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 at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: purple dreaming, invisible strings, the lives of strangers, every bloodstained stone, and more. Enjoy.
The red light seems like it will last forever. My eyes drift up to the camera mounted above the intersection. I imagine a lonely surveillant glasseyed staring at the city’s intersections on a bank of dim monitors. I perform “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” from Macbeth, wondering if my invisible audience is surprised by this sudden bit of theater, entranced by my flawless and impassioned performance. Is there even actually a person on the other side? I suspect I’m simply training an AI bot and hope it will learn to appreciate unexpected encounters with art and culture. I grip the wheel worrying about whether it’s even legal to jack around with the system like this. A few pigeons nod when I finish just as the light turns green. Good show, they say, clapping their grey wings. Beautiful. I drive through the city like a suspect in a slow motion car chase from the days when TV was square.
James Brush, Street Theater
I read once that one of the hallmarks of maturity is understanding that you can’t fix anything in time. Everything will change. And not according to your will. I don’t think “understanding” is an accurate verb here. Not even “accepting”, but actively incorporating that understanding into our decisions. Into our emotional responses.
I cry for the blackbirds. I cry for the hedgehog who no longer overwinters in our holly. I cry for the poisoned lake, for the corpse of a stranger, for my missing breast. For my mother, Linda, and the mother she couldn’t be. For my children, and the mother I never was. I cry for the stories that haven’t been told.
It is so damned inappropriate, and completely out of context but, as I write now, I hear Death of a Salesman’s Linda say, “Attention must be paid.” I don’t know. Orbits within orbits. Imperfections are literally the way our DNA changes, the way we evolve, and yet: we cling to our expectation that we are entitled to perfection. We are impatient that our sick lakes heal slowly. We fear that crows will—that they can—carry a grudge. Everything, like the death of a salesman, deserves attention, and we are reluctant to give it. Afraid to see ourselves?
Ren Powell, New Life within An Old Life
When I wrote the essay for my book of winter drawings, Snowy Fields, back in 2023-24, I spoke about why I sometimes work in series. It’s exploratory, I wrote, but often it’s not until later that I’m able to see deeper reasons why I was doing a particular body of work.
The initial reason I began these watercolors this week was actually quite mundane. We are going to Mexico City in a week, and I was considering taking a new watercolor sketchbook, in a more rectangular format than an older, landscape sketchbook by the same manufacturer that I used on a previous trip, more than five years ago. I wanted to test the paper remaining in the old sketchbook to see if it still suited my technique, so I started the painting at the top of this post.
That one painting showed me what I wanted to know; the paper would be OK. But a day or two later, when it snowed, I decided to make another sketch. And yesterday afternoon, I did another.
When I stepped back from the absorbing time spent painting, I realized that I’ve been thinking about how the familiar landscape of my life, of all our lives, has suddenly and radically changed. We’re facing realities and potential outcomes that shake the foundations of everything we’ve taken for granted. It’s frightening, consuming, and unpredictable. Instead of running away from that, I want to see it clearly. I want to go deeper into it and know what we’re facing — not in order to be paralyzed with dread; or to cower despairingly while praying for some savior, human or divine, to fix it; or, worst of all, capitulating in advance — but so that I can make choices and act responsibly and with integrity, whether as an individual, a friend to others, or a member of society.
Beth Adams, The Changing Landscape
I am the superior
officer who loses the paperwork
or makes up the statistics.
I am the one who ignores
your e-mails, who cannot be reached
by text or phone, the one
with a full inbox.When the wise ones
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Genocidal Despots and Poems
come, as they do, full of dreams,
babbling about the stars
that lead them or messages
from gods or angels,
I open the gates. I don’t alert
the authorities up the road.
Let the kings and emperors
pay for their own intelligence.
Money shouts and literature whispers, so the conversation is always going to be difficult, but especially so in a country that has not just a capitalist economy, society, culture, but mindset. There are Premier League footballers earning £500,000 a week; there are closures and redundancies in the Humanities departments and Creative Writing courses at universities; in the private sector, there are people paying thousands for week-long writing courses on Greek islands with good food and wine. Meanwhile, the Arts Council is scatter-gun but necessary: as well as propping up the big guns (the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre, etc.), it gives cash to people without traditional privilege. It’s a Band-Aid plastered over deep political failure. The countries in Europe – two hours by Eurostar or Ryanair – that offer tax breaks to independent bookshops and restrictions on discounting by online retailers, or where the government buys copies of all new books and distributes them to libraries, seem very far away.
My tribe: writers, artists, gallerists, small-press publishers, booksellers. Not exclusively, far from it; some of the people I love have no interest in books at all. But if any of them is making more than the ALCS 2022 median income of £7,000 from their writing, painting, showing, publishing, they are rare exceptions. My point here is not to counter arguments that we are not ‘professional’ because we don’t make money (we are professional); and not to suggest that we don’t need paying because we are ‘incentivised’ by ‘love of creating’ (we also like a roof over our heads, and food); and not to claim that we are especially resilient or somehow ‘heroic’ (no). This is simply how it is, though you wouldn’t know it from how writing is reported in the news. And not from the ads for writing courses that promise to ‘take your writing to a new level’ or ‘progress your career’, with advice from ‘industry experts’.
