Is it possible to have ever been in a place completely free of pain? Was such a place beautiful, or was it unremarkable for the absence of any attachment to the things you might have meant when you said I wish or I want, or I cannot, I can? What did you lose in those years when all you wanted was to empty each room of objects that seemed to crowd the tight, airless room inside your chest; or did they come back, multiplied in number, edging each other for space on the furniture? Outside, evening arrives faster than it can fall. Trees drop the last of their leaflets, knowing this time of year is past announcement. You couldn't stop walking into it even if you tried: even if you held still, you'd feel the landscape bristle with either hurt or love, a kind of static electricity. At last, you might say, or Oh; as one by one, lights flood the insides of their bowls.
Cipher
Up, and to the office, where all the morning, and at noon home, where my wife not very well, but is to go to Mr. Mills’s child’s christening, where she is godmother, Sir J. Minnes and Sir R. Brookes her companions. I left her after dinner (my clerks dining with me) to go with Sir J. Minnes, and I to the office, where did much business till after candlelight, and then my eyes beginning to fail me, I out and took coach to Arundell House, where the meeting of Gresham College was broke up; but there meeting Creed, I with him to the taverne in St. Clement’s Churchyard, where was Deane Wilkins, Dr. Whistler, Dr. Floyd, a divine admitted, I perceive, this day, and other brave men; and there, among other things of news, I do hear, that upon the reading of the House of Commons’s Reasons of the manner of their proceedings in the business of my Lord Chancellor, the Reasons were so bad, that my Lord Bristoll himself did declare that he would not stand to what he had, and did still, advise the Lords to concur to, upon any of the Reasons of the House of Commons; but if it was put to the question whether it should be done on their Reasons, he would be against them; and indeed it seems the Reasons — however they come to escape the House of Commons, which shews how slightly the greatest matters are done in this world, and even in Parliaments were none of them of strength, but the principle of them untrue; they saying, that where any man is brought before a judge, accused of Treason in general, without specifying the particular, the judge do there constantly and is obliged to commit him. Whereas the question being put by the Lords to my Lord Keeper, he said that quite the contrary was true: and then, in the Sixth Article (I will get a copy of them if I can) there are two or three things strangely asserted to the diminishing of the King’s power, as is said, at least things that heretofore would not have been heard of. But then the question being put among the Lords, as my Lord Bristoll advised, whether, upon the whole matter and Reasons that had been laid before them, they would commit my Lord Clarendon, it was carried five to one against it; there being but three Bishops against him, of whom Cosens and Dr. Reynolds were two, and I know not the third. This made the opposite Lords, as Bristoll and Buckingham, so mad, that they declared and protested against it, speaking very broad that there was mutiny and rebellion in the hearts of the Lords, and that they desired they might enter their dissents, which they did do, in great fury. So that upon the Lords sending to the Commons, as I am told, to have a conference for them to give their answer to the Commons’s Reasons, the Commons did desire a free conference: but the Lords do deny it; and the reason is, that they hold not the Commons any Court, but that themselves only are a Court, and the Chief Court of judicature, and therefore are not to dispute the laws and method of their own Court with them that are none, and so will not submit so much as to have their power disputed. And it is conceived that much of this eagerness among the Lords do arise from the fear some of them have, that they may be dealt with in the same manner themselves, and therefore do stand upon it now. It seems my Lord Clarendon hath, as is said and believed, had his horses several times in his coach, ready to carry him to the Tower, expecting a message to that purpose; but by this means his case is like to be laid by. From this we fell to other discourse, and very good; among the rest they discourse of a man that is a little frantic, that hath been a kind of minister, Dr. Wilkins saying that he hath read for him in his church, that is poor and a debauched man, that the College have hired for 20s. to have some of the blood of a sheep let into his body; and it is to be done on Saturday next. They purpose to let in about twelve ounces; which, they compute, is what will be let in in a minute’s time by a watch. They differ in the opinion they have of the effects of it; some think it may have a good effect upon him as a frantic man by cooling his blood, others that it will not have any effect at all. But the man is a healthy man, and by this means will be able to give an account what alteration, if any, he do find in himself, and so may be usefull. On this occasion, Dr. Whistler told a pretty story related by Muffet, a good author, of Dr. Caius, that built Keys College; that, being very old, and living only at that time upon woman’s milk, he, while he fed upon the milk of an angry, fretful woman, was so himself; and then, being advised to take it of a good-natured, patient woman, he did become so, beyond the common temper of his age. Thus much nutriment, they observed, might do. Their discourse was very fine; and if I should be put out of my office, I do take great content in the liberty I shall be at of frequenting these gentlemen’s company. Broke up thence and home, and there to my wife in her chamber, who is not well (of those), and there she tells me great stories of the gossiping women of the parish — what this, and what that woman was; and, among the rest, how Mrs. Hollworthy is the veriest confident bragging gossip of them all, which I should not have believed; but that Sir R. Brookes, her partner, was mighty civil to her, and taken with her, and what not. My eyes being bad I spent the evening with her in her chamber talking and inventing a cypher to put on a piece of plate, which I must give, better than ordinary, to the Parson’s child, and so to bed, and through my wife’s illness had a bad night of it, and she a worse, poor wretch!
my child my candlelight
my brave new world my keeper
my rebellion in the heart
my frantic blood
living only on woman’s milk
my cipher of a child
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 21 November 1667.
