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: a green snake, the sound of a lawnmower, worms without mouths or stomachs, a protest dance, and much more. Enjoy.
It’s the time of year when, according to the lunisolar calendar, we move from 小暑 xiǎoshǔ–when the heat begins to get unbearable–to 大暑 dàshǔ, the hottest time of the year. It may also be the greenest time: my garden suddenly plumps out huge squash leaves, giant sunflowers, masses of beans, zinnias, basil. The tomatoes are finally burgeoning after a late start. It’s too hot to spend much time weeding and pruning: I harvest what I can and retreat to the shade as soon as possible, where I can read. […]
I’ve been taking a break from reading poetry, though that wasn’t planned on my part. July brought a wedding, a death, and some travel; and now, in the intense summer doldrums, I prefer to read for entertainment or information, or just to pass the time. Poetry takes more brain and heart space for me, more “intentionality” or concentration, than most non-fiction books or novels do. This is not to say any other genre is less demanding in and of itself. It’s a personal quirk: I am more attentive when reading poetry than I am when I read other forms of literature, probably because I’m unconsciously (or consciously) endeavoring to learn something of the craft and style and context of poems by other poets. It’s a method of processing how to write poems. But as I have no plans to write fiction or non-fiction, I read such genres for entirely different reasons.
Usually I try to read outside on the porch, in the hammock, on the garden swing. Some days it is just too damned hot and humid, though, and I resort to the air-conditioning indoors. The indoor climate has no flies or gnats but also no bird songs, cicada hums, cricket calls, breezes, scents of summer.
Ann E. Michael, Reading in shade
Soon it will be time to read something new–I got Alison Bechdel’s latest book from the library last night. But in some ways, it will be a return to the old. Sure it’s not officially the dykes to look out for who are all grown up now. But I suspect it will be like visiting old college friends.
I am hoping that much of my autumn will feel like revisiting old literary friends from college days. I spent part of this week trying to remember the name of a book that came out when I was last teaching this literature, a book about the women of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle. Yesterday it just popped into my head: A Passionate Sisterhood. And lo and behold, the public library has it! I’ve requested it and should be able to get it before I need to teach the material.
I remember loving it so much that I bought my own copy back in the early days of this century and promptly never taught that literature of the early days of the British Romantic era much again. Did I keep the book when we moved 3 years ago? I can imagine thinking my days of teaching that literature had come and gone and getting rid of it. I can also imagine that I kept it for sentimental reasons.
I am wondering if this fall will also feel like a time when I meet up with my old creative writing self. Clearly I am not going to write a novel–or even take notes on a novel–this summer. But maybe teaching a creative writing class will inspire me in new ways, or in old ways. I’d be grateful for either.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Last Saturday in July: Saturday Snippets
We’ve reached that strange mid-point of summer when I start to long for fall. It’s usually around the time the heat and the humidity gets untenable and inhospitable to being outside much at all. I start to long for rainy afternoons, chilly air, and hot beverages all day long (not just coffee in the AM.) Start to long for pastries and dishes involving apples and pumpkins and cranberries. Fall makes me long for various serious projects and very serious poeting after dallying much of the summer, even if this summer has been productive for getting poems on the page. I am rounding a corner on the CLOVEN series of Iphigenia/myth inspired poems and nearing the end, I can feel it. Possibly before September if I keep at it. There is still traces of summer left to grasp, however, so I intend to enjoy the cool of the A/C at my back in front of the window while I write, icy afternoon cocktails courtesy of the wedding gift blender, and occasional outings into the heat.
Kristy Bowen, July Paper Boat
I often think of Paul Celan while walking alongside the Seine that, in the summer, smells like fish, sweat, and rotting apples. One can look at the green of the river and imagine the countless bodies that have fallen in it or will fall in it in the future, or one can also try to guess how many of the people sitting there, with their feet dangling above the dark greenness while drinking beer or wine, have imagined falling in it. It’s not because the Seine is particularly reminiscent of death but there is something sinister about a green snake eating its way through an almost ancient beige city, a hungry void. When I first came to Paris, almost 10 years ago, I remember a young man flashing his naked butt to tourists floating on the Seine river cruise holding their glasses of cheap champagne, erupting in laughter.
Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People
I walk in the pale hollow woods
Ruth Lexton, The Work of Poetry in The Age of Large Language Models
and find a poem hanging in the trees—
did I make it out of the generative engine
that is my mind or does poetry exist out there,
waiting for me to process it? Where does thought end
and language begin: heart, veins, throat, tongue?
I began this week with yet another “thank you but no thankyou” response to a pamphlet competition. It’s tough to keep “plugging away” at this, and to challenge the thought that I’m just not good enough. Then I remind myself that this group of poems has been longlisted in a major magazine, shortlisted by a respected publisher and highly commended in a well-regarded prize. There is something there – but it’s hiding.
Back to the drawing board I go. I read the book as a whole, rather than focusing on individual poems and allow my impulses to guide me as to which poems don’t quite fit. I cut them, read again and think about what is missing. This pamphlet is a story, a journey and as I’m cutting and reworking I realise I’ve been trying to cram two themes into one book. Rather than start at the beginning and consider what I want this book to be, I’ve started halfway through; I’ve taken a group of poems I like and tried to shoehorn them into a single concept. The end result was a group of poems that kind of fit, but unless you live in my head the thread is a bit jumbled. I’m confident in the poems (as much as one ever can be) and feel that I’ve made something that works as a whole and sent it back out into the somewhat narrow world of poetry. Apparently the average number of rejections for a book before publication is 15 so there is still plenty of hope. We will see.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, An aha moment for my latest work in progress.
I fell off my meditation cushion
like theology without underpinning.I was so delighted by the sound
of a lawnmower I forgot how to walk.I wrestled with an angel all night,
Rachel Barenblat, I Came Home from the Meditation Retreat With A Black Eye
clung until they blessed me.
On Roaring 20s Radio we try our best to share a brilliant and diverse mix of new discoveries, bold new voices, exciting indie outsiders, and some of the more mainstream big names too. When choosing books for these lists, I often boost writers that I meet on my adventures, at poetry events and book festivals, and I also select hot books to preorder from my towering proof piles. Roaring 20s Radio champions poets and indie publishers, artists and writers that are smashing through the silence, that shine a light on the here and now, there are so many courageous people and organisations that we include and love and admire. […]
Oh Big Blue
The poems in this collection were written and illustrated by children aged 9 to 17 from Palestine. They are some of the Palestinian entries from the 2024 Hands Up Project poetry competition. They are presented in the form in which they were originally received, with a foreword by Alice and Peter Oswald.
The title of the collection was taken from one of the competition entries, a poem by 13-year-old Joud Isleem, who wrote: “Oh great sea, oh big blue! Take my dreams and bring me hope.” These are poems written by children, written in a second language, written from the centre of impossibility, written under bombardment, written with no water, written with no internet, written in a notebook and decorated with butterflies and sometimes decorated with blood. They show the beauty of the world, even in impossible circumstances.
Salena Godden, Roaring 20s Radio: book recommendations
[George] Szirtes’ first full collection, The Slant Door, won the Faber Memorial Prize in 1979, he won the T. S. Eliot prize in 2004 (for Reel), and in between he was one of the ‘Oxford Poets’. After the Oxford Poets series closed, he switched to Bloodaxe, and they published a New and Collected Poems in 2008. Just last year he was awarded the King’s Gold Medal for poetry. Recently I read a fascinating interview with him about his cultural and linguistic identity (he moved to England from Budapest when he was eight), and you can read a few of his poems — mostly from the more recent collections — on the Poetry Foundation website. As well as his own poetry, he has published many translations from Hungarian.
Alongside all this, he regularly posts poems or fragments of poems on Twitter — including, for instance, a villanelle on the spectacularly vulgar wedding of Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos last month in Venice […]
Szirtes’ conventionally published poems are unquestionably much better than most of the Twitter poetry. On the other hand, a literary culture without occasional verse — verse as part of the cultural response to events as they happen — is surely a dead one. I rather admire the courage and humility of as good a poet as Szirtes being happy to put his ‘first thoughts’ out there in this way, and by following his account as well as his published work you could certainly learn a lot about that mysterious transition from an early draft to a finished poem. I think how we feel about this gets in interesting ways at our ideas about poetry as a craft or art: should the poet be working away privately and only allowing “out” the most polished work or should they be putting communication first, encouraging engagement and response by circulating drafts as they are written and letting us into the workshop?
