the best teachings of deism, which, to my mind are less about the deity than about each other. But so much of what has spilled out of religious belief through the ages is something exactly other. Exactly the opposite of this axiom to take care of each other. As a species we are fearful, it seems, of the unknown, and particularly and most of all of the unknown other human beings with whom we must share this earth. I like this poem by Lauren Camp because of its almost inadvertent empathy, the startlement of the speaker to this moment of unlikely, even reluctant, resonance with an other.

Marilyn McCabe, in my melancholic friendship

My dear friend and fellow Bayit builder Steve Silbert just underwent chemo for Hairy Cell Leukemia. And from the infusion chair, he wrote and drew an extraordinary series of prayer-poems — the prayers he himself needed to pray, which he realized midweek could also probably speak to / for others navigating cancer and their caregivers / loved ones.

I remember sitting with my mom when she was in the infusion chair. Not for chemo — to treat her mycobacterial lung infection. The cocktail of meds she was on gave her neuropathy and destroyed her hearing before she and her doctors decided to stop treatment. Anyway: maybe that’s part of why these speak to me and move me so deeply.

I also know what it’s like to write one’s way through something difficult or painful. (Miscarriage poems are still available as a PDF, though the lulu chapbook has disappeared. And there are postpartum depression poems early in Waiting to Unfold that I hope have offered hope and companionship to others in those particular tight straits.) […]

Anyway: I hope you’ll click through to Steve’s beautiful work and will share it with folks you know who are navigating cancer or similar illness.

And while I’m talking about illness and healing, I also had the privilege of midwifing Adam Green’s beautiful collection Recover: A Teshuvah Journey Through Eating Disorder Treatment into the world. A different kind of illness, a different kind of healing, but kin to Steve’s work in the sense that both grapple with embodiment, suffering, and finding a way through.

Rachel Barenblat, Prayers for healing

Death can mark every door with soot
from a torch, let loose a plague of insects
from the sky. No coin can appease it,
but perhaps an amulet pinned to your
undershirt creates some kind of force
field. Still, the body is a hard book to read,
immersive text swirling with dull humors.

Luisa A. Igloria, Home Remedy

Perhaps the clearest example of the personal intersecting with the cosmic is the title poem, Pedestrian in the Multiverse. It plays with the idea of multiple universes in which every event may have different outcomes, recalling Schrödinger’s cat: alive in one possible universe and dead in another. The poem juxtaposes ordinary human concerns—the speaker ‘needs a jar of preserved lemons’ and carries ‘a shopping bag heavy with// apples’—with international violence, as bombers have ‘scored a direct hit’, and with cosmic conditions in which ‘there is only helium’, ‘the sun is a red giant’ and ‘gravity// is dead’. Written in the present tense, these moments appear to coexist, while the absence of a clear temporal relationship between them gives the poem a deliberately disjunctive structure. Its principal thread is the transformation of the opening phrases ‘my father runs towards me’, ‘he looks happy’ and ‘I am almost exactly the same’ into the concluding ‘he looks happy’ and ‘he is almost exactly the same’. The subtle exchange of identities suggests an ordinary consciousness moving through everyday life while surrounded by innumerable unrealised possibilities. In Booker’s hands, a scientific hypothesis becomes a metaphor for human experience: for all the lives that might have been lived but were not.

Throughout Pedestrian in the Multiverse, Booker brings apparently separate realms into productive contact. Memory revises the past, encounters with nature illuminate human vulnerability and responsibility, and cosmic speculation enlarges the significance of ordinary experience. The collection’s formal and thematic diversity is therefore not dispersive but integral to its achievement: each poem tests what happens when one way of seeing meets another. Intelligent, compassionate and alert to both intimate feeling and the wider world, this is a collection whose transformations continue to resonate beyond the individual poem.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Pedestrian in the Multiverse’ by Claire Booker

There’s a strand running through Jon Cone’s No Vibrato Hard Transcendence of engaging with other poets, with a tradition of his own making. These poets include Emily Dickinson, William Stafford, Jack Gilbert, James Wright and Jean Valentine, so it’s a specifically American lineage. His Dickinson poem, which has a title that’s too long to type out in full here, is the nearest thing he comes to direct imitation:

The strain- the pain
Of pale souls who wear
Winding sheets of rain –
Bent under the turning year –

Other poems are less directly acts of homage. ‘Throat Singing, for William Stafford’ takes Stafford’s ‘Traveling through the Dark’ and turns it into an account of Cone’s own encounter with a dead deer, one which, though it ends similarly to Stafford’s, represents a very different kind of moral dilemma to the older poet’s. But you need to read it yourself, I won’t spoil it for you.

Later in the pamphlet, we meet ‘MEMO: To Be Considered Later in the Cool of the Aleph Inn’, where the conversation with the poet it responds to is of a different order. The piece opens with a prose introduction that starts:

You utter maroon, you Billy Wordsworth! Not lonely as a cloud. No way. Clouds are pack animals.

The reference is clear enough, and the criticism to the point. The rest of the text consists of a list of potential alternative similes that Billy might have used, or maybe not. Here are a few:

Wander lonely as a process server
Wander lonely as the wildfire particulate
Wander lonely as the thick-headed levitator
Wander lonely as a receipt tossed by the curb
Wander lonely as the final horn

Any of which would have made the original poem more interesting and accurate.

