Books and Music – Page 9

October 2, 2022October 2, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 39

I am trying to focus on the good in the days. What hope survives the hurricane and what small joys it misses entirely: the bones that are surprisingly strong, and the seemingly fragile, tiny wings of things that hide and hold on. Maybe in a world that is so arbitrary, the real good is to walk behind a storm and gather the good. Willfully accepting.
The students are playing in the park this weekend. While they pin themselves, and spirit gum themselves into their costumes to rehearse, I photograph the white mushrooms growing on a tree stump. White, marshmallow ears.
Ren Powell, The Dead are Listening

Each memory—
                 a shattered
puzzle.
      It could be raining
on the inside
      of this skin.
Romana Iorga, Forecast

Experience collects, filling my cracked cup. I hold it tight
between my finger bones. It is all that I know.
Charlotte Hamrick, All the Days Come ‘Round

But back to basics. An A. A W. An ampersand. The Hebrew letter Shin (ש). Ellipses, those no-see-um markers which represent what isn’t there. […] If one wants to edit out the ellipses, one needs to put them back in in order to signal that they are gone.
A door is a door but it is also the Hebrew letter Dalet (ד). Why am I telling you this? I don’t even speak or write Hebrew. But that’s why. As a child, I sat in synagogue and marvelled at the books filled with knurls that were letters. Scrolls filled with them, lung-sized rectangles of close-inked text on sewn-together pages of parchment; letters, crowned exoskeletons both etymological and entomological. Scrolls crowned in literal silver crowns, wrapped in velvet, kept in a gold-lit ark. […] The sounds of chanting, the cantor with a silver pointer in the shape of a pointing finger. And the marvel that these letterforms, these mouthshapes, were unintelligible to me except as script or music. The calligraphic maze. An amazement. The shapes of letters as tactile, aesthetic, their meaning not in their meaning but in their form, the inky music of looking, the region of the brain, evolving with these letters, the calligraphic region, the frontal majuscule, cerebral longhand, the amygdalet (ד), the homunculus not holding a pen but made of language, of letters. […]
Gary Barwin, Language2 or the square root of minus language. [ellipses in original]

It always strikes me, when I finish a sketchbook, how much like a diary it actually is. During this journey through a little more than a year — a year that’s seen a lot of upheaval and emotion and change — the images and the choices recall exactly where I was and what I was thinking, while to the viewer, they probably look like innocuous still lives, landscapes and skyscapes. In some ways, this visual diary is more personal and secret and coded than written words could ever be.
Beth Adams, A Visual Diary

When I first read The Artist’s Way, I didn’t grasp its connection to the modern recovery movement. Each chapter starts with the words “Recovering a Sense of.” Laid out in a twelve-week plan (I later learned that Cameron is a recovering alcoholic) the chapter titles end in positive, affirming words: “safety,” “identity,” “power,” “integrity,” “possibility,” “abundance,” “connection,” “strength,” “compassion,” “self-protection,” “autonomy,” and, finally, “faith.” My favorite parts of the book, however, were the sidebar quotes. From M. C. Richard: “Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance;” from Jean Houston: “at the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.” Read in order, these flashes of insight created their own text.
So how well does The Artist’s Way, and other books in this genre, hold up after thirty years? They are still worth reading, as long as readers understand that there is much more to an artist’s life than what they present. One of the glaring omissions in these books, which strikes me as odd since they’re mostly written by women, is a frank discussion of the obstacles that women face when they attempt to carve out some time for themselves in order to practice their art. Cameron touches on it in Chapter 5, but she muddies the water by toggling between hypotheticals: a man with an interest in photography vs. a woman who wants to take a pottery class. These are not equal entities, but Cameron treats them as such.
As we all know, wives, mothers, sisters, female servants, etc., traditionally did the domestic work, including raising children. This mostly unpaid labor provided male artists with the time and solitude they needed to be creative. As Toni Morrison states, as quoted in Chapter 5 of The Artist’s Way: “We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I’m not sure we deserve such a big A-plus for that.”
Gradually, I outgrew The Artist’s Way, and its exhortation to unblock my creative potential. I’ve come to realize that Cameron’s book, as well as Goldberg’s and many others in the creativity genre, are as much autobiography as they are instructional manual. They tell a compelling story of recovery from a variety of things, whether substance abuse, low self-esteem, or a lack of faith; for that alone, they have value.
Erica Goss, The Artist’s Way, Thirty Years Later

I don’t even know where they are
the precarious trees
colour-coded
she’s taken up rowing
tinkering on the piano
in the darkroom
Ama Bolton, A day at the Dove

I remember being overwhelmed with tears in Venice, thinking, wow, it looks just like its pictures, but it’s REAL and I’m HERE. The same with the Alps. Standing practically nose to glacier, or what’s left of them anyway, or to feel, through that strange clarity and distortion of light and perspective, that I could bend across the balcony railing and the deep valley that separated me from the mountain, that I could like it like an ice cream cone. Or even just visiting the next town over when I haven’t been there for a while. Wow, when did this building go up? Hey, I never noticed that garden before. That big tree is gone but look there’s a woodpecker poking around in the stump.
I rarely write in the moment. You won’t often find me scribbling at some foreign cafe, although I like the idea of it. Travel is the time of intake, of slurp.
Only later will time distill all that I took in and leave the vivid traces of travel. That’s what I may write about. Or use as imagery as I write about something else entirely. Those moments or experiences that have stuck to my skin, have wrinkled into my brain are what I can put to use in the building of a poem, visceral, lively. Or at the very least, travel nudges me to recall in my daily life that sense of being alert and perpetually interested.
Marilyn McCabe, Baby baby baby, baby baby baby; or, On Travel and Writing Poetry

Each day oscillates between what shrinks
and what expands, what I once could do
and what I can, sweet jazz and pounding,
a clock that crumbles into dry ash
or measuring cups overflowing
with uncooked rice and broken nut bars.
PF Anderson, NINES

Is imagism really the goal? It doesn’t have to be, though there is something to be said for the principles that H.D., Aldington, and Pound formulated in 1912, in regard to direct, sensory, concrete description that avoids metaphor, simile, personification, or apostrophe. And it’s a lot harder to do than it initially seems. But there’s also something static about the image, even if ideally it embeds within itself a whole “complex” — and H.D.’s “Evening” demonstrates how to graph movement imagistically (rather than staying stuck in the “instant”). We can also think of the directions in which William Carlos Williams took the thing, the ways in which Lorine Niedecker makes imagism kinetic, or how imagism shows up in the work of a contemporary poet like Harryette Mullen (e.g., in her tankas).

Once learned (true imagism), who wants to stay static, but it is still a poetic skill worth learning. It connects us to the world, to the environment, to non-human animals, to plant life, or even to the concrete concrete of a city. Connecting us to the world, it breaks us out of ego, out of our own heads and feelings, which is sometimes a good thing to do. It is a mode we can return to and maybe interlayer with other poetic modes as our deepening compositional experience enables. Okay, poetics class over — now go do whatever you want.
Michael S. Begnal, A Few Thoughts on Imagism per se

Where do I start? With a winter solstice poetry reading in Brooklyn, in a dark room on a dark night; his poem evoking a Di Chirico painting made my head explode, the work was so much more interesting than anyone else’s. But we didn’t speak that night. I met David before the equinox the following year, at a critique workshop run by the people who had set up the solstice reading: Merle Molofsky and Les von Losberg.
David didn’t have a presence; he was a presence. He read in a growl, with a slight lisp and a Brooklyn accent, and he could quiet a room. The poems were not lyrical or narrative, nor formal, nor confessional–they were jazz-like, full of strange images that sounded like surrealism and yet were not. He wrote prose poems and free verse and tiny little aphoristic pieces that sometimes made me laugh and sometimes broke my heart. He was not famous. He had not studied with well-known poets. But he had much to teach me, I thought, from the first time we sat around a table and read our work to one another.
Ann E. Michael, Poetry mentors: david dunn

“Worrying about the lorikeets” appears to be about another unsuitable marriage between two people who are polar opposites, “He opts for Def Leppard to her Bach,” when they come across a dead bird,
“She saw in his upturned eyes the weight
Of its dumb pain—then it was that she
Remembered what she’d always known.”
His sorrow for the bird reminds his wife why she married him.
“Anamnesis” is a subtle, thought-provoking collection that explores memory both in terms of what’s remembered but also inherited memories and how memories accumulate. The poems are gentle but multi-layered, inviting readers to return and re-read.
Emma Lee, “Anamnesis” Denise O’Hagan (Recent Work Press) – book review

A woman is moved on for holding up a sign.
A man is warned he will be arrested
if he writes on a blank piece of paper.

In the pavilion of continuing hypnosis,
the gentlemen in striped blazers applaud.
An army crosses a river. A bridge not blown up.
The dry season. Hurry, before the rains come.
The morality police murder a woman
because her hair was visible
as she walked in the street.
The wind whips stones into shapes
that say what we need to hear.
When we place stones in a circle
do we shut ourselves in or out?
Bob Mee, THEY WILL FIND A THOUSAND GRAVES

My personal poetry highlight of the summer was listening to Roger Robinson read and be in conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama at the Greenbelt arts festival.
It was a performance of great generosity, humour, anger, humility and power. You get to a stage in your poetry-going/reading life when you can tell when people are phoning it in. There is no more dispiriting a spectacle. This was the opposite of that. The more I’ve thought about it, the more it reminded me of a remark by the conductor Benjamin Zander, when he said that a maestro achieves their power not by making a sound, but by releasing those around them to be the musicians they are meant to be as they interact with the score.
Prompted by the twinkling Pádraig (‘It’s on page 51’), Robinson treated us to a several poems from A Portable Paradise as well as many more from his earlier volumes, some of which are now out of print. Introducing ‘The Job of Paradise’, he spoke of how it was inspired by the sight of a hearse slowly turning the corner of his road in London. He removed his hat, he said, and stood in respect as the hearse passed by. But it made him think. Here was the driver of that hearse, doing his job, suit and shirt pressed, his gaze steady, his pace stately. And here was the hearse doing its job, just by being a hearse, a long, shiny black car unlike all the others in the flow of traffic. And from there he made the point that it is the job of each poet and poem to ‘remind us how to live our days’ by showing readers the ‘paradise’ that is all around them.
Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: The Job of Paradise, by Roger Robinson

In the last breath of September, it was my pleasure to attend and celebrate Gary Glauber’s new collection of poems, Inside Outrage (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2022). He read beautifully via Zoom. His selected poems touched upon an array of topics: Love, Mr. Rogers, teaching, poetry, civil justice at Starbucks. It was the perfect antidote to the drumming of the atmospheric river and wind pummeling the windows outside, allowing me to disappear inside, into words for an hour that passed too quickly this afternoon.
With a shelved and bespectacled Homer Simpson over one shoulder and a guitar over the other, Glauber began his reading with his poem, “Blocked,” one he explains celebrates a lifetime of poetry. The poet reminds readers, “Let us celebrate the infinity / of our limited mortality…” It is also one that considers time and the travel of the “…inestimable unknowable” that is “much like a poem.”
Kersten Christianson, Gary Glauber’s Collection of Poems, Inside Outrage

In ancient times, spiderwebs were used as bandages.
Rats laugh when you tickle them.
A dentist invented the electric chair.
It rains diamonds on other planets.
Bumblebees can fly higher than Mount Everest.
Men are more likely to be colorblind than women.
There are a million rivers all around me, but only one of you flowing through my life.
Rich Ferguson, A Matter of Fact

You want to believe it
and you can’t —
that’s the miracle,
the old monk said.
Tom Montag, TEN OLD MONK POEMS (87)

What would we like others to know about our experiences these last years? If you could tell folks in the future in a sentence or two, for example. When I was in a very. dark. space. at one point, I couldn’t articulate it, more because I knew that if I did things would get darker for me personally. But I learned some things in that dark place I’ll never forget. The line by Nicole Brossard is one that has popped into my head a lot the last couple of years: “You have to be insane to confide the essential to anyone anywhere except in a poem.”
Shawna Lemay, Taking the Light into the Dark

After lunch and cake with friends, I spent several hours of my 53rd birthday sequencing Wonder & Wreckage. My goal is to have the manuscript complete by Christmas.
Collin Kelley, Self-portrait at 53

Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize is the full-length poetry debut Two Brown Dots: Poems (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2022) by “Kentuckian, a mom, a knitter, and an Affrilachian Poet” Danni Quintos. Her first-person explorations and recollections write around and through a self-determination and self-creation, seeking answers to a space she requires to singularly establish; illuminating lyrics around memory and being, offering answers as best as she is able, in due course, due time. Set in three sections—“Girlhood,” “Motherhood” and “Folklore”—Quintos writes across the length and breadth of lived experience, from watching her father from a distance, summers and childhood crushes and living as an awkward youth, to the experiences of pregnancy and eventual motherhood. She offers stories of her connections to the Philippines, writing of a familial background she simultaneously holds and can’t help but carry, offering, as part of the poem “Possible Reasons My Dad Won’t Return to the Philippines,” “What if he remembers everything [.]” A few lines further, as the poem ends: “[…] the little boy in him left / here with all the cousins, no one / to call nanay or tatay, alone, / the shape of him on a mattress / the version of him that stayed.” She writes of differences, from the ways in which most (if not all) teenagers feel as outsiders, to the consequences of racism, reacting to boundary-making micro-aggressions offered for no reason other than the colour of her skin. “I didn’t yet / understand. And every summer after,” the poem “Brown Girls” ends, “a whirring // reminder that I didn’t belong here, a little song / sung at me by the bodies that slept for years // underground. How we couldn’t see what he saw: / two brown girls under a white couple’s roof.” In certain ways, Two Brown Dots is a collection of poems entirely centred around the body, and how those bodies are experienced, both from outside and within, offering physical responses through the lyric, from adolescence to the fact of living in a predominantly Caucasian space. Her poems are sly and smart, curious and rife with detailed narrative.
rob mclennan, Danni Quintos, Two Brown Dots

I’ve been proofing chaps and reading manuscripts and thinking about October happenings. I have also been proofing the final version of automagic and getting it ready for my first galley in a week or so. I feel when I get back from being gone, there are a couple days of finding my rhythm again.
But yes, here we are on the cusp of October. I not only made chicken soup I’d intended for the weekend, but have had the space heater on since yesterday, but mostly gazing longingly at the shut windows and wishing I could open them again.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 9/30/2022

Last night at the Library of Congress, Ada Limon gave her inaugural reading as the nation’s poet laureate. A few weeks ago, when I realized that my canceled Thursday night class was the same night, I applied for a free ticket. I got one, but in the end, I decided not to go.
I got an e-mail on Wednesday that advised that we would be required to wear masks, and I would have been wearing one anyway, but I did start to think about the wisdom of this kind of indoor event when a pandemic is ongoing. I did get a booster shot on Friday, but I’m not in a hurry to test that protection.
I don’t know why I didn’t think about the potential of crowds when I requested a free ticket. I’m not used to sell out crowds at poetry events, and the Wed. e-mail advised that we would be at full capacity. The line to get in for the 7:00 p.m. reading would start to assemble at 5:00 p.m., and we’d be let in to get seats, if we were far enough in the front of the line, at 6:30. There would be overflow seating in a hall where we could watch on a screen. […]
So, what did I do instead? I went to the American University library to get my Wesley ID activated to be able to use the AU library. I came home and made myself a dinner of roasted brussels sprouts and a baked sweet potato, which was much tastier than it sounds.
I was feeling oddly exhausted, so I was even more glad that I didn’t go downtown. I was asleep by 8. But before that, I tucked myself into bed. My bed faces west, so I had a great view of a glorious sunset, as I read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. It wasn’t the cultural/literary even that I had planned, but it was the one that I needed.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Laureate Thursday, Literary Thursday

               I learned my first prayers there,
waiting for the butcher’s hand to emerge
               from out of the pocket slit in the throat
of a thrashing animal. You said if I closed
               my eyes, sound would be more
terrible than sight. My reward: small
               specks of a sweet inside red-taped
pitogo shells, unburied with a bamboo sliver.
              I wake sometimes with the sense of a footprint
small as a snail’s, pilgrim feeling for a path
              to everything we’ve always wanted to say.
Luisa A. Igloria, In dreams you walk through wetmarket aisles with me again

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Yes. Many times. I thought for a long time that the “I” in a poem should be taken out, obscured, muddied, that the worst kind of poem was a deeply personal poem. My first book (Little Prayers, Blue Light Press, 2018) is filled with fantastical leaps and it takes a kind of sideways look at my personal experience. In 2017, when I started work on the manuscript I’m sending out now, I surprised myself by writing intensely raw and revealing poems about my experience with motherhood and my struggles with infertility, including the life-threatening miscarriage I suffered in 2013. I had to shut off a voice telling me that this kind of writing was bad. It’s been very freeing to write about this stuff, though the challenge, always, is to find some way of moving beyond the myopically personal into more universal territory, and I’m always looking for models. Franz Wright did this beautifully in his writing about addiction, God, and mental illness.
Thomas Whyte, Susie Meserve : part two

tiny people on a tiny screen
even through headphones
I can hear the rain
Jason Crane, haiku: 1 October 2022

I’ve just finished reading Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment. It is an extraordinary book, beautifully written. It’s one of those books that you can sink into, and carry around with you, exploring the themes and questions and points of view in your mind. It came at just the right time, as I feel I have been exploring my own, metaphorical islands, some of them abandoned, some of them not so much. Cal Flyn’s islands are real places in which human intervention has stripped and scorched them, the interest is in the psychological attachment to them, and the physical response from nature. My metaphorical islands are grief, writing, friendships. Last week I sent the new poetry collection to the publisher. I know they’re waiting on ACE funding, like so many indie publishers, so I’m really just waiting to see what happens before I can release any details. One nice thing about it was the way that my editor shortened the title of the collection in her response email. Something about that made it feel familiar, wanted, warmed to, and that made me happy. The collection has passed through that strange place, has gone from being a Schrödinger’s collection that exists only when I perceive it to be a collection, and is now a manuscript on a desk in a publisher’s office with a title that is solid and firm, a title that can hold the weight of being shortened for ease of communication. Put simply: It exists as a complete thing, it is created.
And so I bed into the non fiction book. I’ve started getting out and immersing myself in the physical places on which the non fiction book is based. It’s been wonderful. These places are islands of time in which I can almost touch the people who came before me, who lived on this land.
Wendy Pratt, Exploring the Islands

Every part of the country has things everyone knows if you live there, but comes as a surprise to outsiders. Like White Sands in southern New Mexico. I had been to Seattle several times but had no idea that Spokane was known as the Lilac City. If I hadn’t read Talley’s chapbook, I still wouldn’t know that. But you don’t need to know that to read this book; all is soon explained. And the poems here do many good things besides giving information.
Postcards from the Lilac City begins with stories of growing up in a certain place, Spokane, Washington, with change over time: a carousel taken down and later restored, bike riding before helmets were worn, the time when bikes are replaced by a brother’s old car. Already there is good language and some experiment in form; in the later sections the experiments are bolder. In the middle section, “Spokane Postcards,” a stanza of description is followed by a letter from the author to someone from back home – never mind that many of these missives have too many words to fit on a typical postcard. The last section, “After Vietnam” does not return to a historical approach, as one might expect, but presents various moments in a variety of forms from an adult perspective. The whole makes a satisfying read, sharing specifics of experience in poems carefully crafted.
Ellen Roberts Young, Recommendation: Postcards from the Lilac City by Mary Ellen Talley

There’s a good case to be made for October being the loveliest month, in England at any rate; though only really when the sun shines and the plentiful golden yellows are at their best, like Samuel Palmer landscapes before your eyes.
It’s also a month of melancholy, too, which suits me just fine. The ideal time to get stuck into some serious reading, which, in turn, will feed into writing. Over the years, early autumn has traditionally been a time when I will make a concentrated study of a favourite poet’s oeuvre, to see how the quality of their output, and the clarity of their thinking, deepened over time. Poets who, either by choice or premature death (yes, I realise that most deaths are premature in some respect), published in a disciplined and selective manner are ideal for this, Elizabeth Bishop for one.
Like everyone and anyone who loves poetry, I’ve long liked Bishop’s poems. Curiously, though, real, devoted love for them has been awakened in me through an apparently unlikely source, Colm Tóibín. His book On Elizabeth Bishop, published by Princeton University Press, is as fine a critical reader’s study of another writer as any I’ve ever read. I find it interesting that it should be a writer known until recently solely for his novels, albeit wonderful ones at that, who has really opened my eyes.
Matthew Paul, On (Colm Tóibín on) Elizabeth Bishop

This weekend feels a bit like the last hurrah. University starts soon and I know any free time I have will be focussed on that. The weather is beautifully autumnal, leaves glowing with sunlight as if it’s putting all their energy into one last show. It’s infusing the poems I’m trying to write. And I’m writing which hasn’t happened much lately.
This weekend is Zineton, a 48-hour challenge to create a zine. Helsinki Writers are having their second go at it. I’ve discovered a fun AI art site Wombo which is making it even more interesting as I really don’t have any talent for visual art. So I’m writing a couple of poems for that and waiting for the other writers to send me their work. Then the rush to put everything together begins.
Gerry Stewart, Zineton and Scotstober 2022

The cover for Flare, Corona was chosen this week (reveal soon!), and I started thinking about mailing lists, updated business cards, and scheduling readings. Oh yes, and Seattle AWP next March. My PR for Poets book recommends starting six months ahead of time laying the groundwork for the book launch, and that suddenly hit me.
Also, this month is full of literary activity: the book club I host is meeting on Oct 19th, the Skagit Poetry Festival is happening next weekend, and I’m working on an interview and a spooky poetry podcast. Plus, I’ve got poet dates—getting back into social life is gradual for me—because, let’s face it, in Seattle most of us start hibernating in November and don’t come out until March.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Welcome to October: Upcoming Book Launch Planning, Upcoming Book Club, Poetry Festivals, and Podcasts

Pumpkins are all right (in pies, not in lattes, thanks)–but what the suddenly cool, rainy weather makes me want to do is read. It’s also nourishing to be read. Hurrah for the thoughtful attention Sarah Stockton gives Poetry’s Possible Worlds in the Staff Favorites section of River Mouth Review. I love the Octoberish timing AND that it coincides with the second printing appearing at the distributor. This means you can order it again directly through SPD or your favorite indie bookstore. It’ll soon show up on other places you order books, too. A small press book tends to spider along–think of silk threads thrown out, wafting in a breeze, and finally sticking somewhere. It’s both a stroke of luck when it does, and a result of arachnid effort and patience. The first push on this Poetry’s Possible Worlds is done, I think, but I’ll keep spinning.
The small press book I’m reading right now is Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s Look at This Blue. I hadn’t realized before I picked it up that it’s a long poem–she calls it an “assemblage”–although the thinking she does about epidemic violence, ecological damage, and inequity is a through-line in all her work. I need and want to read it slowly and not when I’m tired in the evening, which has been my time for page-turning fiction.
Lesley Wheeler, Book season (hours of ellipsis)

who breeds the flowers that hurt so much
whose wound mourns the gun
shall we grow weary of searching when we’ve buried the sun
Grant Hackett [no title]

September 25, 2022September 25, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 38

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week: changes in season, changes in state, mentors, music, what shrinks and what expands, squeaky wheels, experiments with boredom, self-criticism sessions, the necessity of avoiding great blue herons, and a “ruckus network of howls.” Enjoy.

Hardly watered gardens hymn dry yellow melodies of thirst.
Desert flowers tell the wind’s fortune as coyotes howl a gallows prayer.
In bedrooms all across the city, I hear lovers’ bodies rub up against one another, strumming the strings of bliss.
I hear the mattresses of miserable landlords groan from the excess weight of it all.
Rich Ferguson, All Across the City

One thing about being home much of the time is that I feel more in tune with the rhythm of the days than I ever was in the closed cave of the library. […] Since I don’t have an A/C, there were days in the summer when I could feel the heat encroaching at my back. Could feel and smell the rain blowing in when it stormed. Today, the shivery cold that finally made me shut them. […]
Summer felt longer but faster, if that’s possible. I felt more of it, even if I only went out in it occasionally. But there was at the same time more variation in its texture, much less time spent under fluorescent lights amid book stacks and more time for noticing things, even just from a third floor window. Listening, as well, to unruly car alarms, distant sirens, how sometimes I can hear the train two blocks away clearly, but sometimes not at all. Every Monday, the lawn mower down below me and the scent of just cut grass. The steady bang of renovations in surrounding apartments. The creep and click of my remaining neighbor’s doors.
Kristy Bowen, love letter to summer, who has to be going

Remember these: the heft
of a sleeping child, half-
unlatched, hair matted with sweat;
the sound of cowbells
drifting downhill; the book
you climbed into, as in a womb.
Romana Iorga, Things to Do with Silence

As I stood in a crowd of Canadians on Sunday, at the conclusion of the service, and the organ moved from the final hymn and blessing to the opening bars of “God Save the King”, sung to those words for the first time in 70 years, I could feel the emotion around me. Likewise, who could remain completely unmoved by the final minutes of the Windsor committal service, when the crown and other symbols of Elizabeth’s earthly and historical power were removed from the coffin before it sank beneath the floor?
Under the September sun, thirty friends and family members stood around my father’s grave in the old village cemetery where I played as a young child. At the conclusion of the brief committal service, we placed the paper box containing his ashes into the same grave where my mother’s remains had been buried sixteen years before. Then I took a shovel into my hands and put the first earth into the grave, passed the shovel to my husband, who did the same, and then, slowly, silently, nearly all of the people present took a turn, and we buried my father together and then strewed red roses on the grave. […]
For death, I think, is the great leveler: it comes to us all, we all go down to the dust, and no one can take their earthly goods or power with them. When those deaths occur which stop us in our tracks and cause a shudder or even an earthquake in our own lives, it is a time to look in the mirror. What can we learn from the life of this person who is with us no longer? What lasts, what remains? What do we want to do with the unknowable balance of time that remains to us, and with the friends who surround us in those moments, surely far more precious than gold?
Beth Adams, Unparallel Lives

the rest
as they say
is history
Jim Young [no title]

Adrian Owles. That was her anagrammed alias. She used that name for things like electric and phone company bills when her real name set off “overdue payment” notices, resulting in her inability to get services. She did, in her youth, have a conniver’s sense of how to skive and get away with it. To some degree. She learned the skills from her father, a brilliant alcoholic from a once-wealthy family. From her mother, she learned poetry and an idealistic, romantic outlook on life…but also that she should be independent and never rely on men to take care of her or keep their promises.
Well, maybe she learned that last part from her father. Her parents never divorced, but her father was an absentee dad. That’s the picture she supplied to me. I suspect it was true, but I know only a tiny part of her story. Ariel Dawson, my poetry mentor, was a year younger than I but so well-read, aware of the “poetry scene,” reading craft essays and books before I knew such things existed–and taking reasoned issue with some of the writers, too, in ways it never would have occurred to me to do. Question such recognized authority? I would not have dared.
What is a mentor? A kind of teacher or model of behavior? Ariel’s behavior was far from conventional, which did appeal to me. We hitchhiked from Michigan to NYC and back. We stayed up almost until dawn and drank wine and talked about poetry. We ganged up on the poor man teaching a creative writing class at our college by questioning his pronouncements and asking about poets and poetry he had not specialized in. We sneaked into bars without paying the cover charge or having our IDs checked (Michigan had a liquor law that permitted 18-year-olds to drink, but Ariel was only 17). I kept wondering quietly to myself: Is this how poets behave? Is unconventionality necessary to the craft?
Ann E. Michael, Poetry mentor: Ariel Dawson

Each day oscillates between what shrinks
and what expands, what I once could do
and what I can, sweet jazz and pounding,
a clock that crumbles into dry ash
or measuring cups overflowing
with uncooked rice and broken nut bars.
PF Anderson, NINES