Victoria Moul, The poetic tweet
There’s always a blue door in our dreams,
in our former lives.A cerulean blue door, with wooden slats
held by a small hook in the white plastered wall.It opens, closes and opens, screeching like a sick
Jill Pearlman, The Blue Door in our Dreams
owl, such are the vagaries of age.
This is the second poetry/art book to come into my life recently.
Once again, a perfect marriage of word and image. The twelve short poems are by Beau Beausoleil, who shares his daily poems with friends worldwide by email. In the last year, recovering from illness, he has been taking therapeutic walks in Golden Gate Park and elsewhere in his neighbourhood, and giving fresh attention to the world of nature as it intersects with the human sphere. In Poet as Naturalist, the poems are paired with Nanilee Robarge’s very appealing semi-abstract paintings and collages. Each double-page spread balances an image with a poem. Almost every poem begins as an observation, often quite straightforward: …I look up … too late/ to see the bird fly/ by the kitchen windows/ seeing only its quick shadow … and ends with a startling, amusing, or profound thought: ... One day/ I too will leave only/ the breath of my shadow/ behindI’m not a fan of centred poems, but in this context the centering is wholly appropriate. The book is beautifully designed by Robin MIchel, and published in San Francisco by Raven and Wren Press. It is a joy both to handle and to read and re-read.
Ama Bolton, Poet as Naturalist
A whale dies, and once the gasses have left it,
it falls, slowly, to the sea-bed, where it sustains
(nurtures if you prefer) an eco-system.
As it rests under the crush of the sea
worms without mouths or stomachs
whose males live inside the females
consume its bones. It can take centuries.Anyway, so, I’ve been reading poetry again.
Bob Mee, PERMANENCE
There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness.
It makes all the difference in a day, in a life, to hear that voice, all the more to be that voice. It is our evolutionary inheritance — we are the story of survival of the tenderest, the living proof that tenderness may be the ultimate fitness for being alive.
I know no better homily on this fundament of our humanity than Ellen Bass’s poem “Kiss” from her altogether soul-salving collection Indigo (public library).
Maria Popova, Kiss: Ellen Bass’s Stunning Ode to the Courage of Tenderness as an Antidote to Helplessness
I think a lot about how time seems to just slowly unfold, not much going on, really, not much changing. Then boom. Something is thrust upon us to which we must react/respond. Allow/manage. Shift to or remain stalwart from. Sometimes we sort of see it coming, like watching a movie. Like we forget this is real life. Until it is undeniable.
I like this poem because of how it depicts the onset of storm as an interesting thing from which we remain detached. I like how it unsettles our confidence, this poem, in what we know or think we know. That chilling moment when we realize, oh…wait…
So many tornados coming. Or wait, no, they’re here.
Marilyn McCabe, pressure change and distant noise
The Bean Eaters is one of the perfect poems. Gwendolyn Brooks won’t need much introduction to American readers, but I don’t think she is well known in England, or at least not as well known as she should be. I found about her in a workshop sometime after I moved to London.1
Then again, one of the things I love about ‘The Bean Eaters’ is that it needs so little introduction. It is a loving, knowing portrait of a couple who don’t have much. The title reminds me of Van Gogh’s ‘The Potato Eaters’. Here they are:
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.Everything is reused, both words and their component parts: ‘plain’ is there twice in that third line, ‘chipware’ calls back to ‘flatware’. The original rhyme is everywhere, so much so that it becomes invisible. The poem is literally economical. It makes do.
