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: the ludokinetic poem, the transparent eyeball, traveling on motherless roads, constructing a witch, and much more. Enjoy.
In Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, he notes that there is “a secret protocol between the generations of the past and that of our own” because “we have been expected upon this earth.” Our ancestors knew of our coming. As such, just like all previous generations, we possess what Benjamin calls a “weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim.” In other words, although we are not super heroes or gods—not capital m Messiahs with the power to redeem the past, present, or future with grand utopian visions or Paradise on earth—our small, contingent acts can disrupt the version of time that appears linear or inevitable. If we were glitter nail polish, the base color might be our ordinary positionality in the flow of time–our genetics, our culture, our place–and the glitter would be our power to change the course of history. […]
After many months now of watching the genocide of civilians in Gaza, of praying, of gathering money to support the large family of my friend Mahmoud who sends harrowing videos and photos of the devastation and violence there every day, of calling my Senators to demand a ceasefire, peace and justice there have started to feel, for many, like a lost cause. It boggles the mind and confounds my spirit that people can see and know about the thousands of lives lost—many of them children—and not be spurred to outrage. And for me at least, the lost causness doesn’t feel limited to just Gaza, but has leaked a sense of lostness out beyond its edges into everything else. As my friend Cassie […] recently wrote on her fantastic newsletter, “My scientific proposal is that the genocide in Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023 caused the luck to run out in the world.”
As a result of this lost-cause feeling, this luckless feeling, I’m looking for ways to spend more time and energy and heart resisting this particular part of the death machine. A local friend and I are going to be gathering folks who want to organize locally, I’m going to start joining Mothers for Ceasefire at their Wednesday morning demonstrations in downtown Durham, and I’m imagining ways that poetry might be an avenue of resistance here in my own little circle of messianic influence. My idea (still nascent) is that I would print up a series of cards, little broadsides, with poems about Gaza and by Palestinian poets, and the flip side of the card would have links to donate to aid organizations and numbers to call our State Representatives. I would put stacks of these in places around town—coffee shops, vintage stores, yoga studios, maybe therapy offices.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, On Time
People are starving
and we argue about
who’s more at fault.
Measles is roaring
back to life. Every
day is Tisha b’Av now.
Which means every day
a seed of hope
is planted.
Every day, a runway.
Every day we get up
from the floor,
brush off mourning’s
ashes and begin again
like our ancestors
in the wilderness
who every year
would dig their graves
expecting to die
and wake to discover
another chance.
A seed of hope / is planted. Tradition holds that moshiach / the messiah will be born on Tisha b’Av — the seeds of redemption growing in the soil of our darkest day.
Every day, a runway. Tisha b’Av begins the seven-week runway toward the Days of Awe and the Jewish new year.
Like our ancestors. See Rashi on Taanit 30b:12:1.
This poem was inspired by a conversation after the first session of Seven Habits of Highly Evolved People, the pre-high-holiday class I’m co-teaching with R. David Markus this year.
Rachel Barenblat, Every day
When I think of what helps in these times, I often think of music. My impulse is to go somewhere beautiful—the woods, the water—and play music. One of the things the cantor sang was a Hebrew chant of the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd.”) I’m not a religious person—not believing in lords and such— but these words were powerful in their imagery (“I shall not want,” “lie down in green pastures.” “…leadeth me beside the still waters.”)
When I have a chance in the waiting room, I’ve been making little visual pieces to have the centring effect of making something. Of creating some little beauty. Of making marks to somehow speak to the world. They don’t respond per se to the emotional weight of the moment excepting that making marks, but being “cautiously optimistic” about things is always helpful. At home, I type out some figures on a typewriter and load the scans into the computer which I bring to the hospital. I’ve called them Typewriter Rituals because making them is a small ritual.
Gary Barwin, typewriter rituals in the ICU
When I think about what I am doing here (in this newsletter, that is, I do my best not to think about the other question) I realise that one of my biggest and fondest inspirations is Carol Rumens’s Poem of the Week column [in The Guardian]. Rumens has been writing the column for almost two decades. Each week, she shares a poem, sometimes an old poem, sometimes a new one, then takes us through it, closely and clearly. Anyone will get something out of the discussion, whatever their relationship to poetry, because (because not despite) she always starts with what makes a poem a poem. Its sound and its shape.