Back in the day when I was a kid, it seemed cool to be an old soul. Whoever first enlightened me, when I first heard the phrase (to be or to have?), I don’t recall. Being an old soul seemed like a good defense for a solitary or brooding adolescent— especially when you have big black eyes too serious for your face!
Now that I’m not a kid, I’m thinking it might be cool to be a young soul. It’s not up to us, of course, not on the smorgasboard of options. Yet after yet another birthday, I’m thinking why not. It always takes a while to come to oneself. This old soul has learned a few things; it understands that play makes everything tick, beauty is real, everything keeps turning and flowing, go!
Now during the Jewish High Holidays, we are told that our souls are washed, we get refreshed, the clock is set back to how God made us, we get spanking fresh souls. Birthday of the world — aha! Old soul, meet young soul. May you be renewed, and be yourself.
Jill Pearlman, Old Soul/Young Soul

I promise I am going to talk about real serious writer book stuff in a minute, but for this first part, can I say…whee, it’s decorative gourd season and I am celebrating fall by visiting pumpkin farms and burning candles like there’s no tomorrow.
We visited one pumpkin farm on the autumn equinox and another the next day. We had beautiful, unsmoky weather and I decided we should take advantage of it before it all turns into the inevitable winter rain. (Someone joked that Seattle has three seasons: rain, summer, and smoke. Sort of true for the last few years!) Besides getting to talk to local farmers, which I love, it gave me and Glenn a chance to get out of the house, into fresh air, get some mild exercise (I’m still using a cane, there’s only so much pumpkin farm tramping I can do), but it also sort of helps your body know: hey, we are changing seasons, pay attention to the leaves, to what is blooming and what is dying, what grows out of the ground, the colors of the sky. Haven’t poets been writing poems about that stuff for years?
Jeannine Hall Gailey, It’s Decorative Gourd Season! Autumn Equinox and Fall Feels, Pumpkin Farms, and Decisions About Cover Art

jazz in the morning
country in the afternoon
dead cricket in the light fixture
Jason Crane, haiku: 19 September 2022

alone
every other weekend
in a new house
I experimented with boredom
I listened to those cds
you said would improve me
but I never got that music
it was a country I could starve in
Paul Tobin, EXPERIMENTS WITH BOREDOM

“Yeah, I didn’t want to remind you about the equinox,” my spouse said.
“Right? Another thing on the to-do list,” I agreed. We mimed leaning our shoulders into the wheel of the year. “But I got it done!”
It’s autumn and my birthday and I’m struggling. Sleep has been especially hard. If I’m to have any chance at all, I have to turn off the screens, even Netflix, an hour and or two before bedtime and read something completely unrelated to work, as well as popping Unisom and melatonin–and while I love sinking into a book, the new routine makes the day feel even shorter. I’m ruminating about some old conflicts and challenging people in my work-life; self-doubt has blown back into my life with a vengeance. I wish I could stop THAT wheel and get off. I live less than a ten-minute walk from campus, which is a beautiful way to commute, but sometimes I get home and it still feels too close, looming in my imagination. It’s also inherently a job without solid boundaries. On what side of the line, for instance, does writing sit? Is criticism work and poetry play? What about now that I’m writing creative criticism?
I like many aspects of my job, and as I’ve been writing in a forthcoming column, that’s how they get you. Universities run on uncompensated enthusiasm; without it, they’d have to change the business model.
Lesley Wheeler, The wheel(er) considers turning

This ocean knows everything, her
sand is coarse inside my mouth when I talk,
inside my thoughts as they spawn. All I know,
I learnt from her brown-blueness, lapping
around my ankles like a warning. How to
talk without speaking, how to listen while
still retreating, how to let go even when the
full moon is drowning in your belly.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 14

At first I thought about going to a different part of campus. I didn’t see any elements I could use: so many dead leaves, so many shades of brown, ugh. But then I saw a leaf that was more rust than brown, and then a burgundy leaf, and then some leaves drifted by on the breeze, and I started examining not only color but texture.
I thought about creating some sort of creche with sticks, but it was a breezy day. As I contemplated that base of a tree which I thought might shelter my unmade creation, and then I looked at the trunk. I realize it had marvelous possibilities, so I took a leaf and threaded the stem of a leaf into an opening.
The breeze didn’t blow it away, so I did it again, and then again. Soon, I had a trunk full.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Autumn Leaves from a Different Angle

After that there were a lot of random poems, experiments, some of which turned colors and boiled over, which is good, and some of which didn’t. Two of my favorites were about black widow spiders. I always seem to write about black widows during August, since they’re in the crooks and corners of patios and garages around here, growing big and shiny in the sweltering heat and knitting their cottony egg sacs. Of course their ferocity is legendary, but in reality they’re mostly timid and serene. I always get a lot of poetic mileage out of black widows. […]
This year I tried something new: painting postcards specifically for the poems, and also the reverse—writing ekphrastic poems about my own paintings on the postcards*. I sort of liked painting to complement the poems; that was a free-wheeling exercise in abstraction, or in surreal representation. But I didn’t like writing ekphrastic poems about the paintings; that felt weirdly self-referential, a kind of narcissistic loop. Like, I painted this somewhat abstract landscape, and now I’m writing a poem about it. It was a sham, a trick I was pulling on the reader—a made-up poem about a made-up visual scene. It was like trying to build a house on air. There didn’t seem to be much point to it.
One of my favorite poems of the month was about a baby that someone at a party asked me to keep an eye on for a few minutes. We were outside, it was raining a bit, the baby was sleeping in a little covered hammock—and suddenly the world exploded into metaphors. That was way better than any made-up landscape. There’s something to be said for writing poems about real things. This was a good reminder of that.
Amy Miller, Art Imitates Art: Poetry Postcard Fest 2022 Wrap-Up

my Work of Breathing poetry book was in the top 8 for the Able Muse award
as much as winning would be great, honorable mention is not so bad.
thinking about the hundreds and hundreds (I assume even a small press gets quite a few submissions?), getting to the top 8 tells me my book is probably just about THERE –it might be a matter or rearrangement or the judge’s particular taste.
besides, this book is very precious to me, particularly precious being about my daughter Kit, so I’m in no rush and feeling awful choosey about where I send it in the first place.
I also don’t really have any doubts about it. I read a lot of poetry, and I think (my own emotions about it aside) that it is a good book. Not everyone’s cup of tea…fairly dark…but I think the quality is there.
Renee Emerson, honorable mention

The origin of the word critic is “sieve.” I like this idea. That a criticism or a critique (whose positivity or negativity is surely in the eyes of the receiver) is like a mesh, and what comes through is a clearer substance. Certainly the goal of receiving a criticism or critique is receiving some kind of clarity.
Apparently I have a reputation for being critical. And I don’t mean vital to something’s existence. It means I have opinions and articulate them apparently sometimes to people who don’t want to hear them. Be that as it may, I am concerned at the moment that I’m not being critical enough of my own work. I may have mentioned — and it is by no means bragging, it’s just a fact — that I have three manuscripts of poems I’d like to get published. There is some crossover between two of them — I figure whichever gets published first wins. But they’re not getting published and nor am I having great luck with the individual poems. So one must cast a glance askance at the poems, I guess.
My editorial approach at this point in the development of the mss, which range in age from one to four years old, is to put them away while I’m awaiting the glacial process of submissions, and occasionally, every few months or so, give them a look see. Sometimes it results in me giving a poem or two the heave ho. But by and large, I read the collections and think, yeah, I like that.
This worries me. Shouldn’t I be suffering over every word? Shouldn’t I be shuffling around the order restlessly until some golden order is achieved? From whence comets this troublesome onset of “it’s all gooood”? Critic, criticize thyself.
Marilyn McCabe, All that’s left is flesh and bone; or, On Casting the Critical Eye on Your Own Damn Poems

We’re not hanging about this week. Too much to get done. Sunday lunch has just gone in the oven and I have a hot date with the Red Door Poets in couple of hours to hear Mary Mulholland, Tom Cunliffe and Katie Griffiths, Alex Corrin-Tachibana, Matthew Paul and Claire Collison reading. Can’t wait.
Before then I have to do this and answer some questions about my own work. I’ve been invited to do so for a magazine this week. It won’t be published for a while, but I don’t want to get behind on stuff. Sorry, I don’t want to get further behind. The invitation was lovely, it was a bit of a double-edged sword as it meant I didn’t make it into the print mag, but I think that in many ways this means my poem will reach further, but more on that closer to the time.
The only real developments this week was me sitting down to think about the running order of my pamphlet again. As you can see I got somewhere, but I think you will also see that my cats disagreed. So, we start again. And we lock the door.
Mat Riches, Sun-bleached bunting

I think of this place before
we opened the door and crossed
the threshold—every gleaming
floorboard and clear
piece of tile, cornices like violin
scrolls; the air in the rooms
already singing of work and days.
If you stood in the center, the years
would tumble into your hands. And
the only thing to do is open them.
Luisa A. Igloria, Work and Days

I think I’m tired of reading books that not only match the poet’s own life-path to the point where they feel wholly autobiographical but that they are self-absorbed, insecure, obsessed with the behaviour of the body and past indignities inflicted on it – and by the frustrating, demoralising ‘struggle’ to conquer the trauma these things have created.
Sure, there are some excellent poetry books dealing with the consequences of real life trauma that feel raw and powerful. Claire Williamson’s Visiting The Minotaur is wonderful.
There are also several I’ve read recently, however, that feel fake, as if the trauma is exaggerated for the sake of writing a book about it, a subject to be explored because it’s fashionable. Sadly, this one felt as if the poet had struggled with some kind of block and had fallen back on this to emerge from it and get a book out. The back page blurb, naturally, called it a brave book. It’s really not.
I could have mentioned the book. What’s the point? Any publicity is good publicity.
MAYBE my reaction is in line with my growing tendency to be reclusive, certainly in terms of the ‘poetry community’. I read poetry most days, buy books, prefer to support the smaller presses, if possible. I think I’m capable of writing better than I have done at any point in my life up to now. Partly, I think, that’s because I’ve managed to shed contact with all but a few poets and that I have no need of acclaim or recognition. I don’t need a prize (wouldn’t know what to do with it), don’t need to teach anyone how to write, don’t need another book with my name on the cover. I like to spend time exploring writing and what it brings to the experience of living – along with watching football, looking after hens and pigs, managing woodland and watching wildlife. I pay homage to the need to ‘get writing’ out there by including various bits and pieces on this blog and am interested in the reaction they provoke – an old friend who saw them told me last week he found them demented, which I appreciated – but mostly the rest is frills and frippery. Someone else said there were so many poems on here that they need to be divided into books. Maybe. For now, it’s too time-consuming and distracting from the real business of getting it down. So it goes.
Bob Mee, STRUGGLING TO BE GENEROUS AGAIN…

6. In your poems, be parsimonious with “how” clauses. I too often see lists of these. This has become an overused strategy. Likewise, avoid overusing “the way” to begin items in a series.
7. Be very sparing with poems about poems. I can take maybe one per manuscript. You won’t get rejected if you have more, but if your manuscript is accepted, I will almost certainly ask you to revise some of those poems. I find this kind of poem particularly vexing when the poem is making its way along beautifully on a particular topic and then suddenly starts referring to itself as “this poem.” That knocks me right out of the poem. My heart sinks with disappointment.
8. Avoid great blue herons in your poems. I add this here for a light touch, but seriously that bird is so overused in poetry! Surely there are other magnificent birds. And does it have to be a bird?
Diane Lockward, Thoughts on Poetry Manuscript Submission

Fast forward through five years in Cambridge, when I was working and finding it hard to find a writing group, to the early 1990s when we moved to Swansea, hometown of Dylan Thomas. I took some classes in the Welsh language and soon became acquainted with simple greetings, mutations, and popular words such as ‘hwyl’ and ‘hiraeth’.
A few months later, Peter Thabit Jones introduced me to some English versions of the Englyn. Thanks to poems in English by Gerard Manley-Hopkins, I came to understand something of Cynghanedd, the Welsh notion of ‘sound-arrangement’ or harmony within a single line, achieved by following one of four set patterns involving rhyme and alliteration. I would recommend Listening to Welsh Verse by Mererid Hopwood (Gomer Press, 2005) for those who are interested in learning more.
I have a deep love of poetry forms. This was nurtured by The Book of Forms: a Handbook of Poetics by Lewis P. Turco. Little did I expect to have three of my own sample poems, a Clang, a Folding Mirror poem and a Bref Double with Echo, published in the turquoise-covered 2012 edition, which included odd and invented forms.
During my Swansea years, I came to love the poetry of Edward Thomas, whose four grandparents hailed from Wales. I was already familiar with ‘Adlestrop’, but was unaware that Thomas had written so many poems in such a short space of time before his untimely death in the Great War. ‘Swedes’ may not be a ‘typical’ Thomas poem, but it immediately caught my eye and made me realise how powerful metaphor can be and how the smallest details can transform a text. In ‘Swedes’, the discovery of an ancient Egyptian tomb is compared to the opening of a swede clamp. David, my archaeologist husband, and I became so intrigued by the detail in the poem that we undertook some research and wrote a short paper, ‘Leaving Town’ and ‘Swedes’: Edward Thomas and Amen‐Hotep (Notes and Queries, Volume 50, Issue 3, OUP, September 2003, pp. 325–327).
Caroline Gill : part two (Thomas Whyte)

In a poem
something has to
rhyme. It doesn’t
always have to
be the words,
the old monk said.
Tom Montag, TEN OLD MONK POEMS (85)

The adult still contains the child he once was. The child thinking up word combinations to make a lesson pass more quickly grows into an adult who still enjoys word games. Our past is still with us and we have a choice as to whether that is a good thing or not.
“The Past is a Dangerous Driver” looks at how the past seeps into the present and the consequences of that. In some poems nature reclaims human structures, reminding readers of man’s relatively short time on the planet. In others the boundaries between past and present are more permeable. A storm prompts thoughts of war or the collection of metal for the war effort inspires thoughts of other uses of metal, particularly a medal representing a life after its end and the impact of a hypothetical lost life on the present. There are lighter moments too, the game of guessing what an acronym might represent. Mason’s structured poems guide readers through a journey where people might be ready to move on but the past isn’t ready to let them go yet.
Emma Lee, “The Past is a Dangerous Driver” Neal Mason (Holland Park Press) – Book Review

The fourth full-length poetry collection by Toronto poet Adebe DeRango-Adem, following Ex Nihilo (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2010), Terra Incognita (Toronto ON: Inanna Publications, 2015) and The Unmooring (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2018), is HUMANA (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2022), an assemblage of vibrant and performative poems akin to chants, focusing on voice and the polyrhythmic lyric. “GREAT FOREST CHORUS OF SCREAMS,” she writes, to open the poem “VOX TELUM/MEMORIAM,” “composition in a key / of a tree reluctant to give life […]” Her poems are composed as gestural sweeps of language, utterances and tradition, song, prayer and declaration. She speaks and sings on race and identity, history and community, doing so with such force, and clearly a voice to be heard, to be acknowledged; to be reckoned with. “O COMMONWEALTH—!” she writes, to open “VOX LINGUA/MALEDICTUM,” “HEX your gilded lexicons—! I spook / the master’s language I see how texts / turn white & whiter foam // the colour of dissolve […]”
Set in three sections—“FUGUE I,” “FUGUE II” and “FUGUE III”—DeRango-Adem sings a song-sequence against and of silence, arranged in performative gasps, gaps, staccato declarations and long, languid sweeps. These are poems to be performed, composed as passionate celebration and of witness, and her performance radiates. As the two page “VOX GENUS/PROVECTUS” ends: “a ruckus network // of howls [.]”
rob mclennan, Adebe DeRango-Adem, HUMANA

Rob Taylor: Standing in a River of Time is a hybrid — part prose memoir, part poetry. Each section opens with a prose narrative and closes with poems on the same subject. What drew you to this structure, as opposed to writing one or the other?
Jónína Kirton: This book was to be a collection of poetry. While working on the collection I had been experimenting with essay writing, and had a few essays published in anthologies. One of the essays is in Good Mom on Paper, and it includes a poem that is also in this collection. I found it hard to write about being a mother, and yet it was such a big part of my life. As with every other essay I had written I had many false starts. After a number of attempts an idea emerged: perhaps I could not only merge prose and poetry, but I could also keep the prose short. I give thanks to the editors Jen Sookfong Lee and Stacy May Fowles for allowing me to experiment and to include a poem.
RT: What role did the mentorship of Betsy Warland (she who mastered the form so fully they named a hybrid book prize after her!) play in helping you find this form?
JK: After writing the essay for Good Mom on Paper, I returned to writing my book and did what Betsy had taught me; I let the narrative lead. I never intended for the book to be this long but as I wrote the prose kept coming. Then while working with my substantive editor, Joanne Arnott, a rupture occurred, and the book exploded. Suddenly, I was going back into some of my childhood. The book became about the effects of colonization on one Métis family. Often, the discoveries revealed in the book were happening for me in real time.
In many ways the narrative chose the structure. The writing of it was at times healing and had a mystical feel to it. I would sit at the computer, and it poured out of me. Sometimes I would be crying so much that the front of my blouse was soaked but I could not stop to dry my eyes. I had to keep writing.
It was my husband who noticed after reading the prose he felt the poems, most of which he knew well, were made stronger by knowing the back story. When he said this, I knew I was on the right track.
Rob Taylor, My Body Knows More Than I Do: An Interview with Jónína Kirton

Throw the windows wide. Comfort poor Van, who is appalled by Martha’s disappearance, and sleeps all day on her spot on the couch, not even rousing himself at the sound of a can of cat food being opened. (His consciousness is on strike: it refuses to return to work until she’s back). Water the plants. Muse on the variations of cloud building and dissolving, north over the neighbor’s gable. Count, if I must. One hundred and fifty breaths is one attempt at falling asleep. Fifteen long breaths, if I’m lying on my belly, opens the subway stops along the lumbar spine.
Dale Favier, Aurelito

where is the child missing from my death
where is a road that walks on its knees
how many waters are never dreamed
Grant Hackett [no title]

September 18, 2022September 18, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 37

From dawn to dusk,
the pewter silver-grey
of clouds that haven’t
aspired to the sky.
We walk inside them,
drawing onto our faces
the unrained drops.
We’re comfortably dislocated
from horizons; paths ahead
are vanishing points lost
in feathers; red kites
whistle the fields’ edges.
I walk, you run the curvature
of this known, unknown world.
Dick Jones, Dog Latitude §6

I remember a critic of my poetry saying ‘Oh oh, Richie’s in the graveyard again’ and thinking how facile that was, as if I was a ghoul hovering around the charnel pit. The unfathomability of death and the mystery of existence is really what all poetry is about, even the stuff that masquerades as something else. All roads lead to it and attributing it to a creator is just too easy. I think poetry itself offers a real, viable substitute to religion, its authors hoping (invariably vainly) that something of themselves will outlive their own demise. Secular poets can be sacral too, in a place where the song and plainsong can meet.
Richie McCaffery, Losing my religion

Always spinning back to that chorus
like the song on the radio. Funny
how sounds echo in an empty house
as if they too have come a long, long
way, as if they too, diminished,
are looking for the nearest escape.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 13

For the past 2 months, I’ve spent a lot of time driving long distances. I realize that not everyone likes to drive the way that I do. I should modify: I like to drive the way I do when I’m driving alone. Driving with others in the car is a whole different experience.
When I’ve made a long car trip, I sometimes feel like I’ve fallen out of time. I used to think that I only felt that way after an airplane trip and that a long car trip would help me feel cemented in time. That’s not the case for me, at least not right now.
In the past, I’ve felt a longing to be in places other than where I am: it’s been a longing for a particular geography mixed with a longing for particular people. At this time in my life, I feel fully present wherever I am, almost as if other places have ceased to exist. When I’m in my seminary apartment, I rarely think about my little house in the mountains. When I was in the mountains this week-end, my seminary life seemed like a dream I had.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Particular Geographies and Yearning

Colors burn on his eyelids–swift,
painless flames. What
does it mean, to grow new eyes?
To keep them always open?
Whose life has he stumbled into,
while crawling along his own?
In the dream, the king wears his face.
His words are kind. He should
come to no harm, this king.
Romana Iorga, Another Oedipus Story

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
As a mother of five and an emergency physician, it simply boils down to time!! I see things all the time that few people see. I’ll think, “I have to write about this…” But then I don’t, and I quickly forget the image or situation that felt so urgent. I’m most successful when I’m intentional about writing. When I’m intentional, I try to write at least a poem a week.
Thomas Whyte, Rachel Mallalieu : part five

Philadelphia guitarist, songwriter, singer, producer and poet Sadie Dupuis’s second full-length collection, following MOUTHGUARD (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2018), is Cry Perfume (Black Ocean, 2022), a collection the publisher describes as “a collection of lyrical poems that engage with grief and loss and the toll of overdose and addiction with an activist bent.” Dupuis’ short, declarative narratives are set with a dark undertone and absurdist, surreal sheen; she writes narratives that feel off-balance, unable to completely find solid ground. “I chew up my feet,” she writes, to open the poem “MY PRETTY POET,” “Running down a mountain times five / When I buy the green gem / I’m envied by thousands / When I look into the makeup monitor / My eyes are the color of American money / Bleach-sanitized [.]” There’s a particular kind of swagger through these lyric character studies, one that carries a tone of exhaustion across a weight of experiences through performance, touring and loss; around, as the back cover offers, the “glamorized toxicities often inherent in entertainment.”
rob mclennan, Sadie Dupuis, Cry Perfume

One of the highlights of my first year on the York MA in 2020 was being introduced to The House of Fame by Chaucer. I just found it such a revelation – completely original, hilarious in parts, very relevant to current ‘celebrity’ culture, and kind of bizarre. My only previous encounter with Chaucer was at school when we had to look at the General Prologue and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales. So not even the funny bits!
When I recently came across a review of a biography by Marion Turner, Chaucer, A European Life (Princeton University Press, 2019) I bought it, and found I couldn’t put it down. Rather than tell the story of his life chronologically, Turner goes for thematic chapter headings (“Great Household”, “Milky Way”, “Inn”) that are intriguing, and that explain the historical and cultural contexts vividly. I loved it.
My current project is reading The Canterbury Tales (albeit in modern English, I admit – Nevill Coghill’s translation for Penguin Classics) So far I’ve only skipped the Monk’s Tale, which looked particularly heavy going, and in fact the ‘Host’ tells us afterwards that it practically sent him to sleep with boredom, so maybe that was a good call.
Robin Houghton, Chaucer

The dishes I most enjoy are cooked by chefs who demonstrate an understanding of how flavours and textures work together, a subjective understanding, of course, that coincides with mine. From the first mouthful, I know we’re on a similar wavelength. And the same goes for poetry. Within a stanza, I know whether a poet has a certain feeling for a line, a cadence, a sentence, that I also share.
In both cases, food and poetry, there’s always a delight in making unexpected discoveries, either at a backstreet tapas bar or from a small press publisher. One such example is Paul Ings’ first pamphlet, One Week, One Span of Human Life (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). This title might give certain readers the erroneous impression that the work inside might be abstract or metaphysical. However, it simply serves to indicate the pamphlet’s structure, which follows the course of a week.
Matthew Stewart, A poem from Paul Ings’ first pamphlet

Sree Sen’s journey throughout “Cracked Asphalt” is a geographical and emotional one, moving from Mumbai to Dublin. The speaker is realistic and doesn’t assume that she can move away from the harassment she suffers in the country she was born in and neither does she pretend everything’s rosy in her new country. The move puts her in a limbo: she’s now a guest when she returns to her country of origin but not completely at home in the country where she has settled. However, she finds joy in small things: food, planting, art and refuses to beat herself up for difficult days where regrets surface or that day’s tasks feel impossible. There’s a reminder that winter does eventually turn to spring. Hope can poke through the darkest of soils.
Emma Lee, “Cracked Asphalt” Sree Sen (Fly on the Wall Press) – book review

Aside from the minor point that I’d never be asked, I’d hate to be Poet Laureate.
Obviously, once you’ve decided to accept the barrel of sherry, or whatever it is these days, in exchange for your soul, you have to do the job. When a monarch celebrates a jubilee or there’s a royal birth, marriage, or as in last week’s case, a death, then you have to sit down and do your best to write something meaningful and appropriate. And, I suppose, given you’ve been given the top job, you have to try to make it seem as if nobody else could write it.
Simon Armitage is obviously a very good poet. A fine reader of his poems, too, from my memory of being at an event at which he was the star turn long ago.
And by simply being Poet Laureate, his books sell better, so I get why he would accept the offer, assuming he cares how many they sell. He might even feel by taking the job he has the chance to make a difference. A bit strange, but I’ve heard it said.
The downside is that it is almost impossible to write anything useful and balanced – make that real – about the life of a monarch.
And sadly, if predictably, I thought his elegy for Elizabeth II dreary and forgettable. There were no lines or thoughts that stood out. It was pretty much what you’d expect a laureate to say. It was in the grand tradition of stuff written for patrons, living or otherwise, going back to when poets felt it necessary to fawn over the wealthy in order to put food on the table. (Try out the endless stream of well-written drivel from some of the seventeenth and eighteenth century poets to see what I mean.)
Bob Mee, SHINING MORE BUT WEIGHING LESS: IS THIS THE FATE OF A POET LAUREATE?