Jeremy Wikeley, Twinklings and twinges
1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book will always be a reminder to myself that what I have to say matters to someone out in the universe. When I started writing poetry, my wildest dream was that a press would actually take my ridiculous poems about sentient sexy potatoes, Prince, and Predator seriously. I am still amazed that my poems find readers and now that I have a second book out, I am constantly pinching myself that this is my reality. After I finished my first book, American Radiance, which is largely about my family, I promised myself I would move on and write about a new topic. My second book, I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated, is even more focused on my family. I realized that I’m essentially going to write the same book over and over again, because every poem about my grandmother is ultimately a poem about the moon, and everyone knows how poets feel about the moon.
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I am drawn to poetry for the privacy. Most of the time, I feel naked writing in prose, and while I love reading novels and essays, I need the distance that the lyric provides, or to put it less poetically, I want to keep my top on. […]
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I generally avoid prescribing what the role of a writer should be. As a teacher of young writers, I see firsthand the tremendous impact that poems have for helping people understand themselves, and also for understanding others. To me, empathy and poetry are connected in a way that is essential. I teach “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski every year because that poem saved my life; I don’t know what role that gives me as a writer. Mostly, I’m not that different than a person handing out pamphlets on the street. I’m giving you something that has transformed the way I see the world, Maybe you’ll remember a line from this poem when you need it, maybe you’ll immediately throw it into the recycling bin.
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Luisa Muradyan (rob mclennan)
grant
a star
its anger
earn
a range
garner
aster
Luisa A. Igloria, Inside the word stranger
I discovered Fanny Howe’s poetry through her Selected Poems, published by University of California Press in 2000. Her previous books – poetry and prose – had been published mostly by small American presses, and described as “experimental.” I didn’t then (and possibly don’t now) have a strong grasp of what constitutes the experimental. But Howe’s early poems were invigoratingly strange to me for how they inhabit a corridor or anteroom between Language Poetry and the lyric. They love the line as a unit of sound and sense; syntactical relationships are clear even when how the referents relate might not be; associations feel spontaneous but not arbitrary, assertive but not labouring to subvert lyric convention. The writing doesn’t appear effortless; the discipline of its attention and choices reminds me of an animal’s stillness as it confirms the origin of a sound or scent (what Howe wrote about Simone Weil’s work, that it’s “tense with effort,” could apply to her own). And as the animal is in that moment, the poems – for all their concerns with justice, with ethics, with others – are, resolutely, alone. They are deeply, naturally, weird.
When I left the west for Toronto, Catholicism was among the things I abandoned. It was, like the landscapes and work I grew up with, thrown into relief against a hyper-urban aestheticised agnosticism whose cathedral, back then, was the bar. Location became inseparable from dislocation. I had just published my first book and felt claustrophobic in my own anecdotes. Despite not really having a style, I wanted to blow it up. The way Howe’s work lingers in the temporary felt spacious, accommodating. The poems don’t make a home of the temporary so much as find its midpoint, wander through its empty house, look out from the middle of it. That this suggests a luxury of time the temporary wouldn’t seem to possess is part of the work’s effect. Time passes differently in the mind. The poems are like gaps that expand in the narrative when we realise that each of us is essentially wandering in our own wilderness.
Often, reading her Selected Poems, I was in over my head. At the same time, phrases, lines, passages would surprise with unpredictable and uncanny accuracy, abstractions articulated with an unsettling precision that’s felt in the way that proximity to a cliff edge is felt.
Karen Solie, What Did You See?
I’ve recently heard 2 female competition judges discourage writers from entering stories about “The 3 Ds” – “Death” (especially of babies), “Dementia” and “Domestic violence” – there are many entries on those themes. Increasingly, the same advice applies when sending to magazines – when the success rates get into the 1% range, and editors need to quickly read 100s of submissions, stories need to stand out, and editors don’t want too many stories on a single theme.
I often try to write stories that are quiet. I’ve even tried to write about middle class families who have middle class problems. The characters are not so content that “happiness writes white” (i.e. you don’t see the white ink on the white paper) but nobody dies, goes mad, or gets hit. In fact, nothing much happens. If artists can do still lifes with apples, grapes and shadows, why can’t I do a story about getting the kids off to school and taking a thoughtful walk back along a stream?
Not only do I leave out dramatic events events, but I’m careful with the language. Any striking phrase/image that comes to mind when I’m writing prose tends to end up in the poem I’m currently writing (which becomes a rag-bag of fireworks at best).