Poem of the Week has introduced me to a lot of poems and poets I might never have encountered elsewhere. But Rumens will also change how you think about poems you thought you knew. Put a good poem in front of a good reader and they will always find something surprising, because poetry is the gift that keeps on giving (in this sense, it is very good for the environment). This week’s poem was ‘Sea-Fever’ [by John Masefield]. You can read it here […]
Like Rumens says, I don’t think you can have it too many times. I know this because I’ve been reciting it to our toddler in his cot most evenings for the past month. This is partly because I simply don’t know many poems by heart, partly because once you start doing one thing with a toddler they tend to want you to do it again (he doesn’t have many words yet, but he will ask for the “poom”) and partly because it is such a joy to say.
Jem Wikeley, The Long Trick
A little bit of fun for mid-August — two of the poems that I most enjoying saying to my own children (whether they like it or not). Both of these are very cheering I find at trying moments. The first is by Alfred Noyes, now probably known only for his (fantastic) ‘The Highwayman’, which is still widely available as an illustrated picture book. Years ago, I said ‘The Highwayman’ to both the older boys, then perhaps 7 and 5, while perched on the lower bunk at bed time; I got all the way through to the end, enjoying it greatly myself, and was quite pleased that they were still listening. After I finished, there was a pause, before the younger of them burst out “but it’s sad!” and started to cry, and the elder leaned over the edge of the top bunk to remark censoriously, “I really don’t think that was appropriate for us, Mummy”. (You have been warned.)
I’m not sure ‘The New Duckling’ is entirely appropriate either but it’s very funny […]
My second suggestion, Charles Causley’s ‘Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth Toast’ is a great favourite of the children and I have never got bored of saying it. The final stanza is particularly delicious.
Victoria Moul, Two poems to learn so that you can say them to your children for your own amusement
These hot, humid summer days I’ve been waiting for fall. And then I feel guilty about it, because of that whole be-here-now stuff, that whole life-is-short-enjoy-it-while-you-can stuff. That whole climate-change-this-may-be-the-new-normal stuff… I try to spend some time each day (usually in the cooler hours) in that living-in-the-present stuff. But then it gets hot, and I get whiny. But all those hyphenated points above are so true, dammit. And life is so damn uncertain. So now I’m working on enjoying being a hot thing that lies on the couch feeling hot. If the couch has a breeze, I can almost pull it off, that gratitude business. It’s worth a try, even if I fall back in to whineland. I woke up the other day thinking, dang, I was going to start working on my upper body strength — a little weight lifting every day. I did it for a while, but that was…well…a while ago. That’s okay, I told myself. Today is a new day. You can always start today. I appreciated my generous self for that thought. As Nina Simone sang, “It’s a new life for me, yeah.”
I admire this Stafford poem for its challenge to the new day, the new life, the new yeah. It’s a tape-it-over-the-desk poem. We all need a few of those.
Marilyn McCabe, When you turn around, starting here, lift this
distant thunder
Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August ’25
white curtains billow
in the dusk
A short interactive poem of mine, ‘The Whisky Shop’, is published in the latest issue of Taper, a journal of computational literature (poems and experimental lit crossed with coding, essentially). The constraint for all submissions to the journal is extreme: 2KB file size. A Microsoft Word document of a one-page poem I’m working on at the moment clocks in at 16KB.
To bring ‘The Whisky Shop’ — originally a longer poem with many more options for line swaps — down to 2KB I had to remove all the spacing in the .html file, as well as most of the poetry, and then spend another couple of hours working on efficiencies in the code. For example, all the style selectors are just one character long. Effectively I put the whole thing into a compactor, and I did wonder at one point if it made sense to do so for the sake of a submission to a journal. The end result is a different poem, but interesting in its own way, and I have some ideas of how to yoke the two together in future.
It’s a ludokinetic poem, which means the interactive element is intended to locate the reader inside the poem in some way. In this case, what I envisaged is someone shuffling memories like cards to reconjure a distant experience.
Jon Stone, Taper #14 / The Whisky Shop
Recently, when typing up notes from my journals, I found quotes I captured while watching an Indigo Girls documentary (as one does). It’s full of testimony about how writing and singing allowed them to create — and re-create — themselves.