But I don’t wish to give the impression that Cone only writes this kind of response poems. There are a range of more or less short pieces that deal with the poet’s direct experience of the world, often with pointed wit:

POEM

I visit the gun shop
to look at death poems

There are also a number of very fine prose poems, including the extraordinary ‘Father Gustav, S.J., Recalls Seeing the Jackson Pollock Exhibit for the First Time at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1967)’. Here’s an extract from around about the middle; ideally I’d give you the whole thing, but it would be better if you got the booklet and read it that way:

And thereby distractions were prevented from entering the cell of my consciousness as if I had shut a massive iron door. I saw a forest become a thick bank of cloud transform into the surface of a sea. I saw a strange bird with long beak and legs, wings outstretched, as if dancing. I saw snakes extended through thick clouds, and black creatures with bodies smudged and weird tongues where faces would be. I saw a large flatfish with the face of a woman, and a series of ghostly apparitions floating upon bandages stained red and green and yellow. Tall grasses marched toward me going this way and that. Eight tall black trunks seemed to lead a furious parade. The colors were feverish, dirty, dull. Gray and black, orange and yellow, and beige. I did not know how to calibrate the noise the sounds made as I looked at them with my eyes.

Cone is a fascinating writer who, in his own quiet way, is setting about the task of redefining what an individual poetic voice might be like. Go read him.

Billy Mills, A Plethora of Pamphlets Reviewed for your Pleasure

It’s been far too long since I shared a poem I love by another writer. But we’re back! This week’s featured author is the brilliant Jennie Owen with an evocative piece from misty Lancashire. Halloween may have been a few days ago, but Jennie’s poem speaks to Pendle and the ghosts of wronged women.

The trials of the Pendle witches in 1612 are among the most famous witch trials in English history, and some of the best recorded of the 17th century. Jennie is looking at ‘dark tourism’ across the north of England in her creative-critical PhD and has written a cycle of poems that respond to the landscape and history of Pendle. I’m thrilled to be able to share one of them here.

Jennie Owen is a Senior Lecturer and Staff Tutor in Creative Writing with The Open University. She is a Pushcart, Best of the Net and Forward Prize nominated poet, who has been published in a wide variety of journals, magazines, and anthologies. Jennie is currently reading for her PhD with Manchester Metropolitan University, with a focus on poetry and traumascapes. Her collection Tips for Collectors of the Macabre, is available from Yaffle Press. Hagstruck, a collection about the Pendle witches, will be published Spring 2027.

I love how Jennie works with sound in her poetry: the layering, the litanies. This poem is richly evocative of both time and place and calls on the sense that landscapes ‘remember’ or hold the things that have happened on them and in them. Read this piece out loud. Then read it again by candlelight. It becomes a kind of spell.

Pendle, Winter 2024

Hiking down down down
to the distant demdike,
we finally understand
that this is an earth
that shifts in an instant,
shaped in the daylight palm,
it warms wax to cold curse

it bends liquid to solid,
jars and drowns strangers
as they shin up far green folds
traipse through redfearn,
in and out of wet robey moss,
past bulcock grass so sharp
it bleeds pins at the scar. […]

Helen Mort, Featured Poet: Jennie Owen

This poem gets much of its power from simple phrasing and a clear overall arc, contrasting meek stillness and suppression with the grand cosmic and historical movements that are first presented, as it were, in an objective point of view, then, in a startling twist, from the point of view of the deaf and silent dead. What makes the poem marvellous and hauntingly memorable is its combination of forceful simplicity with ripples of suggestion that tug the mind in many different directions, hinting at complicated, contradictory, fluidly shifting layers of feeling as we read.

Some ripples flow from the associations of words. Take “safe” for a start. Metre gives this word quiet but thought-provoking emphasis, making us hear it simultaneously in very different ways. We can hear the speaker as contemplating and envying the way the dead are shielded from the shocks of worldly life, like snails in their shells. Or it can suggest that the dead are safely disposed of, tucked away and kept from bothering the living. In this sense, we may think of Hamlet’s words as he hides Polonius’s body – “Safely stowed!” or Macbeth asking the First Murderer whether Banquo is definitely dead and hearing the reassurance that “Safe in a ditch he bides / With twenty trenched gashes in his head, / The least a death to nature.” As the stanza develops there’s a constant flickering between thinking of the dead as enviably protected and thinking of them as deprived. If “chambers” and “sleep” suggest comfortable security, “Untouched by Morning – / and untouched by Noon” suggests deprivation. “Meek” suggests that the submissiveness of the dead is a matter of weak will but it also invokes the blessing of the meek in the Beatitudes. To some the “roof of stone” in line five might suggest the strength of protection enjoyed by the dead but the word “Stone” seems to me to fall with a chilling weight, and its contrast with “Rafter of satin” makes me think of the iron fist in the velvet glove, the implacable force behind the superficial comfort of the padded prison.