Tim Love, The 3 Ds
The artist is mid-step,
Jason Crane, POEM: Cartier-Bresson’s Alberto Giacometti Going Out For Breakfast, Paris.
toes of one foot raised
as if he’s debating whether
to go on or turn back.
The gray and the rain are strong.
The stomach is stronger.
It’s this, just this,
then back to the tiny studio
crammed wall to wall
with imagination realized;
electricity in the brain transferred
to the hands, to the clay,
to each of us admirers.
But first, coffee.
Consider, if you will, that a footprint in peat can last for 25 years, and that peat grows at a rate of 1mm a year. Some of the peat on Walshaw Moor has been growing since the Bronze Age. It is 3000 years old. Once peat is disturbed, it begins to emit carbon, rather than store it. This will be a very dirty wind farm.
The development is opposed by major ecological and heritage organisations, including the RSPB, CPRE – the Countryside Charity, and the Brontë Society. Nevertheless an application for a Development Consent Order (DCO) is expected to be submitted to the Planning Inspectorate in June 2026.
All of which translates to – this existential threat to these extraordinary moors is very real. It comes as a particular shock to the people of Haworth, which relies heavily on its moorland and its Brontë heritage. People began to come to Haworth soon after the death of Charlotte Brontë, the last surviving sister, in 1855. Patrick Brontë, the father of these extraordinary children, was bemusedly dealing with curious visitors until he died in 1861, and Haworth gradually became the literary landmark it is today, now second only to Stratford-on-Avon in terms of visitor numbers. The Brontë Parsonage Museum has over 80,000 visitors every year and Haworth is regarded as the jewel in the tourism crown in West Yorkshire.
Hundreds of local businesses, from the shops and restaurants which line the iconic cobbled Main Street to the hotels, guesthouses and holiday cottages spread across the wider area, thrive as part of the tourist industry. As well as the village, the surrounding moorland attracts people from all over the world who walk up to Top Withens: the signposts, which are written in both English and Japanese, attest to this.
We need clean, green energy. But energy produced built on peat is not green. Energy produced at an irreversible cost to threatened species is not green. Energy produced at an immense cost to Northern communities, only to meet our ever-growing demands for energy, is not justified, nor is it clean.
Tomorrow, we dance in celebration, in protest, and in hope.
Clare Shaw, Actually The World’s Most Wuthering Heights Day
sometimes i wonder if
Robin Gow, 404 dire wolf skulls from la brea tar pits
the humans are wolves. if maybe
we are farther than ever from resurrection.
in the dark of the museum, we howl.
sometimes one of them will hear us.
they’ll stare into the glass until
their skull is one of ours. jaw
& ragged teeth & tar-black bone.
My parents are coming out for a visit in two weeks, and after that, I’m going to a short residency to work on my manuscript, and maybe on some more essays. I’m trying to be more deliberate with the time that I spend and still put time aside for joy, relaxation, and all that stuff we type-A folks are bad at. If I don’t put time aside for rest, I won’t do it. I’ve been writing essays for five weeks, and enjoying it, and even sending some out. I’m waiting to hear back from publishers on my latest poetry manuscript, but I’m wondering if putting together a book of essays might be a smarter way to spend my time. It seems urgent to get voices out about disability, and while both books deal with that subject matter, the essays might be a better choice for a wider audience. We’ll see.
This weekend was the lavender festival at our local lavender garden (JB Family Growers Lavender Farm), and we went both days and had fun, and the weather blessedly cooperated (no rain, but also not crazy hot). I also noted that a lot of my friends and family members are experiencing a melancholy that isn’t specific to one bad thing, but rather a pervasive mood. Maybe that makes sense, politics and plagues and wars are bound to make a dent in our souls, and if they don’t, maybe something’s wrong with us. Walking at sunset in a field of lavender does something good to our nervous systems, or spending time picking blueberries or watching birds and going to the forest. We need to remind ourselves of the good things still in the world, of the possibilities. We need to give ourselves something to fight for.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Change in the Air, Lavender Festivals, and Melancholy
U.S. 1 newspaper is a venerable publication here in the Central New Jersey towns and businesses that line the Route 1 corridor.