Like most writers, like many small presses, CB editions makes a loss, every year; a sustainable loss, to date; a healthy loss, because it keeps me on my toes. CBe has never had Arts Council funding for any of its books but of course it is subsidised – by my state pension, by my bus pass, by my having picked up design and typesetting know-how in previous work so I don’t have to pay for these, by my freelance work for others, by my living in a country in which there are people who have ‘disposable income’. This isn’t news.
Charles Boyle, Writing and money (and death and sex)
In the further framing commercial scarcity model vs. abundance model, people who share haiku online, knowing it will make those poems ineligible for contests and magazines, win my admiration. Like, Charlotte. What does hoarding a poem until a reward with publication do? A publication is laminating a marginalia jotting on a newspaper clipping. Poems if shared are broadcast, exchanged, but pinning to a submission window of small paywalled patrons limits the ideas, corrals them when they could be free to bounce against other ideas. […]
Movies, shows, writing with hooks all can exacerbate the priority of crisis, the one inevitable outcome, awfulized emoting instead of creative various directions of solutions and de-escalations. Like anything so long as we remember it is silliness and play but we train the brain by every act, yes? Filtering in a reductionist way is funny unless you believe it’s getting at the underlying binary real vs. lie.
an emotion
Pearl Pirie, Links, Thinks
is a thought the body has—
branch broken by wind
I feel that learning to move around your artistic intentions, and by this I mean a wider view of what you want to do as a writer in the long term, is as important as making those publication milestones. How you move on to new projects, and the way you build the skills around finding new projects is something we don’t talk about a great deal in the creative community. There is immense pressure to ‘succeed’ in a traditional sense. Good art, good writing is success. Of course, partly what I have just said is privileged bullshit too, because art needs an audience and artists need paying for their work. But what I’m talking about here is allowing yourself space to not be entirely invested in one single project and having the courage and confidence to use that place for growth, to explore, to create, when you don’t have the much easier to acknowledge jumping off point of publication. This skill is a necessary part of developing as a writer. If you learn it early, it is easier than learning it later in your career.
There are different ways of moving forward. If you’re like me you might have a whole range of eclectic interests. You do not lose anything by playing with the ideas around them. If you’re too stuck to write what you want, just write. Bring something, anything into existence. Make notes, listen to the things that spark your interest, your joy and just write about them, describe them, journal on them. Be careful not to rush into a new idea feeling it is definitely the one, and applying for funding grants and planning out project timelines etc. I find that, after moving forward from a project there is a tendency to grasp for the high you got when you were in the flow of your original project, the sensation of really getting somewhere. In reality you will probably have to play in the fallow fields, let yourself explore, let yourself come to your work with the beginner’s mind – looking for the feelings of joy that you began your writing journey with before it begins to feel more natural to be turning your focus away from your original project.
Wendy Pratt, What if you are not the one?
i have lived my life one tablespoon at a time.
Robin Gow, tablespoon poem
this is about how much you’re allowed
to swallow. the birds that come & make nests
in the smallest of places. voles who carve songs
through dark. i would put the sky
on my tongue just to feel a star flicker.
i buy more tablespoons.
The latest from Tennessee-based poet Erin Hoover [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] is the full-length collection No Spare People (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), a follow-up to her full-length debut, Barnburner (Elixir Press, 2018). Hoover offers short, carved narratives in a sequence of compact lyric, articulating sharp images on and around domestic patters and patterns in the author’s American south, and the complexity of writing through experiences that often feel far away from the possibilities of writing. “I was trying to explain that transportation / between having thoughts and doing for others,” she writes, in the opening poem “On the metaphor, for women, of birthing to / creative activity,” “because in every household the metaphor is clear: / the caretaker is a woman, and so / when I began / writing, I listed out my mornings, the preparations / and cleaning up of spills and toys, taking down / and fetching, the driving and carrying of people / that no one wants to know about / if we believe in the reality of book contracts / and job offers.” She writes of income inequality, misogyny, motherhood and family, as the poems circle around the locus of home and family, and the conflict between a weight of domestic expectation set against the desire for something else, also, beyond (such as writing). “You’d have to understand the home / as a unified construct,” the poem “Homewrecker” begins, “as a guarded entity, / locked up like a bank vault, a virgin / or like a rarified set of collectable dolls / with no inherent value but worth agreed / upon.” The density of her lyrics are quite striking, moving through prose poems and more traditional lyric shapes, moving through frustration, love, motherhood, helplessness, politics and rage, offering cutting moments, phrases and lines I’m tempted to endlessly quote. That line from “Death parade,” for example—“It is tempting to want always to reduce the thing to its detail. To make it small.”—or further moments, thoughtfully carved. “I drove to the border // of my dry county and bought a handle of vodka,” she writes, as part of “My generation is not lost but we are losing,” “drank to blur my vision. I wanted to be as useless // as a governor.” She tells stories with lyric punches, where the mind can’t help but catch, consider.
rob mclennan, Erin Hoover, No Spare People
Current politics has made me take more notice of several politicians’ imaginary numbers — far from fact and human needs. And, after a while — to relax — my mind moved on to the imaginary numbers of mathematics, and I found (at the PoetrySoup website) this poem which I’d like to share.
Imaginary Numbers by Robert Pettit
Anybody can consider this statement as moot:
Negative real numbers cannot have a square root.
When working with real numbers with values less than zero,
the squared product will be positive; so where do you go?
In a parabola, all points except zero lie above the x-axis.