Borealis
Years ago, you thought you understood what it meant to plan for the day the body, finally released from its cage, might enter a field as if clothed in only the cool, visible frost escaping as breath, without trembling. Or as if guided by the old percussion beneath the blood, but shorn of its fearful palpitations. But below the varied complexity of light falling as bars of unworldly green, the goddess travels westward each day to herald the sun's return. How can she do this without breaking or surrendering, without believing the yoke is not hammered iron but fire, molten, melting.
Advisory
When they were all called in to the great ship, keeping one eye on the winds carrying unimaginable volumes of water and another on oceans the color of a long-festering bruise (gone the rows of silky, scalloped caps): did anyone want to punish the bellwethers by leaving them behind, or did they finally believe the warnings they rang through each town? Before this, rain was merely something that passed overhead; grew bored, bowed out. Winters were spiked with an icy throb like violins. But here's a tarp, a roof that pounds arrival without pause. Inside, they pretend the day of the dove is soon. For that, they've even brought candles and cake.
Poetry Blog Digest 2020, Week 50
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. This week found poets looking forward and back, celebrating and mourning, reading, reflecting, raging and reminiscing. Some exciting new publications make an appearance. The solstice approaches.
For over a decade now the Christmas season has been marked for me by a party a friend and her partner host this time of year. It isn’t your typical holiday gathering of interlocked friends: there is a brilliance to their tradition of inviting a core group of weak ties, and each year a few new faces. It’s positively “urban” in its inclusiveness. And as someone who borders on recluse, I find it relaxing.
The food follows in a similar vein: familiar (though hardly “traditional”) dishes and deliberately introduced new recipes. Near the end of the evening every year, M. plays the lacquered white piano and we sing carols.
These parties may be the only parties I have ever attended without feeling a pressure to secure my belonging, or wriggle into tightly-knit cliques by way of an interesting anecdote, or tactical compliment/question. I still don’t know how to do that, and am comfortably past trying, actually.
But this year there’ll be no seasonal gathering around dinner table and the piano. I feel the loss, and am trying to re-frame the fact. I am pulling back to identify the loss, and to appreciate exactly what was so very pleasant.
We aren’t supposed to cling to the pleasant, but I don’t think that precludes seeking to experience it. And maybe for the first time I am observing my passive social life, not in terms of an area for self-improvement, but as a potential for creativity.
I suppose in the self-help jargon the word is “agency”, but oh what connotations come with that: productiveness and goals. Not for me.
When the world pulls apart as it has, I am noticing the spaces between. The loose ties, the fluidity of interactions. My perspective has shifted.
Loosening the weave
Ren Powell, Perspective in the Time of Covid
potential in every thread
ever-new garments
How to make something true? How to slow down that endless flow that we find ourselves participating in, the big scroll….? I keep returning to the line by C.D. Wright on trees, when she says, “The trees true me.” What is it that trues me? What trues you? How to make things that ring true as trees?
Shawna Lemay, Dwelling on Images
It was the persimmons clinging to the leafless branches of a modest sized tree that first made me fall in love with this house. Now, 23 years later, I’m still no closer to getting used to their exuberant abundance.
early sunset
Dylan Tweney [untitled photo post]
a flock of crows winging homeward
People used to ask “what’s new?” or “how’s work?” or “what’s the family up to?” but this year’s standard inquiry seems to be “how are you holding up?”
I don’t know about you, but the holding and the up both are pretty tenuous. Every day seems to pose a more serious threat to democracy, the environment, to justice. This week we are breaking records for Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths, with experts warning of a “dire winter.” I know people who are currently suffering with Covid-19. I know people who have died. I also know people who say concern over the virus is “overblown” and continue to go to the gym and to large gatherings although we’ve now hit daily death tolls exceeding those on 9/11.
Sometimes it feels like I’m polishing every splinter of hope I can find. But when I pay closer attention to what’s holding me up, I find a vast scaffolding. Here are a few rungs on this month’s ladder.
An ash tree in our yard continues to thrive despite invasive ash borers. I greet this tree every time I walk past. Like the sycamore, dogwood, hawthorn, and maple trees around our house I consider this tree a friend. It’s the first tree I see when I look out our back windows, its branches almost always full of twittering birds. I know ash trees are in serious decline. Millions of U.S. ash trees have already died due to the invasive ash borer, including hundreds of trees in the woodland part of our property. But some trees continue to thrive. They’re called “lingering ash.” Somehow these trees, untreated by insecticides, carry on. Their genes seem to resist predation. Science hopes resistant ash can perpetuate the species. This tree’s resistance to annihilation can’t help but inspire me. Let’s hope we can be the lingering best versions of our own species.
Laura Grace Weldon, Holding Up
who are you digging for sweetheart?