Edmund Prestwich, Emily Dickinson’s Safe in their Alabaster Chambers

Ach, it’s sad to watch them, busing to ad-biz
boredom every dawn—grown up now, the scruffy
crew we used to shepherd to school down six
dutiful blocks. The things we dreamed for them! Raw
enchantment. Princess-oranges from Prokofiev.
Firebirds from Stravinsky. Ghazals from Urdu.
Grammars turned to glamours, that little tongue-twist.
How’d they get stuck here, in the world as it is?
In nothing more ensorcelled than turquoise hair,
jewelry-glitzed? At least they’re not in Iraq,
karma be thanked, but the state of the S&P
leaves them slack-jawed, hanging like zombies onto
morning commutes and late-night television.
Numb, we wait. They don’t tell us what they dream.

Maryann Corbett, A Slant Approach to Halloween

— On a cheerier note, one of the things we/I still can do is talk up our favourite authors, humans, and perhaps especially those who publish with small presses. Alice Major is a beloved poet and essayist from my hometown. Her latest book is Triangularity out with University of Alberta Press.

— I can tell you firsthand what a delightful and kind person Alice is and what a rock she is in our writing community. Her thoughts on poetry, and reflections on her history of writing poetry, and on living a whole life in and with poetry are so worth reading. I love that she talks about not imposing her own “concerns and preoccupations” on the poetry and poetics of others. She says, “We haul our whole life history into our poetics, even if any given poem has nothing to do with personal biography. We each bring our own ways of exploring the multiple dimensions of this world and assumptions about what matters in creating a poem. I have decided opinions about what matters to me, my own belief systems. But I try not to lay my triangular expectations over the work of others.”

— And this for me, really encapsulates the truth and generosity of Alice Major.

— One more quotation from the book which I also love: “But I do believe, as an article of faith, that the only route to solutions starts from individual bonding and the way it leads us to a wider narrative of love.”

— The way Alice lives is an example to anyone embarking on the creative life. She lives her words about love and community in such generous ways.

Shawna Lemay, The Writerly Ecstasy

As most of you will have noticed, France is being particularly French at the moment, and in Paris there is a rather oppressive atmosphere as everyone waits to see what the weekend and the start of next week will bring. On Monday the lycée and university students return after the Toussaint break, and we’ll find out whether we are back to the impromptu homeschooling of our lively (*euphemism alert*) 11 year old. He’s away on a rugby trip with his team all this week, and yesterday they won a tournament. To celebrate, they built a barricade of suitcases and furniture across the door of their dormitory, sang some patriotic and/or vulgar songs, and threw shoes at the “police” (their coaches). Suffice it to say, I’m not sure things are going to calm down in France any time soon.

This is all highly traditional of course. France is in many ways a much more conservative and traditional society than the UK. One of the many positive aspects of that respect for tradition struck me this week after I picked up a pocket-sized paperback that caught my eye at one of the local bookshops. Cent poèmes pour voyager is an anthology of the 100 poems shortlisted in this year’s RATP poetry competition. (The RATP is the Parisian transport authority, the equivalent of TFL (Transport for London) in the UK.) Paris, like London and no doubt many other cities, has a poetry on the métro scheme, in which short poems are displayed in métro carriages. But this anthology is not a selection of existing poems that were chosen for display, but the best 100 entries in a national competition — a concours — for amateur poets from anywhere in France and of all ages.

There are two shortlisted poems here by seven-year-olds. Here’s a prize-winning single couplet by Amélia Lepeltier, aged 7, from Maisons-Alfort, south-east of Paris:

À mon rêve, tous les jours, je mets un marque-page Pour que le soir je retrouve tous les personnages

Every day, I put a book-mark in my dream To find my characters at night again

I also really liked this one by Noé Potocki, aged 8, from Montreuil, east of Paris:

la vie c’est des virgules à l’infini

life is commas unendingly

And what about this one by Adèle Fleurot, aged 10, from Paris (tricky to translate because the words are so ordinary, but it has a lovely sound and rhythm as well as a clever meaning):

Vivre et mourir Telle est notre destinée Cher avenir je te souhaite Un beau passé

To live and to die Such is our fate Dear future, I wish you A beautiful past

What is particularly delightful about these three little epigrams by children is not only that they are so successful and accomplished but also that they are so unmistakably French — in their forms (alexandrines in the first; the sort of short lines and scattered rhyme we recognise from the major surrealists in the second), but also in their style and preoccupations. Two are unselfconsciously about the meaning of la vie.

Generally speaking I’m a bit of a sceptic about poetry competitions (the recent UK Forward Prize results were as dismal as ever), and the resulting publications can often be pretty deadly. But this one is charming! How did they pull it off?

Victoria Moul, Gangster toads and the meaning of life

If I ever cross paths with Ruth Padel, I should probably buy her a pint. In 2019, I was about to start an MA in Creative Writing, specifically poetry, after 20 years out of academia, and even though I’d spent those 20 years teaching in schools, I was at that point still woefully unaware of great swathes of modern poetry. I knew it. But I hadn’t waited this long just to do a half-arsed job. I hit that reading list hard. The poetry, of course, but mostly the books about poetry. My reading notes from that time range from delighted (‘YES!’ / ‘Love this’ / ‘Zeugma is the best word I’ve ever seen’ / ‘THIS’) to the anxious (‘I can’t get my head round this’ / ‘I am hating this book’ / ‘WTAF’).