I learned, this week, that Rosemary Cappello has died. She was among the first people to encourage my writing and was an advocate for poetry and the arts in Philadelphia, where she lived for most of her life. I would not call her a mentor of mine; but she has been mentor to many other people as well as instrumental in setting up poetry reading series, poetry events, and other gatherings. All while also editing and publishing Philadelphia Poets Journal, a literary magazine that started as an 8-page photocopied zine and became a 100+ page annual journal…what energy, what devotion! And such kindness–when I first met her in the early 1980s, we saw each other often at poetry readings and open mikes. Then I moved away, first to Connecticut and then to the Lehigh Valley. Yet whenever I returned to Philadelphia for a poetry event, it seemed Rosemary was there. She always remembered me, too! In recent years, I’ve encountered her on Zoom readings and events. And I knew she had health struggles and trouble with mobility, but she never flagged in her enthusiasm for the arts.
Ann E. Michael, Poetry mentors

Your grandson found photos of you on eBay this morning. They’re archival newspaper photos — from the San Antonio Express-News, or maybe from the San Antonio Light which hasn’t existed in decades. It’s disconcerting to think of a stranger buying these black-and-white 8 x 10s. Because they have a yen for pictures that give off that 1980 vibe? Because they like the jut of your nose, the spark in your eye? They’re “vintage originals.” No one knows they’re part of my family history. Someone could pick these up for their visual appeal, the way I used to browse for hand-tinted postcards of the Mohawk Trail. When we were cleaning out your house, we recycled all of the yellowed newspaper clippings — none of us wanted more clutter. You might say, “Who cares, they’re just old photos!” But I can’t resist these old photographs of you, cropping up in my browser this morning like you’re waving hello from olam ha-ba.
Rachel Barenblat, Old photos

It’s cemetery season for me, coming up on the annual Evergreen Cemetery Walk. I’ve been a longtime writer of scripts and scenes for this walk through Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, where community members and schoolkids can meet the people who are buried there, and, in the past, I played many characters and this year will do so again. It’s an exhausting but rewarding experience! As actors, we do two rounds of six performances each on the weekends, and three rounds on schooldays for field trips during the week, in all kinds of weather. It used to fall in October, and now it’s bumped up to September and the first weekend of October, because the schoolkids were not wearing jackets and appropriate attire in the cold or rainy weather! My character is Helen Clark McCurdy (1866-1962), who ran for office.
It’s also spider season, and all the webs are up!
Kathleen Kirk, Cemetery Season

A house can be restless
as a mouth not done feeding
itself. A house with an egg-
yolk moon over it, a forest
of beautiful braided trees;
a chorus of waterbirds calling
from one edge to another.
Luisa A. Igloria, Fable

It’s cold. A cardi, a blanket, a cat and a cup of tea kind of morning. After months of no proper rain, it spent a couple of days dousing us, but now it’s autumn, bright-coloured and nippy. I picked my daughter up from a Scout activity yesterday and the Finnish forests were at their prime, the birch and spruce and lake contrast just beautiful. It won’t last, so I’m making the most of a quiet morning before my Uni course starts back up and the kids come home, working on poetry and organising my writing. […]
I’m doing lots of back-ups and rearranging files. My laptop spent the summer getting a few small things repaired and one of my external drives also died, so I’m chasing down old versions of files. All my writing seems to be backed up somewhere, but I lost some old books I produced back when Grimalkin Press was a proper small press almost 20 years ago. I have paper copies of almost everything, but, of course, I lost my copies of the one book someone contacted me to buy. I think I’ve managed to find them a second-hand copy and I’m trying to get the digital files restored, but it’s made me want to go through my digital records and double-save everything.
I like the idea of archives. I’ve kept a handwritten journal since I was 13, I keep old letters and writing notebooks. And millions of photos, both digital and paper. I keep back-ups of different collection ideas, of different drafts of poems and forgotten novels. But it’s the organising of them that appeals, sifting through, deciding what to keep, what could be useful later. […]
I once spent weeks going through the submissions, letters and other paraphernalia of Chapman Publishing, setting aside things for their National Library of Scotland archives. The press is now defunct, but at the time it was one of the most influential voices in literary publishing in Scotland. We received early correspondence from writers who are now well known, from those who influenced Scottish writing. You never knew if that crazy letter from some young poet would be the first steps in their writing career. Boxes stored in a basement in Edinburgh holding treasure for some future researcher.
Gerry Stewart, Back-up and Carry-on

One of the good things about doing a “submission season” with your friends—our group tries to do a submission a day on a certain month, this year September, is that is motivates you to look at journals you might not have heard of, or considered before, or considered outside your reach. When you really look at where you submit over time, it’s probably the same places over and over again, and maybe there’s an editor at another magazine you’ve never sent to that will absolutely love your work. It’s also a good excuse to get to the bookstore in person and look at literary magazines available in your area—you might be surprised what you can find. It also forces you to take a look at the poems you’ve been writing—is this one ready to send out? Why has this poem you like been sitting around, not submitted anywhere yet? And also to update your records—in my case, an Excel spreadsheet—to see how many poems and submissions you have out. Sometimes I catch duplicate poems or even duplicate submissions— hey, I’m as human as the next person, and probably slightly worse at keeping records. So, I encourage you all to take a look at your poetry and see where you could send your work and try some place new this month.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Woodinville Book Club Meets and Talks Art and Fraud, Last Visit to the Flower Garden on a Chilly Evening, More About Submission September

When I was a young woman, I happened upon a slim book of poetry called Mapping the Distance, by another young (but slightly older than me) woman named Alicia Hokanson. Many of the books that drift onto my shelves later leave them, but this one has remained for more than three decades. I felt some kind of kinship with this writer, back then: Both from Seattle, both teacher-writers, both in complicated relationships. There was something in her face in the author photo that felt a bit like looking in a mirror.
Something (I don’t remember what) a few weeks back caused me to do a search for Hokanson, and I discovered that in 2021 she published her second full-length work, Perishable World. I learned that in the intervening years, she had a long career as a secondary school teacher in Seattle. She retired from teaching in 2014, from a job she took in 1987, two years before her first book was published.
Where Mapping the Distance is the story of a young woman grappling with the challenges of early adulthood, Perishable World is (at its title hints) about life’s challenges at the opposite end of time’s fulcrum. Instead of a story filled with questions about choices, it’s a story filled with inevitable loss. I’m still reading it, so I can’t give a full accounting or review, but the writing is gorgeous. I can see, reading from both books, the development of craft and voice that occurred in the decades between them.
I can see that Hokanson is still, as she was then, just a little bit ahead of me on the journey. She’s offering, again, a map to places I can see but haven’t yet reached–not only as a human living in this particular corner of the planet, but as a writer, too.
Hokanson continued to write poetry for publication during her decades of teaching, but there is a gap of more than three decades between her two full-length books of poems. I have one book to my name, published in 2003. I remember telling someone that it took me more than a decade to write the poems in it and joking that I hoped it wouldn’t be another ten years before a second book. It’s now been nearly two decades, and I haven’t written even a handful of poems in the last ten years.
Still, I have been writing. Here, mostly, and although this writing doesn’t require what poetry does, there is something about committing words to an audience that hones craft.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Inspiration

Yesterday, I finished up the layout and posted the accompanying e-zine for the MEMOIR IN BONE & INK video series. It felt fitting to be putting both the video project and that zine to bed (well, out there in the world with a bow on it for whoever wants a little more than the videos can provide) I wrote those poems back in April as part of NAPOWRIMO, with just a title and a general idea that I wanted to talk about writing and artmaking and how it relates to the body and experience. I sometimes think about the idea of memoirs, and how sometimes I am surprised when people say they are writing them, since I feel, even at middle age, I don’t have all that much to say except maybe about very specific things. But then, I’ve written a number of fragmented, memoirish series like the hunger palace and exquisite damage. But then as a poet who always twists the biographical stone cold truth, I’d feel weird and exposed writing a true memoir. I am also not sure I have anything interesting enough to say in it.
But then again, even this blog sometimes feels like a really long memoir project. Or maybe a really long letter to someone I don’t even know. A youtuber author I watch was talking about trying to set habits to journal like Virginia Woolf, who spent her afternoons journaling and letter writing, which seems nice, but my afternoons are devoted to writing other things. The blog entries, which took the place of the paper journals I once kept, happen in the in-betweens. I’ve often wondered if I lost something when I transitioned to journaling in online spaces, but mostly what I see flipping through old ones is a lot of useless emoting over unimportant things.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 9/11/2022

The question that I am obsessed with these days is by adrienne maree brown: “What is the next most elegant step?”
And this is sort of the way one composes a still life. You put something on a surface, you move it, you add things. You take away. You compose. You arrange the debris, the rubble. What is the next most elegant step? What is the step that taps into the magical matter? If you’ve composed a lot of still lifes, you know when you strike upon that magical combination. At least usually you do — sometimes it’s revealed to you later. With photography, I usually know when I’ve caught some primo light. I know when the sparks are flying. But it’s later when I upload the photo to my computer that I know for sure. And that’s a fun and exhilerating moment…until it’s not…which also happens. You just don’t always know. You hope! But you don’t know for sure. And then funnily, you think you’ve got some magic down and no one responds to it at all when you post it. Which is also fine, because maybe it is magic and it’s just not felt yet. Maybe it’s not magic to anyone else. That’s also fine. It was magic to you.
The thing about what brown says about the elegant next step is that it “acknowledges what is known and what is not known.” And this is also very like the still life process: you compose into the unknown.

It’s also a bit like this blog post: I’m just trying to make the excellent link between still life and poetry. But I think it’s there without me nattering on about it. Or maybe it’s something I need to write more about, longer, elsewhere. And probably will.
Shawna Lemay, Poetry of Still Life

i curate the cures for hates ~ but there are none
they are as incurable as they are incorrigible
broken hearts are two a penny
and i haven’t any pennies
i have pinned their iridescent carapaces
the thick skinned burrowers
many a sarcophagus entombs a wry smile
staring at the keyhole
the dust ready to pounce
Jim Young, adjust

Classical music concert by the sea. Sun hot on our arms, yet the air makes us shiver. Little cabin, doors thrown open. Unaccustomed voices — women and black composers. Accustomed voices: Dvorak. Simultaneity: Crickets.
These are not usual times. It wasn’t the crickets who were letting the air out of the helium balloon. They weren’t stoking anxiety and desire — rather they were the adults in the room.
They left it to Dvorak to indulge in a sustained shriek! Those violin players stroking the same strident bow on the same strings, higher and higher -a scream that would be unacceptable at the dinner table! Crickets took the middle zone and cellos planted their feet on the ground.
The evening wind blew cool and clean. Renewed, after the storm of strings broke. The crickets play on.
Jill Pearlman, Dvorak’s Cricket Folk Dance

September 11, 2022September 11, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 36

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week found poets reflecting on summer travels and gearing up for a new academic year, judging contests, polishing manuscripts, dealing with extreme weather events, mourning the dead, wallowing in sadness and marking moments of joy.

Somehow, it’s already September. Today is Labor Day, a rainy one here in Upstate NY, and I’m using it to get started harvesting “the good stuff” from a writing journal I finished in the last half of August. I’m hoping to find some poems — or at least decent starts of poems — for my current “Gertie” manuscript. Regardless of what I gather up from those notes, the hard work begins.
I’ve been putting off writing the final poems. I’ve been putting off finishing the manuscript. Partly, I just needed more distance, time, space… all the dimensions of opening to how it wants to go vs. what I try to impose on it.
Another big factor in putting it off has been my own fear of failure. I’m working through it. Outings like this August kayaking trip are not unrelated to conquering my fears. I’m tougher than I know and surrounded by people who keep trying to show me… and plenty of opportunities to prove it to myself.
I’m not interested in doing that portage again, but I’m glad I did it the one time. I may not be be built for carrying heavy boats long distances, but I can push through and accept help. I can find worn metaphors and float them into waters they were never intended to navigate.
Yes, just like that.
Carolee Bennett, poets were not meant to portage

The other day I bumped into Tomaž Šalamun. I was enjoying the last few hours of walking around Ljubljana, took a wrong turn down a side street, and there he was, sitting cross-legged in black and white at the entrance to a poetry centre named after him. I felt a mixture of emotions on meeting him. Surprise, awe, and a kind of annoyance that I had completely forgotten his connection to the city. Had I remembered, I would have taken my copy of Homage to Hat and Uncle Guido and Eliot: Selected Poems (Arc Publications, 2005) with me, in my own act of homage.
I asked if I could take his photo and he said I could, but not much more. I stood there for a moment, looking at him, then said goodbye, then stepped out again into the bustling street outside. It was very hot.
Later in the airport while we waited for our delayed plane home I thought of him again. Eking out my last bit of phone battery, I read his poem History (translated by Tomaž Šalamun and Bob Perleman). I recalled how for a brief moment, sometime in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Šalamun had had the appearance of being all the rage in British poetry magazines, books and commentary. I used his poems in some of my workshops. Nearby some children were playing noisily in a designated soft-play area, one of whom was too big for the equipment, much to the delight of her friends. It was still very hot.
Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: History, by Tomaž Šalamun

Is this my job – to stop a moment in time for you?
The trouble with memories is the glow they have.
She unravelled until she became everything to me.
What does it mean when we say things last.
What we said to each other, our language,
our sound, is half-forgotten.
Words travel from page to page.
Doubt clambers aboard each one.
At the edge of the track children wave.
I look out of the window as if I can see.
Bob Mee, THE DOUBT TRAIN AND THE GIRL BY THE LAKE

Alas, every day could not be as perfect as that one – the next day after our visit a strange orange haze settled over us, the full moon shining spookily overhead. Some of my poet friends in WA and OR were evacuated today as wildfires sort of ringed the Seattle and Portland areas. It was also almost 90 today, on top of dangerous particulate levels (above 150) so—I was consigned to the indoors, with Glenn going to get the mail and do errands in a KN95 mask—sure, for covid, but also, for evil smoke.
On the positive side of being cooped up for two days, I got to watch the new Ring of Power series (beautiful production), the new Thor movie (silly at the beginning with a lot of laughs and screaming goats, sentimental and sad at the end?) and get a bunch of submissions in as the literary magazine submission season starts up again for the school year. So many places are closed for the summer, and I’ve been less motivated lately than I should have been, so it was good for a bunch of us to give ourselves the goal of doing a submission a day during September.
One of the other benefits of getting together with writer friends (besides the overall happiness thing re: above) is that you can discuss your worries (in my case, author photos, promotion, cover art) and it really helps your anxiety. So not only do friends help with the happiness levels, but they can help you feel more normal and less stressed about things like your upcoming book. And you can discuss grants, which literary magazines are open for subs, and congratulate each other for your wins and console each other over your losses.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, What Makes You Happy (September Edition) and Submission Season Returns (with Wildfire Smoke)

The more I mull it over, the more I like the idea. I like the experimental aspect of it, and the speculation and the surprise. It means that instead of preparing the soil in spring, all I’ll do is spread the compost out as usual–but not dig it in. I’ll water if the spring is dry, but mostly pay attention to the things that sprout and determine as early as possible whether those are edible or ornamental, or just weedy. The downside is that I’ll get all those marvelous seed catalogs and…will I be able to resist? Also, my spouse will complain. He likes a well-laid-out, well-delineated garden so he knows where he can step and where he shouldn’t, what to water, and what to pull out. He may also object initially to the aesthetics of an unplanned truck patch. But around mid-June, I will be admiring my volunteers. It will be beautiful.
~
Always I find metaphors and analogies between the gardening process and the writing process. The way I put my recent chapbook (Strange Ladies) together was similar to the theory of an all-volunteer garden. I drafted those poems at different times over many years and let them sprout even though they did not seem to fit in with my other writing projects or plans. After awhile, I realized they made their own kind of peculiar and surprising design.
I recognize that experimentation is a big part of my writing process. I love just playing around with words and ideas; when I first started writing more purposefully, my poems were often a bit surreal and strange. Over the decades, I’ve experimented with craft, prompts, natural world imagery, poetic form, philosophical and speculative concepts, and memory. It’s hard for me to say where my style or genre of poetry fits. I experiment, but most of my poems are not “experimental.” Much of my work uses observations of the natural world as major image and motivation, but I am not quite a “nature poet.” It doesn’t really matter how or whether my poetry fits an identifiable description. I weed as I go along, and I let anything that looks interesting (or familiar) show me its stuff.
Ann E. Michael, Volunteers

Whenever I feel like I have lost my way, I go to my garden. There I will find everything: beauty, growth, life-and-death fighting, and rot. I should say that I go to my garden every day whether or not I have lost my way. I am always astonished by the beauty and intelligence of what I find there, and inspired to consider what poem or art might come to being that opens up a conversation with what I’m seeing. Here, for example, is a clematis flower from my garden. I’m taken by the vibrant shades of lavender/violet streaked through its petals and wondering if I might be able to dye some fabric that honors those colors. I love the star-like shape of the flower and enjoy the irony of its placement on the very floor of the garden. I hadn’t meant to take a photo of an assassin bug, but here it is, watching out, I imagine, for aphids and other destructive insects. I wonder if its tumeric-colored body has a meaning in the world of insects, and if I might create a piece that mingles his color with that of the flower. Beauty and terror together.
Sheryl St. Germain, Inspired by Nature

Anything can be the starting point for a poem. Recently I was driving along listening to a Hank Mobley cd, it was hot so I had the windows open and because of the turbulence of the moving air I could not hear the bass solo. This led to the thought that the wind had stolen the bass solo, which in turn led to this poem.
Paul Tobin, LOVE AT FIRST NOTE

Last year I discovered the existence of a branch of lit crit called “Monster Theory.” Not that the ideas encompassed by that term would startle anyone who thinks much about cryptids, were-creatures, berserk A.I., etc., but it’s been useful for me as a teacher to see the categories and definitions laid out methodically (although, as you know, monsters like to violate categories). I used monster theory recently in an hourlong seminar for my college’s First Year Read program, which I agreed to participate in because I’m a soft touch and because it focused on Grendel, a novel that had long been on my reading list. It was fun in many ways–my group was lively–but I disliked Gardner’s book. I didn’t take to the style, and the idea of writing from the perspective of a monster feels a little ho-hum after so many pro-serial-killer shows and movies. Most of all, though, the kind of monstrosity got to me.
In Beowulf, Grendel is straight-up terrible; Gardner’s revision flips the bias, illuminating an outsider who’s monsterized, almost compelled to evil by a culture defining itself as righteous. Poetry itself plays a role in monsterization: Gardner’s Grendel is obsessed with a bard he calls “the Shaper” because the latter reshapes bloodthirsty, pointless massacre into inspiring ballads of heroism. (Cue the WWI poets I’ll be teaching soon in a regular class: Owen, Sassoon, and company rage not only against war itself but against idealizations of war in poems like this by Rupert Brooke.) So, okay, I get the kind of story Grendel offers. I’m supposed to sympathize with the misunderstood shaggy beast. That ceased when Grendel, who had been treating his nonverbal mother with a mixture of longing and revulsion, brought the same misogynistic stew to his obsession with Hrothgar’s young queen and sexually assaulted her. A philosophizing suicidal murdering rapist? Not a great case study for inspiring community among new undergrads, if you ask me.
Yet I love so many monster stories! My other class this term, a first-year writing seminar, features a bunch of them. Geryon in Carson’s Autobiography of Red, for instance, self-identifies as monstrous, a claim that makes for great class discussions and student essays. “Monstrous” in Geryon’s case might translate as queer, shy, and artistic as well as red and winged. It also means “cross-genre.” Carson’s poem-novel-autobiography is a monster in itself.
Lesley Wheeler, Professor monster will see you now

I’ve grown up in a world that views beauty as an option, an ornament, something you can dabble in at the end of the day if your serious work is done: a matter of private taste, with no objective importance or reality. This view is so obviously and immediately wrong, to me, that all the philosophies undergirding it — which includes all the ones I encountered in my youth — struck me as obviously and immediately wrong. Or at least irrelevant. I don’t know much, but I do know that beauty is the center of life, not its periphery. It’s not an inert thing you titillate yourself with from time to time: it starts things, it precipitates thought and action. It is the fundamental experience of orientation. How can you tell if you’re faced in the right direction? If you’re perceiving beauty. Life is, in some ways, as simple as that.
Dale Favier, Intimation

Notice the V in love
and wonder what
it’s pointing to,
the old monk said.
Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (303)

Perhaps if Lot’s wife had waited until she got to the cave before letting nostalgia overwhelm her, the plot of cosmology would have gone in an entirely different direction. In fact, it might have ended in that cave, and left us in peace. Why couldn’t the Lord understand that all she wanted was to write a poem about ruins? Is it because men have a sole claim to ruin?
She looks tiny on the plinth; her head like a newborn with no talent for wailing. The artist has stripped Lot’s wife of her limbs. Perhaps he feared she would escape the gallery, and travel back to the underworld.
Mona Kareem, Three Poems

Thanks to Chuck Brickley, I’ve recently had the great honour of co-judging, with Kat Lehmann, the Haiku Society of America’s annual haiku competition, named in memory of Harold G. Henderson, who played a pivotal role in helping to popularise haiku in English.
I’ve been reflecting on why it’s such a great honour. The answer is complex. First off, that the HSA should ask me, some schmuck from England, when the easiest thing would be to ask two (North) American haiku poets – I find that immensely open-minded, especially at this time when globalism seems to be in retreat. Secondly, that so many of the English-language haiku poets whom I admire are American. Thirdly, that much of the rich culture which has influenced me as a person, and as a writer, is American – not just the obvious poets like Bishop, Brock-Broido, Kerouac, Lowell, Snyder and Williams, but art film, music and all, right up to yesterday, when I had Jake Xerxes Fussell’s interpretations of old folk tunes from the South on repeat.
Matthew Paul, Haiku Society of America Haiku Award

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book (Bread Of) was released into the world around the same time I gave birth to my son. My first child, my first book. My life changed so much at that moment, it felt like suddenly all of my insides were external. Severed. Alive. Public.
The first book felt a bit like an exorcism of some old trauma that needed to be transmuted. This next one, [a go], feels more like a representation of my poetics. I am so excited to put this one into the world. To have these poems be seen and heard and read; to watch them take on a life of their own, as poems do, regardless of publication.
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
This is a difficult one to answer.
Poetry came to me, really, is what it feels like. I remember being frustrated, wanting to write prose, actually, but poetry seemed to say: me first. It is a language you start to understand and then the other more normalized ways of thinking and feeling just kind of bore you. […]
12 – When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Get out in nature, get into my body via yoga or a hike or a nice little joint. Pull cards, take baths, read words of favorite writers, or just agree to write badly & show up again tomorrow.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Gabrielle Joy Lessans

Does it feel as though metaphor could be the last refuge?
Come in, have a drink of water.
It might taste like rust or the mossy lining of an old well.
All I wanted was some kind of life of the mind.
Luisa A. Igloria, On Being Told I Have so Many Unread Books

It was back to school week here, but not for me. When my last year’s boss sent me a picture of Cane in his classroom on the first day of school, I felt some hard FOMO. Or something that was sad. Or mad.
I remember standing in front of a room of new students, being lit up the way his face is in the photo, and I missed it. It made me sadmad about my body and its limitations, and the public education system and its limitations, and time and its limitations, and change–inevitable, relentless, unceasing change.
Then the queen of England died, which also made me feel sadmad–about history and colonialism and the disappearing of things that I know are problematic (at best) but still are the things I’ve known for my whole life and even though I know (I know) what’s wrong with them I want to cling to them because at least I know them, and because they are mine, and because so many of the emerging unknown things right now are so unsettling/terrifying/overflowing with potential doom.
I miss having feelings about collective events that are simpler than mine seem able to be any more.
Rita Ott Ramstad, What a long, strange week it’s been

saturday morning, ashen, as if this monsoon has stapled itself
to the sky and will never leave, the deluge will wash away
everything, even sins, even sinners, the levitating fear that
woke me up before dawn is still rising, though I’m afraid the moon
will be much too cold to touch
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Half past dawn

Nedjo Roger’s often politically engaged poetry and songwriting pursue glimpses of transcendence in the everyday. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Canadian Literature, SubTerrain, Contemporary Verse 2, and Class Collective, among others journals and online publications, and in various chapbooks including In Air/Air Out in 2011.
PP: It’s been a minute since we last connected. What are some artistic projects you’ve worked on in the past few years?
NR: In 2014 I wrote and performed a Chaucer-inspired solo mock epic in verse, “The Trois-Rivieres Tales,” for the Victoria Fringe Theatre Festival and reprised it in 2016 in Vancouver and on Salt Spring Island. So much fun to be part of the Fringe.
I co-host the monthly Salt Spring Public Library Open Mic and in 2017 I put together a project that published the chapbookBlackberries: Poems from the Salt Spring Library Open Mic.
In 2018 I was lucky enough to connect with a travelling musician JA Cockburn who arranged and recorded a bunch of my songs, which led to the 9-song album My Utopia Is DIY.
In 2019 with sponsorship from Salt Spring Arts I put together a two-day performance festival, Saltfest. I lined up a performance space and ten shows, supported the artists with their performance needs, hosted.
Pearl Pirie, Checking In: With Nedjo Rogers

This week’s post began with something that happened at the end of last week’s Fridays at Four discussion. Someone read a beautiful short poem by Jean Valentine, “Mare and Newborn Foal.” Someone else asked a question about what it was saying, I offered some quick impressions about possible things behind it, and the person who had read the poem stepped in and pointed out–correctly–that that wasn’t necessary: the poem was whole and complete as it stood. This is a crucial point. All of my first teachers repeated something it took me a few years to understand: that a poem isn’t about the world, it is a world. We understand it by considering how its various pieces relate to each other, not to things outside the poem. That’s the aesthetic I’ve followed ever since. There are others, of course, but that’s the one that’s deepest in me.
And that line of thought took me back to an inspired book title: How Does A Poem Mean?, by the poet, translator, and scholar John Ciardi, first published in 1959. Poems “mean” in very different ways, just as paintings do–from realism to impressionism to surrealism to abstraction, and an array of others (see the images above). What we need to do as readers is discover how any given poem “means”–if we try to read it through a different lens, we won’t be able to make any sense of it. If you try to read a Wallace Stevens poem, for example, in the same way you’d read a Robert Frost poem, it won’t work. And vice-versa.
We find poems that seem to reflect the daily world we live in the easiest to enter on first readings, just as we might paintings that show recognizable scenes and objects the simplest to talk about. But keep in mind that those “realistic” paintings are based on illusion–the techniques of creating three-dimensional perspective in two dimensions took centuries to develop.
Sharon Bryan, How Does A Poem Mean?

Someone on twitter said that this period of time between the death and the funeral was a ‘sacred’ time and that’s how it has felt, a place in which the family’s grief was closed off, private, a place where we kindled his memory back. On the day of the funeral we opened it up to everyone else. From a personal point of view, this grief is very different to losing my daughter. When we lost Matilda I became an animal called grief and that animal was insatiable in its need to be near her. A lot of it was the terrible instincts, the beautiful instincts, that exist in parenthood. I could not find my way through it, not for a long time. The loss of my dad is so sad, a great well of sad that runs right down inside me. But it is a slow pain. I do not feel eviscerated by this grief. There is an inevitability to losing a parent, a terrible knowledge that at some point, and you never know when, you will be without them, a knowledge hat a door will close and you will never be able to reopen it, that you will lose a person that you love, and there really is no getting away from it. The older I get, the more grief there is. What a terrible, wonderful thing is the human animal, that we are so aware of ourselves and so aware of the loss of a person we love. That we must live that.
In this slow, deep grief for my dad I have found myself reaching for poems, or rather the poems feel like they have been reaching for me. Seamus Heaney’s ‘Digging‘ is one that I have come back and back to. The image of the father in the garden beneath the window:
Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down
Reminds me so much of when we first moved to my dad’s dream house: the small holding he’d always wanted. I can see him now, from the bedroom window, in the veg patch, in his old coat and his little blue hat, throwing the spade into the ground.
By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.
Poetry is more than just words on a page, it is a vibration that you pick up. The poem becomes the place where the emotional experience is created and carried, a place where the emotional shared experience is relevant, where that great ache of grief is met, and I feel that in this poem. I relate to it, but of course cannot relate to it. I relate to the emotions. I feel that insecurity around purpose, the vulnerability of doing something different to what was expected, to move away from a path that a parent expected of you and that perceived disappointment, that way of trying to make them proud. I don’t really know what my dad wanted for me, but while we always had books in the house, I do know that my parents never saw being a writer as a way of making a living (to be fair, I am barely scratching a living from it so perhaps they were right).
Wendy Pratt, The Poem as Shared Emotional Experience

All the high holidays
I haven’t lived yet
stretch ahead of me
without parents,
just still photos
behind the lit candle.
It’s a scant six months
since we buried him
on his side of the bed.
Having no parents
is so much more (or less)
than having only one.
Rachel Barenblat, Abandon

During the past week, as I’ve worked on poetry submissions, I thought about how long it’s been since I typed in new poems. I write poems by hand on a purple legal pad. In an ideal world, I would return to the work after a few weeks, make revisions, type the poem into the computer, and start sending it out into the world.
Over the last ten years, my best practice has dwindled. In a good year, I’ve entered 5-30 poems into the computer. I think it’s been about 2 years since I entered anything new. My submitting has also dwindled, and if I’m not submitting, why type drafts into the computer?
This morning, I reflected on a good reason to do it–because then I have it. For a brief minute, I thought I might have lost my box of purple legal pads full of rough drafts, about 10 years of rough drafts. I had more legal pads, but I had entered all the finished poems out of them. For decades I kept all the rough drafts, just in case. But it’s become clear that I’m unlikely to go way far back to work with drafts. I can barely keep up with the recent rough drafts.
The thought that I might have lost all of my recent rough drafts (a decade’s worth of rough drafts) made me feel wretched. It didn’t make me feel any better to realize that I didn’t remember exactly what might have been lost.
Happily, I thought I remembered that they might be in the box with my sketchbooks–and happily, they are.
I will likely be in this apartment for the next year or two. Let me not waste this time. Perhaps, if I focus, I can get all the more recent poems entered into the computer before it’s time to move again.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Prodigal Poetry Legal Pads Return!