Romana Iorga, exhumation
what scrap
of your life
have you stashed
in the ground? whose
memories
have replenished
the soil? how I wish
it were mine this
single-minded
joy
for digging
The cute Anne Taylor pink coat, waist-tailored with the velvet collar, and matching lipstick behind the mask, because this time, I am not sick, see? Hi, I’m still alive, hospital where I have been so many times in the last eight months, from first wave panic of not enough PPE to now second, or third: ain’t dead yet, say the rose quartz earrings, matching coat, and devotional mouth;
valiant front, isn’t it, all this, until the lady at check in says, at the end of the usual exchange, rote for all of us now, all of us who know it, anyway, who have had to, “…oh, and we call Michael, right, if anything happens?” and the blade of foot kicks me in the stomach, and even strong as this core has become I can see my own soul shoot out backwards from my body, hit the wall behind me, crumple to the floor,
still, I say calmly, politely, “No, absolutely not, please remove him from my file,” and I look away, because if she looks at me I will cry, and in peripheral vision I see her note the brittle ice shatter sound at the edges of my voice and she hits delete, and asks “Do you want to add someone else honey,” and I answer “No thank you not at this time,” and it’s sort of amazing that I haven’t been to the hospital in that long for once, and still I wonder how many more ambushes with this there will be,
and then the rest of my energy, the entirety of my physical being is occupied, waiting, dodging (the shakes) (the needy invasive chatty creeps) (the screaming snot-flinging children) (the waiting room chairs marked for distancing) (the pain) (god damn this pain) (you stupid, stupid bastard what you have wasted how dare you be so stupid at such cost how could you my god look at all you have destroyed for us both)
JJS, labs
you listen to the Blues
straight-up, all-American
lugging lowdown bad news
you moan and groan
knowing reality is your dance partner
not asking who leadsyou begin to play with woe
compete, restate, elaborate,
find the slinky horn, mockery,
human pulse in the drum beattragedy to be stuck in a single mode
and joy is improvisational — all elegance,
Jill Pearlman, Red, White and Blues
meditation, intentional
No one went anywhere very much
Luisa A. Igloria, The Aftertime
anymore. Parked cars sat
idle on each street. All summer,
windshields gathered fallen
crepe myrtles. In fall, a thick
sifting of dry pine needles.
In kitchen drawers we found
soup spoons that needed
polishing, a blue-green
teapot that was a gift
years ago; a pair of glass
candlesticks, handpainted,
never used. As if it were
Christmas, we took them out
and marveled; finally
we lay them on the table,
poured tea, lit tapers.
We wouldn’t run out of books
yet, though as the year
dwindled down, there wasn’t
much light to read by.
A dear friend still wants me to tell her the time I was born so that she can do my reading. I hate to avoid the question, but I avoid all things hocus-pocus. This is weird for a life-long relatively devout Catholic to say, I know. Hocus-pocus is essential to our storytelling. At the same time, the Christmas season is approaching and I’m feeling like a doubter more than ever before. My husband’s journey through diagnosis to first treatment took up our last 8 weeks and involved planning for the worst-case-scenario and many days and weeks of waiting for pictures of treatment and possible outcomes. It was heart-wrenching and the planning for the end made the end seem inevitable. I wrote some poems.
I shared our story with few at first, making the circle larger as we learned more and could answer difficult questions about the prognosis. We received an overwhelming outpouring of support in the form of thoughts and prayers and anything to be done. I wrote some poems.
I started to think about the prayers. In the first round of letting our closest family and friends know that it was something and something bad, they prayed. I wondered what the prayers would do to the blood already sampled and the tests already running and the analysis about to be completed. I don’t believe God works that way, in any form of the Trinity. This repeated in the second and third rounds of testing. Nothing was going to do magic on what already was set in motion. They prayed for our strength. I wrote some poems.
Okay, I said, I can use some strength. I was waffling among ledges of anger and fear and grief, each adjusting higher and lower from moment to moment like a scissor-lift. I was driving my lovely family crazy, while they remained steadfast. The prayers were working on them. I wrote some poems especially now that we had entered Advent and a friend challenged me to write one a day. I signed up for a prompt-a-day-Advent-calendar and wrote to that. (www.twosylviaspress.com)
Then, all-of-a-sudden, things started lining up. All the bad luck seemed to reverse: of course, we are lucky to have a hematologist/oncologist in the family treating my husband; he is fair enough to give us the honest frightful truth; and kind enough to look for the next-best-option to prolong my husband’s life; he found it just two days before my husband would start therapy; and the numbers look good and we couldn’t be more relieved; and the planning for future inevitabilities is done for whenever we will need it. I wrote some poems.
Tonight, celebrating our luck and practicing gratitude and praying those thanks, I wonder: are we lucky to be in this situation, fortunate to have found the problem at this time, happy to be young(ish) and healthy, blessed to be in this particular family, and/or unlucky to have this cancer at all? I have some poems to write.
Thanks for the thoughts and prayers. They help.
Cathy Wittmeyer, Poetry & Timing & Luck & Stars & Gratitude
spent much of this afternoon walking in the rain – trying to accept the weather, rather than rail against it! In fact, I’ve been trying to accept quite a few things that don’t sit well with me lately, attempting not to let the relentlessly bleak news get in the way of poetry, and life. Easier said than done.
Julie Mellor, rain-washed fields
The haiku above doesn’t please me as much as it should – the pun on ‘greens’ seems a bit slight, and I also have a vague feeling that I’ve read a similar poem elsewhere, although I can’t remember where. If so, many apologies to the writer. Haiku may be short, but they’re of infinite variety, so there’s no excuse for not being original. However, sometimes lines come to me and I’m really not sure if I’ve invented them, or whether they seeped into my brain after reading something. And what I’ve been reading over the last couple of weeks is Presence magazine, trying to whittle down a list of favourite poems so I can cast my vote in the ‘best of issue’ award. I really like the idea of a reader’s vote. It means I read the poems a whole lot closer and in doing so, new meanings and resonances surface. So, more reading this week, and hopefully a bit of editing so I can send a few haiku out over the Christmas break. In between, there’s cards to write, presents to wrap, the post office queue to join … Oh well, at least the rain seems to have eased!
early twilight
snow enters a barn
on the backs of cowsMatthew Paul, On a haiku by Christopher Herold
This haiku by the great American haiku poet, Christopher Herold, was the winning poem for ‘December’ in the Snapshot Press Haiku Calendar competition 2019. It was a very worthy winner.