Thank goodness, then, that quite early on, before I got myself entirely overwhelmed, I read 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem by the poet Ruth Padel (Vintage, 2002). It’s the book that came out of The Sunday Poem, the column she wrote for The Independent on Sunday between 1998-2001 – each week, there was a modern poem, accompanied by an essay that turned it upside down and shook it until all the good stuff fell out of its pockets. 52 of those columns made it into this book. They’re technical, microscopically closely-read, and just what I needed back then to get my head in the zone. I was startled by them at first, worried by all the things I hadn’t spotted myself. But by number 4, I was hooked. […]

In her introduction, Padel laments the fact that so many people see modern poetry as difficult: ‘many people today … no longer expect poetry to be there for them, to welcome them.’ She’s on an absolute mission in this book to show us poems and say ‘Look at what this poet’s doing! Isn’t it fantastic!’ I love that. I’m all for that. It doesn’t have to make us feel stupid. ‘The point is pleasure, after all,’ she says. And it is a pleasure, to witness her digging iambs and consonant rhymes and transferred epithets out of poems and holding them wriggling up to the light. When she shows us Sean O’Brien’s poem Rain (which, she says, should be cartoon-captioned BLOKE LEAVING PUB IN RAIN FAILS TO HUMOUR FURIOUS GIRLFRIEND BY WRITING POEM ON WET WALK HOME), we’re shown how the poet uses dactyls (DA-dum-dum) and anapests (da-da-DUM) to mimic the hammering rain, and then we’re shown how this metrical wizardry only begins when the rain does. (My 2019 self wrote SO COOL! next to that bit.) This is not stuff that you have to be aware of to enjoy a poem, of course, but Padel gives us a ‘technical illumination’ that lets us glimpse the workings of each poem, and that is a gift.

Nia Broomhall, Week 33: 52 Ways to Look at a Poem

even the light is gold
with loathing. to go in
terror of the calendar;
the pink and waferish
moon. who do i think
i am? this black
discerning skirt hangs
slack upon the wire
frame of failure. no
good can come of it.

Fran Lock, “OPTIMUM TRAJECTORY”

Ghazals, it turns out (and I knew this on some level already), satisfy one aspect of my sensibility while offending another. I love phrase repetition. It’s one of the first exercises I do with first-year students — a simple technique that lends a piece of writing an unmistakeably poetic character without the need for end-rhyme, fixed meter or floweriness. It disrupts narrative flow — that is, it makes it hard to slip into a prosaic account of a series of events, because some feature of the whole must stay fixed even as the rest moves forward. The attention of the writer must also stay fixed.

Because I am a creature of many and various fixations, therefore, I find it easy to think in the broad shape of ghazals. On the other hand, a ghazal is made out of couplets, and each couplet must be syntactically complete, ending on the repeated phrase. This allows for very little variation in build-up, and restricts the extent to which a poem can shift in tone and intensity. My instinct when first drafting ‘Asteroid City’ was to alternate between short and long sentences, gradually extending the long ones, to give the impression of something heaping, gathering — a tower starting to list. The ghazal won’t let me do that. It’s made out of equal units, evenly spaced footsteps.

I suspect this is why you don’t see many ghazals published in leading journals. Difficult to describe any one template that dictates the shape of poems prized by journal editors, but certainly an extremely common feature is the parting blow, the sting in the tail, the ending you don’t see coming. Here are a few from journals I have immediately to hand:

“how do you get rid of what you loved / when it no longer works” (Sirka Elspaß, translated by Martyn Crucefix, in The Little Review #2)

“In the third person I exist for now, / a sentence in his mouth.” (Megan O’Rourke, Poetry Magazine, October 2026)

“We already know, he sighed. / We already know all your questions.” (Per Olvmyr, Poetry Wales, Summer 2026)

Hard to pull this off when some idea of your ending has been advertised in the very first line of the poem, then immediately reinforced by the second. Instead, I suppose there has to be a sense of inevitability, of being followed or haunted, as in Dorianne Laux’s ‘Moon Ghazal’, or of the speaker performing a reliable ritual, as in Patricia Smith’s ‘Hip-Hop Ghazal’. The poem, in effect, has no ending — only a jumping-off point, like a ghost train coming back to where it started.

Jon Stone, DIARY / On Ghazals

The little pig’s house of straw. K’s bed. The second pig’s house of sticks. Ophelia’s river. Often the main characters are neglected. Which birds lost their feathers for Icarus, which bees their wax? What about when you were turned to stone by Medusa—were you wearing a scarf? Where’s the scarf? Look how a baby lamb leaps. That’s gravity, spring’s main character. Your honour, it was the bullet not the gun.

Gary Barwin, Two Fairy Tales

Poetry often dodges commercial reasoning as most sales are generated through readings and festivals or directly from the poet themselves rather than bookshops. However, the cover still has to attract potential readers and be distinctive enough to stand out on piles of books on a stall.