A smear of rust
A shot of sweat
Shadows rip the sky
Language lathered soars
waxed and raw
Why whisper
When you can scream
Charlotte Hamrick, Push

What I’ve found uplifting is that libraries persist. Even at the beginning of the pandemic, we were doing library take-out. The phrase I’ve heard so often these last years is, “you’re a lifesaver.” Or, “I don’t know what I would have done without the library.” Or, “it’s such a comfort that the library is here.” When this all started, I had so many conversations with people on the phone when we were doing library take-out, or later in person, with folks who said they were so isolated and lonely and that we were the only ones with whom they’d had a conversation.
The library is a lot of things but I’ve been thinking about it lately as a gymnasium for the soul…..because it’s a place in which you can ask good, nourishing, complicated, simple, heartfelt, deep, innocent, weird, lovely questions, and if you’ve read my novel, Everything Affects Everyone, you know how I feel about questions. The questions I’m asking, anyway, from within that space are:
What does optimism look like now? What radical good can we do with the power of our imaginations? What can we do to foster that important feeling of belonging? How can we hold / create spaces for complexity and also delight? How will we, going forward, be collectively human? How can we help others not squander their gifts? How can we uplift and challenge and encourage and support each other? How do we want to contribute and live and be and be ALIVE now?
Libraries encourage those who use them to dream, to wonder, to imagine. They are places of comfort and solace and good company. People have brought their griefs and bewilderments to the library because, I have heard, it’s a place that makes them feel okay. And that is something that we all deserve — to feel okay. (Shouldn’t that just be the basic minimum?)
Shawna Lemay, The Library as a Gymnasium for the Soul

Rob Taylor:Time Out of Time is many things, but perhaps at its heart it’s a love story about reading: how a reader can fall in love with the words of a writer and, in a sense, even with the writer themself. In this case the writer is Lebanese poet Etel Adnan, and the book is her 2020 Griffin Prize winning collection, Time.
“I would follow you anywhere… I don’t even know / what you look like,” you write, and later, “I have fallen in love with an arrant ideal.” Could you tell us more about this one-sided love affair? And would you describe it as “one-sided”?
Arleen Paré: Oh yes, this was a one-sided love affair. Etel Adnan knew me not at all from the vantage point of her very full international life and that was fine with me. People used to ask if I had sent her the manuscript and would I not want her to know that I was writing about her. But no, I was happy that she hadn’t heard of me and my infatuated manuscript. How could she ever have heard a whisper of me? And then she died in November 2021, just as the manuscript was going to print and the possibility was gone. It was a fortuitous crush that enriched my life enormously.
RT: Time Out of Time is a sequence of 49 short, numbered poems, supplemented by a handful of titled poems (including “Pop Culture 1”). This mirrors Adnan’s approach in Time, which contains six numbered sequences. Did you know you were going to mirror Adnan’s style from the beginning, stringing out a book-length project from these smaller responses? Or was the book something you stumbled into, a bit love-drunk?
AP: I knew I wanted to mirror almost everything about Adnan’s poetics in Time; I was entirely smitten with her elegant, spare style. But the project-as-book developed as the month of April 2021, poetry month, the month of writing a poem-a-day, stretched out day by day, poem by poem and suddenly I had over fifteen pages of poetry. By the end of April, I knew I was aiming for a full-length collection. It was an energized period, and I was a little love-drunk. Yes, it was both, stumble and drive. I find I can only really write about someone or something if I begin to fall in love with them.
Rob Taylor, Admiration, Applause, Adoration: An Interview with Arleen Paré

I was having a discussion lately about sadness…how sometimes we crave it. How you can listen to the same sad song or sad movie scene and somehow the sadness is cathartic. And maybe that idea of catharsis is what art is all about. All I know is that there are times when I set out deliberately to cry, and I know it going in. It’s not really the passing things–a sad video about cats or animals example that I glimpse when I’m scrolling. Or the sort of angry crying I used to do over work-related things. Or even the sad crying I sometimes do when I think about past relationships I wish had ended differently (the Taylor Swift sads I like to call them.)
When I was a kid, I have two Christmas memories that stand out. One, I’ve talked about before, a certain sad Christmas tree song I used to make my mother play again and again. I would stand in the middle of the living room and cry. The other was “Frosty the Snowman” on tv, something I would look forward to airing every year, but the part I was focused on was him melting and the scene in the greenhouse and I would cry and cry. I would wait for that part specifically because it was so sad.
I joked that this meant I was going to be a poet, even then. But I usually don’t see writing, or the writing process in general as sad. Or even unpleasant. I was thinking about this as I was reading this article this morning, about the tortures of writing. When I wrote feed, it definitely felt like a catharsis, and maybe some of it was sad to write, “the hunger palace” in particular, mostly because things still felt very new and raw after my mother’s death. The rest of the book was not so much sad, nor were other things I wrote around the same time.
In general, the difficulty comes from knowing where to start. I feel like once I am rolling on a project, the writing becomes easier, and the better it flows the easier the next part, the editing, is. However, besides the tortuousness of proofing and slogging through line edits, the poems themselves are not unpleasant to write, nor are they particularly tortuous in emotional toll or construction. Sometimes, there’s a sort of exhaustion I feel afterward but its more like I just finished swimming across a river. It’s tiring, but good.
The idea of the suffering of poets is a strange one, but then again, many turn to poetry to address other kinds of traumas and mental illnesses and this may be why. Some of the most brilliant poets I have known have also been the most in need of help, maybe not all the time, but sometimes. I hate the idea that madness is genius, but I think certain ways the brain misfires can be terrible for living in the world, but really good for art. Ask these people and I think they would willingly give up poetry for stability in almost all cases.
Kristy Bowen, poetry and misery

there are no poems
left to write
clouds across the moon
Jason Crane, haiku: 8 September 2022

“Notes from a Shipwreck” navigates choppy waters, as if knowing that still waters are merely the lull before a storm. They explore themes of identity, immigration, the watery foundation of trying to make a home in a country where you’re not entirely accepted and how we might find our communities and people with whom we can share common values and interests. Mookherjee keeps the shipping and sea theme sustained throughout but it never becomes predictable and none of the poems feel like fillers, as if they were just included for the sake of padding out a collection. Each poem has earnt its place.
Emma Lee, “Notes from a Shipwreck” Jessica Mookherjee (Nine Arches Press) – book review

I did double duty in the Labor Day Parade again this year, walking first with the McLean County Democrats (blue shirt) and then with Moms Demand Action (red shirt, underneath my blue shirt, on a day cool enough to wear two and take one off!)! What a great turnout of both participants and parade viewers! So many laborers! All the unions were out, as we have a workers’ rights referendum on the ballot on November 8. (Vote Yes!) So many candidates! So much candy.
August exhausted me, and not just with all the Sealey Challenge poetry reading, which also enlightened and energized me. Lots of brain energy of other sorts these days. Plus…termites. Yup. Sigh.
Kathleen Kirk, Parade/Shy

Let’s imagine our lips are punctuation marks on permanent vacation so life becomes one long run-on sentence of kisses.
Let’s paint complex maps of New York City streets across our foreheads then dare one another to find their way sweetly across our faces.
Let’s begin the journey of a thousand miles with a smile.
Let’s plant trees in all the places we never met.
Rich Ferguson, Let’s

While the time away wasn’t as productive as our last holiday, I did manage six new drafts…two that arrived just under wire and happened on the flight back. I think the last time I got through 10 or more, but given how slim the pickings have been this year I will take six. Who knows what will happen to them. The ≥10 from last time mostly turned into good and useable poems, some of which should make it into the book, so I have hope. I’m just glad to be writing things again. I also managed to work on a draft I’d started before we went, and have even revived an old poem that had been binned that is now a contender for the book, so I will take that as a win.
I can’t afford a trip to, but probably earn too much to warrant a reduced fee for a writing retreat, so these periods of productivity are useful as a way of setting me up to work own stuff for the rest of the year, or until the next burst. Obviously, if new poems want to come in between then I will not that gift horse (the poem) in the mouth (the spontaneousness).
Mat Riches, Cromer, Fango, Have I Read Enough?

love in the sand
amongst all the footprints
my wife’s bunions
Jim Young [no title]

How does a poem begin?
The beginnings of poems often occur external to the author; a branch falls, a lover does something ordinary in a particular way that signals the end of a relationship, a parent dies… these are the beginnings of poems and they are occurring all the time and everywhere. We are surrounded by the beginnings of poems, the poet notices these things in a way that allows them to be expressed as words. There is language based poetry that has less to do with these external events and more to do with words in the abstract sense and I would suppose that these poems begin with the word itself, or a letter even. In the beginning was the word. Does everything begin and end in poetry? Perhaps.
Thomas Whyte, Michael Blouin : part five

where in my flesh does absence nest
where did the earth first breathe
why does my shadow walk on his knees
Grant Hackett [no title]

September 4, 2022September 4, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 35

that moment
between summer and autumn
without a sound
Jim Young [no title]

I get up to let out the dogs and make coffee. I quietly appreciate my dear spouse who kneels on the kitchen floor trying to entice our 16-year-old dog to eat a few morsels of meat which my husband regularly buys and cooks for him. I look out the window, delighted to spot a great blue heron in the pond.
I try to stay in the moment, just watching this creature’s prehistoric-looking countenance and admirable patience as it waits to spear a fish, but here it comes again, my awareness of what we’re doing to this beautiful planet. Nearly half the world’s bird species are in decline due to degradation of their habitats as well as to climate change. In North America alone the bird population has dropped by nearly three billion birds, a decline of 29 perfect since 1970.
Okay, I’m going to stop with the reality overflow. I simply want to acknowledge this is how the day goes for many of us. We’re fully enmeshed in our ordinary lives — getting to work on time, stopping at the grocery store, making supper, keeping up with family and friends, trying to pay bills, hoping to get a better night’s rest than the night before. At the same time we carry the weight of guilt and anxiety over the state of the planet.
E.B. White, author of much beloved books such as Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, as well as The Elements of Style co-author, once said, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” I have to disagree with the late Mr. White. I don’t think we can save it without truly, wholeheartedly savoring it.
Savoring, for me, is about awe. It’s about seeing relationships between what is and sensing the expansiveness of what’s just beyond our rational minds. It’s about connection. It’s about what my friend John C. Robinson calls partnering with Creation.
Laura Grace Weldon, Shifting To A Kinship Worldview

my mother is tired
of picking blueberries
meal moths fly
out of the pantry
I step out of the pool
and my weight returns
Han VanderHart, Notes in August

Dear Oxfam Bookshop Customer,

I doubt I’ll ever know your name or face, but I do know that you visited the Oxfam Bookshop in Chichester at some point between Easter and August this year, pulled my book, The Knives of Villalejo, from the shelf in the Poetry section, and decided to buy it. I’m left to imagine you browsing, picking it up and flicking through the pages, perhaps pausing to skim-read a poem or two before taking the plunge, maybe wondered who Camilla might be (the person to whom I dedicated this copy of my book when it began its first stab at life).

I only discovered my collection had gone when I visited the shop last month, checked its old spot, and found it had vanished. It was no longer sitting in its slot under S for Stewart between other books that used to accompany it and are still left waiting to be chosen (see picture below!).
There’s a thrill to giving a book a new owner, another reader, and I hope you’ve enjoyed your copy. The unanswerable question now, of course, is whether you’ll keep it, go back to it or even let it go again in due course to another charity shop. For now though, I’d simply like to thank you for granting it a second chance.
All the best in a shared love of poetry,
Matthew Stewart, A letter to an Oxfam Bookshop customer

We decide to do a “braided” reading or what I call a “living anthology” where one poet reads, the second follows, then the third and so on. It’s a great way to create energy in a reading and you can’t have a “set” playlist because you end up responding to what one poet read with one of your own poems. Which is what happened.
John read a poem and talked about his kid, which made me read a poem I wrote to my non-binary kid called “Love Poem Where Nature is Non-Binary & Uses They/Them Pronouns.” I was not planning on reading this poem tonight at all—it’s not in Dialogues with Rising Tides, so I had to pull it up on my phone from Dropbox.
During the reading, I saw one younger human really leaning in and after the reading, they came up to me and said, “You have a non-binary kid, I am a non-binary kid.” There are some humans that you run into that you see still move through the world with only love and connection, it’s as if all the things that could harm them have bounced off their love force-field. This person was that circle of love.
We talked for a bit, they shared their new name, and then they said, “I would like to hug you, may I?” As a mom, when a teenager/preteen asks for a hug, the answer is an absolute yes! (Though actually, I don’t think I’ve ever refused a hug to anyone.) I told them what I believed–that we have so much to learn from non-binary & trans humans who *know* who they are and who are brave enough to speak it and claim it.
This beautiful person’s mother was there, and she was crying. She said, “We weren’t supposed to be here, we dropped in to say hi to the owners then you read your poem and honored my child.” We all hugged and I realized immediately that was why I was there–that poem was for them.
This was exactly where I needed to be. Poetry readings have a magic to them that I’ve forgotten after 2 years of no in-person readings. And to think, when I was leaving the house today, I was thinking–this is a long drive for nothing.
Understand, we do not know who our poems will touch. Quality over quantity. For me, this was a moment that will always stay with me. Love your humans and support them. This child had a mother who supported their journey and their whole self. And I so appreciate those who honor their non-binary/trans children. I loved how supported this young non-binary human was. I wish all trans/non-binary folx had this love and support–they all should.
Kelli Russell Agodon, Your Poems Do Matter & Why It’s Important To Read Your Poems in Public: A Memoir

The poems from The Small Door of Your Death are all written in what I might call a minimalist style. Because they dealt with the death of my son, I couldn’t bear to imagine ornate poems that pointed more to the skill of the poet than the subject of his death. The title comes from a line from an untitled poem [it comes down to this] about the moment of his death:
you choose the vein
in the back of a hand
to carry
this last intimacy
a puncture mark

the small door
of your death
I imagine, here, that small mark in his vein, as a kind of door to his death. I have thought a lot about this image and wanted to render it in cloth. I’ve made some thirty or so pieces that contained the door as a symbol, but none of them felt right. They were somehow too busy, too elaborate, too forced. I have cut up or discarded these pieces, so I can’t show them to you here.
But a few months ago, in a class with Claire Benn on working with earth minerals, I painted a piece of canvas with black ochre. I meant for it to serve as a background to another piece, so the edges were darker than the center: [photo]
But with the help of others in the workshop, I saw that there was something happening in the cloth that I hadn’t intended. There was the suggestion of a door. I decided this piece might work on its own with only minimal stitching. Here it is with one line of hand-stitching. Today I quilt it with black thread that mimics some of the lines–like veins–that are the result of wrinkles in the fabric. Then I’ll iron it and see where we are.
Sheryl St. Germain, Minimalism and The Small Door of Your Death

I take out the seeds and pith, slice them into thin
half-moons; salt them generously like bodies
for a long keeping. I was taught to save
everything I can, though I might not know
to what earthly use I might put a bathtub
full of fermented cabbage, a jar of gelatinous
spores. I’ve kept the stumps of my daughters’ birth
cords, a few yellowed baby teeth; their impossibly
small first shoes and cotton camisoles, snippets
of hair, toenail clippings. What will happen to my own
body when I separate the withered from the green,
the wrinkled from the supple, firm, or measured?
Luisa A. Igloria, Preserve

The two pictures of very different birds—the gigantic, dinosaur-esque pileated woodpecker with its bright head, and the tiny, fairy-like immature hummingbird—represent something about literature and book promotion that’s very true—it’s not always the biggest and brightest writer, flower, or bird that wins the evolutionary race—sometimes it’s the smallest, most camouflaged and flexible. My best assets as a writer now at 49 are different than they were at 32. My poems are different, my experience of the world, and my outlook. So, I guess it makes sense that I’m a little nervous this time around, sensing that my book—and my person—have been changed, that I’m a little less certain, less confident but quicker to shift gears and adapt. In most fairy tales and myths, the protagonist is often changed against his or her will be their journey—sometimes literally into birds or cats or white deer, sometimes by their actions, like Gretel’s quick dispatch of the witch that threatened her. No one comes out unscathed from their magical journeys, even if they disappear into the haze of a happy ending.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Visiting with Seattle Poets, Welcome September, and Planning for March/April Next Year and Thinking about Post-Covid Book Launches and Book Marketing (In an Uncertain World)

The last book this August is Swan Song, by Armen Davoudian (Bull City Press, 2020), which seems a perfect way to end this Sealey Challenge, with a sad, gentle, glorious burst of song at the end. And I read the whole bundle from Bull City Press, and its Frost Place Chapbook Competition. A fine gathering!
The poet grew up in Iran, and it was lovely to find that the title poem is a ghazal. Subtle yet tight rhyme ripples through the book. Ah, but the sad irony of the closing lines of “Persian Poetry”: “Yet I study English poetry / because Persian would have been too obvious.”
Swans drift through, or paddleboats in the shape of swans, as in “The Yellow Swan” and “Swan Boats.” I found the coincidence of blue in “Swan Boats”: “Time out of mind, this was our turquoise blue
mind out of time, watching white thoughts come, go
across a mirror which, unchanged by them,
itself was change and could reverse the down-
ward wish of light, the headlong wash of stone
skipped on its current.
Lovely language, lovely reversals there.
This morning I woke early, found a wishing star on the horizon in a dip of trees, and wished what I always wish. I hope it comes true.
Kathleen Kirk, Swan Song

The stars move
at terrible speed
and we move with them,
the old monk said.
Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (299)

[Pearl Pirie]: So Monty, what have you read lately that’s lit you up?
[Monty Reid]: There’s always something lighting me up. I really liked Jorie Graham’s breathless Runaway. I liked her early work, but after a while everything she wrote just became so routinely portentous its power faded. But Runaway, urgent with climate change and so many failures of meaning, is inspired work.
PP: (Let me interject: her opening poem about rainstorm is particularly apt at time of writing.)
MR: For the past few years I’ve been making a point of reading poets from non-anglo languages (mostly in translation) in part just to get away from our overwhelming self-regard. One of my recent favorites is Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold. A Spanish poet, who grew up in (and resisted) the Franco era, taught himself how to read by studying a book of his father’s poetry, worked in a bank for some 25 years and went on to win most of the literary prizes in the Spanish speaking world, his Book of the Cold has only recently been translated (by Katherine Hedeen and Victor Rodriguez Nunez). A chilly hell, full of remarkable imagery, it charts the instability of post-Franco Spain, and more broadly. A snowball earth, as opposed to an overheated one.

I’ve also been dipping into Dionne Brand’s new Nomenclature, New and Collected Poems. I wasn’t familiar with some of her early work, so I’m grateful to have it all in a single volume. A particular pleasure to read the epigrams from 1983. And it’s intriguing to trace some of her language from the early books to the new incantatory long poem – ‘Nomenclature’.
Pearl Pirie, Checking In: With Monty Reid

When I started blogging — about three blogs ago now — and well, these were different times, but I had a rule for myself that I wouldn’t quote from anything that I hadn’t read in its entirety. This is a pretty sound practice in general, still though, right? I don’t stick to it one hundred percent, but I do like to sit and sift through my beloved books and then actually type out the quotations or poems. It’s a way of inhabiting, for one thing. Learning. I think the practice has also made me a better writer, having done this for so many years. People who do this more religiously call the practice, “copywork.” It hearkens back to the days of the commonplace book. In a volume I love, Index Cards, by Moyra Davey, she resolves herself to: “Refrain from quoting authors I’ve only read secondhand.”
And so that was a bit of a tangent, and maybe just a way of saying that there may be typos ahead, haha, but below you will find 4 poems that sort of fell into my hands as I perused some poetry from my home library this morning. Rather perfect for the first day of September. I hope you enjoy them! They’re about looking back at the huge and sudden summer, that land of green, and taking stock. It’s fitting also, to end up on the couch, or in my case the chaise longue, which is where I’m headed after writing this post, to just revel and remember and daydream a little about all that has happened and all that I loved.
Shawna Lemay, 4 Poems About Summer’s End

there’s a sadness humming
in the skylight corners
a wind song looking
for a tune
it’s all melisma
my blues
for busted sleep
and burgled dreams
Dick Jones, nightwalking

How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Poems’ processes vary for me. Of the poems in The Clearing, some tumbled out fully formed. “Ways to Describe a Death Inside Your Own Living Body” took maybe ten minutes to write. Maybe less. It was inside me and needed nothing more than a valve to land on the page. “Memento Mori: Bell Jar with Suspended Child” was a different story. It was originally about ten lines long – really just the opening image of an old Victorian glass dome with a landscape made out of a dead child’s hair. A year or so later, I revised it into a sonnet; then I realized the poem was resting in what it knew vs. striving for what it could discover – so I decided to try pushing it toward a long poem, sustaining it over many sections and pages. From start to finish, with several months-long breaks in between, that poem took probably three years as it found itself. Each poem requires its own line of inquiry and its own fresh methods, at least for me; and that’s something I love about poems – the constant reinvention. “Flight Theory” took several months, too. The long-line contrapuntal form required tiny syntactical articulations. But again, each poem teaches its writer so much about how to build a form unique to that poem’s utterance.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Allison Adair

It is Labor Day weekend. Summer’s drought has not ended, but the slower pace of the university summer schedule has. Crickets are creaking, the swallows have departed, afternoon shadows grow longer, and the students are back on campus. I am busy.
Meanwhile, three sets of friends have had their elderly, beloved canine companions die. Dry leaves fall from the tulip poplars. Each week, my mother seems to lose a few more words from her lexicon. The jays scream every day at 4 pm.
I have been feeling a bit run dry myself. Like a small stream that needs a thunderstorm or, better still, a few good wet days to replenish it. As in: not writing. Yet I have found Charles Simic’s 1994 The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs quite inspiring, if “inspiring” in this case means nourishment for the mind and heart without actively producing anything in terms of output. The book is part of the University of Michigan’s wonderful, decades-long series Poets on Poetry.
Simic writes, “A poem is an invitation to a voyage.”
Oh, let me never get so busy I cannot go on such voyages!
Ann E. Michael, Run dry

Words as soft as silence. They
might have laughed. I didn’t tell them it was also
how I imagined love. Because a cloud wasn’t a
wrapper that hung empty after all the rain had
fallen. The cloud was the entire rain. I put things
like that in my notebook between poems.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 11

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
The greatest challenge with poetry for me is writing it. I get distracted by my daily life. Cooking, cleaning, interacting with people, keeping up with the news, and all that we do to manage our lives. I need nuggets of inspiration and quiet time to spark poems. The pandemic has helped keep me inside and in touch with my deep self. I think my monastic existence enabled me to write my poetry book, Three Penny-Memories: A Poetic Memoir, which is forth-coming from IEF (Experiments in Fiction) this fall.
Moreover, once I write a poem, I do a great deal of revising, wordsmithing, and refining of format. You might say that I communicate with the poem. I don’t consider myself prolific as I need time to remaster first drafts. I go for quality, not quantity.
Another challenge I face is digging in deep for the truth. Sometimes I feel blocked by my topic as I can’t face the truth or fear offending someone. When I was writing Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir, I grappled with the taboo notion that I might not love the woman my mother was becoming due to Alzheimer’s. I was her caregiver. I realized she couldn’t live with me as I had a full-time job. My husband was at home teaching music lessons daily and it would have been unfair to him to make him responsible for her. And we had stairs she couldn’t manage. All through out my care and oversight, I felt incompetent. Maybe this is how she felt raising seven children. Maybe she had to love me regardless. I wanted to share my heartfelt journey with her into her end of days. This required examining our relationship honestly. I tend to be codependent, so my fears of displeasing people blocked me. Once I let go of those fears, I realized how powerful poetry based on authentic truth is.
Thomas Whyte, Barbara Leonhard : part three

Needless to say, I’m over the moon to have a haiku in the current issue of The Heron’s Nest, but more than that, I’m in awe of this beautifully quiet yet expansive haiku by Frank Hooven:
dinnertime
one sandal
under the swing
I love the simplicity and tenderness of the scene, the way what’s left behind is enough for us to construct a whole backstory. No wonder it’s the editor’s choice – if you follow the above link you can read her comment in full, and it says much more than I could so I’ll leave it at that, except to say that the issue is packed full of superb poems and I feel very humble to have my haiku alongside them.
Julie Mellor, The Heron’s Nest

The past month was full! We crammed in as much last-minute summer break fun as we could (and I’m still a bit sore from two nights of all-you-can-play laser tag) while also trying to prepare for the new semester. Last week was full of meetings, and this week we all started school again!
The end of July and the month of August still found me immersed in poetry though. Highlights include a week in Asheville at the Glen Workshop, where I took the lyric essay workshop with Molly McCully Brown and had so much fun with writer friends. It was especially fun to be there when Agape Editions announced that they’ll be publishing my second full-length poetry collection, Hereverent, in Spring 2023!
Katie Manning, Glen Workshop, La Playa Books, SDUT Festival of Books

Of course, I tried to figure out the why of my temptation to call her done. I think she is, for all intensive purposes. It is September almost, a time which I imagined I’d be starting new. (and actually I have in bits and pieces I am excited to move to if this is it.) But not at the expense of Persephone and the sirens I have spent three months with now, sometimes moving fast, sometimes not moving fast at all. If I call it done, it’s still going to require a bit of reordering, line edits, and just proofing my shitty typing to be anything like ready to show anyone. I have been sending some of the early, already edited pieces out for publication and snagged an acceptance for September, so they will likely start filtering into the world.
Of course, nothing says I can’t set it aside and maybe return, but I never really do. I have a strange relationship with work in which I will write like mad and then shut it away for months and months to come back to it fresh, so by the time I circle back around, it will feel done whether it was or not. I will have already moved on to some new nonsense, no doubt….
Kristy Bowen, endings and other uncertainties

This morning, I looked at the date on my computer: September 1. We all have different seasonal markers, and one of mine is September 1 as the date when many literary journals open for submissions after a summer hiatus.
In the past, long ago in the past, before online submissions, I would have had a stack of submissions ready to be mailed on September 1. I had a plan and a purpose, and I needed publications. I had a vision of a better teaching job or maybe a life of a freelance writer who got grants and speaking engagements and great tax deductions.
My submitting life is complicated now. I am astonished at how expensive submitting fees have gotten to be. I have problems with a $3 fee, and now many of them are $4 or higher. Several stamps, paper, and printer ink cost far less in terms of money. I was one of those people who used to send out poems/stories again and again, on the same paper, so my submission costs were even cheaper.
That said, I do prefer online submissions. I just don’t want to pay so much money for such a slim chance of my creative work being accepted.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, September Submission Strategies

My new poetry book is out!
Very grateful to the essential rob mclennan for this first review of my new book. If a book is published in a forest and it isn’t reviewed, is it even there? rob makes sure so many books are there, are heard.
He quotes the poem Brainsnail from a suite of Lucretius “translations”in its entirety. These translations are more transcreations, reimagings rehabitating some aspect of the original. Haroldo de Campos spoke about giving the poem a blood transfusion. There’s an interesting article on Cannibal Translation here.
I only knew the term transcreation from its use by contemporary poets, but here’s a longer history.
My technique/process often involves using Google translate (moving the poem through many different languages), sometimes N+7 (I use the automated Spoonbill N+7 which gives 14 versions, each one more distant from the original.) I almost always then revise the poem freely. The idea for me is that these initial transformational processes generate material for me to consider, material outside the greater limitations of my immediate imagination, but that then enable me to listen carefully and open up another part of my imagination, listening for interesting or engaging moments, resonances, possibilities in the generated text. Something of the source material inheres (certainly formal aspects, but other things too, and I am aware of my source and its context–this has an influence on my revision and writing, too.) There’s a frisson between the original and my version, inviting the reader to consider the connections or relation to the source. Also imagine the process and what it might mean. How did we get here from there? In what way does these new version retain aspects of the old, in what way is it diametrically opposed or divurgent?
I like the portmanteau “Brainsnail.” In what way is a brain like a snail? It can be slow. It leaves a trail. Something in the coils of both. Maybe brain is to snail as a translated poem is to its original. Or is it the snail of the translator moving through the brain of the original?
Gary Barwin, The Most Charming Creatures — New Book! — and a note on the Brainsnail of Translation.