The first line enables the reader to see that beautiful, colourful light at the start of the ‘magic hour’. The mention of the word ‘snow’ in conjunction with ‘twilight’ naturally makes the reader feel the coldness. But, above all, how brilliantly the poem captures a momentary movement in time by attributing the verb not directly to the cows but to the snow, and does so by putting the focus so specifically onto the backs of the cows. There isn’t a need for high-register language. It’s a timeless winterscape, perfectly rendered, like a painting by Brueghel the Elder.
The 2021 Haiku Calendar is available for order now and is unmissable.
From deepest Somerset, Krakow, Edinburgh, and Wem they logged in to wish the book well on its journey into the world, and what is more, they brought their own drinks. I told you they were a generous crowd. For Penny in Western Australia, it was 4.30 am the next day. My editor Ross Donlon (Mark Time Books) was even further ahead — 7.30 am in Castlemaine, Victoria. This skillful display of time and distance travel was all part of the ride.
Although moving from the digital (this blog) to the page (that book) may seem counter-cultural, for me it’s been necessary at a time when so much of my time is spent staring at a screen a couple of feet away from my varifocals. The book weighs in at 210g. I know this because I’ve weighed it (plus packaging) in order to post it out to readers.
If you would like to buy a copy of your very own, they cost £10 each including second class UK postage. If you want to get a first class postal service, add 50 pence. Email me at liz.lefroy@btinternet.com to let me know your requirements. If it’s a gift, I can giftwrap and add a card for another £1 and post it straight to the recipient. If you live outside the UK, I can work out the postage rates.
You can also find I Buy A New Washer (and Other Moderate Acts of Independence) in the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishops Castle, and Pengwern Books, Shrewsbury. And there is a lending copy at Shrewsbury Library, (although the librarian I’ve been dealing with has taken it home for the weekend, so you may have to wait your turn). I will sort out a wider means of distribution in the new year.
I’m deeply grateful to those who suggested this project to me, in particular Ross Donlon and Anna Dreda. I am so grateful to you, my readers. Some of you — Peter, Kev, Anna, Graham, Helen, Morar, Mike (and it turns out, Zoe!) — have been reading diligently for years.
When I started this blog in 2014, I thought it would be a playground in which I could practise my poetry writing skills. What I’ve discovered is that playfulness / mucking about / having fun / being spontaneous (and moderately independent) suits me.
Liz Lefroy, I Commit To Paper
Sent From Elsewhere is a major collaboration with Swedish/French musician/ artist Frédéric Iriarte that we have been working on for most of 2020. When we started this, we decided to make tracks that sounded different from anything we’d do by ourselves. So here are complex improvisations, radical remixes, and strange texts, using vocal effects that I’d been thinking about for ages… We are both very happy with the result!!
The album consists of 9 tracks, featuring Frédéric on guitars, basses, saxophones, keyboard, piano, flute, Jew’s harp, harmonica, vibraphone, FX and percussion. I did the vocal performances, played a few bits, and put the lot together in sometimes major remixes. [Listen on Bandcamp]
Ian Gibbins, Sent From Elsewhere: poetry and music with Frédéric Iriarte now out on Bandcamp
[Rob Taylor:] Speaking of points of connection, a number of the poems in Mythical Man involve, or take place on, dating apps (two of the poems in Mythical Man contain quotes from Grindr). Did it feel at all strange or anachronistic to write about a digital space in a print book? Does writing in a more “traditional” way about a very modern form of communication allow you a different perspective on it? Do I sound one-hundred years old for even wondering over these questions?
[David Ly:] You only sound roughly 78 for even wondering over these questions. It definitely did not feel anachronistic to write about digital spaces in a print book because I write from my experiences and being who I am, the digital space(s) where I exist are just an integral part of my existence whether I like it or not, but I also am very much a print book reader. So putting the two together wasn’t strange at all. I do feel it strange that people find it a talking point that my poems are drawn from things like dating apps and other digital things. It’s just the world I/we exist in! So it feels right and comfortable to write about them in my poems.
I don’t know if writing about modern forms of communication in a more “traditional” way gives me a different perspective on it. If anything, writing poetry about digital spaces and how we exist in them makes me slow my thinking down more and reflect more on how I (and others) exist in places like Twitter, Instagram, Grindr, etc. And I think that slow-thinking about this allows me to write sharper poems.
Rob Taylor, Old Stories Made New: An Interview with David Ly
Being on sabbatical puts a insulating layer between me and the academic seasons, but I can still sense the weather shifting via publication cycles. Even for magazines and presses without university affiliations, there are year-in-review lists and columns: Aqueduct Press just published one of mine, and I’ve just submitted another to Strange Horizons for early January publication. I’ve been reading proofs for December issues. Rejections are souring my inbox. I also received three delicious acceptances from magazines I’ve never cracked: I’ll have poems in Smartish Pace and Kenyon Review Online next year, plus an essay that’s central to my forthcoming book, Poetry’s Possible Worlds, will be in American Poetry Review. I’m freaked out, sad, tired, and feeling like a shut-in, yet that is some serious holiday cheer.