Emily, one of the Indigo Girls, also talks about the pressures and joys of performing and says this:
I’ve had nights where I was sad, didn’t feel like playing, and by the end of the night I’m just healed, just washed over with that energy of togetherness.
That energy of togetherness. YES.
I’m a loner. Deep, deep, deep in my bones. So the level to which I’ve discovered, nurtured and delighted in writing community has been one of the biggest surprises of my life.
Like… y’all: I’m still writing — inspired! healed! — every damn day because of writing community. Jill Crammond. Sarah Freligh. Woman Words. The Albany open mic scene over the years. The Madwomen in the Attic workshops. Second Best Witches Writing Group. The fairly new but growing Ass in Chair Collective. And others. I’m so grateful.
In art, togetherness really does provide more than camaraderie. It’s energy-giving. It’s momentum-building. It’s cheerleading.
It’s also accountability. For example, after a verrrrrry long break from submitting to journals, I’m back at it. Slowly. Surely. It’s 100% thanks to writing pals who tell me, when I can’t see it myself, that my work is worth making and needs to be out there.
These are the vibes: It’s selfish to hoard your creativity.
Carolee Bennett, Writing Community and the “Energy of Togetherness”
These days, instead of sitting down to write, I go straight to the basement and make art. Today, I completed the third in a series of season-themed encaustics with poems embedded in them. I altered an old poem to fit the photo:
The fabric of spring I wanted to write a sentence with verdant, wanted to use the word lush, wanted it fragrant in word only. wanted it wordy, wanted to roll in the word green, needed the stains of the word grass on the knees of the word jeans, but all day the wind shook the japanese cherries and yesterday’s blossoms have popped like a piñatafull of confetti, blanketing the word lawn with the word pink, a magic shag carpet. I listen for its breath, small jean genie, must of earth behind my ears, rolling,wordless, in the new-woven fabric of spring.
And that brings me to the point of this post. When I lost my job last June, I intended to finish writing a children’s book, work on the rest of a novel, and find a publisher for my full-length poetry manuscript, Words with Friends. I finally accomplished one of those goals.
Today, I’m able to share that my poetry book will be published by Meat for Tea Press! I’m so freakin’ excited!
Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Waxing Poetic
I was
Luisa A. Igloria, Fontanel
a young mother when someone guided my thumb
to the hollow atop my newborn’s head, to feel the space
between the bones of the skull where they
had not knit together yet. Even now, I still turn
toward the idea of an opening, some keyhole
through which I can thread my undimmed longing.
Our days are filled like this, with conversations and songs and silence, and with questions like, “If you were a chip, what kind of chip would you be? What kind of chip would you like to be?” Which reminds me of a voice note question my partner asked me – what does your mind do when you’re walking? She knows how the inside of my mind is usually ten cinema screens competing for who can be the loudest or brightest or fastest or most bizarre…I notice that, somewhere in between footsteps and breath and retelling each other The Lord of the Rings, the noise has all but stopped.
And Niamh sings to me again, something they have created from the best lines we’ve spoken, about mountains and not giving up. They apologise that it doesn’t rhyme, and I say that the journey doesn’t rhyme – every day is unknowable. And then I consider that perhaps our footsteps are a sort of rhyme, and that each day, in its different textures and forms, has a series of small repetitions – chance encounters with Flor and Florus, Ken and Ali, the Belgians…how each different day echoes with blackberries and the way everything sparkles in sunlight after rain, and wrens and stonechats, oaks, beech.
Today began in Grasmere, in rain which switched in a moment to sunshine, and strong wind, until I gave up on my coat and let myself be drenched then dried. We walked over Hause Gap, and by Grisedale Tarn, black and grey and slapping at its shores, and down Grisedale Beck into Patterdale. All lividly beautiful, the world startled and bright in its rain and sunlight, but the best part of the day was the extra three miles to Brotherswater Inn via Hartsop, and how the poem of the journey rang loudly with harebells and bracken, hawkbit and tormentil and dandelion, yarrow and dock, thistle and nettle and clover, foxglove and wild thyme, so we were singing and the wild mountain thyme grows around the blooming heather.
Clare Shaw, Coast-to-Coast: Day 4
sun-striped path
the forest’s outbreath
fills our lungs[…]
Today is sunny, but through the weekend, the clouds hung on till afternoon, and I was chilly enough to wear a wool sweater. Here on the Northern California coast, we have entered the month of Fogust. In our cool and damp micro-clime, so perfect for redwoods, locals are amazed by the temperature if it reaches 70 degrees.