I appeared in Australia last Friday. Having reduced my university teaching hours so that I have more time for creativity, I said ‘Yes’ when invited to read my poetry at 9am here, 6pm there, on screens in and around Castlemaine, near to Melbourne. I appeared in Australia last Friday at Ross Donlon’s online event, marking my first poetry touchdown Down Under.
My preparation for this reading was admirably early. I refer you to my geography project, compiled in LIV26 (when I was twelve and there was no national curriculum). Given a free hand by Miss Smith, I made the most of having cousins in Western Australia. These cousins, never having met me (not then, not now) posted samples of Australia over to London (postcards, tourist brochures, leaves, pressed flowers, merino sheep’s wool). I included them in my Australia project. […]
I’d also liaised with my friend Darren Mason in the matter of making sure I was ready for this important debut. During the first 2020 lockdown, I wrote a poem about my bicycle and the freedom she gave me in those first strange days, which Darren went on to animate beautifully. The advantage of the reading being online was that I was able to share it with my audience 10,577 miles away. See the film here: Shrewsbury, Friday Morning 27th March 2020
Liz Lefroy, I Appear In Australia

Our tomatoes are going bananas. We can’t keep up with them. I don’t know the things I need to know to preserve them, and we can’t eat all of them before they rot. (If you know me in real life, let me know if you’d like some.)
They are SO good. So much more flavor than grocery-store tomatoes, even the ones at the produce stand that sells local goods. Last night we had a dinner of tomatoes with basil and balsamic vinegar, accompanied by ciabatta and fresh mozzarella.
This week was the first in our almost new-normal. Cane had his back-to-school inservice days, and for the first time in 32 years, it was not back-to-school inservice week for me. I am doing a small curriculum development job for his school (the one I taught in last year), so I did go to some meetings, but it was nothing compared to how this week has felt for me in the last 3 decades.
It felt amazing. Freeing. Calm. Busy in a good way.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Overabundance

I like to buy second hand books, sometimes to feel the years that are worn into the pages – foxing, old coffee or blood stains, a fold, maybe even a tear – and sometimes to wonder about the inscriptions. The poet John Robinson once wrote about spending 10p on a copy of Samuel Butler’s The Way Of All Flesh from the cheap boxes on trestle tables outside a shop, taking it on holiday to Greece, and opening it to find the inscription ‘John Major, London 1959’. It may or may not have been the John Major but the poem was lit by the possibility contained in that joyous moment.
I thought of this as, in a Stratford-upon-Avon coffee shop, I looked at a poetry book I’d bought a while back in a sprawling second-hand shop in Los Angeles, not far from Skid Row or Desolation Row or whatever this week social commentators called the hard streets where people slept and held together their lives in bags or shopping trolleys. The book was called Down At The Santa Fe Depot, sub-titled 20 Fresno Poets. It was published in Fresno, California, in 1970.
Before I began reading, I looked at the biographical sketches. I do enjoy these. One poet revealed he had been stuck in Fresno for 24 years. I understood that. I’d been to Fresno for a week and it felt like six months. Another one declared he had been raised in western Pennsylvania and had gone to various schools. […]
I settled down with another large coffee and began reading the work of poets who were writing in 1970 when they were young and had something to say. I read it from first page to last.
And so – of course, I did – I googled one of them, Roberta Spear, whose poems seemed honest and kind, and discovered she had died of leukaemia in Fresno in 2003 – the year, incidentally, that I was there, and who was considered important enough to have an obituary in the Washington Post. She also had a website that described her as mother, wife, poet, dancer, friend.
I was sorry she had died. I would have liked to have told her that I enjoyed her poems.
Bob Mee, A BOOK HAS A HISTORY… Alternatively, Googling in a Coffee House in Stratford-upon-Avon

Some days, those strange headlines rush and tumble into our lives, shatter our personal alphabet, then leave us to pick up the pieces of broken lives and languages.
I remember days when we used to read poetry to one another on the front porch of my aorta. How every line would beat a distinct pulse of love.
I can still hear it now.
It’s a comforting feeling,
like how I know my daughter‘s old baby cradle won’t wake up one day to realize it’s a nest of grenades.
Rich Ferguson, Read My Lips

Summer can be poetry without the words. A sweet peach cuts through time and puts you right in the everlasting camp of the gods. A tomato is a love apple, pomme d’amour. The spume of the sea drenches with spent force and effervescence. This is real, just as drought is real and dog days are real that swelter through any and all summer months.
I always want to keep my finger on the pulse of this life force in reality, this apprehension of elemental life. Along comes so-called “real life” with its go-go energy, rage of politics and urgency of injustice. Poetic receptivity feels quavery in the shadow of this, so I reframe the question: What should poetic attention be attentive to?
I ask a poet what to do. “so little joy — sister of the gods— in our poems Ryszard,” Zbigniew Herbert writes in “To Ryszard Krynicki — A Letter.” “too few glimmering twilights mirrors wreaths ecstasies.” Both poets lived through World War II and Communist takeover of Poland.
A line earlier in the poem says: “we came too easily to believe beauty does not save.” The poet later asks: “what forces of the spirit do we need/ blindly beating despair against despair/to ignite a spark a word of atonement/that the dancing circle might last on the soft grass…”
He calls it a riddle and so do I. Though beauty is wide and inclusive. Reality is inclusive. Imagination is not the fairy tale version, but an existential feature of survival.
Jill Pearlman, Saving Joy

when did our poems cease writing the sea
Grant Hackett [no title]

August 28, 2022August 28, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 34

I remember some key things from psychotherapy. It was a revelation to me when my therapist said:
It’s okay to change your mind.
He didn’t, in that moment, mean about what I was having for dinner, but that’s included in the permission to understand that our words are not always our bond, but our process – a way of getting to grips with thought, emotion, woundedness, intent, desire, the bewilderment of being unsure of what we want because of, well, because of (for one thing) our unique interaction with the world not being taken seriously enough as children. Being squashed down.
The poems: they don’t come out fully formed, you know. It’s usually a bit messy.
So here I am, back in my blog which, I have learned since I announced its demise in June, is a friend I don’t want to live without. Not right now, anyway, when I’m in grief and times are so troubled.
Liz Lefroy, I Step Through The Gate

And a father sells his nine-year-old daughter in marriage to a sixty-year-old man and tells his screaming wife Get back inside, you donkey!
Ah, but this is not poetry, you say.
And a child’s arm is blown off when a guided missile smashes into an apartment block.
Ah, but this is not poetry, you say.
The humiliated stand silently in small groups, waiting for re-education to begin.
Repeat after me: I am guilty on all counts.
Ah, but this is not poetry, you say.
Any minute now, nothing will happen.
It’s always about the unsaid.
Bob Mee, AH, BUT THIS IS NOT POETRY, YOU SAY

watching the storm
from the darkness
of the driver’s seat
Jason Crane, haiku: 21 August 2022

I feel an amorphous weight inside. I think it is because of the new series of poems I am writing. Or attempting to write. Honesty does not come easy. Words that should want to break free of restraint and guilt, sit and stare at you with soft, reproachful eyes. I have backspaced more than I have written. I have written more than I thought I could. There is still a mountain to climb. One step up, two steps down. One poem in. Two poems out. The mornings are weary of my wounds. The night refuses to listen.
I read instead of writing. Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion’. I read a little. I backspace some more. I meet friends, people who may be friends. I talk a little. I backspace even more.
Austen’s Anne says in the book, “that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.”
I wonder if poetry should be enjoyed safely. I wonder if it should sear and chill and raise and drown. Both poet and reader. Austen in her dulcet voice sounds a note of caution. For both poet and reader. So, I ask myself as Rilke commands. Must I write?
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Survival Guide for Poets

In a previous life, I was a waitress…before that, a farm girl. I spent a lot of my farm-girl childhood pretending to be a horse named Stormy. I think somewhere in time I was a tree.
Bethany Reid, In Your Previous Life

I’m rereading [Rebecca] Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which is completely dog-eared from my first time through, so many pages I tagged that had ideas I needed to revisit and think about or phrases I loved or things I needed to go back and write about. Now too I have to pause after every page or two because so much thought is incited in me by her own. This is reading at its finest! “Reading with a purpose,” as it were, as I was in need of food for thought, and this is a feast indeed.
And yet the what the book also is teaching me is that as a writer and as a traveler, I need to learn how to be lost. If I can unclutch the map, not worry so much about where I’m going but focus more on where I am, I could discover more. And don’t we travel, and don’t we write, to discover?
I can feel sometimes my rising anxiety to get where I’m going — I’m speaking here both about travel and about writing, of course. Feel the urge toward the relief of “oh, there it is.” But what is my hurry, and what is the problem with lingering withOUT purpose, with turning and ambling, poking down an alley just to double-back. What is the problem with being a stranger here myself?
What Solnit does so well is just that, diverge, pause, seem to take an odd turn, but somehow she finds her way back, and I, the reader, am perfectly content with the zig and the zag. To wander and to wonder. The word wander is from words related to wend and weave. The origin of wonder is unknown.
Marilyn McCabe, Why am I soft in the middle; or, On Writing and the Unknown

The most important question behind the question is: is reality something we can have a relationship with? Is it something that we can love? Is it something that can love us? And my answer to that, again emphatically — passionately — is yes. It’s not only possible, it’s necessary. We already do love it: it already loves us. To understand and unfold that is a work much larger than a lifetime, larger than all the lifetimes. But we did not step into reality from somewhere outside it. We are not strangers here, looking to strike up an acquaintance. To see the universe as alien and unintelligible — that is a really extravagant philosophical position, a totally untenable one. That we, each of us, popped into existence ex nihilo, and must grope about looking for ways to make contact with an alien universe — that is the default philosophical position of the modern world, and it makes even less sense than God as a patriarch of ancient Palestinian herdsmen. We are not foreigners here. We love, and are loved, from the very beginning to the very end. For better and for worse.
Such a sweeping statement prompts the question, “am I really saying anything? What is this love worth, if everyone has it all the time?” This love isn’t (necessarily) passion, or fondness, or esteem: it’s only a philosophical assertion of connectedness. It’s not what one hankers for on a lonely Saturday night by a silent phone.
In a way, no, it’s not saying anything. But it flips figure and ground. It changes the question of loneliness from, “how do I connect in this alien, unintelligible universe?” to “what must I do to shake off this delusion of separation?” My loneliness is not something I have found: it is something that I make, moment by moment. The task is to not to start something, or build something; it’s to stop something, dismantle something.
Dale Favier, Dismantling

Every so often, I still taste soap from all those years ago when my mom would wash my mouth out for talking dirty.
The taste reminds me there’s a fine line between what is acceptable and unacceptable, and how that fine line can sometimes come in the form of Irish Spring or Dove.
In her own way, my mom did me a favor. At least I didn’t grow up sounding like a drunken sailor with Tourette’s.
To honor my mom, I keep a sweet-talking spot beneath my tongue.
Rich Ferguson, Soap or No Soap

My father died today: the end of a very long, mostly happy, vigorous life. We were with him. I’m grateful for so much, relieved that his suffering was short, and yet still feel like a tree has fallen in the forest: it’s hard to imagine life without him being in it too. But of course, as long as I am alive, he will live in me.
Beth Adams, My Father. December 15, 1924 – August 22, 2022

I finally saw the hedgehog that has taken up residence under the holly bush. Leonard is curious, but fortunately, he hides behind my legs while he sniffs at the air from a safe distance. The creature’s not a hare, he knows that much. It makes me happy to know there’s a hedgehog here again. I can’t even begin to explain why. We will only catch glimpses of him in the half-dark for a few more months before he sleeps for the winter. But somehow knowing he is there… like a weird kind of vague promise of something good.
Unexamined hope.
I keep reminding myself that life is good right now. I am even learning not to brace myself for bad news when a message notification pops up on my phone. T. sends snaps of their new puppy swimming in a pond way up North. I can hear the splashing, and him and his wife laughing softly.
Ren Powell, Unexamined Hope

As a traveler, I understand;
you, a traveler, too,
must travel, we must
say good-bye,
but a drop
of radiance,
a grape
of imaginary sun,
has touched the blind blood
of everyday…
— Pablo Neruda, excerpt from “Ode to the Third Day”
Neruda, were you writing about a day of the week? Or were you lamenting the end of summer, as I hear through the howl of my re-entry struggles? You who understood all things, of course felt the keen sorrow of leaving behind life’s elements — gracious friends, groundedness, sea, sardines, openness. To your odes, we sing along with sweet regret, knowing how lucky we are to touch those values. Loss is the nature of the game!
Back at home, I am resolved to bring expansive “summer” — i.e. human values — into what seems like our never-ending strife, conflict, struggle. I’m modeling my plans after more balanced friends to 1) create the better world of our little garden rather than rail against the one that seems to loom, and 2) to bring lightness to the truth that we’re all flawed, to laugh rather than judge.
Seems rather North American. I prefer Neruda’s continuing language: “we will cherish/ this insurgent day,/ blazing,/ unforgettable,/ a bright flame/in the midst of dust and time.”
Jill Pearlman, A Drop of Radiance has Touched the Everyday

As I was getting ready to leave New York City last week, it occurred to me that much of the art I saw on my trip, from the Statue of Liberty to the majority of the art at the MOMA, was a response to oppression. I started thinking about what it means to live in an age when so much of the work of artists is a form of resistance. Of course, artists and poets have always functioned as truth-tellers, often to their peril, but the intensity and scale of the art I saw emphasized this fact to me in new and thought-provoking ways.
For example, on the Statue of Liberty tour, I learned that the statue was more than just “a gift from France to the people of the United States,” as I’d been told as a child. Its main purpose was to commemorate the end of slavery. Hidden at the statue’s base are broken chains, meant to symbolize the freeing of America’s enslaved people; the statue’s designer, Frederic Bartholdi, “originally designed Lady Liberty holding broken chains, but later deemed the explicit reference to slavery too controversial. Instead, a broken chain and shackles lie at the statue’s feet, delivering the abolitionist message more subtlety.”
It’s beyond ironic that a statue celebrating the end of slavery had to be toned down. Our tour guide told us that Bartholdi took this action, at least in part, to appease wealthy donors whose money was crucial in paying for the statue.
The statue is also the site of one of the world’s most conspicuous displays of ekphrasis: Emma Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus,” printed at the statue’s base. Many phrases hit me as I read the poem, : “brazen giant,” “imprisoned lightning,” “world-wide welcome,” and of course, the famous lines about the tired, poor, the wretched refuse, homeless and “tempest-tost.” The poem asks the world for these “huddled masses,” indeed demands them. Not the wealthy, the educated, the strong and beautiful, but their polar opposites.
“The New Colossus” transformed the statue from its original purpose to “the role of unofficial greeter of incoming immigrants,” as New York journalist John T. Cunningham put it. On that windy dot of an island in the New York Harbor, I was profoundly moved, imagining boatload after boatload of immigrants being greeted by this gigantic Mother of Exiles, as Lazarus calls her, before they landed at Ellis Island.
Erica Goss, Pictures & Words: My Visit to New York City

Paralyzed by her past, she can do nothing.
She sits on a rock and stares at the junction
of three rivers, this spot that Thomas Jefferson
declared the most beautiful in the New World.
The parents return to a field of calm.
Their boys have recruited other disaffected
children. They’ve created a game with inscrutable
rules. The parents discover that the boys have devoured
the best parts of the picnic. As the sun skips
west, they munch carrot sticks and apples as they watch
the children play, making up rules as they go along.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Harper’s Ferry and the Looming History

Summer’s heat is lingering here in Finland, but autumn is coming up fast. Cooler mornings, the birch turning gold overnight, geese starting to move on in long, noisy threads. My favourite season, but it’s always tinged here with the knowledge that winter won’t be far behind and will last too long. I should probably get out and do something in the nice weather while it lasts, but there are never enough hours in the weekend. […]
This week, I’ve also dealt with the recording the Helsinki Writers Group is doing for Helsinki Open Waves, liaising with the technician and the 3 other poets. I can’t wait to hear the final product, it sounded so cool even without embellishments, but the technician was going to try and add a soundscape behind our poems.
We had a rough theme, Below the Surface, but we each went our own way with it. When we brought them together there were overlaps and echoes of each other’s work that we hadn’t planned or expected. It can be a repeated phrase or image or sound though all the poems’ subjects are very different. We shared our work briefly in the writing and editing stage and I find those chats often bring a poem to fruition. What you can’t quite reach alone is nurtured through sharing it with others. The group has a few poets now, after a long time of me being the only one and these collaborations are so much fun.
Gerry Stewart, The Switch from Summer to Autumn

My son left this week for his senior year at college, which removed a handy barrier between me and working all the time. My writer self, my teaching self, and my role as Department Head are competing hardest for my hours. Teaching and chairing are more deadline-driven so my writer self is hanging on by her fingernails. She has grit, though.
What I’ve been writing during the past few weeks–it actually does have a deadline, Tuesday–is a column for the web platform of a scholarly journal. This longish piece concerns creative scholarship and has made vivid to me how fiercely creative writing and scholarly training are fighting in the colosseum of my brain. Seriously, I’ve published a book of creative criticism and other essays besides. You’d think I’d know how to argue for it by now, but I’m finding this piece very hard for reasons that may be emotional as well as logistical. I think the essay is clicking now, but it’s one of those subjects I had to write too much about before I could cut the thing back to a better version of itself. The throughline kept shifting and I kept finding other sources I wanted to consult. Both creative writers and scholars discover what they think by writing about it–despite animosity between the fields, they have more in common than not–but scholarship places a much higher value on reading all major statements on the subject so far. I think that’s what serious, curious writers should do, learning everything they can if they’re going to make some kind of beyond-the-personal pronouncement, but it’s also true that this assignment is an online column, not a full-fledged article. Sometimes you just have to stop.
Lesley Wheeler, Splitting / creative scholarship

Poet Sonia Greenfield shared on her Facebook page an essay written by Haley Mlotek, “Against August” (The Paris Review) and I think it’s pretty damn wonderful. Yes, August is well-planted within summer months, but it doesn’t carry the late-spring anticipation of May, the giddy affection of June, or the full-blown buzz and hum of July. In fact, my reply to Sonia’s thread consisted of this: August is to muck around in the mire of all least favorite things: summer’s end, teacher in-service, and rain, rain, and rain, at least here. I am especially keen on her borrow of a few lines by poet Marge Piercy to make her point about August. In her poem “Blue Tuesday in August,” Piercy writes,
The world smelled like a mattress you find
on the street and leave there,
or like a humid house reciting yesterday’s
dinner menu and the day before’s.
Perfect!
Kersten Christianson, Not Much Love for August

A thrill to be read so enthusiastically and perceptively by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, one of the three judges of the Singapore Literature Prize English fiction category. She made her thoughts public on her FB page after the award ceremony was over. She has really good things to say too about my fellow nominees, Cyril Wong and Mallika Naguran.
“The Singapore Book Council celebration of the 2022 Prize winners for various genres in different languages was yesterday (Thursday), so I no longer feel bound to discreet silence as one of the three judges for the English Fiction Award. I wrote up my enthusiasm for three of the 33 novels and short story collections mailed to me, and include them here, to share with their readers!
“Jee Leong Koh’s Snow at 5 P.M.: Translations of an Insignificant Japanese Poet
Jee Leong Koh’s Snow at 5 P.M. may be Singapore first global novel. It is multi-genre, with 107 haiku introducing many of the prose passages. Set chiefly in contemporary Manhattan, with Central Park as the jewel in the setting, the fiction flashes off and on, like red warning signals, to a futuristic climate-changed Singapore Island and planet. The novel is multi-civilizational, the protagonist-narrator being a diasporic Singaporean living in New York City, in quest of his speculative protagonist, a Japanese poet immigrant to the same American territory. The novel is a mash-up of sub-genres. It is a mystery story, puzzling a missing poet known only through the half-burnt sheaves of haiku left in the apartment the narrator has moved into. The fiction is thickened, like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick’s whaling information, with empirical botanical knowledge that offers a different discursive dimension to the haiku images of flora and fauna. Asian American scholarship and displays of literary erudition are scored with erotic gay intimacies. Multitudinous digressive language plays, sub-characters’ lineages and histories, suggest unities in the tradition of Joycean epic works. Snow at 5 p.m.’s hybrid literary traditions, genres and sub-genres, generating complex threads, each digressing and spinning other threads, achieve a tour de force, a globalized Singapore imaginary that dazzles.”
Jee Leong Koh, SNOW AT 5 PM Won the Singapore Literature Prize

Susan Glickman is an artist of words and brush. She paints, edits, teaches and writes many genres: fiction, essays of literary history, non-fiction, children’s books and poetry. She has won a whack of awards for her writing. (I can’t believe her fabulous collection from Vehicule The Smooth Yarrow is already a decade ago. Time to reread.)
PP: Susan, what have you read lately that lit you up?
SG: In addition to my typical diet of poetry (recently a lot of Jane Hirshfield as well as Dionne Brand, Dorianne Lux, and John Steffler), and historical fiction such as Lauren Groff’s magnificent novel Matrix, I have been reading a fair bit of sci-fi and sci-fact. The former includes a deep dive into Ursula Le Guin as well as more contemporary stuff like Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, the fabulous time-travel novels of Connie Willis, and Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, the latter inspiring books such as Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus, Charles Foster’s Being a Beast, and Carl Safina’s Becoming Wild.
PP: Well, my reading list just got a longer. Those last two in particular. I’ve heard very good things about Sea of Tranquility and The Soul of an Octopus was great. Can you add a why or how for the shoutout?
SG: I’m overcome with grief at how humanity has abused this planet. I am seeking a better understanding of other creatures as well as paradigms of alternate ways to live.
Pearl Pirie, Checking In: With Susan Glickman

I’m tired, physically and mentally–a lot on my mind these days–and I feared I was tired of poetry, but, no. Early this morning, I picked up Break the Glass, by Jean Valentine (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), and could not put it down. The poems felt both fragmentary and liquidy, like pieces floating or somehow flowing…with little punctuation to stop the flow. That body of water [on the cover] with bodies in it, which looks like people standing, is an installation in Germany by Antony Gormley, called Another Place (1997, cast iron/100 elements), photographed by Helmut Kunde. The poems dropped me in another time and place, some celebrating Lucy, that early hominid, and who knew I’d find the coincidence of the word Australopithecus in three books this August, two books of poetry and one about teeth.
Kathleen Kirk, Break the Glass

The narrative [CJ] Evans writes across the seventy stanzas, each five lines in length, of “TRYING TO HEAR A HYMN TO LIFE” loop and swirl around a variety of images of wetlands and Lake Merritt, resting in the centre of Oakland, California, the Simon and Garfunkle song “America,” the memory of Sandy Hook, his daughter’s imaginary sabertooth, “Toothy,” and other family moments, connections, memories, dislocations and trauma, all wrapped up and around not only a belief in life itself, but the very act of that particular brand of faith. “I can’t see the lake from here,” he writes, early on in the poem, “but I believe / it still is. Just as I believe in the shellmounds / I’ll never see, the sabertooth, that the flat moon / is actually a sphere. I believe as I do / in this tabletop you can’t touch: wood pulp crushed // in a hydraulic press with glue.” Or later on in the same poem, offering: “I believe in this as much as god / or biology, which is to say, a bit less // than to make a bet with it against a bullet, / but enough. I call it belief, but it’s purposefully, / wondrously unexamined.” There is such a stunning beauty to this collection, one that shows itself as open-hearted while playing rather close to what might suggest a deeply-wounded chest. This is what one might call a darkly optimistic book; one filled with as much beauty as one can muster, and everything one can see after having been in the dark.
rob mclennan, CJ Evans, LIVES

The fig’s branches lean closer to the ground
exhausted from all their summer bearing
My tongue fingers the space where
a cracked tooth used to be
I thought the potted Buddha’s hand citrus
given by a friend had perished in winter
But here it is pushing out its signature
green laddered with fresh new thorns
Luisa A. Igloria, On the Cusp

On Saturday, fellow poets Ian Parks, Simon Beech, Tracy Day Dawson and I walked the route of Ted Hughes’s paper round up from Mexborough to Old Denaby, as described here. Ian, born and brought up in Mexborough, led us on the route which took in the former newsagent’s where Hughes and his family lived from 1938.
At the right-hand-side of the shop is Hughes’s bedroom window overlooking what was a slaughter-yard back then. It inspired his gruesome poem ‘View of a Pig’, published in his second collection, Lupercal (1960). Like most, if not all, English children of my generation, I studied the poems of Hughes more than anyone else’s, except perhaps Owen and Sassoon, and it was the earthier, meatier poems like this one, and ‘Pike’, also from Lupercal, which we read the most. The poem’s last two lines – with the perfectly-judged anaphora, alliteration and simile – ring across the years from an England long-gone:

I stared at it a long time. They were going to scald it,
Scald it and scour it like a doorstep.

The route took in the possible setting of ‘Pike’:

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them—

Stilled legendary depths:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old

The route took in Manor Farm, where Hughes went trapping and shooting with his brother. It’s the setting of his poem, ‘Sunstroke’, again in Lupercal:

Reek of paraffin oil and creosote
Swabbing my lungs doctored me back

Laid on a sack in the great-beamed engine-shed.
I drank at stone, at iron of plough and harrow [. . .]