I’m rarely in a good mood, honestly, when I’m processing publication’s endless clerical business, even the wins. Being immersed in writing and reading feels better. Yet there are payoffs. A big one today is getting to celebrate the just-published issue of Shenandoah. I’ve been proofing the fiction, nonfiction, comics, and translations sections, which I otherwise have almost nothing to do with, although I love what the other editors have selected. The poetry section, though, is full of my babies. I recruited a few of the authors; most are people whose work I didn’t know before last year, when I sifted their beautiful poems out of the hundreds and hundreds submitted during our brief reading period. I can’t play favorites, loving them all equally, but here’s a tasting menu, each chosen because it will make you feel replete:
Samyak Shertok, “The Last Beekeeper”
Stephanie Rogers, “Fat Girl LaCharta”
Diane Seuss, “[To say that I’m a witch makes me feel better all-around]”
Ashley M. Jones, “I Find the Earring That Broke Lose From My Ear the Night a White Woman Told Me the World Would Always Save Her”
Emily Franklin, “Tell Me How You Got Here”
There’s a wide range of other feelings and experiences represented in this suite of poems, but for now: honey, rhubarb, persimmons.
Lesley Wheeler, What’s cooking and what’s already on the table
Later in the week the publishing gods kept on giving, as the Winter issue of The High Window was published, featuring two poems of mine: ‘Selling The Trampoline’, and ‘A Short Survey’. I’m still working my way through it at present, but there are some wonderful poets surrounding me. Simon Richey is one – I have his collection ‘Naming The Tree’ on my shelves, and there’s a poem of his that caused me to buy it. I wish I could remember what it was, but I loved it and it wasn’t in the book, so I hope he gets a new collection out so I can hopefully be reminded.
Both of the poems of mine are ones I really like, Trampoline feels like more of a summer poem to me, but A Short Survey is one I wanted to get right, somehow combining the day job with my writing. I think it’s a vein to explore further, but I’m not going to force it. Both these poems took several drafts and rethinkings to get to this stage.
As ever, come for my poems and stay for the others.
The final gift from the poetry gods this week has been what I think is the fastest ever move from a first draft to final draft to acceptance. I finished the second draft of a poem last week, and after running it by a voice I trust, I sent it off yesterday for consideration towards a chapbook/anthology. I woke up to the acceptance email this morning. While the idea for the poem came in the middle of this summer, I didn’t write anything until two weeks ago, so that’s positively sprinter-level stuff for me.
Mat Riches, It’s (almost) the End of the (working)Year (as I know it) and I feel finest
I’m fascinated by the third issue of the Hazelton, British Columbia journal Partial Zine (described as “an offline journal of poetry, notebooks, and emails”), the first issue I’ve seen, produced by Adam Katz (formerly of Toronto; formerly of Buffalo) and Vera Maurina Press. This issue includes an array of some fascinating visual and text work by a range of poets, with only half the names I’m familiar with: Andy Gricevich, Raymond de Borja, reck bell, Ellen Dillon, Chris Macalino, Pansy Wright-Simms, Jordan Abel, Robert Jackson, Sila Katz-Kuperman, Woogee Bae, Ava Hofmann, Kristian Enright, Dennis Teichman, Ted Byrne and Michael Simard. There is something really vibrant, nearly explosive, in the works collected here. The issue opens with nearly a dozen pages by American poet Andy Gricevich (does anyone remember the publications he used to produce as CANNOT EXIST?), an array of il/legibilities he describes in a brief afterword: “Later I started to think of them as ‘songs’ (at least sometimes), where greater legibility=’lyrics’ over the ‘background music’ or harmonies of the other marks. // Still later I started thinking a lot (and still haven’t really followed this out consciously) of illegibility as a sociopolitical issue—rendering ourselves unreadable to state, medical, corporate, social media and technocratic attempts to comprehend and anticipate our desires and needs.” Between dense visuals of collaged images set upon a background of crinkled grey, set as a field of tricks with light, Raymond de Borja includes the short piece “The Given is What Accident Refracts to a Gift,” that reads: “Set where various cities touch without tremor—the timbre of a tear—offered—in the fabric of—to a listening where—when straining for—there—when towards—disambiguation—an attentive ear—understands—that it cannot understand—the impulse towards—what we feel we mean—when saying here.” As part of Woogee Bae’s addendum to her own handwritten piece reads:
the idea circulating in my head kind of frustrated me as I put it to paper, so that’s not what this is.
a rough breakdown of the word “mung” (like mung beans).
my current obsession.
several definitions, different uses of the word throughout history
data manipulation
ruins
hereThere is such a wealth of work here, from handwritten to straight text, from visual collage to designed and modified text, all in their own way utilizing the page as field and the text as building-block (the only structures missing might be the physical, modified text itself, a la Kate Siklosi, Gary Barwin, Amanda Earland Derek Beaulieu, etcetera). This is clearly a journal worth paying attention to. To order copies, check out the link here; to submit (“Special consideration will be given to submissions to Partial Zine 4 that are in some way based on pieces in Partial Zine 3”) email: adam.robert.katz (at) gmail.com
rob mclennan, Partial Zine 3 :
Is 2020 a lost year? I’ve seen this mournful term on several occasions recently in the media and even being invoked by poets. However, I’m convinced it’s a misnomer and can only lead us down a dead end.