Many students get confused because of this.
This placed mathematicians in a bit of a quandary.
That was until numbers were invented that are imaginary.I did not find online biographical information about poet Pettit but I did find this link to his many many poems available at PoetrySoup — a list going back all the way to 2010. AND here is a link to his 2010 limerick, “Seventeen.”
JoAnne Growney, Imaginary Numbers
I have a confession: I can’t remember the last time I felt Joyful. Sorrow, yes, that’s easy: I felt profound sorrow after my brother died. There have been times I’ve felt so down, it seemed like up to me (to paraphrase Richard Farina). Failing to find a relevant recent experience, I felt like an imposter writing about joy. That’s why it’s been so hard to write, and to finish, this essay.
But Joy was prominent in the news the summer of 2024. I’m referring to Sunday afternoon, July 21. What’s significant about this time of joy is that you might say it happened within minutes: one minute, President Biden announced that he was withdrawing his candidacy; a few minutes later, he endorsed the candidacy of Kamala Harris, his Vice President. Immediately, donations in the millions were raised for Ms. Harris. This groundswell of support felt like a moment of wide-spread civic joy.
So, the sorrow of our limited electoral choices planted seeds, which drew forth a change. And that joy was shared and spread. “Joys impregnate,” as Blake puts it. In other words, joy is increased through sharing. A joy shared is a joy more than doubled.
As I say, financial support was a means to express joy. And a means to support joy. To prolong and preserve the joy. It’s a human symptom: we want joy to be everlasting, but joy is briefer than happiness, which is all too often contingent on outside circumstances. Fundamentally, joy is an expression of awe — which can only be expressed in finite moments. No human, it is said, can look upon the fullness of divinity (or joy) and live.
Or, as Blake put it:
He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunriseSo, this understandable desire to cling to joy will kill it. We cannot buy joy. We cannot cause joy to be everlasting.
As Ingrid Fetell Lee has noted, psychologists describe joy as an “intense, momentary experience of positive emotion — one that makes us smile and laugh and feel like we want to jump up and down.” goes further:
Joy is not happiness, even though the two are related. Joy is delight, gladness, and pleasure — a deep inner wellspring of contentment and comfort. It is a disposition, an outlook, and maybe even a purposeful practice. Happiness is what we feel in relation to external conditions; joy is experienced regardless of circumstances. A wise maxim says, ‘We pursue happiness, we choose joy.’
But that moment of elation was quickly overcome by November’s election result, which disappointed about 51% of the voting public. Again, sorrow was brought forth. Like some cyclothemic disorder, we swung from joy back to sorrow.
In fact, the emotion was more than sorrow — it was depression. If, as it is said, depression is anger directed inwards, this depression encompassed anger toward one’s fellow citizens, and mourning for the dream of America. We experienced emotional whiplash.
This real-life moment illustrates Blake’s notion that the opposites of joy and sorrow are intertwined: “Joy and Woe are woven fine / A Clothing for the soul divine / Under every grief & pine / Runs a joy with silken twine” (Auguries of Innocence).
Joy and sorrow are extremes of human emotion: joy is something more profound than happiness; sorrow, something deeper than sadness.
James Collins, Choosing Joy
I look back to the road and notice
Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Ordinary things
the sky ahead of me has broken
into a swathe of blue and I feel
that flip of joy inside me – you know the one,
as if your heart and your stomach
have performed their own little high five –
and it reaches my face in a smile.
How can I love a changing world when it’s this moment I love? No, wait, this one. No, this one.
Already the shadows have shifted, the bright smear of sun dwindled. That leaf blowing sideways like a flag has stilled. Has it fallen? It has not fallen. It will fall. Marcescence is the hardening of a twig against the old leaf in preparation for the new. Brash bud will push out in fresh hue in due time.
No one is due time. Nothing is owed. But this moment is for the taking and I’ll take it, ticking though it is in the palm of hand.
I found this poem by Grant Clauser in the Broadkill Review. I admire this poem for its quiet attention. I am no fisher, but I understand the kind of attentive presence required, attention that ripples out from the lay of the line to the set of the shadows to the movement of clouds, and back. The minute made long, lingering. As only a poem can do.
Marilyn McCabe, from the swift current
My husband comes birdwatching with me. He is a brilliant bird spotter. He can spot a bird well before I would. He has, however, absolutely no idea what the bird is called. Even though we’ve been birdwatching for years. He will enthusiastically whisper, ‘Over there, big white bird at the edge of the water.’ Pushed to identify it, he says ‘it’s the fish-nicker’ – which I think is a brilliant name for the Little Egret he’s seen.
Watching birds is a joy for me. I am ok with identification for the most ‘obvious’ birds. It matters to me, up to a point. If I see something I haven’t seen before, I’ll look it up, but if I haven’t taken a pic of it, my memory won’t usually be good enough. And some birds even confuse the experts.
I write poetry about birds too – and when I write I need to use the right name. I have to accept though, that any potential reader may not know the bird I’m writing about. So, if they feel inclined, they have to look it up. And then they may think, ‘ah yes, I can see that poem captures that bird’ or ‘I can see why she used that bird for that idea’, maybe.That’s no different from references in poems to places, people, Greek gods or whatever. The reader will either know them or not, and will either look them up or not. And then they can decide whether that reference works for them. And, as always, it may or may not work for them, and/or may not mean the same as it did to the writer.