I’d been lucky with my first two poetry book covers, for “Yellow Torchlight and the Blues” and “Mimicking a Snowdrop”. The publishers took the title poem and found an image that reflected the poems: a battered jazz poster featuring a saxophone, and a snowdrop emerging as a sign of hope from rubble. The third, “Ghosts in the Desert” could not take that approach as it did not have a title poem so the publisher took their favoured poem from the collection and illustrated that. Hence the collection having a figure skater executing a layback spin.

My fourth collection “The Significance of a Dress” presented a challenge. The title poem is set in a wedding dress hire shop in a refugee camp. Visiting the camp just to take a photo for a book cover was both impractical and expensive. Using an existing photo would require buying a licence due to copyright and might come with conditions for use. Taking a photo of a new wedding dress would also come up against copyright issues. While walking around Leicester’s city centre, I saw a dress hanging in a charity shop. It was a perfect match for the dress described in the poem and very much preloved. I took a photo and converted the photo to a cross-stitch design. I’d not long finished the cross stitching when my publisher suggested having some textile design for the cover. My cross stitched wedding dress was then adapted for the cover. My cross stitch is done is shades of white, but the cover is sepia.

This too was a deliberate decision: clean white covers on a book stall at a fair or festival discourage browsers from picking them up since sticky finger marks stand out. That’s not a problem with a sepia cover. It’s also a reason to consider matt covers rather than glossy ones: it’s not just that gloss reflects light, but it also marks more easily. Sometimes the tactile nature of covers – how does it feel to pick up and read the book – gets overlooked.

My original embroidery had another outing when Arachne Press held a “Ten Years of Cover Art Design” at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery in London.

Emma Lee, The Art of Book Cover Design

Poetry Hikes is my new YouTube channel in which each episode I go on a hike somewhere, show off the woods and any interesting features, and then sit down to read a few poems to viewers. That’s it. Nothing complicated. But why?

I’ve been thinking of ways to share poetry with more people, especially people who maybe aren’t already on my “friends” list or follow me on social media, and people who may not regularly read or even seek out poems. Exposing people to new poets is one of my favorite things about teaching. Poetry readings at colleges, bookstores and other venues are great, but they tend to have limited audiences—mostly people who are already eager poetry readers (or are friends with the poet).

And somewhere along the way I was inspired by several YouTube creators who post videos of their hiking and camping trips. The Wondering Woodsman, Maxim Outdoors, Walter Zolna, and Chimfwembe are among some of the accounts I follow. These channels have helped me find new places to hike, offered useful tips, and are just relaxing to watch.

I don’t have much to offer on hiking and camping that those creators don’t already do, but the outdoors is a big part of my poetry life, and I thought maybe if I combine the two interests, I could open up new readers for some of my favorite poets. And there are lots of good poetry podcasts, so I didn’t want to start another.

So I bought an inexpensive GoPro camera, picked a poet for my first hike, and headed to a local trail to see if this was something I’d want to keep doing. The result is Episode One, which takes place on Haycock Mountain in Bucks County PA, and I share two poems by Todd Davis. Episode Two continues that hike with two poems by David Budbill. I also get a little lost.

Grant Clauser, I Started a New Project: Poetry Hikes

いつせいに雁翔つ空の重さかな　高久清美

issei ni kari tatsu sora no omosa kana

geese depart
all together
the weight of the sky…

Kiyomi Takaku

from Seika (Blue Blossoms), a haiku collection of Kiyomi Takaku, Honami Shoten, Tokyo, 2010

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 1, 2026)

What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I was actually just asked about my process and I ended up writing a response in a day-log Susan Sontag-style:

My Process: How to Write a Poem

1.     Alarm at 5:20

1 go to bed early the night before. It helps.

2.     Up at 5:30. Put on the kettle. Put on music—loud, perhaps Julieta Venegas or Natalia Lafourcade. Or maybe something in English today. Go outside—Stuart and Zapote are howling at the door for breakfast, and the rest of the cats come running when you call them. Pick bitter herbs from the garden. Venus is still bright at dawn.

3.     Bitter tea, then make espresso for LG and me, while he makes breakfast for the boys

4.     6:20 Boys to school. Start chores: feed horses, birds. Check for new calves

5.     8 AM breakfast with LG. We wonder what we are going to do with our house problem. Maybe cry, maybe not.

6.     9 AM get distracted with hundreds of things that are not on the to-do list, or distracted with what is on it, or talking or observing or bringing a calf down from the cerro or making yogurt or teaching a kid how to communicate with the horses or school meetings or gardening.

7.     Forget to do some things that should be done

8.     12:14 PM sit down to write. Feel like a fraud. Write a paragraph of nonsense. Give up.

9.     12:56 hang up a load of laundry

10.  12:58 there are swallows and clouds crisscrossing the sky like the clotheslines

11.  1:10 something terrible in the news. Make lunch.

12.  2:50 kids home. Eat lunch with them and whoever else shows up. We laugh, talk about all the things of the day. Beautiful.

13.  4:33 Do dishes and other things that no one else notices. Something terrible on the news. Write another line.

14.  7:35 boys come in from chores, playing, etc., sit on the couch and listen to their chatter or silence. Make something for dinner. Close the gate, accompanied by 6.5 dogs. Stargaze for a moment. Call the cats. Check on the horses.