Of course, my above comment isn’t intended to trivialise the fact that countless people have lost everything in 2020, while it’s also clear we’ve all missed out on experiences this year. Nevertheless, one of the things that poetry teaches us is that time is never lost or wasted.
Fallow periods in our poetry lives are necessary. Through our writing, we soon learn that the genre doesn’t require or even benefit from our spending eight hours a day sitting at a desk. In fact, it encourages us to live and let ideas percolate through our subconscious in the meantime.
Beyond our writing, it’s worth adopting a similar approach to our days, using the patience that poetry given us. As a consequence of having pressed the pause button these past few months, certain projects will have lost significance. Others, on the other hand, will have unexpectedly become crucial. Our priorities will have shifted and we’ll be in a better position to face the rest of our lives. In other words, however we view it, 2020 is in no shape or form a lost year.
Matthew Stewart, A lost year…?
Last week as I was going over proofs, I was thinking about work and progression and how well some things come or hang together. Much of feed was written in 2018 as a kind of therapy, though the title and my notes for the hunger palace, or parts of it, existed earlier, though it took Christmas break that year to come together. 2018 was a productive year in general, that writing out of grief, so of course, those projects would wind up speaking to each other. I had just come off writing the love poems from sex & violence, and that book was coming together in November 2017 , so I was ready to dive in on something new anyway. Since daily writing was happening much of the year, there was a lot of other projects mixed in as well, other manuscripts that were started. Some are finished mostly (dark country & animal vegetable monster). Others, not so much (automagic). Either way, it’s just a lot of output, some of it still living in a weird formless stack of random poems. While 2019 was slightly less so, amazingly 2020 has been a productive year, though it has felt like pulling teeth sometimes. While I can’t say I’ve had the focus for actually reading or making much art, I’ve been writing, which may be the only thing saving my mental state. As such, I find I have almost the whole of an entirely new manuscript (collapsologies). I look at the poems in one slant of light and hate them, but in another, they feel like the most interesting, important thing s I’ve written. It goes back and forth.
I also feel like different projects speak to different poetry concerns. feed is far more personal, while something like animal, vegetable, monster and collapsologies are more externally oriented. I sometimes feel like each new thing brings out a different poet in me, but at her core, she is still the same. Every once a while, I bring out old poems in the files I keep in the bureau next to my desk for a giggle at how awful they really were, but how i took them so seriously. If I say my real pursuit of writing (anything decent anyway) began in 1998, it’s been over 20 years at all this. If I start at the very beginning, freshman year of high school, it’s been far longer.
Kristy Bowen, book notes
Unusually for me, I find myself 8 handwritten pages into…well, what it is I can’t yet say, but I’ll loosely term it at this point an essay. I decided to start with a geographic point and then try to get myself to spin out from there, writing in whatever direction consciousness, or subconsciousness, or unconsciousness took me. I’m bemused at this, and am trying to still the anxiety I always feel to conclude a piece of writing, to tie it off, like a scarf from a knitting needle.
The urge to end is, well, urgent. What more could I have to say? How will I ever make all this work together? I’m trying just to keep knitting. What if it never ends? Well, won’t that be something?
Marilyn McCabe, I wish I had a river; or, On Letting Writing Flow
one foot after the other foot after the other on
Jim Young, on route to the swansea vale on a sunday morning
the steel-frosted sleepers parsing dawn’s progress
to the vale works smoking sedately in the distance
on a sunday morning after a statuary night out with the boys
so cold and overhung in step after step into the warm
innards of the work’s entrails of hot pipes and
furnaces and catalytic converters
vanadium pentoxide tasting of stale beer to
my bleary mind’s eye rehydrated by canteen tea
and a corned beef sarni half now half later
There’ve been times I drank so much I drowned in the hundred-proof truth of sorrows and joys.
If you’re quiet enough, you can hear the calendar disintegrate, build itself up from dust, then count backward from your last brightest moment.
In the dive bar of memories, toppling off the barstool can make falling feel like flying in the body of a beautiful bird circling a cemetery where blue is the color of love-cried eyes.
No need to fear the shadows lurking in the darker corners of these days.
They, too, carry miracles in their pockets.
That and enough quarters to play your favorite jukebox songs until the full moon comes home.
Rich Ferguson, In the Dive Bar of Memories
The fat candle fizzled out in the hot wax just as the fresh sunrise began to color the morning sky. Timing is an interesting thing, isn’t it? The length of a coincidence. How does one measure things that are random? Look, jobe, you old white-beard, all night you sat in that chair and now it is time to get up and greet yet another day of living. What time is it? The same time as always; now.
James Lee Jobe, hot water in a tub never felt better
There is no wisdom
Tom Montag, ANNIVERSARY
in the grey silence.
Fifty-one years
we’ve been married,
wondering Are we
good for another one?
The sun will break through.
The moon this evening.
We know what we have
We have what we want.
I’m still in a writer’s block, hemmed in by depression. I feel that I have nothing left to say, and yet I have very much left to say.
I am so worried about our country. Trump has done serious damage in so many ways, and I will not live long enough to see it repaired.
I don’t expect to live past 85; that’s just 13 more years. Both of my parents lived into their 90’s but with terrible diminishment which began in their early 80’s. I don’t want to live that long.
As of today, we have a vaccine for COVID 19 which is beginning distribution. So I hope that by the summer, I will be able to visit my friends and go to Cape May again.
In the meantime, I look forward to teaching Modernity in Literature again, starting in late January.
In the meantime, I look at the growing dark, waiting for the Solstice.