Each July, the paper dedicates an issue to the poetry and prose of those who live and/or work in the region, and this year a prose poem of mine is in it. I hope you enjoy it! :- )
Summer Trip
Sitting under a striped beach umbrella, SHE is absorbed in a paperback novel.
Off to the right and closing fast, HE is running toward her at full speed, his eyes fixed on the plaid kite trailing behind him.
Destiny is like a word problem: if one train heads east and another heads west on the same track, will two strangers fall in love at the point of impact?
Shouting a warning that goes unheard, I can’t help but wonder about inexorable forces and immovable objects (and the dubious taste of pairing stripes with plaid).
Bill Waters, U.S. 1 summer fiction issue 2025
July is a month that feels like a long walk in the neighborhood. The neighborhood is normal with beautiful lawns fronting neat homes and the walk moves along at a steady pace. July days are waning, though, and I’m ready for the walk to end so I can hunker down in my sheltering house to wait out August, a month that feels like flailing in the deep end of a pool. August is my least favorite month for many reasons. August 29 this year will be the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I’m contemplating posting some of my (scarce) Katrina-related writing, both published and not. Some days it feels like what I should do but other days I don’t want to review those memories. I’m a little sick of thinking about it still after all these years, to be honest. But sometimes a mood will hit and I’ll write about that time again. Anyway, we’ll see what August brings. I’m not sure anyone is interested in reading about all that now, anyway.
My July Listopia begins with three stellar pieces I read in litmags this month – a prose poem, a microfiction, and a nonfiction. After assembling the links and quotes, I realized they’re all about parents and how they affected the lives of the characters/writers.
Charlotte Hamrick, July Listopia
We sit on the terrace in the pouring
rain with a steaming bowl of Maggi.
There is the spectre of absence.
Of wrongness. As if death is
everywhere. Except here.
As if that is okay.Gibson’s poem pings in the silence:
Rajani Radhakrishnan, If you say it’s okay
“When I left my body, I did not go
away.” I think of Alareer. “If I must
die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.”
“Death be not proud,” said John
Donne, “Death, thou shalt die.” I
say it aloud to the rain. “Death,
you shall die.” It rains harder. Colder.
It isn’t easy to know if you are doing anything that matters in the whoosh and rush and pilloried crush, especially in the arts. There is no pause, no gratitude, no real vacations, no bonus, no moment of glory, no pedestal, no island, no floor, no window, no spar, no acknowledgement, no paycheck that gets you ahead, and no way to ever stop. You stay on the merry-go-round. You’re forced to keep proving yourself to keep your work alive.
I met a friend this week who said, “Are you sure you want to keep going? Other presses are closing left and right. You could move to Ireland.”
It is getting hot in Los Angeles. I am no longer sleeping. We have an espresso machine, so I drink too much coffee. Ireland is far away. But despite the impostor syndrome, despite my attention being pulled in a million directions, I want to be a great writer. I want to spend more time on my work. I have always wanted to write something lasting. I have always wanted the great tango of intellect and imagination to be my life. That matters to me.
I still have game. I’m in this. Someday, I’ll feel I belong. I will walk into the room and know how I got there. I won’t have to prove it.
For now, I’m swimming upstream. Above me is waterfall. But I swim. I write. There is no win or lose, I tell myself. I will give it my all. I will save nothing for the swim back.
Kate Gale, Swimming Upstream, Running Uphill: On Belonging
Last fall we had the good luck to be in Florence for a couple of weeks and one of the highlights was visiting the Odeon Theatre and which is now also a Libreria / bookstore. I’m sure I posted about it at the time, but as I began spiralling after looking at the news this weekend (I know you likely know that feeling), I needed to get my brain headed somewhere else, and I thought of the Odeon as a happy place. I was thinking about the instruction to touch grass which is mocked, but hey, it works. And another thing that helps is for me to look at photos of a previous happy place.