15.  8:58 Sudoku in bed with help from SK. M tells me about the birds and his homework. Maybe write a poem tomorrow. Or maybe this life is one already.

What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pine trees, VapoRub, cold mountain air on fallen leaves, stammpot or Beppe soup remind me of Canada.

It’s a little cliché, but the petrichor of the first rain on the soil after eight months of dry season is something I first experienced in Mexico. The wild cempesuchil (marigold) in the fall is also so evocative of Mexico for me.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lisa López Smith (rob mclennan)

The truth is, we poets don’t have a bloody clue what we’re doing most of the time. Phrases and lines arrive out of the nowhere, as if the poem were busying itself writing us. That’s why ars poetica poems are so common: we’re desperately trying to figure out why we don’t have a clue. I flicked through Nick Laird’s Up Late and picked out four artes poeticae. One about paper clips; another, a night sky; another, a marriage:‘Poetry’s the art of introducing words / that haven’t met & getting them to sit together / in a small room…’ and one where the terrible fish he spots in a mirror isn’t his ageing self, but a poem, which ‘swims off immediately / and with good reason. / I would eat it for its secrets.’

Last week I was in Edinburgh to hear Alice Oswald reading from her new book Rhapsody, A Manifesto. At one point (I’m probably misquoting here) she said ‘I’d rather teach luck than teach poetry workshops’. Of course, I immediately wondered how I could go about teaching luck. There was some research in the 1990s which identified the key elements that make us ‘lucky’. Most, if not all, might apply to good writing practice too:

• Stay open to your surroundings. (Absolutely. Pay heed to the world: it might not be around tomorrow. The task of the writer, says Anne Carson, is to pay attention to the small things, because they make big differences.)
• Listen to your intuitions. (Well maybe. Go with your gut instincts, but be prepared to challenge them later. They’re as often as not banal and predictable.)
• Think positively. (Actually – most of the time I encourage writers to write their way through their doubts and nurture their uncertainties, because doubt is always so much more interesting than knowledge.
• Be determined – stick with it. (Stop moaning. Writers write. End of.)
• Expand your networks. (Read lots of poems. Find a writing group. Go to readings. Read lots more poems.)Subscribe now

Psychologists explain the mystery of the writing process by describing the competing Default Mode Network, which draws together memory and emotions in the daydreamy background while the Executive Control Network keeps things focussed and ordered. But when the ECN relaxes a bit (when you’re out walking the dog, listening to a concert, or lying half awake), the DMN delivers that killer line you didn’t know was there. And then there’s Hyper-Associative Thinking, Semantic Priming and Transient Hypofrontality. No wonder we fall back on the poem as paper clip.

It was Horace who wrote the first verse ars poetica over two thousand year ago – a letter of advice to a Roman family aspiring to be poets. He reminds them that a poem requires unity, underpinned by harmony and proportion; that a poet’s qualifications should include common sense, knowledge of character and high ideals. Gosh, that last one’s been lost in translation. I could count on one hand the poets I’ve met who display anything like common sense. But he did hit the nail on the head when it comes to process versus product: parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus – ‘Mountains groan in childbirth and out will pop a silly wee mouse.’ I know the feeling.

John Glenday, Ars Poetica: on Poems about Writing Poetry

Sometimes, I’ll get overwhelmed thinking about how Catapult, Soft Skull, and Counterpoint just went out of business. I never thought that they would be gone. They were well-funded until they disappeared, taking their books with them.

Then, I remember the stars. The stars have been here for millions of years, glowing in the night. In the end, our existence is tiny, and everything I do is both important and unimportant at the same time.

But I remember, too, that literature has endured through centuries, others believing in the magic and wonder of story. I believe in books. I believe in my upcoming memoir, Little Soldiers. I believe in publishing. I believe in Red Hen Press.

On days when we don’t have enough money or will to keep going, we have joy. We have wonder. We find more books that bring us to the light, that reach across time like stars. We believe there will be a way to keep publishing non-corporate books, that people still believe in this work.

We are about to launch a new website, which is going to help us. We aren’t due for anything big or transformative or earth-shaking. We are due to start dancing. To notice the sky. To note all the things that we have to be grateful for, including the people who keep holding us to the light. So here is to wonder and magic, to more than survival—to thriving.

Kate Gale, Our Flash of Stars: On the Wonder and Magic of Living

This week’s task is to get the final proofs out for the eco-gothic anthology, which is slower going than I’d planned. I still have a handful of chaps to make decisions on left from the summer reading period, plus some really great new full-length projects to choose from coming in now. We’ve already released a couple of longer projects this summer and will be adding more to the schedule in among the shorter books. The recent Sharon McPeter’s Jewels and Amy Lyon’s Seizures are prose memoir hybrid projects that have turned out really nicely and I can’t wait to do more. They take a little more time in the layout, being longer and more dense than the usual poetry chaps, but are highly enjoyable to work on. I also found a cool way to still add a handmade touch on a recent chap […] by creating a slip-cover edition you can get in the shop exclusively.