Anne Higgins, In the last week before the Solstice, in the forty-first week of the Quarantine
I think about giving up on my dream of being a writer, sometimes, honestly. This year especially. I was good at my job as a tech writing manager, I liked advertising writing and working in publishing as an acquisitions editor for technical books. I liked getting a steady paycheck and the nice feeling of people praising you for a job well done – very absent in the poetry world, you may notice, except for a chosen few. I liked feeling useful instead of useless. When I was healthier and younger, I spent almost as much time volunteering as I did working – and I was sort of a workaholic. I miss being able to “do things” for people, physically, that I used to be able to do. I resent my disability, honestly, my immune system’s weakness and the symptoms of MS – vertigo, nausea, muscle weakness at odd times – and the feeling of a shrinking life those things can bring. I love my husband, who has always been very supportive of my writing career, and I’m happy he’s embarking on his own adventure, getting his first Master’s Degree, but I wonder: what’s next for me?
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Discouragement During the Holidays, 2020 Edition
Once I compared daily prayer
to a chat window open with God
all the time. That was before.
Now the chat windows where I text,
the Zoom windows where we meet,
are as fervent as prayer:the only way we can be together
Rachel Barenblat, Windows
anymore. The digital windows open
between my home (my heart) and yours —
they’re what link us, together apart
like lovers with hands pressed
to far sides of thick glass.
I wrote the first draft of this post in a way I rarely write anymore: On paper, with a pen. When I began writing, as a girl, that was the way of all first drafts; through my childhood and teen years I had a large, hard, permanently red bump on the first knuckle of the finger my pen pressed against; a remnant of it remains, a permanent disfigurement that is evidence of something I’ve always been compelled to do.
I picked up a pen because I was on a third day of avoiding screens, a third day of trying to muddle through work with a multiple-day migraine. In my migraine, there are various factors always at play: work, screens, stress, meds, sleep, rest, hydration, exercise, food. Trying to figure out exactly how to put these together is like trying to solve a Sudoku puzzle. Maybe I can get one line to work, but I can never get the whole box to add up correctly. If I take off work to avoid screens, I increase stress from falling further behind. If I exercise when fatigued, I can trigger an episode, but if I don’t exercise I don’t sleep well, which can also trigger an episode. If I spend Sunday in food prep for the week I know I will eat well on work days, but I might end Sunday fatigued rather than rested, and stressed about other things I didn’t get to do.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Begin again
Today I pause from giving you updates from grief’s front line and take a leaf from the blogs of Karen Walrond and Simon Parke.
From Karen I borrow her line of hope and choose to say into the darkness ‘This was a good week’ and from Simon I am reminded to practice gratitude, even if I can muster it only for my kettle.
For Peter, who sent me links to two beautiful poems, one by Clive Wilmer, the other by John Freeman.
For my friend Martin, who rings to say hi.
For Greg, who texts the same.
For my activist friend Roger quoting Ghandi and Dr Martin Luther King Jr on an Advent WhatsApp group.
For my theologian friend Luke reminding me that the world is dark, but that the light always wins.
For my friend Cock.
For the lifesaving blog of Shawna Lemay, whose posts always leave me feeling more human, less alone and a little more sane. Like this one on Anna Kamienska.
For the Amos Trust, whose Seeds of Hope anthology is out now.
For my dad, who is still modelling everything I need to know.
For my colleagues.
For my students.
For this, by Anna Kamienska (please read it slowly).
For nattering with Jan in the health food shop.
For Shim being home.
For Millie, who takes me out of the house and ‘clear of the wheel of myself’.
For Harold Budd.
Anthony Wilson, This was a good week
The heat has rumbled off and on through the night. It’s the earliest we’ve ever had the heat on down here in the southeast tip of Florida. Our low yesterday morning was 48 degrees, which I know will sound balmy to people in the northern part of the continent.
I’m thinking of the first days of the furnace of my childhood in Montgomery, Alabama. We usually had warm Septembers, but there would be one night in October when it would get chilly, and my dad would turn on the furnace. I have nostalgic feelings about that scent: waking up to the whiff of natural gas that fueled the furnace, the smell of summer’s dust incinerating.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Comfort Smells, Comfort Food
warm December day;
Jason Crane, haiku: 11 December 2020
a puff of white ash
as I seal the incense jar
Substitutionary
Up, and all the morning at my office shut up with Mr. Gibson, I walking and he reading to me the order books of the office from the beginning of the war, for preventing the Parliament’s having them in their hands before I have looked them over and seen the utmost that can be said against us from any of our orders, and to my great content all the morning I find none. So at noon home to dinner with my clerks, who have of late dined frequently with me, and I do purpose to have them so still, by that means I having opportunity to talk with them about business, and I love their company very well. All the morning Mr. Hater and the boy did shut up themselves at my house doing something towards the finishing the abstract book of our contracts for my pocket, which I shall now want very much. After dinner I stayed at home all the afternoon, and Gibson with me; he and I shut up till about ten at night. We went through all our orders, and towards the end I do meet with two or three orders for our discharging of two or three little vessels by ticket without money, which do plunge me; but, however, I have the advantage by this means to study an answer and to prepare a defence, at least for myself. So he gone I to supper, my mind busy thinking after our defence in this matter, but with vexation to think that a thing of this kind, which in itself brings nothing but trouble and shame to us, should happen before all others to become a charge against us.