Annette Makino, Sizzling summer haiku
I have spent a delightful morning pondering Bruce Springsteen–we are almost to the 50th (gasp!) anniversary of the release of the Born to Run album. Born in the U.S.A. was my Springsteen entry point in the late summer of 1984, and then I got Born to Run later that autumn, in November. I liked it alright, but I don’t think that any other Springsteen album has captured my heart and imagination like Born in the U.S.A.
On the NPR program Fresh Air, I listened to this interview with Peter Ames Carlin, which explored the making of Born to Run–a fascinating glimpse of the creative process. Before I listened to that interview, I read Peter McWhorter’s piece in The Washington Post (hopefully a gift essay to read throughout the ages) about the Springsteen playlist that he listened to seven times–that’s all of Born to Run, plus eleven songs: “Rosalita,” “Prove It All Night,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “The River,” “Spirit in the Night,” “The Promised Land,” “Backstreets,” “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The Rising,” and “New York City Serenade.”
By listening to the playlist seven times, he gained a new appreciation for Springsteen, particularly the poetry of Springsteen. He has some interesting insights about poetry and the 21st century person: “My Bruce immersion teaches me that the reason poetry on the page is such a rarefied taste in America today isn’t that Americans don’t have a taste for verse. It’s because there are pop music artists whose lyrics scratch that itch, just as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Lowell once did. Taylor Swift’s music fits into the same category for me, as well as for many people over 40 I have spoken to about her work. I hear her songs as poetry; the music’s job is just to help get it across. And that’s what I hear when I listen to Springsteen: I hear poetry, and I hear Americans’ love of it.”
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Poetry of the Playlist, for Reviewers and for Students
I was listening to Mimi Klavarti yesterday. I was cutting my hedge, she was talking on the excellent Poems We Made Along The Way podcast. She was talking about writing constraints, and how they can help to open up creativity rather than constrict it. Have a listen (and to the back catalogue – they’re all great). I’m not sure this is what she had in mind, but I’m going with a self-imposed time constraint. I hope to finish this in the time it takes me to roast a chicken for dinner.
Ok, the chicken is the oven. We have an hour and 20 mins…go.
First, a quick update. Flo and I went to Norfolk for our annual shindig in Worstead. I was asked to read a few poems from CtD one evening round a campfire. It was lovely to be asked. It reiterated how nerve-wracking it is to read to family and friends. Being a bit pissed and it being dark didn’t help. My reading also set three others off reading too, so here’s to next year’s official poetry circle at the Worstead Festival. […]
Earlier in the week I’d been made aware of a series of readings by a new poetry collective called Femina Culpa. The three ladies behind it were reading round London and one such reading included a reading at Bethlem Museum of the Mind which is just down the road from me. My friend Ellie works at Bethlem, and I can’t not attend a poetry event that is that close to home.
All three readers read amazing tales and stories of women from the past and how they’ve suffered mental illness issues/made to suffer because of this. Check out Emma McKervey, Linda McKenna and Milena Williamson.
Mat Riches, A Chicken in the lighthouse
As artists, how do we want to spend the time and energy we have left? My energy is not what it was, I’ll be honest. And my time on this earth dwindles, as it does for us all. I’m at that surprising “experiencing ageism” time of life. I’m at that “being overlooked for the grants and awards and even minor recognitions” time of my writing life. It was probably going to happen anyway, but the 2020s hasn’t been kind (or generous) to many creatives, has it? I don’t even know what to advise myself these days so I certainly can’t dole out any advice to any of you. Keep trying? Stay weird, seems evergreen. I sort of want to just stop hustling or imagining what I could do as a side gig next. Is my time better spent writing obscure Canadian non-bestsellers and just staying home more? Probably? I feel like if I haven’t started a Substack by now, I missed the boat on that one, plus I don’t think I can write in Substack voice. I’m too small, too unimportant, too insignifcant (don’t worry, these have always been goals of mine) and too tired of that particular kind of hustle to garner any great subscription income.