I should add that Ian has a wonderful poem published today over at Black Nore Review, here, and I’m looking forward to hearing Ian read at Mexborough Library this Wednesday.
Matthew Paul, On Ted Hughes

This morning, as I was lying in bed, half awake and trying to decide if I should just start the day or sleep another couple of hours, I found myself thinking about words and media, about literature and books and all the ways we take in information now. Also the nature of that information, particularly when it seems all is possible and there is an outlet for everyone. How it can be misused and handled badly. How the good has a sturdy platform, but also the bad.
When I was a teenager and young adult, the world touted the danger of televisions..of the downfall of reading and literate culture. It seemed inevitable. Even among people my age, not all were readers, which was strange to me, having had books in my hand since before I even understood what was in them. The same child who scribbled in notebooks and said I was writing when I barely knew the alphabet. The Mother Goose volume I carried around until it fell apart despite not being able to do much beyond read the pictures to discern the story unless I convinced my mother to read it to me.
My parents, especially my dad, who were only high school graduates, were still readers. My mom liked stories and painting, but her reading was mostly magazines. Still, words were something always available in some form. Whether it was mags and novels passed off from my aunt (one of the most prolific readers in the family) or our weekly trips to the library, books were just always present. My dad read the newspaper daily, and books about everything–not just novels. No one read poetry of course, or maybe even knew people were writing it, but words in general were not foreign. I only learned about poems in junior high and high school, though it depends on what you consider poems. We all fought over Shel Silverstein books in the 5th grade, so maybe I guess I just didn’t think of them as poems but rhymes. Poets were like unicorns and outside of some teens who wrote poems and professor, I didn’t see a real poet until my second year of undergrad (in some weird confluence of stars, I later got to publish her.)
Kristy Bowen, words and the world

“Violet Existence” explores issues of class, sexism and imposter syndrome, a sense of being the outsider and not being fully seen. Katy Wareham Morris captures the maternal voice: protective of her children but wary of a society that holds mothers up to an impossible ideal. The poems open to a vulnerability as they spill across the page, presenting contemporary situations with a promise not to raid the myth kitty or assume readers have a knowledge of Greek myths.
Emma Lee, “Violet Existence” Katy Wareham Morris (Broken Sleep) – book review

The typewriter is a recurring theme here and it seems that I’m overdue on sharing some poems about them, about the act of typing, and the music of typing. I love how Clarice Lispector and Annie Dillard and May Sarton wrote about typewriters and typing in their prose and I’ve shared some of their words in a post titled My Most Intimate Friend.
The first poem is by Charles Simic who I’m beautifully indebted to because he allowed me to use his poem “In the Library” in my novel, Everything Affects Everyone. His poem strikes upon the both-ness of delight and dark despair that it’s possible to feel these days.
Next is Australian poet, David Malouf’s poem about grasshoppers and the music they make — you can just hear the typewriter sounds as you read. The poem by Matthew Francis immediately caught my eye because he talks about a blue Smith Corona, which is what you see in my photograph. Adam Zagajewski’s poem is a self-portrait that begins with an image of his writing implements and goes on from there. But honestly, I’ll always share an AZ poem even if it only loosely fits the theme. The final poem is quite shamelessly, my own. It’s also the shortest piece I’ve ever written. I’ve shared it around a fair bit since my book came out and is probably one of those things that I like a lot more than anyone else, but that’s okay! It’s about typing rather than typewriters, but I think still works in this grouping. Which I hope you enjoy!
Shawna Lemay, 5 Poems about Typewriters

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
I should say first that I appreciate the use of the term form over the term genre. I find genre largely pointless—recently a brilliant friend of mine told me, If you want to write poems, write poems. If you want to sell poems, call them stories. I’m getting away from form.
Poetry as a form is fundamentally limber. It is a form that attempts to undermine categories of form. Poetry collects, but it does not horde. It is a form of accumulation which constantly is compelled to let go of itself.
I have a deep respect for other forms, other disciplines—they are hard. I don’t wish to say that there is anything that they cannot do. Questions of formal capacity do not seem to me like questions related to Can it? but rather questions related to Is it willing? Poetry is willing. Poetry is always willing.
Thomas Whyte, Evan Williams : part five

Today, Elee sent me a line she thought might be good in a poem.
“I no longer consider it necessary to find alternatives to harmony.”
Earlier, my friend Donato suggested I try writing a triolet.
So it was good that Elee sent the line—it’s true: it’d be good in a poem.
The line is a quote from the composer John Cage.
And it’s hard not think how it might apply to everything.
For instance, it’d be harmonious to end with Elee’s good-in-a-poem line:
“I no longer consider it necessary to find alternatives to harmony.”
Gary Barwin, Alternatives to Harmony: TRIOLET with CAGE refrain

As someone who has been entranced not only by the otherworldly song of the seals, but also by the author’s skilful dexterity as a poet, Where the Seals Sing fascinated me from the outset. I delighted in the Pembrokeshire seal-watching cameos and the small but memorable details of the natural world, such as the fragrance of the Elderflowers encountered along the coast. The sections on music and mythology were intriguing. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the reports of cruelty, pollution and plastic were often devastating. I was totally captivated by Susan’s engaging affection for, and whole-hearted dedication to, her Grey Seal subjects. I would love to think that some of her zeal and practical actions might inspire us all to play our part in these uncertain ecological times.
Caroline Gill, ‘Where the Seals Sing’ by Susan Richardson

I recalled a visit in 1984 to Goodrich Castle in Ross on Wye, Herefordshire, England, where we did just that–dropped a small stone into the well–and waited what seemed a long time for the sound to reach us. From what I understand, tourists can’t do that anymore; the National Historic Trust has upgraded the ruins to make them safer to visit. The tourist board doesn’t want anyone falling down wells.
But I digress. I meant the metaphor to apply to how writers listen eagerly for response to their work once it is published. Will anyone review it? Will anyone read the review? Will anyone post about it on social media? Will anyone contact the writer to say those words we want to hear: “I love your book!” –?
Sometimes, yes. And for those who have done so already, a million thanks.
Ann E. Michael, Pebble in the well

I was talking to my family about the careful balance of re-entering the world after two and a half years of basically living in a bubble. Tomorrow, I’m having over a poet friend and I’m looking forward to making friends at our new Woodinville book club at J. Bookwalters. But I have to be careful – I still haven’t gotten covid, though I have friends who are getting it for the first time and family who are getting it the second and third time. I’ve been talking about re-entering the working world a bit more, with my MS vocational therapist, talking about setting limits and boundaries, balancing my ambition and physical limits. I’m cautiously optimistic, I guess – and hoping to stay healthy enough for AWP in Seattle and my April book launch.
But how do we know what’s safe, with the confusing and often contradictory guidelines about covid, and is life ever really safe for those of us who are immune compromised? I nearly died from complications of pneumonia from the swine flu and people barely made a big deal of it of swine flu. I think about how the pandemic will affect art for the years to come – and artists who’ve suffered from complications of covid – the way the 1918 flu affected art and artists. Will people want to read, or see art, or hear music about the experiences of loss, isolation, and anxiety that came with this pandemic? Will people want to stamp out the last few years in denial? Americans don’t like dealing with death, and they certainly don’t like dealing with mass death.
As the summer seems to be drawing to a close, and people are talking about a fall rise in covid cases, new variants, new vaccines and how well they might work, I am looking forward to the natural increase in writing energy I get when it gets a little cooler – the “back to school” feeling that never really goes away.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, More Sunflowers and Dahlias in Late August, Thinking About the Balance of Re-Entry and the Effects of the Pandemic on Art and Artists, and What’s on the Horizon

outside the dentist
gaps in the autumn trees
the numbing of time
Jim Young [no title]

Forever Young
For CB
on my birthday
I light a candle
and watch it burn
down to the dark
this is no time for wishes
time has no hold on you
Ama Bolton, Forever young

August 21, 2022August 21, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 33

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week, poets were mostly back from vacation and gearing up for the fall, but life is throwing curve balls at some. I guess it’s the perilous times in which we find ourselves, but there’s a certain feeling of malaise in many of these posts. But exciting new books and works in progress continue to motivate and inspire.

April 19, 2022. 11:35 am. A pile of calendars, datebooks and diaries heaped in the middle of the yard. A red gasoline tank. Gas poured. A match lit. The huge, the huge conflagration of everything that has happened. Also, because represented in the burning heap were days, weeks, months and years that were yet to happen, they too are gone, turned to fire, heat, ash, crackling. My face flushed. Clouds puffy in the sky. The sound of traffic on a nearby road.
Gary Barwin, Thursday

I have this “image” in my mind. Except it’s not an image—I think it’s a sensual memory. Indistinct. Life of some sort in the palm of my hand. I curl my fingers inward to hold it, but carefully. This thing is delicate. Easily disfigured.
Easily killed.
A heartbeat flutters sketching a ghostly sonogram on my skin. It’s a game of peek-a-boo and “careful-careful” and I feel like a toddler not knowing how to control my body with tenderness. I feel like a toddler confronting the wonder of it all.
But these moments pass so quickly. Something shiny just out of reach catches my eye. And “living in the moment” too often means a singular attention focused on this immediate thing. Too often the drama.
And it means something irreparably damaged. Lost before I knew what it was.
Ren Powell, Holding Life Loosely

melt me
like ice in a
cool drink
linger like pie
steaming in a window
haunt me
an explorer for a fool’s
soft lies
Charlotte Hamrick, Small Death

I took the summer off, almost entirely, from any of the familiar measures of writing productivity.
I fought this break early on. (I’m often really hard on myself.) But then I embraced it. As we say in my home state of Maine, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” So, much like the weather (especially the weather *these* days!), my POV on what success means to me in my writing life fluctuates WILDLY.
Here’s my best guess at what happened.
I got close to finishing my Gertie poetry manuscript and had a crisis of confidence. Instead of despairing — ok, I despaired a bit (wherever I go there I am LOL) — I went with it and reflected on priorities, asking questions like
– Why do I want to finish this manuscript?
– What do I want from the writing life?
– What does success look like for me?
– Does it matter how many times you pause and start over?
– Are those separate attempts or part of one long life’s work? (and does it matter? who’s counting?)
I weighed the answers against everything going on — most notably summer vibes and tectonic shifts in parenting — and decided that writing wasn’t currently at the top of the list. It was freeing!
I’ve continued to dabble, taking myself on a DIY writing retreat and tackling a low-stress daily challenge from Sarah Freligh this month. However, I let go of the “musts” and “shoulds” and stopped obsessing over finishing the damn book.
So what did I do instead? EVERYTHING.
Carolee Bennett, what does success even look like?

Today’s feature at Escape Into Life marks nine years of showcasing artists — emerging, mid-career, and established — from around the world. It also marks my last Artist Watch column for the magazine. Nearing age 70, though still without a bucket list, I know it’s time to pass the virtual pen to a new editor.
As Artist Watch editor, I have given significant virtual room to artists who are women and artists who work in highly varied media. I owe a debt of gratitude to the many painters, sculptors, photographers, paper-cut artists, portraitists, installation artists, mixed media artists, collagists, illustrators, printmakers, and digital art wizards who accepted my invitations and generously shared their marvelous work. They made creation of my monthly Artist Watch columns a joyous endeavor and filled with beauty my days (and nights) of looking at art. Joy and beauty, especially as found in art, remain the two essential things I look for each day.
Maureen E. Doallas, New Artist Watch Feature at Escape Into Life

The pandemic has made it difficult to think expansively over these past few years. Our emphasis has been on hunkering down and surviving. But I came into the summer with something like Big Hope, in part because a next nonfiction book (a collection of essays in unconventional forms) has been coming into focus. After the brief spring “tests” of driving first to AWP in Philadelphia back in March, then a literary festival at Clemson University, I lined up substantive summer travel in the form of two residencies–first ten days at A.I.R. Studio in Paducah, Kentucky, and then all of June at the Storyknife Writers Retreat in Homer, Alaska. Both offered responsible options for quarantining (if needed) and staying safe, while also furnishing the community I’ve craved.
Those residencies were amazing. Full stop. Storyknife, in particular–we were on the Ring of Fire, with volcanos on the horizon! in the solstice season, meaning, 20 hours of light a day! six women writers, gathering around a dinner table!–took my breath away.
I used my time at these two residencies to read, write, and refresh. So there’s no easy way to segue to what came next: on my last full day in Alaska, I got the call that my husband was in the hospital back in our home of Washington, D.C. He spent most of July in the ICU. Now we’re wrapping our heads around what comes next. I had to resign my Visiting Writer-in-Residence position at American University for Fall 2022. I had to defer a plan to join the faculty of the University of Nebraska’s low-res MFA. I have no choice but to slow down, to be present in the moment, and to be grateful for the company I’m keeping. (And, in a brief nod to the fickle cruelties of the American medical system: to remember, money isn’t real.)
That’s the thing about life–it keeps changing, right out from under us.
Sandra Beasley, Buckle Up

I’ve written two poems about this over the week that we were losing him. I feel like my brain is trying to process his very quick demise. I’ve been thinking about whether it was the right thing to have the operation, to take that risk, worrying that we pushed him into it, worrying that my mum will always wonder what would have happened otherwise, if we’d chosen death by cancer, had turned down the chance the operation offered. But we didn’t make the decision, how could we? No one made a decision for my dad, dad made all his own choices, whether we disagreed or not, and it was him that chose the chance to be a whole person – vital, present, capable of another fifteen years to complete his projects, to have holidays, to build memories. When they tell you the risks in an operation, they are real risks, not just something they have to tell you to tick a box. And this was a very high risk operation. But still, so quick, so hard to align the vital presence of my dad, with the old man who looked so much like my grandad, in the ITU.
When he left us, striding across the car park, he’d removed all his jewellery. The letter he got from the hospital told him to bring nothing but himself. He took them literally and didn’t even take a mobile phone. We had no contact with him at all. I thought at the time how it felt like some sort of religious ceremony, a baptism perhaps; the stripping away of all worldly goods. But actually, it was much more primal than that. Much more like a warrior facing a final challenge. Much more like a man going into the desert alone. Something he knew he had to do himself, a rite of passage. He entered into a place where there were only two outcomes. I don’t see that as losing any sort of fight. His faith gave him two options, not one death and one life. And I have never met a braver person in my life, how brave must you be to make that decision, to take that chance. That was the bravest thing I’ve seen anyone do. He did it for himself and he did it so he could continue to be married to my mum. And he was a warrior, did fight this, with every sinew, he fought to keep the life that he had with my mum. He fought to continue to suck the marrow out of every experience. I like to think of life as a journey, and our job within that life, as we move around it in the vessels; the bodies that we are in, is to experience every part of it, to find joy where you can, to be compassionate, to live a full life. My dad did that. I like to think of him continuing to journey. Journey well, dad, journey well.
Wendy Pratt, Saying Goodbye to Dad

I can frame my own space
now, hear my own voice. But the
universe still reveals no premise for
why something is, why it wants, why
it is denied and why it grieves into
poetry. There is also no explanation
for why a monsoon sky is the colour
of a sonnet, why a heart breaks in
the way day doesn’t, why a moment
shapes the poet when the poet shapes
the moment, but in the reverse
direction, as if time and poetry
are mirror reflections staring at
each other from opposite worlds.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 09

Here in August, during the Sealey Challenge, I love the immersion in lives, languages, and cultures not my own. In this book, The Wild Fox of Yemen, by Threa Almontaser (Graywolf Press, 2021), I also loved tracking the wild fox, its brief appearances, its changing meanings…and, as keeps happening, tracking the coincidences–how the books or images in them keep connecting, or how my mind is doing that. I encountered the Tooth Fairy in the nonfiction book, The Tales Teeth Tell, but I was surprised to find her here, in the very first poem, “Hunting Girliness,” “It is not tasteful / to fuck with the Tooth Fairy, baby teeth planted // in the oleanders.” (And I just made the connection that she is “hunting” girliness, like a fox!)
Teeth again, and precise dental terminology, in “Recognized Language,” “Now the words shed from my mouth like deciduous teeth.”
Kathleen Kirk, Wild Fox of Yemen

My favorite line in John Palen’s new chapbook is unpacked in the final poem, “Riding With the Diaspora,” which is the shared title of his book. He writes, “At 6:00 on a winter evening / we’re all diaspora, all a little homesick.” Even in the thick of summer, in the wander-about in full sun and high temperatures, this line takes me straight into the heart of winter, into that collective confusion from where is it we actually hail.
Kersten Christianson, The Great Scattering: Reading John Palen’s Riding With the Diaspora

Another poem I like from the same haibun is this one:

day and night equal:
as celandines close
the stars come out

What I like here is how much is implied, rather than actually stated. The shapes and colours of both the stars and the flowers are there, but not in words! And in the context of the haibun they also colour the prose and bring the landscape and Cobb’s journey vividly to life.

As you might have guessed, it’s been a bit of a haibun week, both in terms of reading and writing. How fortunate I feel, to have reading and writing time. Two weeks to go before the start of term – and believe me it always comes around too quickly. So, I’ll finish with this fun haiku, taken from the haibun ‘The School Christmas Show’:
a child blows
into a balloon
the balloon blows back
Cobb, David, Business in Eden, Equinox, 2006
Julie Mellor, Business in Eden

“The Yellow Toothbrush” is a searingly honest, literary exploration of trauma and the burdens that fall to mothers. The speaker does not condemn her daughter, seeing her as a victim of circumstance, unable to seek help for lactation psychosis due to the fear of losing custody of her baby son who was loved and wanted, after a series of abandonments. Her daughter’s imprisonment seems to be punishment enough. However, the speaker does not abandon her daughter. She still visits. Though the question remains: how much [of the] responsibility for that fatal night was her daughter’s or is blame to be laid at the feet of a society that works against mothers, and what about the baby’s father, the daughter’s father? It’s a tough, non-judgemental read.
Emma Lee, “The Yellow Toothbrush” Kathryn Gahl (Two Shrews Press) – book review

People talk a lot these days about the divisions in our country and our world. With good reason, they lament the brokenness we see among a large swath of the population, and the despair many feel that the “normal” world will never be regained.
I have a different view. I come at this chaos with the idea that we are making a hairpin turn in civilization, and won’t be returning to “normal”. There will be a new humanity to live in a new world. And poetry will record the changes of the heart.
Such abrupt changes in often leave behind a lot of broken crockery. Even broken earth. But within the human heart lies unity. If I did not feel that, know that every day, I could not get out of bed. I would not want to wander such a lonely world. Reaching the broken ones with kindness can go a long way to heal the rifts and fill the gaps in those hearts. It reminds me of the Japanese practice of mending broken ceramics with gold, a substance even more precious than what you are mending. Kindness is the gold to mend our broken world.
Rachel Dacus, Mending Our Broken World with Gold

Some see God
in the suddenness
of the sun
out of a cloud.
Surprised by
an event so much
bigger than
the monotony of
thought (the telling
of the same
old story of
doubt and fear),
they glory in
this brief gift
of external light.
For me
when caught
unawares
I understand
in the moment
that the light
that matters
is always
bright within
and the shadows
are of your choosing.
Dick Jones, Dog Latitudes §22

Last week, I was finishing up a lesson on Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, a woman who started off an English major and wound up switching to Biology, the reverse of my trajectory. I was once a bright-eyed 18-year-old convinced she could save the world by saving the oceans. A year later, being terrible at math, I sought other ways to save the world. By the time I graduated I was less bright-eyed and fighting to live in the world, let alone save it. I feel like this happens to most of us.
Kristy Bowen, postcard from a thousand miles

Some years ago now I visited Orford Ness Nature Reserve, a strange and mysterious place on the coast of Suffolk. Strange in the same way as any place with ‘Ness’ in the name, mysterious because of its history as an atomic test site and before that as a place of experimentation in radar and ballistics. Even though wildlife has reclaimed this marginal sweep of land, the area is dotted with derelict structures and unexplained features some of which are still off-limits to the visiting public.
A few months later my poem ‘Searching for the Police Tower, Orford Ness’ won the Poetry Society Stanza Competition 2014, fuelling my (long-gone) belief that I was destined to be the Next Best Thing in poetry. I had no idea at that point that a zillion poets had already ‘discovered’ Orford Ness. Those were heady days – that period many poets go through, in which you imagine yourself being snapped up by Faber and consequently winning the Forward Prize. Although I now see the folly of it, I would never laugh at anyone for having such a dream. Rejoice in each and every early or small success! Live for that moment, as it may never return!
Anyway, my point is that even your oldest, earliest successes can have a longer shelf life than you think. A few weeks ago I got an email from someone at the National Trust who had been looking for poems about Orford Ness to display in the Visitor Centre there next year, as part of some kind of festival. She’d discovered my poem on the Poetry Society website and would I mind if mine was one of the poems to be displayed. Why would I say no? It’s so nice (and unusual) to get such a request. Will anyone waiting for their ferry ride over to the Ness in 2023 bother to read my wee poem, up on the wall with plenty of others? And will it enhance the enjoyment of their visit? Will they remember (or even read) my name? Who knows. But there’s no harm in imagining it.
Robin Houghton, Orford Ness

Magma has published my poem ‘Seen while walking: one high-heeled boot, black suede, in a public flower bed’ in its ‘Solitude’ issue. This is my first time in Magma after submitting multiple times. This poem was one of a series I wrote last year while taking part in ‘Walk to Write’ an online course offered by Sarah Byrne at The Well Review. It coincided with a time of being alone or with my immediate family for long periods, during various lockdowns, and going for daily walks around the town where I live, noticing and sometimes taking a photo of things I saw. Apparently there were over 5000 poems submitted for consideration so I’m feeling very lucky to have sidled in this time!
Josephine Corcoran, Two New Poems in Magma Poetry and Raceme magazine

As life has afforded few spare moments of uncluttered mind-time in which to write, I’m back to scribbling notes, phrases, and ideas on random pieces of paper and in my journal. This fallback method works well for me, an old-school pen & paper poet. Quite a few colleagues-in-poetry use various smart phones and electronic devices to write notes-to-self and even to draft poems, but when I resort to that–on the rare occasion that I have my cell phone but not a writing implement or bit of paper–I forget about my ideas, which are filed somewhere “in there” (on Samsung Notes’ app). It’s a good thing I am not considered a significant author whose work is worthy of preserving, because my poet-life drafts and mementos would be challenging to archive.
For the moment, my writing has a work-centered locus: curriculum, to-do lists, meeting schedules and agendas, orientation and presentation scripts, group emails to announce this or that Important Thing that likely 80% of the recipients will ignore. I get home, eat dinner, pick beans, tomatoes, zucchini, and zinnias. And I read. The one thing I always seem to have time for!
Ann E. Michael, There’s always a book

It’s another day when boredom is looking for its passport to have an exciting adventure in a strange land.
Perhaps it’ll visit a house made of hellos.
Maybe it’ll date a crossword puzzle.
And while, at first glance, the puzzle may appear to be blank, just below the surface are wisdoms waiting to be discovered.
Once boredom finds its passport, it opens its front door and looks out upon the land.
A voice lingers in the air:
this is a collect call from the world. Will you accept the dream?
Rich Ferguson, A House Made of Hellos

Moving my way through the stunning new collection On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) by American poet and critic Douglas Crase, I had foolishly presumed I hadn’t actually heard his name prior to this, only to discover I’d read his essay “Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime,” included as part of the late Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]. Moving through that essay once more, the cover price alone. As the press release for On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays offers: “On Autumn Lake collects four decades of prose (1976-2020) by renowned poet and beloved cult figure Douglas Crase, with an emphasis on idiosyncratic essays about quintessentially American poets and the enduring transcendentalist tradition.” Some of the essays collected here, truly, are revelatory, and he writes repeatedly, thoroughly and thoughtfully on poets such as Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), John Ashbery (1927-2017) and James Schuyler (1923-1991), among multiple other pieces on an array of literary activity, centred around his attentions across some four decades. […]
There is such a delight in his examinations, offering a joyous and rapt attention and passionate engagement on very specific poets, poems and moments, while simultaneously able to see how the threads of his particular subject’s work fits into the larger fabric of literary production, culture and politics. As he writes as part of the essay “THE LEFTOVER LANDSCAPE,” “Much of art is the struggle to make emotion less embarrassing.” There is something quite staggering in that simple, short sentence that Crase manages to get, and get to. Honestly, go to page 135 and read the whole paragraph that sits at the bottom of the page. It’s breathtaking. And read the whole essay. And then read the whole collection. This is easily the finest collection of prose I’ve read in years.
rob mclennan, Douglas Crase, On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays

[Pearl Pirie]: […] What’s your life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?
[rob mclennan]: I spent much of July re-entering the novel manuscript, set aside since November or so, as I worked on poems, until I had to return to reviews again, where I am currently (my list of titles-in-progress include poetry books by Polina Barskova, Krisjana Gunnars, CJ Evans, Gary Barwin, Nicole Brossard, Laynie Browne, Su Cho, Joshua Bennett, Billy Mavreas, Janice Lee, etcetera).
PP: mentally notes: Nicole Brossard and Billy Mavreas have something new?
rm: Our young ladies had various day-camps throughout July and into August, which allowed me a different kind of attention, so I was attempting to take advantage of that, for the novel. I’m hoping I can spend the rest of August pushing a few weeks ahead of reviews on the blog (and periodicities) to be able to return again to fiction come September, once our young ladies return to in-person schooling (something we haven’t engaged with since March 2020).
I’m also working on a handful of further festschrifts through above/ground press, as well as a variety of other projects in that direction, including a third ‘best of’ anthology to cover the press’ third decade, scheduled for release next fall with Invisible Publishing.
PP: Ooh, you heard it here first, folks, probably.
rm: Otherwise, I’m currently spending weekdays with our young ladies at their outdoor swim lessons, sitting a daily hour poolside with notebook, books and pen at Riverside’s RA Centre, a building I hadn’t actually been in or near before, despite years of driving by. Not long before my widower father died in 2020, I discovered my parents actually held their wedding reception there, so it’s a curious space for me to engage with. A very retro-vibe. Very calming, even despite the array of greenery leans up into the back windows of a government building. Perhaps today I might wave up at them.
Pearl Pirie, Checking in: With rob mclennan

As I drove through the mountains from my house in North Carolina to the DC area, I thought about the coming year, how it will be both familiar and different. I’ve taken seminary classes before, so I know that I can slip back into that rhythm. But this year, I’ll be taking a mix of online and in person classes. This year, I’ll live on the campus, where I hope to have amazing opportunities. But I’ll also be living by myself for longer periods of time when my spouse is fixing up the house in North Carolina.
Yesterday as I drove through the mountains, I thought about how I could structure my days and weeks. I want to get back to doing more creative writing. I’d like to do that early in the morning, and then go for a walk a bit later, like I have been doing for the past month. I’d like to do more submitting to journals, if I can still find some that don’t charge high submission fees, which I define as anything that costs more than a few stamps would cost. I’d like to spend afternoons either going to class or getting ready for class.
And of course, I want to make sure I explore DC. The other day, as I read an article in The Washington Post about the re-opening of the Kennedy Center and what it means for restaurants in the surrounding area, I thought, I wonder if there are still any tickets to Hamilton, which is in town for two more months–and there are! In the past, there used to be a way to get great same day prices on tickets that hadn’t sold yet. I never figured out a way to do that in South Florida. I’m going to figure out how to see some great theatre in the next 2 years while I’m here.
I know that I’m claiming a huge gift. I will likely never be able to afford to live in a city like DC again. I want to make sure I squeeze everything out of it that I can.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Move In Day!