This afternoon Mr. Mills come and visited me, and stayed a little with me (my wife being to be godmother to his child to-morrow), and among other talk he told me how fully satisfactory my first Report was to the House in the business of Chatham: which I am glad to hear; and the more, for that I know that he is a great creature of Sir R. Brookes’s.
I find no love in the abstract
of my pocket
nothing but a little god
and my hat
which I am glad to eat
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 20 November 1667.
Secondary sources
To the office, and thence before noon I, by the Board’s direction, to the Parliament House to speak with Sir R. Brookes about the meaning of an order come to us this day to bring all the books of the office to the Committee. I find by him that it is only about the business of an order of ours for paying off the ships by ticket, which they think I on behalf of my Lord Bruncker do suppress, which vexes me, and more at its occasioning the bringing them our books. So home and to dinner, where Mr. Shepley with me, newly come out of the country, but I was at little liberty to talk to him, but after dinner with two contracts to the Committee, with Lord Bruncker and Sir T. Harvy, and there did deliver them, and promised at their command more, but much against my will. And here Sir R. Brookes did take me alone, and pray me to prevent their trouble, by discovering the order he would have. I told him I would suppress none, nor could, but this did not satisfy him, and so we parted, I vexed that I should bring on myself this suspicion. Here I did stand by unseen, and did hear their impertinent yet malicious examinations of some rogues about the business of Bergen, wherein they would wind in something against my Lord Sandwich (it was plain by their manner of examining, as Sir Thomas Crew did afterwards observe to me, who was there), but all amounted to little I think. But here Sir Thomas Crew and W. Hewer, who was there also, did tell me that they did hear Captain Downing give a cruel testimony against my Lord Bruncker, for his neglect, and doing nothing, in the time of straits at Chatham, when he was spoke to, and did tell the Committee that he, Downing, did presently after, in Lord Bruncker’s hearing, tell the Duke of Albemarle, that if he might advise the King, he should hang both my Lord Bruncker and Pett. This is very hard. Thence with W. Hewer and our messenger, Marlow, home by coach, and so late at letters, and then home to supper, and my wife to read and then to bed.
This night I wrote to my father, in answer to a new match which is proposed (the executor of Ensum, my sister’s former servant) for my sister, that I will continue my mind of giving her 500l., if he likes of the match.
My father did also this week, by Shepley, return me up a ’guinny, which, it seems, upon searching the ground, they have found since I was there. I was told this day that Lory Hide, second son of my Lord Chancellor, did some time since in the House say, that if he thought his father was guilty but of one of the things then said against him, he would be the first that should call for judgement against him: which Mr. Waller, the poet, did say was spoke like the old Roman, like Brutus, for its greatness and worthiness.
books about books
newly discovering the wind
who am I to search the ground
for a poet
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 19 November 1667.
A Bud is Supposed to Flower
Listen, the world isn't asking
for your sacrifice; or your
ladder of bones, your collection
of skin and hair, fingernails.
When it's time to give back what you
were given, you'll slip
anyway under the same ancient quilt
that's covered the vast under-
ground with a galaxy of spores.
Why not answer the hours
with the softer parts of attention?
Morning cycles through noon,
then travels to the place where
the sun's copper drops into
a locked pauper's box. That kind
of wealth doesn't really
disappear; you simply don't see it
for the agitation of birds, or
the flickering of moths rising from
your chest to the narrow
channel of your throat. How
to trust the stillness
of nothing having happened yet;
of a future not necessarily unkind.
Parthenogenesis
Up, and all the morning at my office till 3 after noon with Mr. Hater about perfecting my little pocket market book of the office, till my eyes were ready to fall out of my head, and then home to dinner, glad that I had done so much, and so abroad to White Hall, to the Commissioners of the Treasury, and there did a little business with them, and so home, leaving multitudes of solicitors at their door, of one sort or other, complaining for want of such despatch as they had in my Lord Treasurer’s time, when I believe more business was despatched, but it was in his manner to the King’s wrong. Among others here was Gresham College coming about getting a grant of Chelsey College for their Society, which the King, it seems, hath given them his right in; but they met with some other pretences, I think; to it, besides the King’s.
Thence took up my wife, whom I had left at her tailor’s, and home, and there, to save my eyes, got my wife at home to read again, as last night, in the same book, till W. Batelier come and spent the evening talking with us, and supped with us, and so to bed.
a perfect little book
ready to fall out of my head
a home to multitudes
or one sort of king
wrong about his right
to be read in bed
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 18 November 1667.
The Aftertime
No one went anywhere very much anymore. Parked cars sat idle on each street. All summer, windshields gathered fallen crepe myrtles. In fall, a thick sifting of dry pine needles. In kitchen drawers we found soup spoons that needed polishing, a blue-green teapot that was a gift years ago; a pair of glass candlesticks, handpainted, never used. As if it were Christmas, we took them out and marveled; finally we lay them on the table, poured tea, lit tapers. We wouldn't run out of books yet, though as the year dwindled down, there wasn't much light to read by. News of family and friends came, delivered as if by the same service that brought us bread and eggs, meat and onions— who was sick, recovering, dead. Meanwhile, boots, going-out shoes, mid- heel pumps, sandals, satchels, business suits, hats, dressy dresses remained in closets, hoping they wouldn't so soon go out of style. Those who were alone longed for company; those who lived with many others wished sometimes for reprieve. Everyone imagined the day that was coming very soon when undertakers became non-essential workers, when there'd be room again for grass in graveyards.