So I spent time also reading about ordinary affect theory, affect theory and architecture. Which led me to think about my happy places on this earth. Of which there are many. My study, my backyard. And how weird it is that we might get to be in our happy places at this particular moment in history. And I’ve been thinking about how even so in the past, my brain has broken, being in these places. My goal these days is to protect my own nervous system because what use am I to anyone in a broken state. Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism has said that they are “interested in how people live through historical moments of loss.” We are in the middle of a great shift, ongoingly, and Berlant says that the historical present is “a middle without boundaries, edges, a shape. It is experienced in transitions and transactions.” And though they wrote this before the present historical moment, they talk about the “urgencies of livlihood” where “futurity” is without assurance. Certainly de-stabilized. And this seems in the face of others’ more life and death situation to be a small thing to complain about, one’s future livlihood. You might be “happily managing things” or “discouraged but maintaining” while others are mentally on the edge.
In catastrophe, in the traumosphere of today, how do we live? I remember reading, during all the unknowns of the early pandemic, Berlant’s words, that we are in a spot “when one no longer knows what to do or how to live and yet, while unknowing, must adjust.” It was comforting somehow to feel understood in this way, less alone. All of us in the unknowing, adjusting, adjusting. […]
I think back to all the museums and galleries and libraries I visited in Italy and what drew me to them. Today though I’m thinking about the Odeon in Firenze and the delight of it. I’m remembering the wonderful architecture, the inviting books as you walk in, the colours, the lighting. The fun of seeing what will be on the screen next, the Italian subtitles. Sitting in the seats with a book and a coffee, lifting your head up now and again to see what’s on the screen. The moment of buying the book about the history of the Odeon and finding one of the co-authors worked there and then getting the book signed! That feeling that you were in a special place, one with history, and hope, a future.
Shawna Lemay, Reading Day, Happy Places
Mountain tops, mouths,
romantic languages lingering
In the ears of the blue trees.But God of distraction,
I’m tired of all the distractions.
The choiceless choosing.Let me have one moment that rises
over every other desire.
Let it be enoughto stand still, under this one church,
eight hundred images
of Christ suffering.The pigeons, nailed to their mortal perches.
Tresha Faye Haefner, Once in Florence
Lifting into the sun, like petals
blowing open.
The poet Simonides of Caes was the single survivor of the Thessaly house party in 5th century BC. According to legend, Simonides used his memory to relive the seating arrangement, thus identifying the buried dead beneath the rubble. Ancient Greeks took dreams as oracle, pre-visioning what would come, removing “the terror of the unexpected from the future,” to quote Judith Schalansky. But dreams don’t prepare us for the wind shear of facts.
Attention to dreams prepares us for the fragmentary, the disconnected, the fantastic, the immaterial. But dreams are not always unconscious— we dream of a world in which we can be whole, or be wholly ourselves without violence and terror. We dream of a world in which our dreams matter, our dreams are material to the conditions of living. In this sense, perfect memory can be a handicap that prevents us from re-membering, or piecing the past back together, by making it impossible to choose among pieces. Like the rich, the house of perfect memory is so big that one feels trapped, one becomes claustrophobic, in the ordinary, small houses of others. The richness of one’s house ruins the ordinary by estranging us from inhabiting it. One can’t abide in the chaos of unpruned synapses. So we pare things down; we reduce and highlight; we narrate over the gaps.
But poetry, perhaps more than any other mode, calls our attention to the gaps. The field and lineation makes those gaps visible and tangible. And this is the visionary, the radically-threatening possibility of the poem. We mourn when touched by the vestige of an absence, when startled by the echo of a correspondence. There is something missing. Everything that exists is a ruin waiting to happen once the curator disappears.
Alina Stefanescu, Tsvetaeva in the margins.
like home or history
the body is shrapnel
a fragmenthead, arms, legs blown off
only a torso. Rilke writes
it glows, illuminatingeverywhere and nowhere
is it rage, or pain, righteousness
or some other radiance?no. it is only a corpse
Gary Barwin, Not an Archaic Torso of Apollo (for Gaza)
but understand: there is no place
that does not see you
a deep hole opens in my shadow—
a black umbrella turned to ash.
the breath of one risen from the dead climbs out.
Grant Hackett [no title]