My goal this year is to get 100 rejections. You heard that right. So far I’ve managed 98 submissions of poetry, essays, or my poetry ms. And I’ve had (I’m guessing) about 30 acceptances. That means I still have at least 32 more submissions to make — and (horrors!) if any of those are accepted, then a few more for good measure.
Someone else gave me advice — and sent an adorable video of a three-year-old to illustrate it — of what might be called “radical acceptance.” The idea is to spend some time each day saying, “I LOVE my house,” “I LOVE my car,” “I LOVE this plant…this kid…this dog…this ratty old couch….” You get the picture. Just to flip that usual mode of noticing what isn’t okay, isn’t good enough, etc.
I love these rejections and how they’re helping me get closer to my goal of 100 rejections this year.
Well, it all sounds rather silly, now that I’m typing it up. I get bogged down by big stuff — and why shouldn’t I? Just like everyone, I often get caught by the little stuff and do some serious whining. On the other hand, sometimes I already practice this. A grown daughter hijacks a day when I really wanted to get other things done, and I decide to embrace it. My husband gets in a fender-bender, and I’m shot through the heart with gratitude that it was just a fender-bender and not anything worse. I get a headache and a voice from somewhere says, “I wonder what that’s asking you to pay attention to?”
Bethany Reid, Rejection City

I haven’t been up to much this week as we had several days of 90 degrees and not-great-air quality, so it was nice today, a slightly cooler day, to get out and about – I got my hair cut (see left,) walked around Kirkland a bit admiring some roses, and stopped by our local garden to pick up sweet corn. Even that much exhausted me – summer is not a great time for MS patients, as you may know if you have any MS folks in your life – the heat and humidity can feel like a nauseating weighted blanket. I haven’t had as much energy for writing or submitting as I wanted, but I’m hoping to get back in the groove by September.
I’m also considering starting up an hourly PR coaching business, maybe just a few hours a month to start, to help people get going on their books, small businesses, or projects. What do you think? I feel like I want to do more than just freelance writing, something that helps people, and also something that helps me dip my toes back it the working world. Even with MS, I feel like I have more to give than I’ve been giving, if you know what I mean.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Poem Up On Verse Daily, AWP News, Hot Air Balloons, Hot Weather and MS, Woodinville Read Between the Vines Book Club

We’re listening to Ani DiFranco as I wash the dishes following another of Christian’s amazing meals. Talking about the heady days of the early ’90s when we drove from town to town in the northeast following Ani and Andy the way others followed Jerry and Bob. In church basements and college halls and small-town theaters that used to be vaudeville houses we joined in with ever growing groups of fellow misfits, trying to figure out where the hell we belonged. I think of how young Ani was then — the same age as us, just a few years older than my kids are now — and how wise and powerful she seemed. Not seemed, was. Black tape on her fingers, slamming against the strings. Head shaved except for one wild lock of hair. I was probably the squarest person in all of those rooms but that guitar and those lyrics and that voice and those drums started to sand down the corners of my box. Now it’s thirty years later and all that’s left of the box are the occasional lines I draw for myself. The music, sadly, is still as relevant as ever.
Thursday night in Ithaca
dozens of us on a concrete floor
not even noticing
Jason Crane, haibun: 17 August 2022

I am giving up my current day job, no more market research for me…No more data tables, no more questionnaires, no more significance testing, etc. Nope, not for me, I’m now a car mechanic. I will be fixing cars for a living.
This is categorically not true, but I am proud of myself for finally fixing the boot of our car yesterday. It’s only taken me the best part of two years to do it. Four hours of swearing, sweating and repeated viewing of what may be the best video ever on YouTube has saved me the best part of 400 quid. I am happy. Are there any other poet mechanics? Come on people, announce yourselves.
In other news, there isn’t really any. I’m home alone this weekend—Come over if you fancy it—so in-between the mechanicery (I’m getting the lingo now) and the cleaning, drinking, etc, I’ve managed to work on some poems for the book. I think I’m almost…ALMOST…done with the second pass at them all, so it will be time to get them all in order again soon and go again…
I’ve finished a review and sent that off. I was so close to being up to date, and have somehow ended up agreeing to two more, so I now have 4 to do. Bloody heckers, like, Riches…learn the word no..
I managed to “attend” via Zoom/YouTube the launches of Jess Mookherjee, Ramona Herdman and Tania Hershman midweek. All three were amazing. I’ve not managed to buy Jess or Tania’s books yet (I will, I will, Jane…), but I got Ramona’s last week and read it quickly this week. It’s a wonderful thing. I love her work. It’s one of the four reviews I need to do, so I’m looking forward too going back over it in more depth and to revisiting her other work for context (and basically because it’s bloody great).
Mat Riches, Mechanicals, Blade Runner & A Brief Note About Reviews

Barbara Leonhard’s work appears in Spillwords, Anti-Heroin Chic, Free Verse Revolution, October Hill Magazine, Vita Brevis, Silver Birch Press, Amethyst Review, anthologies Well-Versed, Prometheus Amok and Wounds I Healed: The Poetry of Strong Women. Her poetry collection, Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir, will be published in the fall of 2022 by IEF (Experiments in Fiction). Barbara enjoys bringing writers together and has been sponsoring informal open mics on Zoom during the pandemic. You can follow her on https://www.extraordinarysunshineweaver.blog.
What are you working on?
I’m currently polishing a manuscript to submit to my publisher, EIF (Experiments in Fiction, a company in England owned by Ingrid Wilson). It’s called Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir. The poetry collection is about my mother and me. Our lives were interwoven in many ways. We each suffered from conditions that affected memory. Hers was Alzheimer’s and mine was encephalitis. Also, she was able to have seven children, but I was infertile because she was prescribed diethylstilbesterol (DES) when I was in utero. As I was the eldest daughter, she chose to move close to me so that I could help her in her senior years.
The trigger for this collection of poetry was my uncle’s question, “Do you love her?” The very thought that my love for my mother was questioned sent me into grief counseling. Throughout my care for her as her case of Alzheimer’s developed, I doubted my worth. To understand our relationship, I reviewed the ways my mother’s life and mine intersected. Could I grow to love the stranger my mother was becoming?
The book title is based on an experience I had in Mom’s last few days. My brothers and I were going to grab lunch. When I was stepping out of the car, I saw three shiny new pennies lined up perfectly on the hot asphalt parking lot. Mom would always pick up pennies and insist that I do the same. However, I would refuse, which caused some conflict. I knew these pennies were a message, and indeed, she died on April 3, 2016.
The book is a poetic memoir, so it has an arc. I set the book up in three sections: Light (my years with Mom before she moved close to me; Dust (her time in an independent living facility and her decline due to Alzheimer’s); and Echo (her move to assisted living and death, and the resolution of the existential dilemma about my love for my her).
Thomas Whyte, Barbara Leonhard : part one

there it goes again
the angst of a long summer
in that one song
Jim Young [no title]

These days are loud, though:
the billow of wind, the sermons
of thunder; the undercurrent of all
nostalgias turning into something
we only think we understand. O trigger
releasing a spring, tensing a mechanism,
seething with too much feeling.
O outrigger. I am an island and you are
an island and everyone else is an island
and we could be an archipelago.
Luisa A. Igloria, Outrigger

6. Yikes. I’m also Department Head (seven-hour chair’s retreat Friday, oy); about to teach two writing-intensive classes; and trying to finish an article on creative criticism, a version of which has to also become an ALSCW paper for a seminar on “confession” run by Gregory Pardlo, to be submitted in early September. Also also, I have a body with limits and a life. My personal and professional to-do lists grow like the reddening Virginia creeper in my garden, to which I am intensely allergic and so are a lot of other people, so I can’t seem to hire someone to dig it out. To do.
7. On the subject of spending money, my son begins his senior year at Haverford shortly, so our house is about to become much quieter. We had to buy a car, which I advise against, if you can help it, in this inflationary, troubled-supply-chain moment. New cars, at least economical, fuel-efficient ones, are not to be had for love or money. We scored a slightly used one after much research and a billion dollars.
8. On the bright side, I also bought a long-wanted new sofa to replace the stained, cat-shredded one. It’s a lovely shade of blue, and velvet, a fabric that cats, they claim, are less interested in using as scratching posts.
9. I’d like to read more poems on my new sofa, #sealeychallenge and all, but it’s been hard, given all the creative criticism I need to catch up on and the state of my in-box. The last I finished is Jenn Givhan’s Belly to the Brutal, which I highly recommend. I think it’s gonna win some prizes, at least if the judges can handle its emotionally intense explorations of motherhood, sexual assault, fatness, and tarot cards.
Lesley Wheeler, To do, poetically–or just some human sleep

The weather has been crazy hot this week, like much of Europe. Finland’s not used to reaching 30C in August. Thunderstorms are promised for today, but it’s still clear blue out there. Need to go water my allotment.
I recorded three poems with Helsinki Open Waves recently as part of a project with Helsinki Writers Group. This weekend I have been going through my takes, choosing how to put the poems together. I’m getting used to hearing myself read my work, but I’m not sure if I’m very good at it yet. I usually only need three takes to get a decent read-through, though we’re lucky that the audio technician is happy to cut and paste bits together so I don’t need a perfect take. What I’m still learning is how to emphasise the poem and read it with some expression that suits the words. It’s strange to hear something that you put so much energy into that by the end your body was a tense mess and to realise it didn’t come across the airwaves like it sounded in your head. Hopefully, he’ll be able to make it sound better with a bit of tinkering.
Gerry Stewart, Back to Busy Catch-up

As we were getting ready to come home, I reminded Cane that I almost didn’t make the trip because of the issues with my back. We had such a rich and wonderful two weeks with his siblings and extended family, a longer stretch of time than he’s had with them in decades. I expressed how glad I am that I didn’t miss it.
“You know,” he said, “if your back had gone out a week later, I’m sure we wouldn’t have bought the house.”
I’m sure we wouldn’t. Life swings on the smallest of chances sometimes, on serendipity and luck and things you didn’t know you were looking for until you found them.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Life is funny. And short. Seize the day.

we broke all the glass
in all the windows
no one stopped us
it took time
but the sounds were so addictive
the crack and cascade of glass
eyeless in autumn
a cold wind hummed in the gaps
the snow went wherever it would
Paul Tobin, SUMMER PROJECT

August 14, 2022August 14, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 32

I can hear the sugar, the sweet coffee, as a ripple or a purl in my tinnitus: the sugar makes it sing in a slightly more textured tone.
Dear love, I tried to explain, but it falls off into hesitancies and silences. That we might think what we are doing, as Hannah Arendt said. Might we?
Or more simply that we might learn to breathe.
Beside the freeway, they are building something huge, and the sound of the pile driver echoes for miles. Every once in a while metal strikes metal: and instead of thudding, it rings like a bell.
I think of the Lewis River, or closer to home, the Washougal: I haven’t seen either for years. I’ve developed a dread of returning to wild places I knew when I was younger. But sometimes you go to such places and they’re still there. And meanwhile, the memories run, on bare feet, ahead of you. They will visit even if you don’t.
Dale Favier, The House with the White Roses

I dreamed I was a fish
amongst a tenement of reeds.
Green was my truth
and I glided past the fisherman’s fly.
Dick Jones, LIGHT IS A STORY

Water has also entered my life in another way recently: I’ve gone back to swimming because we have a pool in our new building. During the pandemic I haven’t swum at all, and even before, it was really hard for me to keep it up as a regular practice. The best routine for me at the moment seems to be settling into every other day, around 7:30 in the morning. There’s seldom anyone else in the pool then, and I can swim my laps in an atmosphere that feels extremely meditative even when I’m working hard. It feels great to enter the water, and after a few laps, everything sort of melts away as the rhythm of the strokes, the breaths, and the turns takes over.
Beth Adams, Watery

At the bend of the river
there’s a pond we don’t call
the womb of the world, though we could —
this patch of deep water reflecting
tall purple loosestrife.
The pond is a womb, the world
is a womb. Emerge glorious
and dripping …
Rachel Barenblat, Womb

I am at the point with this poem where I am not sure if it is finished. Does it have more to offer? Should I just leave it alone? It feels like I have more to say, but I’m not sure exactly what or how. Once I might have been sure I would sort it out. Now I am just as likely to wander away and never come back to this poem. Is that O.K.? Is some essential part of myself being lost?
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Strange and Yet Familiar

Between moon and cloud
I wander a quiet
deep and ancient
as mountain moss
You follow
sweet and light
An intuition
A murmur
Charlotte Hamrick, What’s Past is Never Past

It does not hurt that I feel so much more present in other areas in my life that aren’t the freelance work–in the press, in my own writing, in just my tiny household where I actually get to be at home with the cats and cook actual meals and keep the place from being as messy/chaotic as it once was. What I struggled with in the beginning, a structure and routine, I now pretty much have got nailed down, or at least a couple variations depending on how I spend my days. I do not miss venturing into the world, and outside of a smattering of people, do not miss my coworkers or the work itself. Nor do I miss the way my skills and abilities were taken advantage of without anything like reasonable pay (and the complicated thing is some of those people are the same people). The jump was scary–you have no idea–my stability loving Taurean heart was in knots all through late last year, but once I made the decision, the relief never stopped flowing, even now.
Kristy Bowen, the great resignation and no regrets

If you can throw a cow
over the castle wall
you can have the job,
the old monk told
the applicant.
Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (280)

How does a poem begin?
Since I was in elementary school, a poem has always begun as a bodily sensation. I tend to feel it in my calves and arms, this transcendental itch that carries my focus into the mind, and uses my hands to gather words, lines, and thoughts and write them down quickly. It is messy and difficult and can really make a poet cringe. If you’re lucky, you might have the poem completed in your first draft. I live for those poems, I will wait on them for the rest of my life.
Thomas Whyte, Bianca V. Gonzalez : part five

Roses bloom backward to reveal to you the secrets of the underground.
When you venture out on your own, certain memories will be pregnant with broken mirrors.
Days may sound strange because their lips are parched from kisslessness.
Rich Ferguson, The Road Before You

Last night Rachael and I went to see the majestic Kamasi Washington play at The Troxy, and I’m not sure if the mixing desk was being warped by the heat or the temperature was just bending the sound, but something wasn’t right. It could have been everyone in the building looking like they were on the cusp of evaporating, or the permanent beads of sweat decorating my top lip and forehead, but the sound was off. It was a shame as Kamasi and his band looked to be bang on form. I did get to hear him play his song Truth though, and that’s one my favourite things in existence, so we’ll call the night a score draw. […]
The big news of the week, and to my mind it’s absolutely epic (NB a Kamasi Washington album is called The Epic, but that’s by the by and is absolutely not me trying to hamfistedly force a connection out when there isn’t one to be had) news, is that the latest issue of Bad Lilies has been published. And not only that, but issue 9 is called Feral Summers and features Kathryn Simmonds (who I note is Norwich-based), Jessica Mookherjee, Rebecca Watts, Taz Rahman (his work was new to me, but I love it, and note we were also bedfellows in Honest Ulsterman back in Feb), Lisa McCabe, Geraldine Clarkson, Erin O’Luanaigh, Chris Emery, Nikita Azad, Alex Jenkins, Gareth Prior and they’ve only gone and included me too. My poem, The Summer Job is sat in the middle of the issue, and so far be it from me to suggest it’s the sun around which everything else orbits, but I’m also not not saying that.
Mat Riches, Coyote Time & Luminescent Prompts

[Pearl Pirie]: Apart from music, what is underway, or forthcoming?
[Phil Hall]: This fall (2022), from Beautiful Outlaw Press: The Ash Bell—a book-length poem in thirty parts within parts.
PP: Oooh, writing that down on my buy list. And what intrigues you these days?
PH: Susan Sontag’s Introduction to A Barthes Reader is the best thing I’ve read (again) all summer.
The thoroughness intrigues me. It teaches me how to read Barthes (again). I wish I could write as well as her! (And him.)
And why such writing gives me such pleasure in the reading act, despite or besides its usefulness, its cargo—that why intrigues me too.
The kinetic tension of a sustained critical sentence followed slowly like poetry: Sontag, Hugh Kenner, Marjorie Perloff, Peter Quartermain…
~
Also, asemic writing in all its wayward forms. Gesture alluding to Alphabet.
And also asemic in its original meaning, from Barthes: words that by error make a new word without any official meaning, but vaguely suggesting odd meanings…
Here are a few I’ve made the mistake of finding & being intrigued enough by lately to record:
becomerang
poorine
obmutescence
tomen
Such asemicisms seem like poems in nugget to me. Syntax can’t get to them! Even music can’t get at them — too dense to lilt.
They hope to leave Meaning flapping its gums.
PP: As meaning should be left. I wrote in my poem Montague, the machine changed it to Mina guess. Autoincorrect is the new machine asemic.
Pearl Pirie, Checking In: Phil Hall

My spouse, Chris Gavaler, and I met while working on a Rutgers undergraduate literary magazine, The Anthologist. We were both chiefly poets then, shaping each other’s opinions in long Sunday night arguments over submissions (and sometimes over a twelve-pack). After graduation, we moved in together, after which followed many years of reading each other’s drafts; helping each other revise and sometimes hurting feelings in the process; sharing info on magazines and presses; and encouraging each other to persist when trying felt futile. I earned a PhD and dragged him to a small town in Virginia. He earned a Masters in Education, taught high school, went on to an MFA in fiction writing, then started in teaching in the English Department I’d joined years before. What we’re working on, as writers and teachers, usually varies wildly. But there have been synchronicities.
In May, I published Poetry’s Possible Worlds, a big milestone: in process and genre, it blends my scholarly training with a newer commitment to creative nonfiction, and it gestated for 10 years. His newest book, The Comics Form, is likewise the culmination of many years of teaching, writing about, and making comics. It begins with the question “What is a comic?” and encompasses comics’ history, style, conventions, and formal qualities. The book’s own style–clear and precise but intensely philosophical and theoretical–is very different from anything I’ve been up to lately. It amuses me very much that he, the MFA, has the deepest scholarly publishing record in our department, and I, the PhD, have the longest creative vita (although he gives me stiff competition). Somewhere along the way, we crossed paths and raced off in our own directions.
Lesley Wheeler, Not only close but intimate reading

Back then, reading books everyone was reading: Rand,
Gibran, Hesse — imagining perfection, imagining that
misunderstood idealism was some kind of quiet
rebellion, a secret counterculture. Until it came apart.
First innocence was fractured. Like a faraway rumble.
A misheard oracle. The truth is not always true. Then
the heroes turned themselves inside out. This too was
endured like a blood-letting ritual. An inevitable rite of
passage. Home is a variable construct. The cracks grew
wider. And deeper.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 05

The girl takes your card
and asks Soy sauce, duck sauce? It’s
the usual cornstarch-dredged pieces
of chicken with a smattering of sesame
seeds; rice or noodles on the side.
“Happy Family” is still on the menu:
that dish with three kinds of meat
smothered in some kind of brown sauce,
a chaos of vegetables seared in the pan.
Luisa A. Igloria, Happy Family

The full-length poetry debut by Edinburgh-born Ottawa poet Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin is Fire Cider Rain (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022), a collection set in four sections—“Evaporate,” “Condensate,” “Precipitate” and “Collect”—that examine the relationship between a mother and daughter amid an evolution of movement and displacement through the metaphor of water. Across the narrative thread of Fire Cider Rain, Ng Cheng Hin writes of migration and arrival, examining what is gained and what is lost, and what can’t help but be left behind. “as if by ritual, I enter a polemic / of loss,” she writes, to open the poem “HUMAN DISSECTION LAB,” “wherein the axis of grief / lies stitched to the vein of every / hemlock, every arthropod, every / woman’s coarse throat.” Stretching across multiple geographies—from North Africa to Mahébourg to “the edge of Lake Huron” and a Greyhound bus along the 401—there are elements of the tonal structure and familial content reminiscent of another poetry debut from earlier this year, Nanci Lee’s Hsin (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], both of which offer a lyric examination on mothers and daughters, loss and exodus, paired but perpetually untethered and seeking to connect. “like mother like daughter like matter like water –” Ng Cheng Hin writes, to close the poem “THE LAWS OF THERNODYNAMICS I.” Writing again of the narrator’s “Māmā” to close the poem “SEAMELT II,” she offers: “I will begin where she left me / with the sound of // water on tile.”
Her opening poem, the sequence “COEFFICIENTS OF FRICTION,” immediately sets a scene of descriptive thickness and full-bodied phrases, offering a lyric density very much aware of its own music and rhythms. “what breakable, half remembered bodies,” she writes, “bent with small attritions / stratospheric relics gliding north / in radical heaps away from purled trees / broken porchlights, the long ache / of the autumn island fire – […]” There is a staccato pulse of accumulated phrases and lines, writing moments of delicate, subtle music, one atop another until the larger shape begins to reveal itself.
rob mclennan, Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin, Fire Cider Rain

I’m currently trying to decide on 3 ‘water’ themed haiku to send in for the British Haiku Society’s members’ anthology. I admit I’m finding it hard to come up with anything original (most of my water poems are about rain – something we could badly do with at the moment)! And that leads me to my second plug for Presence: Matthew Paul’s essay on Caroline Gourlay, which is informative, incisive and highly readable. Here’s Gourlay on rain (as quoted by Paul):
listen!
the skins of wild damsons
darkening in the rain
Paul’s right to describe this haiku as extraordinary: on the sound patterns imitating rain, the power of the adjective ‘wild’ (I’m paraphrasing his comments here). For me, there’s a sense of a secret being imparted in this haiku. Despite the exclamation mark, I imagine the speaker whispering, a slight hush in the voice, a sibilance replicated in ‘skins’ and ‘damsons’ that might also imitate the sound of rain that Paul mentions. I also sense a relationship being played out (between lovers perhaps, or just friends). I go back to the words ‘wild’ and ‘skin’. To see those damsons darkening is to be out there in the rain, getting soaked to the skin. The command ‘listen!’ implies the moment is shared, that there is someone else in the scene. And the reader? Well, the the reader is being allowed to overhear, to be included in the experience. Yes, it’s an extraordinary poem, and Paul’s essay makes me want to revisit Gourlay, which hopefully I’ll have time to do over the summer.
So thank you Matthew Paul, and thank you Presence!
Julie Mellor, The Coffin Path

Rob Taylor: So many of the poems in blue gait feel timeless: they deal with abstract, existential questions that we as a species have been asking of ourselves since time immemorial. But another stream of poems in the book is tightly bound to the political world of the here and now, centred around particular injustices (such as the confirmation of the 215 children buried at Kamloops Indian Residential School or the ongoing actions at the Unist’ot’en Camp). In these poems you speak very specifically and politically.
These two “modes” seem to mirror your larger life, in which you work as both writer and activist. Could you talk about these two “modes” in your writing: the abstract/eternal and the political/immediate? Do you think of them as distinct from one another, or as part of an indivisible whole?
shauna paull: Thank you for this question, Rob. I think I mostly resist separations between art and world. In the presence of my community work, which was political as well, my most fervent hope was to create access to abundance for the highest number of people. It’s natural then that the work emerges from ontological concerns and enlarges to encompass the concerns of those whose lives are marked by xenophobia of one sort or another. I am aware that some of the poems that address what is present in the “here and now” are doing so because the stories of alterity that open in them are longstanding.
I think song is the one thing that can cross just about every barrier — what moves a space of air cannot be contained by any regulatory or political body, or set of convictions. For me, these poems are a small attempt at creating song-space for witness — my own. This space is limited in various ways, but my hope is to honour what remains alive in the communities I am engaged with and hope to support.
The root values of well-being, autonomy, and dignity for all, will likely always be central to my thinking and making. It’s possible that a practice of paying attention with one’s heart is present in the work, too. Nobody is really safe until we are all safe. At this point in time, I carry an awareness that witness will always be needed, but also celebration and beauty and kindness, all of which are under-sung in the dominant myths of our country and in capitalism. Simplicity and relational attentiveness take time and care and it seems to me, from almost every direction, these benefit humanity.
Rob Taylor, A Gift of Mystery and Many Hands: An Interview with shauna paull

Of course this is written thinking about the recent attack on Salman Rushdie. In addition to the horror of this violence against a writer and against our right to speak our truth to power, to critique, investigate, reconsider, remix, explore, reinvent, inquire, I am also thinking about how the present world seems to be fracturing before our very eyes, even as we know that it has, with the except of climate change, always been like this in one way or another. I feel like this is a series of essay questions in a high school exam: Is the present really worse than the past? In what way? Is there any point comparing? How are we feeling at this moment? What now? What IS possible?
Gary Barwin, EVERYTHING ALWAYS IS POSSIBLE NOW

o think i missed that tomato splitting on the vine
when all the time that last coffee at the roadside cafe
grew as cold as the conversation’s turning
as narrow-eyed tutt-tutted teeth clenched
the moment held
would not let go
our sweat trickled
as slowly
we got up to go
nowhere
Jim Young, this one last long hot summer

This one had poem after poem of gripping intensity and experience unlike my own, so I read it as if looking into a new world. Hard Damage by Aria Aber, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the Whiting Award (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). But it is my world–America with its covert actions elsewhere in the world (once her parents’ homeland) and full of privilege (of which she and I both partake). And it isn’t my world: it is refugee camp, Afghanistan left behind, and languages I don’t know but deeply appreciate, as explored in these poems.
Here in Hard Damage I find grenades compared to turtles and also “grenade” connected to pomegranate in etymology:

Grenade, its shape
so much like the fruit they named it after,
pomegranate, from Latin pomum granatum
(apple with many seeds), something
I can harvest and pick from a tree–
a comfortable taste in my mouth, and yes,
fruit of the dead, or of fertility, depending
on whose sustenance to listen to.
I find connections, of course, to the other books I’ve been reading here in August for the Sealey Challenge–for instance, a mention of the month of August itself, in the poem “Foreign Policies,” one that moves from and shifts back to the more personal poems in the book to the more political: “August, too, was a mastermind, distracting me / toward your lima bean eyes.”
Kathleen Kirk, Hard Damage

I can’t really not mention Larkin, since yesterday was the 100^th anniversary of his birth. Last week, I spent a few days in deepest Holderness, the flatlands of East Yorkshire between Hull and the North Sea.
It’s the area celebrated in ‘Here’, the opening poem of The Whitsun Weddings, and which ends in one of trademark, secular-mystical epiphanies:
Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
Nowhere is that sense of ‘unfenced existence’ more apparent than along the spit of Spurn, which protrudes three miles into the last knockings of the Humber estuary, much in the same way that Southend Pier does at the end of the Thames.
From Spurn Point at the end, you can see Bull Sand Fort, a derelict First World War fort guarding the approaches to the Humber. I wonder if it’s what inspired the strange phrase in Larkin’s ‘Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel’: ‘How / Isolated, like a fort, it is’.
What’s for sure is that Holderness is little changed from Larkin’s time. Since he was still alive when I first became interested in poetry, I somehow think of him as being more contemporary than he is. It seems hard to credit that he was born in the same year as another great writer who inspired me to pick up a pencil, Jack Kerouac, though he, of course, had died long before (in 1969) I came of age. They both inclined to melancholy, and both loved jazz, though Kerouac’s hero Charlie Parker was a figure of hate for Larkin. But I digress. Neither has remained a great, direct influence, but bear repeated, pleasurable re-readings.
Matthew Paul, On Mary Mulholland and Larkin

I increasingly think the urge to disassociate the man from the poems leads to some strange places. Every now and then I read one of Larkin’s advocates arguing for a clear division between the man and the work: the man was a rotter, but the work expresses (in the words of one TLS writer) ‘universal truths’. Or you have the late Clive James, Larkin’s loudest cheerleader, who spoke of the way he ‘went narrow to go deep’, avoiding social issues in order to plumb the depths of human nature.
This isn’t my Larkin. For me, the poetry has always contained a sustained, consistent criticism of post-war society – its obsession with youth and beauty, its endless consumerism, its failed promises of freedom – all of which is contrasted with the realities of aging and increasing social isolation. There is a kind of willful turning away from so much else that was going on in the published poems, and a grim reactionariness to certain letters (there’s the throat clearing again). This is where critics who see Larkin as a poet of post-imperial self-pity have a point. But to either describe Larkin’s poetry as soley a matter of fuzzy nostalgia, or to defend it on the grounds of its unique insight into human nature (or its form alone) is to miss the point: Larkin wrote about limits – and his approach to limits clearly had something to do with who he was and the times he lived in.
For me, that particular sensibility – the concern with limits – never felt like something from a bygone age, despite the period fittings.
Jeremy Wikeley, ‘Born Yesterday’ (Philip Larkin)

Not liking a book is not a reason to not write a review. A reviewer can’t be the target audience for every book published or even every book published in their favourite genre. But every reviewer can write about the book and give the review reader, who might be part of the target audience, enough information so they recognise the book is for them. Once when a music reviewer hated a new album, I would rush out and buy it. When the same reviewer praised a new album, it went on my ‘never, ever buy’ list. We had opposing tastes. But because he was consistent and give me enough information in the reviews for me to know I’d love what he hated and vice versa, the bands he hated were never going to lose sales because the reviewer didn’t like their music.
Emma Lee, A Bad Review is not when the reviewer didn’t like your book

No poetry collections so far for the Sealey Challenge. I’m beginning to doubt I’ll manage much. I read fiction before bed. It’s my wind-down activity before sleep. I can’t read poetry then or not a whole collection as I can’t focus well enough. Fiction keeps me engaged just enough to last a half hour until the melatonin kicks in. I think I’ll maybe read a poem a night from a new/old collection I’m excited about.
Gerry Stewart, Scottish Book Tour Part 4

I’ve been trying to fix these aspects of myself for decades. I’ve had dozens of articles published about mindfulness and adopted (then dropped) all sorts of practices to help me slow down my busy mind. I do inhabit my moments, often get immersed in my moments, but it’s a comfort to know that my skittering mind isn’t something in need of repair. It is the way I’m made. Non-linear attention lets me see all sorts of interrelationships between disparate ideas. This can’t help but show me paradoxes and patterns that help me generate new approaches. The drawback is this doesn’t lead to clear path forward and it can really antagonize those firmly in the doing-things-the-way-they’ve-always-been-done camp. It probably explains my weird sense of humor. It’s also why I have started dozens of writing projects that, with some sustained focus, could be finished – yet instead my focus drifts to ever-newer projects.
I can only speak for myself, but all the charts, apps, and other attention hacks don’t help me. Instead they handcuff me to the stress-inducing norms of a commodified culture, where productivity and not character are the measure of a life. My son’s ADHD, by the way, didn’t impair his learning in any way once we took him out of school. In fact, it likely enhanced it.
Laura Grace Weldon, What Does Your Attention Deficit Look Like?