Sue Ibrahim, Birds and poetry
I’m now allowed to announce that my poem “Sex Talk” will appear in Best American Poetry 2025, chosen by Terence Winch. I had absolutely no idea it was under consideration and have never been in one of these anthologies before–didn’t think I ever would be. The December email from Mark Bibbins was a bolt out of the blue. Thanks to both of them and to series editor David Lehman for honoring a poem by someone they’ve never met. For noticing it in the first place, amid the flood!
I know that “grabbing the brass ring” is a cliché, but I have a vivid memory of the real experience. My mother used to take my sister and me to a tiny amusement park with a carousel. I loved mounting a brightly painted outer horse, not the fixed-in-place ponies but one that rose up and down, for maximum drama. It made me feel strong to rise in the stirrups each time I passed the dispenser, lean out at fullest stretch, snag a silver ring, and collect them on one finger. Then, once in a great while, gold! The shocked joy of opening the Best American invitation felt the same, although deeper and more lasting. I knew even as I wrote it that “Sex Talk” was a poem in which I stretched out in a new way, although that didn’t mean I was confident others would see what made it a breakthrough for me. Some did, I guess! Thanks to editor Mark Drew who helped me find the ending and accepted it for the final issue of Gettysburg Review, to Poetry Daily for reprinting it, and to others who reposted or wrote me notes about the poem. It’s not only joyful but kind of sobering when something you write actually does become, as you hoped, an instrument of connection. As if poetry does have power in a nonsensical merry-go-round world.
Lesley Wheeler, Best American, lit mags, and the merry-go-round
The past month has been intensely difficult for a variety of reasons, including the sudden loss of my youngest aunt. It’s hard to feel like updating a website is important in the face of grief and political upheaval, but sometimes poets and poetry keep me going through the dark, so reminding myself of good poetry-related things isn’t a waste of time.
One of the best poetry things this winter has been the release and virtual reading events for the anthology Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift. Editor Kristie Frederick Daugherty has made the whole process a joy, and I’m so honored to have my poem “1993” included alongside some of my poetry rockstars and friends.
Katie Manning, Swift, Nothings, & Finalists : a catch-up post
Our fixations make up our meditative landscape. When we use the material of our obsessions not as obstacles to be overcome, but as artifacts of the self to be admired and pondered, that is, in my opinion, when interesting art happens.
In a Yonkers, New York basement, a news article, “Elderly Couple Found Dead Buried Under Snow,” struck me with its stark beauty and tragedy. For years, the image lingered, resurfacing with every snowfall or story of tragic love.
As my manuscript deadline drew closer I started mining my thoughts for fixations, such as the one I had about this article. Paying close and reverent attention to my fixations has been invaluable for combating writer’s block for me. I have realized that this is the most productive and fulfilling way for me to produce work that has the potential to lead me somewhere unexpected.
Because the article I was writing about was sparse, providing very little detail about the couple I decided I wanted my poem to do the same. This decision informed both the content and the form of this poem. I used the thin lineation and couplets to metaphorically “bury” the myriad truths about this couple under this particular moment of astounding tragedy. […]
The poem ends pulled away from the scene to an imagined dialogue between the speaker and their partner. This section of the poem was the trickiest to get right. I liked the idea of adding dialogue for many reasons. Philosophically, I think one could argue the medium of poetry is silence. A poet’s job is to sculpt silence into temporary truths. Silence is the marble block with which the body of language is found. It could be argued that what the poet doesn’t say is as, if not more, important than what they are saying and that those omissions are part of a poem’s ineffable beauty. The reason I put dialogue at the end of this poem is because I felt it honored the silence of death to not to make any grand conclusions about it. Part of why I find death so haunting is the aliveness that persists despite of death. This dialogue emphasizes that.
Drop-in by Lexi Pelle (Nigel Kent)
Letter poems are in my top three favorite poem types (after list poems and sonnets), and my most recent poetry manuscript is built around them. In the past, I’ve also participated in letter poem exchanges with fellow poets, and I highly recommend it. These pen pal-esque writings benefit from vivid accounts, comfort/intimacy and the energy of deep conversation, and they’re a joy to write.
I find that even when letter poems are “made up” (i.e. not part of an official correspondence) they deliver depth and emotion that can be tricky to pull off in other forms. Perhaps it’s because we, as poets, instantly feel connected to the “recipient” of the letter, which creates a kind of comfort that puts us at ease and simplifies the task of having something to say.
Whatever the source of the magic, letter poems have something special for readers, too: They let us in on private experiences and offer us glimpses into the relationships between others. (And who doesn’t like a little peek behind the curtain?) This dynamic is so compelling it can carry entire manuscripts, as in The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies, Yours, Creature by Jessica Cuello and Constellation Route by Matthew Olzmann.
Carolee Bennett, 40 Letter Poem Examples for Writing Inspiration
First off, the point of departure for this post is the premise that no part of language should be off-limits or banned for poets. Writing is tough enough without forsaking a chunk of the toolbox.
Matthew Stewart, The use of abstract nouns in contemporary poetry
However, there are a few lexical elements that seem fraught with danger. One obvious example is adverbs, which CW tutors are notoriously wary of their students employing. I actually (sic) love them!