In other news, ballots have been delivered to drop boxes and we are staring down what is likely to be a batshit November, so I am struggling hard to stay away from social media when not work related and avoid the usual doomscroll to protect my own peace. November, with the drastically shortened days and the turn toward winter is already filled with landmines and losses, I don’t need to make it worse.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 11/2/2026

Three days later, I email my publisher. So…what now? Do you sell it? Do I sell it? How do I sell it? How do I get anyone to read this thing?

And that’s the big problem. Now that there’s a product, how do you sell it? Well, as an independent writer working outside of “traditional” literary circles, I have no network, no built-in inner circle to cross-promote with. I don’t have thousands of social media followers waiting for a buy link. It’s just me.

My publisher, as incredibly kind as he is, can’t give me the calm, stolid heart needed to just let things fall where they may. For the first month, I become utterly obsessed. I have got to sell this book! I send out email after email, asking for reviews. I change my author profile on the publisher’s site every hour (how do I make myself more exciting?). I want the names and numbers of anyone who buys a copy so I can add them to the tally in my head (maybe I’ll get one of those giant fundraising thermometers and keep it by my desk, or just scratch tally marks into the wall like I’m in an 18th-century gaol). And, on top of that, I want the names and numbers of anyone who doesn’t buy a copy (that’s another thermometer) so I can ask them to explain themselves. I stay up all night, a promoter who only knows how to write, and that’s when it hits me—there’s no joy. I am not happy. My book has been published, and I am not happy. What, am I going to start badgering people on the street, thrusting books at them, demanding their wallets? Buy my book! I promise you, it’s good! And then another realization hits me: nobody is asking me to do this. Nobody is keeping track. My friends are proud; my family’s proud; my parents are proud. And since I am my father’s daughter, I do some digging too. Most indie poetry books sell at most 50 copies in the first six months, maybe 75 after a year. The math doesn’t math, but, okay. Okay. This is…reasonable. The whole world won’t read it, but nobody was reading it before, right? You kept it to yourself, remember? And now, it’s out there, in the world. A small, few corners of it, but hey, what do you want, the moon? (Yes, but that will have to wait.)

The Infinite Digital Shelf

Looking over the table of contents of my own book (a collection structured as an almanac of dates spanning from 712 CE to the 2020 pandemic—yes, this is a plug, yes, it’s good! I promise!), the irony hits me. My writing ‘explores the slow passage of time and the voices that refuse to be erased by the years’ (per my incredibly kind, incredibly thorough, incredibly encouraging publisher). If the subject of the art itself spans centuries, why am I acting like if a certain number of copies don’t sell, the door’s going to slam shut? After all, I’m the one who opened it. It’ll stay open as long as I want it to. Books, as any motivational library banner can tell us, are forever.

There’s no expiration date on literature. A collection doesn’t vanish if it isn’t cleared from a bookstore display in thirty days. It can sit quietly on that infinite digital shelf, just waiting for anyone browsing the catalog to happen across it.

So, once I let go of the anxiety of immediate validation, a plague we have never been able to eradicate, I stop expecting to sell a million copies. I look at my book, a bound copy of my words that I can hold in my hands, and the joy, miraculously, returns. I start focusing on slow, meaningful connections. My dad tells people at church. I tell people at work. I join Bluesky. I become a Goodreads author. I donate a copy of the collection to my local library. I drop off a few at the indie bookstore down the street. I reach out to Trish Hopkinson. It’s small, and it’s manageable, and with each action, there’s that joy.

Thirty Years to Publish, Three Days to Lose the Joy – guest post by Kate LaDew (Trish Hopkinson)

It’s been a week since the most extraordinary event.

From the moment that the Brontë Society asked Anna and me to curate this year’s Poetry at the Parsonage, we knew we had to seize this chance to do something out of the ordinary. On 1st October, I published “Neurodiversity, accessibility, bogs” on this site, explaining how the radical, rule-breaking nature of the bog has not just inspired us to write differently, but to live differently. And this applies to the way we organise events.

For the first time, in this article, I spoke about a time when I’d been singled out and publicly criticised in a conference by a speaker who had been distracted by my inability to sit still and quiet during her presentation. And I wrote: “inspired by the queer, fluid, rule-breaking ecosystem of the bog, and determined not to organise the sort of event which exclude me or anyone else who cannot or will not be still and silent, we’ve mixed it up. Or mossed it up. We’ve fenned it, moored it, queered it. Bogged it”.

We took our lead from the moors, and we broke all the usual binaries of audience and reader, and we smashed the expectation that poetry audiences sit in silent rows facing at the stage. Instead, there was constant movement, constant creation, audience members writing and painting and gluing their own Book of Bogs throughout the day as they listened and responded – you can see some examples here. [photos]

The open mic happened in a circle, as a conversation: speaking to and with each other through poetry. At one point, I remember saying to Jane Clarke, who was sitting next to me “There are so many writers” – because this event brought beautiful poetry, beautiful thoughts, out of everyone. And such beautiful listening – look!

But what about those poets who’d travelled across the country – in Jane’s case across the sea – to read to us? How did it feel to tables of people who were busily engaged in creating their own work as they listened? Was it distracting? Disrespectful? Did they feel ignored? No, it seemed, they did not. When an event is framed by an expectation of interaction and mutuality, it seems that readers and speakers can reframe movement and noise in the room. Participants who are painting, writing, sticking, moving between tables to borrow a crayon in the right shade of green are expressing interest, engagement, and enthusiasm. The experience is transformed.