FAVORITE LINE AT THE COUNTY FAIR
“The Beautiful Child Contest is now underway at the Cow and Sheep Barn.”
Last night I went to the Schoharie County Fair with my husband and youngest–Demo Derby! Royal Hannaford Circus! Gaudy rides! Crazy carnival eats! And all the joys of beribboned rabbits and hares, cows and sheep and friendly goats.
Marly Youmans, Wordishly

Live Encounters kindly reposted a few fall poems of mine from a little while ago…maybe it will remind you that many writers’ favorite season is on the way! I hope you enjoy them. And enjoy this pileated woodpecker [photo]—we also had deer visitors who ate the last of my roses. I hope that August will be kind to us the rest of this month…
The poems, “Last Flowers,” “Charmed,” “Halloween 2018,” and “November Dark” are available at this link.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, What a Week! Some Fall Poems, More Info about the Woodinville Wine and Book Club, Woodinville Wildlife and Flowers, and More

“There is another world but it is in this one,” said Paul Eluard.
This one, here, celui-ci in the heavy glittering mid-August summer. Sometimes the tree has one cicada that shatters the insistent sun. Sometimes the chêne has one cicada that cries its passion, shrieks its desire over the noonday field, the shadowless yellow grass. Sometimes a tree full of cicadas will work a trance like gentle dancers.
We are not on our way to over there. We share a house with others in our origin story. We shift around, one thing displacing the next in the everchanging present. The cat takes shallow breaths as it sleeps by the red bicycle in the shade.
Jill Pearlman, Here, the Heavy Glitter of Now

airborne invisible
they circle the world
one of us may catch
a whisper in the ear
some write down
the words they hear
he simply gave thanks
for every poem that chose him
Paul Tobin, NO ONE STOPPED US

August 10, 2022August 10, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Bluesy outsider chaotic spider trip

This morning on my walk I was pondering the question of why, when I was going through my first heartbreak back in my early 20s, I burrowed so deep into blues music to the almost complete exclusion of country western. Unlike most of my contemporaries I didn’t grow up listening to rock; my parents were into classical and a bit of folk (The Weavers, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives), and my older brother played old-time banjo. So the first time I heard Delta blues guitar, I didn’t think “Wow, that sounds just like the Rolling Stones!” but “Wow, that sounds just like a clawhammer tune in a modal key!” Which, as I discovered years later when a friend lent me a Smithsonian Folkways compilation of very early recordings of Black string bands, is pretty much how that music evolved.

So that’s why I was prepared to like the country blues, but doesn’t explain why I ignored country western. Too schmaltzy, I always said, but that wasn’t fair to many country singers who avoid the schmaltz. Really, I think it was just that I preferred the more stoic and tough-minded approach to the expression of emotion in blues lyrics compared to the typical display of emotional vulnerability in country music.

And that too reflects how I was raised: in a loving but somewhat emotionally repressed family where it was exceedingly uncommon for anyone to ever talk about their feelings.

Also, virtually every traditional bluesman or woman I’ve ever read an interview with, when asked to define the blues, included in their answer the contention that blues is medicine. I can personally vouch for that. For a young person, at any rate, it was a mighty salve. In part I’m sure that was because so much of how we relate to each other, sexually and otherwise, has been fundamentally shaped by Black culture, with blues and rock lyrics as a major conduit. Blues and jazz changed the entire tenor of our civilization, made us freer and I believe also happier. Or at least a lot less sad.

These days though I don’t listen to much blues, and I’m not sure why. Music isn’t the all-powerful drug it was in my 20s and 30s. I’ve spent too many years listening to “the music of what happens.” John Cage was on to something. There’s music pretty much everywhere if you choose to hear it that way. I doubt it has the healing power of the blues in and of itself, but the physical effort required to go outside and explore such music will keep you on your feet long after most other concert-goers have checked out.

***

I love the fact that one of the most important American poets for actually understanding America was half Japanese: Ai. Another had an English father and a Puerto Rican mother: William Carlos Williams. Maybe you have to be half outside, half inside to see a thing for what it is.

***

I’m watching a small, black wasp flying from leaf to leaf and walking in circles with her antennae down, a female ninja seeking her target: a caterpillar of just the right species to act as unwilling nursery and food source for her progeny.

There’s not much to say about this that hasn’t already been said, by Darwin among others appalled by this apparent refutation of any notion of a just or benign cosmic order: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars,” Darwin wrote in a letter to Asa Gray.

For me it’s horrifying—but also mentally liberating, because I find the idea of a benign cosmic order deeply oppressive. We are not all inside anything, or at least nothing we’ll ever be able to fully comprehend. Order is just another name for chaos. And chaos, as the example of ichneumon wasps shows, can be a real bitch.

But I’m charmed to see there’s a serious attempt underway to get people to refer to the Ichneumonidae as Darwin wasps.

Walking through a Pennsylvania forest in August is a great incentive to cultivate mindfulness: one moment of inattention and you’re wiping another spiderweb off your face. I bow to the spiders; they are my true teachers. The deer flies circling my head will do for an offering.

The thing I admire about birding is the regular reminder to look up. The waking at 5 am and squinting at things through binoculars, not so much. But treetops are just kind of inherently trippy to stare into. I think it has something to do with the shortage of oxygen associated with craning one’s neck.

August 7, 2022August 7, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 31

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week: being the matrix, the Sealey Challenge, the heat, road trips, living in the clouds, words about birds, dreams of rain, and much more. Enjoy.

Sometimes I remember. What she interrupts – with her shows of pleasure, power, riches, praise – is the creative impulse to look up, observe (look out!). Once this ceases – prophetically, the poet Shelley said this back in 1821 – new imagery stops being generated, language withers and dies. Only in my relations with the world (not with her) am I truly warmed. Then I’m the matrix through which the world steps – as the world becomes the matrix through which I step – to rediscover myself not ‘me’ (an atom in an empty universe), but ‘mine’ (living in relation to others, other things).
Martyn Crucefix, The Writer and Technology – a brief talk

I’ve been poking at this poem for a while. There’s a sense that life’s just been a lot lately. I’m noticing it in conversations, in pastoral interactions, everywhere I go. So many things are broken. “Whatever gets in the way of the work, is the work,” in the words of my poetry mentor Jason Shinder z”l, so that feeling became the impetus for the poem.
Tisha b’Av is in a few days. Seems like an apt time to be sitting with what’s broken.
Rachel Barenblat, Since

Yes, it’s August of 2022 already! Still dealing with Covid emergencies, and now Monkeypox has been declared a national emergency. Hey, can we get over one pandemic before starting another? Also, the realization that this is almost the end of summer, which seems literally to have just begun (right after July 4th, I believe). My garden is providing vases full of sweetpeas, roses, and dahlias, and I’ve got to start laying a foundation for promoting my new book next year for BOA. It really does take a lot of advance planning to launch even a little poetry book! Also, all of our outdoor projects have to get done before the rain starts again.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A New Flower Farm in the Neighborhood, the Frustrations of Health Stuff (When All the Doctors Are Quitting,) Trying to Write a Poem a Day and How Is It August Already

Steve Henn is reading for the library in September, so I am starting off the Sealey Challenge with two of his chapbooks from Main Street Rag: Guilty Prayer (2021) and American Male (2022). Don’t worry, the latter is more a critique of “toxic masculinity” than any kind of celebration. I do hope I can keep up with the Sealey Challenge, and read a book of poems a day in August, but I am in a busy time of life, just off a week-long family gathering, just starting a board presidency, and re-situating myself, so we’ll see! I have certainly enjoyed the Sealey Challenge in the past, and love the chance to read poetry sitting in a lawn chair in the back yard. Aha! I am already quoting from “American Male,” making it a Random Coinciday, as well as a Poetry Someday in the blog:
Isn’t it true I’d rather sit out back
in a cheap lawn chair reading poems
than do the edge trimming
or admire a full wall display
of oppressively shiny tools?
Kathleen Kirk, Guilty Prayer

Last day of summer break before I go back to work, a week before my class comes back. It’s been a strange summer, back to travelling, a bit of relaxing, a bit of personal stress. The kids are old enough to entertain among themselves, but not good at going out to find their friends due to Covid, so I think they’ll be excited to go back to school.
Getting to go back to Scotland twice was amazing. Once on my own to Lewis and Harris with lots of writing and relaxing, once with some of the kids to Glasgow to see friends and family. Both were pretty perfect. After my big book haul in Ullapool, we also hit the bookshops in Glasgow. My younger son has gotten into manga, so Forbidden Planet became his Mecca and after he struggled for so long to get into reading with dyslexia, I was happy to oblige him. Luckily the airline didn’t weigh our carryons as I think between the two of us they were a bit heavy with books.
Gerry Stewart, Scottish Book Tour Part 3

I had expected the high cost would mean an older, more serious crowd – people in the 30+ age-range. This was completely wrong. Because all of the writers who taught at the workshops are college professors, 95% of the participants were undergrads. And while most were lovely people, a person in their early 20s is different than a person in their early 40s. This is fine, this is how it should be. But it meant that had it not been for my roommate, a lovely 60YO woman who I got along with fabulously, I would have been lonely… And I’m an extrovert who likes talking to people, especially other writers! But the large age gap meant they wanted to party more, stay up late, and unfortunately, create drama. This is not to say that older people don’t create drama – they certainly can and do – but I try to avoid it when possible because I just don’t have the tolerance for it. But when you’re staying on a secluded estate…well, let’s just say, it’s impossible to avoid.
Courtney LeBlanc, Among the Olive Groves: Thoughts on the Writing Workshop in Greece

I’ve never lived up in the sky before, but it feels like I do now. We have windows on two sides of our new apartment, facing north and west, and they look out on the nearly-flat northern part of the city and its suburbs, the airport to the west, and the foothills of the Laurentians in the far distance. That’s the horizontal picture. But vertically, more than half of what we see outside our windows is sky.
One of the best features of living in a northern temperate zone (in my opinion!) is that the weather changes all the time. I’ve always lived in the northeast, so I thought I was used to the pattern, not only of the seasons, but the day-to-day weather, what the clouds mean, how the air feels, the visual and tactile sense of whether it’s going to get colder or warmer, drier or more humid, whether precipitation is coming or not. But I realize I had no idea of just how much change there was in the sky, the clouds, the sunrises and sunsets, and the rapidity of change during a few minutes, let alone a whole day. It’s completely fascinating.
Beth Adams, Clouds

Sad to hear, via Toronto poet Ronna Bloom, that novelist, poet and literary critic Stan Dragland died earlier this week, half-through his eightieth year. As Stephen Brockwell responded to the news over email: “He was instrumental in shaping my perceptions of Canadian poetry. An open hearted, curious reader and writer.” Most probably already know that Dragland spent his teaching career [at] the English Department at University of Western Ontario, where he remained until retirement (becoming Professor Emeritus), during which he was a co-founding editor and publisher of Brick Books (with Don McKay), a position he served until not that long ago, as well as a founding editor and publisher of Brick: A Literary Journal (with Jean McKay). After retirement, he relocated to St. John’s, Newfoundland and built a home with the writer and Pedlar Press publisher Beth Follett. He also published a stack of incredible books: if you look at his Wikipedia page, you can find a list of his titles, any and all of which I would highly recommend (I’ve even reviewed a few of them here and here; and mentioned him and his work in essays here and here).
As I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve always envied Stan Dragland’s ease with literary criticism; how he articulates the interconnectivity of reading, thinking, literature and living in the world in terms deceptively simple, deeply complex, and incredibly precise. I’ve envied his sentences, and how his prose connects seemingly unconnected thoughts, ideas and passages into highly complex and intelligent arguments that manage to collage with an almost folksy and deceptive ease (a quality his critical prose shares with the poetry of Phil Hall). If the 1960s and 70s saw George Bowering as one of the most prolific reviewers of Canadian poetry, and, as many have said, Frank Davey was our finest literary critic during the same period, Stan Dragland would emerge out of those years as a literary critic with an open and inviting heart, displaying a deep and abiding love for the materials he chose to explore. It was through Dragland’s eyes that I first understood just how wide-ranging criticism could be, as he brought in a myriad of thoughts, references and personal reflections to craft a criticism far more astute, and more intimate, than anything else out there.
I caught a second-hand copy of his Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages (Coach House Press, 1984) rather early in my twentysomething explorations, and was struck by his depth, composing perfect sentences of pure craft.
rob mclennan, Stan Dragland (December 2, 1942 – August 2, 2022)

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
For me the greatest difficulty has always been taking myself seriously enough to justify the time and effort required to make strong poems. I sometimes feel guilty for spending time writing – it feels like such a privilege – so I need to remind myself that I am doing meaningful work. Then, of course, there is the writing itself, which requires commitment and discipline. Some days it feels impossible, but I keep coming back.
Thomas Whyte, Elizabeth Hazen : part three

Another exercise in stream-writing, this time slowly with no set time limit, hoping that by writing very slowly and steadily I could cut out wasted words and let lines form and somehow link to what has gone before. I opened a website news link and saw a feature on a lake in Kazakhstan that turns pink every few years. This seems to me a good place to start. I am physically tired after a morning of clearing ground at our smallholding, so don’t want to think about plot, drama, or characters. Hopefully it will have enough to engage. Will it be any good? Does it matter? There are days when getting a feeling down is all that matters.
Bob Mee, PINK

The Pacific Northwest is roasting under its first big heat wave of 2022, and I’m trying to sustain the energy for writing that I had in the spring. In spite of my best efforts, my mind wanders, and I find myself sitting on the floor in front of the bookshelf. Then I get a brilliant idea, which will help me avoid the writing I’m supposed to be doing for at least an hour: arrange all of the journals I’ve been published in in chronological order!
Every writer who publishes in literary journals and small magazines probably has a shelf or two filled with contributor’s copies. In these days of online journals, actual physical magazines are becoming rarer, but I still get a few every year. When I leaf through them, I feel a profound sense of gratitude to the editors who chose my work. I’m often amazed and humbled to see the other names in those issues: Naomi Shihab Nye, Charles Harper Webb, Mary Ruefle… as well as the voices who’ve left us: John Oliver Simon, Lyn Lifshin, Carol Frith, I find some gems in those journals, by poets whose work I see regularly, and poets I’ve only seen once or twice.
Erica Goss, Browsing the Archive on a Summer Afternoon

Hot breath haunts,
lingers in liquid air.
Old magic explores the night
rhythm of time.
Salt of desire,
how we growl & devour
life’s dirt & dazzle,
laugh in the eyes of the sacred.
Charlotte Hamrick, Scent of Rain

It was a great pleasure to be interviewed by The Wise Owl for their Tête-à-Tête interview series in their latest Jade Edition issue. The Wise Owl is a new, international, monthly e-magazine publishing poetry, short fiction, non-fiction (essays, memoirs, travelogues, reviews (books/films/TV series/OTT releases), literary/critical writing, short film, and visual art. For more information see my interview with Principal Editor Rachna Singh and submission guidelines. They are always open for no fee submissions!
While I’m no longer posting on my website regularly, There are many resources available online to use for current submission calls and other helpful tips, check out some of these excellent literary resource sites, not to mention my lists that will be useful for the long term, such as Year Round Calls. If you’re on Facebook, I’ll continue to run the No Fee Calls for Poems group as well.
Trish Hopkinson, Tête-à-Tête: Trish Hopkinson interview via The Wise Owl + year-round submission call

The spreadsheet of poetry magazines [link added — ed.] is forever growing, albeit slowly. Even though I’m adding perhaps eight to ten titles each quarter, there are those I have to delete. This is usually because they’ve stopped publishing; quite a few mags were set up hurriedly during the pandemic and never really got off the ground. Others have drifted away on a seemingly permanent hiatus, either for personal reasons of the editor or maybe loss of funding. Others I delete because they never update their website, never respond to my query emails or just generally offer an impoverished service to readers and would-be submitters. Sometimes a publication is resurrected from the dead, or at the eleventh hour, which is always good to see: the Fenland Poetry Journal, for example. Even Strix is planning a comeback after two or three years in the wilderness.
Sometimes I forget the original purpose of the spreadsheet, which was to help me manage my own poetry submissions. So recently I’ve been making an effort to submit to magazines that are less known to me, and online mags in particular. As a consequence I discovered The Lake, a serious-minded online mag that’s been quietly gliding along (sorry) since 2013. On its modest website, edited by poet and tutor John Murphy, The Lake publishes new work every month from around ten poets, together with book reviews and occasional tributes (for example this one on the death of Eavan Boland, written by Rose Atfield. The range of contributors is impressive, many from across the world, making for an interesting read. I find that print magazines tend to present more of a monoculture; much as I may enjoy (say) The Rialto or Rattle, they paint very different pictures of contemporary poetry. I guess it’s as much about editorial taste and cultural preoccupations as it is practical issues that may affect submissions from overseas (availability of the journal in question in the contributor’s own country, for example).
Robin Houghton, On feeding The Lake

I created the website back in 2008 or so. I was late to creating an online presence. I started a website and a blog. I decided that I was serious about getting my creative work published and part of being serious meant that I needed to have an audience in place for that future time when I had a book with a spine published. Maybe having the audience in place would make book publishers take a second or third look at my work.
That idea seems like such a long time ago–that a simple website might be enough to build a brand. I was happy to do the blogging and to post on Facebook. I was late to Twitter, but it doesn’t seem too onerous. But as the years have gone by, I just can’t keep up with the various platforms. But that’s not the reason I canceled my website package.
The main reason: my approach to writing has changed. I no longer think that a book publication will change my life substantially. Once I thought a book publication would lead to a better teaching job. Maybe it would have once, when I was younger, when enrollment numbers at schools were rising. The world is a different place now.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The End of My Website

It’s hot here today. I mean really hot, but that’s not really unusual this time of summer. I have stood at the polls all day long in 101 to 104 degrees temperatures many days. My prayers go out for all those at the polls – voters and volunteers today, but also anyone compromised by heat. The homeless, those without air conditioning and those without fans. I confess that these people are in my thoughts and I pray they have some relief from the dangerous temperatures.
The school semester is over. I confess that I am pleased to report the one class I took for the summer session I received an A in. That’s what I wanted, so I’m elated. For those who were supportive of me going back to school, thank you, thank you.
The past week I’ve been up and down emotionally. This has been pretty par for the course lately. There are things that stress me and I try to deal with them as best I can. I confess I’m learning to manage this better, but it continues to be challenging.
Once again I am doing the Grind. A new poem or rewrite each day for a month. I’ve been doing this now for going on 14 months. I recommend this if you need to do lots of new work and want to get lots of writing practice. I confess it has been worth it to me.
Michael Allyn Wells, Confession Tuesday Aug 2 – A Win and an A Edition.

Today was a beach day. We packed cars, brought sandwiches, watermelon and towels. We all arrived at the same time and it sure was busy. The smell of sunscreen reminded everyone of childhood. It was a beautiful day. Someone had brought the Pope. We were bored and so we buried him in sand. Everyone forgot where he was! Finally, the sun went down and we all went home and went to sleep. The Pope was happier in the sand, soft, damp, and cool. One day, he hoped, he’d be discovered.
Gary Barwin, The Pope’s Visit

Animals that usually keep themselves hidden during the day have been out, searching for a cool spot or some water. Yesterday we watched a squirrel dig into ground I’d watered in the morning, and then lie in it, limbs stretched. This morning, tiny birds are landing on the branches of the forsythia outside my window to drink drops from the sprinkler. The sun feels predatory.
We are so fortunate to have AC and secure housing. As we were driving downtown yesterday, I saw a man fall over on the sidewalk. He landed and didn’t move. It was a quiet street, and no one else was around. We pulled over to check on him, and he was unable to get up. He was very large, and he looked so hot. He wanted us to help him up, but we knew we couldn’t lift him and were afraid of hurting him more. I felt so small and inept. We called for assistance, and–remarkably, as getting a response from 911 is not what it once was–an aid car was there within 10 minutes. I can’t stop thinking about what might have happened if we hadn’t seen him fall. How many people stretched out on the sidewalk have I passed by, assuming they are sleeping? Because there are so damn many of them now.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Dog days

A sentence is not always a consequence waiting to happen.
What you don’t see you will never see.
What of a body is finally exhausted after it’s turned inside out?
I would like to be subaltern to the possible.
Luisa A. Igloria, Demystifying

When I was a child and was naughty (not really naughty but perhaps headstrong and wayward), my father would occasionally say to me, “Are you a witch or are you a fairy or are you the wife of Micheal Cleary?” You’d think this would have stuck out more, but my mother had her little rhyme as well which went, “There once was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead, and when she was good, she was very very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid.” So perhaps I grew up thinking that this type of incantation was just part of the lexicon of all children.
I wish that I’d thought to ask my father the origin of his little rhyme. He didn’t say it all that often, but enough that I remembered it as an adult. One day as I considered putting it in a poem about him, I googled the phrase. Bridget Cleary was the wife of Michael Cleary. Bridget who died at the hands of her husband in 1895. Her husband who told friends and family that his true wife had been “swept” by the Good People who’d left a changeling in her place.
Erin Coughlin Hollowell, How to follow a spark

Does this story want to be told in the first person?
In a story without beginning or end, an i that starts
in the middle is malformed, is incomplete, presents
no meaning. i is a burden that cannot tell its story.
Even this ordinary story. The uncapitalized i must say
things you cannot understand, things I dare not say.
And how can you be that perfect listener? You have to
know so much first. Things even I don’t know.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 04

In March 2020, obsessed with the platanes, or plane trees that lend magic to the roads in southern France, I organized a series of poems and pictures about their disappearance. Covid derailed the presentation of the piece— the series languished.
Two and a half years later, I have returned to the same place in Camélas, southwest France, return to the trees, to the scene of poetic, arbored and aesthetic drama — how are things now? There are still graceful roads with remaining trees, sometimes 200 years old, but they stand like the Citroën or Deux Cheveux, a Charles Trenet song alongside gleaming strips of bold blacktop drawn straight on the land. “Old” roads are now designated for bikes or tractors. The modern highway obsession exposes all kinds of things — for moderns, it’s not the journey, it’s the destination. With speed and air conditioning, who gives a damn about quaint shade. Just when Americans are desperate to relearn the language of ecological coexistence, those who speak it are abandoning it.
But the trees? I’m here on a day when the air is already hot; in the care of the platanes, I am cool, in their corridor of peace. As much as I came to check on them, they check on me. The massacre that I witnessed and photographed is over; trunks and limbs that resembled bones and body parts of animals have long ago been carted away. The trees that remain are tagged with little metal plates, 612, number of the highway — G16+ 550. Individual and prisoner, naming’s double entendre.
Jill Pearlman, Driven — Life of the Plane Trees

on a whaling voyage
under an oak’s shade
suddenly: a finch!
Jason Crane, haiku: 4 August 2022

Rob Taylor: Birds of all types appear in A Sure Connection, including the four owls on the cover. Near the end of the book, you seem to acknowledge your obsession via a poem entitled “Another Bird Song.” Why do you think you write so much about birds?
W.M. Herring: I write about birds because I am an observer, and they are everywhere; if you frequent a fairly natural setting and are willing to stay still for a bit, you cannot miss them. Birds differ so much in habitat and habit, yet share so many characteristics. They behave as they were designed to behave, living in a manner that benefits their society. They exhibit beauty in such diverse ways. And, they can fly!
RT: You appear especially drawn to smarter, darker birds like owls and crows.
WMH: Both seem a cut above in complexity and in their ability to reward an observer for their attention. Crows certainly entertain and instruct; that makes them worth writing about. Owls attract because they are enigmatic, riveting, unexpected, otherworldly. An owl sighting pauses everything and makes me take stock of what else is happening, internally and externally, in that moment. I was excited to find Barred Owls in East Sooke as well as in Prince George. I hope the quizzical Barred Owls on the book cover make the potential reader (also) wonder what is within, while providing a broad hint that owls will be involved.
Rob Taylor, A Congenial Barrier: An Interview with W.M. Herring

1st review of INSPECTOR INSPECTOR, and it’s a positive one. Nice to feel the reviewer Toh Wen Li’s genuine enjoyment of the book, not only in the words of praise but also in the generous quotations of the poetry. Nice too to be acknowledged as “openly gay” in the Straits Times, Singapore’s main broadsheet, for the first time, I think. I wish there was some mention of the political dimension of the book, but there are insightful descriptions of the different poetic sequences that focus on technique as well as content. Thanks, Toh Wen Li, for this sympathetic review. Oh yes, and thanks for mentioning my hybrid work of fiction SNOW AT 5 PM: TRANSLATIONS OF AN INSIGNIFICANT JAPANESE POET, which is shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize.
If you are in NYC, come hear me read from INSPECTOR INSPECTOR on Tuesday, August 9th, 6 pm, at the Bryant Park Reading Room, with three other poets. It’s free and open to everyone.
Jee Leong Koh, First Review of INSPECTOR INSPECTOR

I’m a little bit half past the way through the MEMOIR IN BONE & INK video poems, which are turning out to be a fun (although a little bit spookier than intended ) project. If you recall, the poems themselves are the spoils of NAPOWRIMO this spring, that I actually did not finish, but did get around 20 or so pieces I liked and was looking to do something with them. Enter the video poems, which outside of a couple of trailers and art things, I hadn’t really dug into since finishing SWALLOW a while back. They, like most of the things I do, are experiments, so I never quite know where they are going. The last couple have a decidedly darker, more horror-feel vibe, which dictated the music I chose for them, which of course only enhanced those vibes. Nevertheless, I am pretty happy with the results so far and have a few more to tackle before mid-September, when I hope to take what I’ve learned and make some killer trailers for AUTOMAGIC coming around the bend. I will also be releasing the entire project as a zine towards the end of this month if all goes well.
You can see the whole series thus far on YouTube…
Kristy Bowen, how it started, where it’s going

I have two new poems in the latest issue of Contrary–Fern at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital and With Kit, Age 7, Outside the Hospital
Both poems are about my daughter Kit, who passed away at 6 months old after struggling with CHD and spending most of her life in the CICU. The first poem, “Fern,” is about that waiting room experience for parents of sick children–hoping against hope.
The second poem is after William Stafford’s poem “With Kit, Age 7, At the Beach“, a poem I happened upon in homeschooling my children. I was fairly obsessed with the poem for a month or so, because it moved me deeply–first of all to be surprised to see my daughter’s name in a poem (Kit isn’t the most common of names), then to relate to that feeling at the end–that “as far as was needed” that a parent would go and strive for a child. My Kit didn’t make it to 7 months, let alone 7 years, but I had that same feeling for her–that I would do whatever it takes, that I would try as long and as hard as I could. And I did.
Renee Emerson, new poems in Contrary

Sanjeev Sethi’s “Wrappings in Bespoke” is a series of short, cerebral poems that stretch towards what is it to be human, drawing on lessons learnt from his personal life and opening those observations up to a general reader. This is summed up within “Biog”, where
“Images and idioms speak our
accent. We coach ourselves to
ignore the commentators. In an
ecosystem of unequal genii, we
are happy to exist. To be is to
bloom. The rest is contextual.”
Readers are invited to find what speaks to us, ignore the doubters, acknowledge the inequalities, and strive to be content with our lot. What makes us content is not defined so the reader can interpret it as they please. These are words of guidance, not rules. It doesn’t stop a reader striving for material happiness and status, but reminds readers to keep themselves grounded and balanced.
Emma Lee, “Wrappings in Bespoke” Sanjeev Sethi (Hedgehog Poetry Press) – book review

tap tap tap
a new roof goes on
in the rain
Jim Young [no title]

As wretched as the world often is, we–and the rodents, insects, plants, etc.–find ways to adapt for far longer than seems likely. In the face of war and climate catastrophe and the loss of what we love, some of us manage to change and stay resilient, teaching new skills to those who come after us. We do so through art, literature, dance, music, community, love. It isn’t easy and it isn’t certain. But it’s all we’ve got.
Ann E. Michael, Adaptable

how many dreams of rain end a life
Grant Hackett [no title]