Another is the use of abstract nouns, which feel far more troublesome to my mind. Why? Well, because they can mean so many things to so many individuals, social groups and nationalities, even within a single language. Let’s take the example of freedom. Its connotations would be hugely different for a Remainer or a Brexiteer, for instance! When a poet uses this word, they lose control over the effects that their choice of language may have on the reader.
And of course, once we get into the art of translation, this problem deepens even further. For example, la democracia in Spanish necessarily becomes democracy in English. But its baggage for a Spaniard who lived through la transición a la democracia (following Franco’s dictatorship) is very different from its multitude of meanings for certain English speakers from specific points in the political spectrum (need I say more?!). This is one key reason why translating an abstract-heavy poem is a huge ask.
Ambiguity, when deployed skilfully, is not designed to frustrate understanding but to facilitate a more complex or subtle form of understanding, by positioning two or more contrasting implications against one another. In Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” for example, the line “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” simultaneously refers to the power and expanse of Ozymandias’ empire at the time of its peak, and to the near-featureless desert that remains long after its destruction. There is nothing to be gained by discarding one interpretation; the import lies in the ironic contrast between the two. Through such positioning of ambiguous elements, poetry finds ways of representing facets of lived experience and reality that cannot be achieved through logical sequencing alone.
The final question I would like to ask, for the purposes of giving an account of poetry that serves the aims of this chapter, is: what role does the reader play in the poem? From the perspective of New Criticism, they have only to recognise and identify what tensive energies and semantic equations already exist within an individual text. But for critics of the school of reception theory, ambiguity results in potentially boundless depth and restlessness, with scope for continual reinterpretation by different readerships. Umberto Eco identifies this as a defining feature of poetry in his Postscript to the Name of the Rose, where he writes that the “poetic effect” is “the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed” (2009, 545). This capacity can only be demonstrated, however, by the process of reading and re-reading. It is the reader’s engagement with the poem that fulfils its potential as a complex and compelling textual system. We might suppose, therefore, that it is the failure to take into account the role of the reader that leads [Ben] Lerner [in The Hatred of Poetry] to regard the poem as hopelessly gesturing toward a state of completion it can never attain. The reader may be cast as operator, as living component in a dynamic web, rather than the recipient who waits at the end of a single-use delivery mechanism.
Jon Stone, What is a Poem?
I was the starlight,
I was the moonlight,
I was the sunset.
Before the dawning
Of my life;
I was the river
Forever winding
To purple dreaming,
I was the glowing
Of youthful Springtime,
I was the singing
Of golden songbirds,—
I was love.[…]
Fenton Johnson (1888-1958): “I came into the world in 1888. No notice was taken of the event save in immediate circles. I presume the world was too busy or preoccupied to note it. It happened in Chicago. I went to school and also college. My scholastic record never attained me any notoriety.”
“Taught school one year and repented. Having scribbled since the age of nine, had some plays produced on the stage of the old Pekin Theatre, Chicago, at the time I was nineteen. When I was twenty-four my first volume A Little Dreaming (1913) was published. Since then Visions of the Dusk (1915) and Songs of the Soil (1916) represent my own collections of my work. Also published a volume of short stories Tales of Darkest America (1920) and a group of essays on American politics For the Highest Good (1920).” (Caroling Dusk, 1927)
Johnson was a forerunner to the Harlem renaissance and his poems frequented the pages of numerous ‘new verse’ magazines, including Harriet Monroe’s Poetry and Alfred Kreymborg’s Others. He went on to found and edit The Champion in 1916 with his cousin Henry Bing Dismond, a magazine highlighting black achievement, and The Favourite Magazine in 1918: “The first and only weekly magazine published by and for colored people.”
In the 1930s Johnson worked for the Illinois chapter of the Federal Writers’ Project, under the direction of fellow poet Arna Bontemps, which focussed on collecting writings on the black experience in Illinois and helped launch the careers of numerous writers, including the poets Richard Wright and Margaret Walker, and novelist Frank Yerby. After Johnson’s death in 1958, Bontemps would go on to be the executor of his literary estate.
Dick Whyte, Fenton Johnson – 6 Short Poems (1913-1927)
The humans and their news are making me glare and swallow hard, in between I cook and clean and build lego, the Stranger Things set. Got a basic training on autism yesterday evening. I’m making plans for this year because this is the way I deal, I live up to dates. I’m having coffee in the morning at the kitchen table and light that candle, and I want to swear, loudly, vehemently, madly.
heavy winter clouds
Kati Mohr, stranger things
we’re all voyeurs
intently
scrolling through
the lives of strangers
I have been reading about writers writing under truly terrible governments – the Nazis, terrible Roman emperors etc – and studying exactly how they tried to write about their lives and their times. Ovid, of course, and Catallus, but also existenialist poets from France. I wrote quite a bit about Ovid in my first book, Becoming the Villainess because at that time I felt the echoes of the violence and helplessness in my own life. I had no idea what was ahead for my country. I had so much optimism, then, that things would get better for women. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Like this camellia in my yard that bloomed before our week of snow, I had unreasonable optimism, it seems. […]
I think about writers who lived in far harsher environments than I do, with far less encouragement. I owe it to them to keep going. Many women writers I admire did not live to be my age, and so I shouldn’t just take it as an impediment, but perhaps an opportunity to write from the perspective of an over-fifty woman. I have survived this long for a reason, when some of my friends have not. I am still here, for now, writing on a blog I’m not sure anyone reads in a time where writing at all seems perilous, even foolish. I remember Sappho’s poetry fragments being pulled recently from a trash pile, poems that have survived across the years, against the odds.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Snow Snow Snow, and Part II of a Desert Residency in a Grim Time Plus Writing Insecurity
ground mist . . .
Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: February ’25
atop the snow
one perfect pinecone
Last Sunday was Candlemas, the commemoration of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, and the official end of Christmas. In Luke 2, the old priest Simeon breaks into a canticle — a song or poem or lyric speech, in language derived strongly from the Old Testament prophets — which for many Christians around the world is one of the most familiar of all pieces of scripture, because of its traditional use in liturgy. […]
All of the Biblical canticles have very often been made into verse, in both classical and vernacular languages. That’s partly of course because they are just so well-known, and the paraphrase of a familiar bit of a scripture has been a popular devotional exercise since antiquity. But perhaps there is also something particularly facilitating or even inviting for the poet about the form of these canticles, which are recognisably in a ‘poetic’ register, distinct from the surrounding text, but not in any specific Greek verse form. That’s presumably because they are translations of poetry composed originally in Hebrew or Aramaic: the author of Luke may have made these translations himself, or perhaps incorporated or adapted existing Greek versions. Whoever made them, they haven’t attempted to make a Greek poem as such — the Greek text has instead the feel of a fairly literal translation, complete with features which are slightly alien to the language. Sometimes, perhaps, the encounter with a translation of this kind — a text audibly at one remove from its original context — can be a more fertile prompt to the imagination than the daunting perfection of an original.
Whatever the reason, there are hundreds if not thousands of verse paraphrases of the Gospel Canticles, and some of them have become established liturgical texts in their own right, most often as hymns.
Victoria Moul, Hearing the dawn-wind stir
Micropoetry is a different love language. I like the longer poems. I walk through metaphors and anaphora and line breaks the way some people experience flower meadows. I like the way verses ebb and flow till an unexpected close.
But brevity is a trap. The smaller poems still demand beauty and layers and nuance — a profoundly elegant minimalism. And while a haiku might be just an intense moment and the tanka its refined extension, forms that limit lines and words and syllables (while sometimes insisting on rhyme) can be a challenge. The shorter they are, the more difficult to get right. To me, though, the most interesting of the microforms is the Cherita. Created by Ai Li, Cherita is about story-telling but in six lines, split into three verses. There is pause, there is room for light and air and enough opportunity to create. That isn’t a bad way to write. Life, if you’re listening, that isn’t a bad way to be, either.
I wrote a few Cherita this week as the news headlines, strident and acerbic, overwhelmed me. To anyone thinking this really can’t be the world we signed up for, I feel what you feel. How to glue a broken universe together is another problem altogether, but there can be poetry on the side while we look for tools and tape and humanity. Poems to hold us together…poems to hold on to…as we find a way forward. […]
Nothing was left.
Just the scarecrow
with the broken head.But look,
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Just the scarecrow with the broken head
even then,
not one bird.
In a wonderful essay for The Paris Review titled “In This Essay I Will: On Distraction”, David Schurman Wallace evokes reaching the point in his writing when the initial spark loses its come-hither glint—the point where distraction courts the mind. Wallace’s eyes fall onto his shelves, lingering in the memory of former trysts, former relationships with texts. And there, on the shelf, is Flaubert’s final novel, the book left unfinished. There is that temptation courting the mind, looking for an excuse to wander back into it.
Wallace gives us the paradox of writing as labor, namely, that distraction doubles as blessing and curse. Distraction releases us from desire, or from the intensity of edits and drafts and evidence; desire lets the mind literally wander over the wall, and take a side trail into an elsewhere. Desire opens an Otherwise.
Flaubert’s two clerks want to know everything, and this interest in everything keeps them from the labor of attending to something. “Their curiosity has no staying power,” as Wallace observes. Their desire lacks commitment or willingness to sweat.
Writing is not fun in the way that this word is conventionally used.
Writing is cannibalized by “the possibility of detours”; research leads us to the rabbit hole that seeds new ideas and flirts with different beginnings or projects.
Alina Stefanescu, Of strangeness, complexity, and ‘scandalous visibility’.
A fantasy is an open door that allows us to try on someone else’s life for a moment. With a safe word. With a way out.
In the fantasy of my life, I am ready to be anything. I am finishing my memoir, Sailing the Milky Way. My first novel, Under a Neon Sun, is still walking around the world. Red Hen Press is about to be the biggest indie publisher on the West Coast.
We are changing the world, one story at a time. And when we do, we’ll drive down Lake Avenue in my Honda (with its 200,000 miles) and celebrate. I will buy another safer vehicle.
We have a saying at Red Hen: “What matters is how we walk through fire.” We didn’t mean literal fire. After the Los Angeles fires, the staff came back into the smoky air and all got pneumonia. Soon, we are going to fix Red Hen’s roof, which blew off in the storm. (Give us a literal break.) Now, we need to come back like we’re storming the canyons.
I have told the Red Hen staff: I have skin in the game. When we sell 25,000 copies of a book, I get a tattoo. When we sell a book to a movie, I get a tattoo. When we get a million-dollar donation, I get a tattoo. By the end of 2025, I’ll be posting pictures of my first tattoos.
Kate Gale, What is your fantasy, Babygirl?