So Victoria Gatehouse said “There was so much joy and a real sense of connection in the room … it was truly inspiring and memorable”, Jane loved it and said it was”epic”, David Morley called it was “one of the most exciting poetry events I’ve ever had the honour to be part of …. It was a total symphony of poetry. Beauty and truth”. When we make events inclusive, they are better not just for those who are usually excluded, but for everyone. Rebecca Yorke, Director of the Brontë Parsonage who funded and hosted the event, said it was “extraordinarily beautiful.”

Then to finish it off, a Mass Wuther, of course, and dancing away the adrenalin and joy to an excellent set by DJ Poppy Turner, and a drive over the moors through the wild winds, flooded roads and sideways rain of Storm Boelo with my co-host and good friend Anna Chilvers smiling next to me, and something in my broken, moor-loving ADHD self was healed.

Clare Shaw, Bog magic

I’ve noticed a bit of recent grumbling in the poetry zeitgeist, some opining and gnashing of teeth. I’ve done a little myself, about prohibitive submission fees that suggest a poetry Ponzi-scheme in all but name. I hear of algorithmically calculated formulas for prize-winning poems, the word ‘gatekeepers’ gets wheeled out into the light for some exercise with depressing regularity, and we all secretly cower in fear of being mauled for our wretched doggerel by the Moul. On BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Verb’, Poet and Sunday Times poetry critic Graeme Richardson suggested a flooded market of forgettable poetry, destined not for the canon, but an inevitable oblivion. In Poetry London, Joey Connolly lets fly the barb of a ‘wildlife-encounter-anecdote-to-epiphany pipeline’ which certainly finds its mark in this wet flesh.

All the while, we poets have one eye on the machine-mediated possibility of the day when an AI generated (stolen) poem prompts a quivering, numinous ecstasy in the masses like nothing before it, and we shabby pen-people are dispatched to the dustbin of history. I don’t think that’s going to happen, and not because of some shiny ‘100% human-crafted’ sticker on the front cover of a collection, as though it were a hipster’s spelt sourdough from Borough market, but because of the effect of writing poetry on poets themselves. Poet brain, is a thing.

There’s no money in poetry, at least not beyond that enjoyed by a vanishingly small cohort and good luck to them, say I. If the gatekeepers are editors and academics, coffee-circles around their eyes and much put-upon, publishing each other’s collections, surely that speaks of nothing darker than simple friendship? I don’t think the general warmth and kindness of the poetry community is celebrated enough, and to be a little corndog about it, ya know, the point not being the destination, but the friends you made along the way and all that. (I just sicked a little into my mouth, so you don’t have to.)

I suppose the reason I bother with such a potentially pointless endeavour, grimly freighted with its yearning for self-actualisation and frequent disappointments, is all about the process of neural re-wiring that it inevitably stimulates. The act of shaping a language as exquisitely nuanced as English, with the potential for subtle shifts of meaning underwritten with music, its vast colour palette of graduated shade and light, the warp and weft of its textures, is compelling because of what the making of it makes of me. I can hold in my mind layered, structured abstractions in a way I once couldn’t, can feel currents of thought eroding damns and dykes and flooding forgotten plains. Poet brain has taken me by the hand to the edge of the ineffable; ‘bursting out most bright/From a great mountain’s heart into the light.’.

I lay in bed this morning, idly musing over a possibly arcane mathematics, in which a sonnet, or sequence of sonnets, might build through sound into a Mandelbrot fractal, precipitating the volta as an event horizon, or enacting an entanglement through the ‘spooky action at a distance’ of its structured music, perhaps even tricking us, like Zen’s Goose-in-the-bottle koan into a glimpse of the tesseract, or the Godhead.

This, this is the kind of shit I write poetry for, not for prizes, or likes and clicks, but the personally transformative indulgence of curiosity bordering on obsession, an immanent gnosis in the effervescent and eternal present.

Robot poets, do your worst, I’ll be out here like always, biting the day to the core, 100% human-crafted.

james mcconachie, Poet Brain

The night sounds louder than day because the mind amplifies what the senses cannot experience. Above the crunch of the wheel on the road, the darkness outside pours in through the windows left open. Beyond a sharp curve, a sudden light swings into view- two men with a bright torch walking toward a destination they appear confident about.

We slow down when we see the first herd of cows sitting on the road, and then many more along the way. I had thought the cows came over to graze and at sunset return home to the villages and the families that tend them. The driver tells us that these cows have neither bells around their necks nor ropes through their noses. They are cows that have passed their productive years, he says. Often after six calvings, they are turned out because they no longer yield enough milk.

These cows sit in pitch darkness, surrounded by the forest. It’s not about food, there is enough grass to graze on the slopes of the hills. But is that what makes a home? Do they carry memories of the human family, warm and dry spaces smelling sweetly of dry grass and hay?

We assign value to living beings based on their usefulness. What makes me useful? As if in response, the engine of the car switches off. I share the darkness with the cows turned out into the wilderness.

Uma Gowrishankar, The Cows in the Forest