I’m a stowaway on a cold rubber boat.
My desires and old love letters are the sails,
I paddle with spoons and old New Yorkers.From a surge of waves comes a sleek head,
a piercing in its nose –A seal with a straw of plastic.
Jill Pearlman, The Executive Restores Plastic Straws
In the kind of synchronicity that usually happens only in fiction, a piece that I wrote on February 4, 2020 was published exactly five years later, on February 4, 2025. I confess that I am not sure whether to call it a poem or a piece of creative nonfiction, but it’s called “On February 4, 2020, instead of watching Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union Address…” Michael Broder, publisher of Indolent Books, accepted it for the series he is calling “Second Coming: A poem-a-day series in creative response to the threats posed to our democracy by the incoming presidential administration.” You can read the piece I am talking about here.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four By Four #36
The Ravens Perch has published four of my poems this past week. You can find the first of them, “The Plural of Albatross” at https://theravensperch.com/the-plural-of-albatross-by-ellen-roberts-young/
Then page forward to “Night Flight” an experiment at capturing the experience of not sleeping/sleeping on an overnight flight.
Next is “Absence” which evolved from a prompt at the Napa Writers Conference in 2023: many drafts before and after comments by our workshop leader, Ilya Kaminsky and fellow students.
At the end of the set, but perhaps most meaningful to share, is “Cry for the Earth”
Old earth,
your home, is creaking.
Can you hear how much
too fast the hidden heart is
beating?Find the rest of this one here.
Ellen Roberts Young, My Poems on The Ravens Perch
I had a couple of ‘grey walks’ this week; grey sky, cold air, no one around to exchange pleasantries with. And then this poem popped up in my memories on my phone:
Loneliness
Loneliness is grey
It tastes like the lamb that I wish had never been killed
It sounds like crying.
It smells like chips dropped on the floor.
It looks like a storm cloud closing in.
It feels like a rat that is going to bite.
Choosing a feeling, giving it a colour and thinking about what it tastes, sounds, smells, looks and feels like was one of my favourite ‘let’s get writing’ activities when I worked with children. This group poem was written by six year olds, and I love the way their images say something extra about their experience of the feeling. I liked it too when their adults joined in and everyone shared their different emotions. It strikes me that it could also be a ‘let’s think about that feeling’ activity. I know from having written one each time I have introduced it in a writing workshop, that the same exercise results in a different end product each time. Each poem told me something about what was important to set down or celebrate in the moment.
Sue Finch, HOW DO
Wintry weeks grind along like the noisy snowplows tearing through sheets of ice this morning. At least we are having a winter, unlike some years. I may not love winter–especially the short, grey days–yet I live in a region that needs it. Indeed, it is February (alas); but in a few weeks I’m liable to notice snowdrops emerging from the dirt. Anticipation stirs my heart. It feels something like hope, although hope is something I feel less inclined to believe in every year. I guess my problem with hope is that it feels like there is human agency invested in the concept, and as I age I recognize how little effect our wishes, hopes, and prayers have upon anything.
The snowdrops emerge all the same, until such time as they can no longer withstand changes in their environment. There is some comfort in that, for me.
Ann E. Michael, Something like hope
I learned this week of the death, January 9, of my friend the literary scholar and poet Jayne Marek. My friend and my comrade poet. You can read her inspiring obituary here. My review of her new book, Dusk-Voiced (Tebot Bach, 2024), is waiting to be posted at Escape into Life (apparently there is a problem with distribution of Tebot Bach’s books). You can hear Jayne talk about and read from Dusk-Voiced at the Meter-Cute substack.
Jayne and I met at a writer’s conference. Because she lived in Port Townsend and I live in Edmonds, we did not often see each other. Neither of us were crazy about long phone calls. We did not become the sort of friends who hang out on Zooms together, or share poems vis email, though we did share publication in Triple No. 10 from Ravenna Press.
Every November, for the last 7 or so years, both Jayne and I were invited to the Glen Cove Writers’ Retreat on Hood Canal, and every year (with the exception of 2020), we went. At Glen Cove we took long walks together and bird-watched. Jayne was an avid naturalist, and she took amazing photographs of mushrooms and bugs. Evenings, we drank wine and read each other poems.
Bethany Reid, Dusk-Voiced, poems by Jayne Marek
In contemplating writing creatively about the life and death of a real person, famous or otherwise, one has (a minimum of) six key decisions to make, the last four of which are dependent on the first and second.
First and foremost is whether to write poetry or prose. With five poetry collections and four novels already published, I imagine the decision Sue Hubbard made to plump for poetry to address her subject, Gwen John (1876–1939), wasn’t an easy one to make; however, the notes at the back indicate that Hubbard had previously written (at least) one poem about a moment in John’s life so perhaps that had left an itch that needed to be scratched. I admire Hubbard for even taking on such a large and complex project.
The second decision, perhaps a subconscious one, is how much of the subject’s life needs to be recounted to do justice to their main events, relationships, successes, failures and emotions. Despite some artistic success, John, as is widely known now, had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime and lived in the shadow of both her two-years-younger brother, Augustus, who became the most celebrated British painter of their day, and Rodin, 35 years her senior, with whom John had an unequal relationship for a decade from 1904 (and whose forename was, by coincidence, the French equivalent of her brother’s). The 34 poems in this collection run chronologically from John’s childhood and adolescence in North Wales to her death in Dieppe, two weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. As we’ll see, they aren’t ‘Wiki poems’, i.e. they don’t clunkily include facts for the sake of it; rather, they tend more towards impressionistic sketches, pleasingly in keeping with John’s style of painting. Neither do they amount to a full-blown biography (her mother’s death when John was eight isn’t mentioned for instance, though her absence can be inferred), but that doesn’t necessarily make them any less meritorious or successful than had Hubbard written a fuller account in prose.
Matthew Paul, Review of Sue Hubbard’s God’s Little Artist
If this poem was in a family of poems, it feels as if it belongs to the family of poems that another one of my favourite poems belongs to “The House was Quiet and the World was Calm” by Wallace Stevens. There is that same strange rush of immediacy and peace to both of these poems for me, the same heady rush of restless searching and utter stillness.
I love the way into this poem as well – the ‘Here you are’. Who is the you? Is it us? Is it the poet? Is it the speaker of the poem? I know it’s not me because I’m not ‘near the edge of the world, rowing /across a vast lake’. Or am I? Perhaps this is why I feel so tired, so discombobulated, so unequal to the task of writing a Substack post, that is until I climb into the boat of this poem, and take myself back into language.
As I read this poem, I find the boundary between myself and the speaker in the poem suddenly becoming porous and I feel as if the poem is addressing me. When I read “You are tired of having / to re-invent yourself” I think of the wonderful Rilke poem and the shock of that poem in the last line, when the poem turns its face towards us and says “You must change your life”.
Kim Moore, Is February the new January?
Blossomise by Simon Armitage is a beautiful and nifty volume — poems by Armitage illustrated by Angela Harding commissioned by the National Trust to highlight and celebrate the spring blossoms in the UK which have declined in number of late. Obviously, the consequences of fewer blossoming trees has an effect on the human population and on various species. I’m not sure that I was expecting much TBH from a commissioned sequence, but I am delighted by these poems.
We have “Planet Earth in party mode, / petals fizzing and frothing / like pink champagne.” Refreshing and suprising takes, include the CV of Blossom, and also the lovely music in a poem which asks, “How many summers / up ahead? // How many autumns / in his hand?”
Somewhat reassuring is that slim and beautiful books like this go on existing.
Shawna Lemay, Poetry Club – Half an Hour
When I teach creative writing classes, one of the prompts I often give my students is to write a “persona poem,” or a poem written as someone (real or imaginary) other than themselves. This assignment is good for writers in the same way, I think, it’s good for all of us to visit unfamiliar views—it’s an exercise in empathy. The marvelous poems that many students produce are proof that deep perspective-taking can bring about surprising, as well as surprisingly deep, insights.
As a somewhat guarded and perfectionistic young poet navigating academia in my twenties, where I was compelled to share my poems with classrooms of peers and professors for regular critique, I discovered that it was often much easier for me to write in other’s voices—characters I seemed to channel from another plane—than to write openly as myself. Listening to and speaking through these other voices were like turning a palm-sized gemstone around in my hand and watching light refract off its many sides. The gemstone was me, and it was not me. The facets of the gemstone were also a web of possibilities, alternative lives and worlds. These characters acted simultaneously as shining windows into the sources of my fears, my questions, my griefs, and as a kind of shield for my personal vulnerabilities and the intimate details of my own life story that I didn’t want to expose.
As a result, my first two poetry collections—Best Bones and Darwin’s Mother—contain poems written from the perspective of a house servant, a blackfly, an 18th century farmer, a monk, a ghost, an archeologist, a chimpanzee from Dr. Harry Harlow’s infamous primate experiments in the 1950s, of Charles Darwin as a child, a mother cicada, Achilles, the Virgin Mary, and an AI robot. As I’ve continued to evolve as a writer, I’ve become more comfortable speaking plainly as myself (hence this newsletter), but the other voices remain with me. The insects and ancestors and dinosaur bones are murmuring alongside and within my own voice. What began in part as a method of self-protection has expanded my understanding of self into something vast and fractal. […]
My fantasy, unlikely as it may be, is this: That as the negative impacts social media has on mental health and our ability to speak to one another in open-hearted ways become increasingly clear—along with the openly nefarious intentions of the tech overlords who profit from these sites—that there will be a large exodus from the rainbow river. People will put their phones in a closed drawer, then go outside and lay in the grass for a good long while, not doing anything in particular. Maybe on the third day of this new freedom, as they begin to dream up collective ways to resist the institutional crisis and ecocide-in-progress, they might see a pencil on a nearby table, pick it up, and write a poem.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Vast and Fractal
When I slap a mosquito sucking on the skin of my shoulder, I wonder
if the blood is mine or someone else’sWe’re all part of the same cellular network
It is the year of the snake and some have taken power
that isn’t theirsEvery spore, every bloodstained stone, every word we protect
and won’t give surrenderLook at the moths that arrow night after night
Luisa A. Igloria, Why We Should Care
into basins of uncollected light
if i don’t know where the poem is going
then who is writing it
how do i know when it is finishedand yet
after it is finished
i seem to know boththe breath comes from somewhere
Jim Young, who poet who
behind the eyes
to hear again one’s given voice
Grant Hackett [no title]
the great oak of infinite possibilities
breathes
These are beautiful! I hope you’ll check out my poetry that is a collection about the highs and lows of motherhood!