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Visual Literacy
What interested me most about
paintings of Jesus was
the glow around his head
because I saw such auras everywhere
when sun silhouetted our cat
in the dining room window
or lit up dew on tall grasses.In later years I studied art
Ann E. Michael, Heaven, hell, & halos
and learned the problem of cheating
light from solid pigments
the paradox of density layered
so some artists applied gold dust
to depict the nimbus gleam.
I’ve also been questioning things like—should I even still be writing poetry, or is it time I give up on it and try something else? Should I spend my time doing paying work instead? It feels sort of futile to write poetry in today’s political environment—rampantly anti-academic, anti-art, anti-peace-tolerance-environmental-safety and pro guns, business and everything evil and destructive. It feels like no one is listening, even with much bigger platforms than mine. Maybe, I wonder, I should take up filmmaking. Maybe I should leave America for the adventure of exploring another country, another country, which might be more friendly to the arts (which seems like almost any country at this point). I could take up working at the local pumpkin farm (though heavy lifting would be out). I could sell makeup again. This may be a normal part of getting older. I can’t tell as I’ve never been this old before! Maybe things will make more sense when I can get more than an hour or so of sleep a night. I’ll check in with you next week.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Full Moons, Insomnia, Ends of Summer Gardens in Bloom, and Writing Questions at Midlife
Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.
— TWELFTH NIGHT, ACT 2 SCENE 5, LINES 139-41; MALVOLIO
In the month that I begin my Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, it feels right to use a quote from the man himself.
The truth is, I am a chronic self doubter. There is no fixing it. It is part of the strangeness of my brain. The only way of living with it is noticing it, embracing it, and doing the thing anyway.
A few weeks ago I spoke to a mentee about what was blocking their work, why they couldn’t get further on with their writing. They’d had a series of rejections, one after the other, and were doubling the validity of their work. This is something I recognise in myself. I go through periods of feeling like I might have fluked my entire career, that every time someone has validated my work it is because they either felt sorry for me or had made a mistake. Sometimes I imagine that the mistake they made is my fault, because I have given the impression that I am intelligent and competent and talented when I am very clearly not. It is like I have an entire other person inside me that is always telling me how shit I am, and I am never quite sure if they are telling the truth. […]
So far in my Folger Fellowship I have been deep diving the archives and attending seminars and meetings where I inevitably feel like a sore thumb. Most of my colleagues are American, a lot of them are academics. but Oh, the joy of hearing all the projects, the mental stimulation of being around people who are striving to explore so many different perspectives. It is the most creatively nourishing thing I have been involved with. the more I interact, the quieter the self doubt voice is, which tells me that this is a good fit. The confidence in the project is coming not from the validation of the achievement, but from the quality of the work; my work, other fellows work. It’s quite an astounding thing.
And so this is what I am carrying with me into August, and beyond. I will not fear an opportunity that may lead to greatness. I will not let the negative self talk put the fear in me. I will not let the fear [of] not deserving greatness, stop me from reaching for greatness.
Wendy Pratt, August Mantra: Be Not Afraid of Greatness
Hills recline in the distance
smudged by a hand working in pastel,
soft and slow the line where mountains meet violetand clouds lay back smoking fiery pipes.
Village, I am wordless.At a nearby campsite, a grill is about to be lit,
Jill Pearlman, Before the Fire, Dusk
about to blister some sausage. Blister until
twigs catch, vines chatter in the flames
like gossips with nothing on their minds.
I’m intrigued by this new collection, SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025), a poetry title that provides a complexity of literary response to “the relationship between environmental collapse and mental health,” and the precarity through which we currently live. “whereupon I join Lear and his Fool / on the blasted heath,” writes London, Ontario-based writer and speaker Jennifer Wenn, in the poem “Fire and Flood,” “and while the erstwhile king howls / at the gale and deluge I cower, / uselessly, / looking for a sign, [.]” There are multiple pieces echoing Wenn’s particular sentiment, seeking a sign or marker of hope through the gloom, with other pieces that rage their appropriate rage through the storm, or even a spiraling into a dark swirl of hopelessness. As Toronto-based poet,editor and translator Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi begins the poem “Movement XVI”: “that dark resignation to loss. how long to run after joy and just / find construction cones scattered. I take out the trash and who / knows maybe I’m resistant to pesticide. some relief comes in / the form of needles. I’m defeated by numbers. It simply won’t / happen.”” Sometimes the only way to respond to a crisis is to write through it, providing a clarity of thought and potential action, and this collection, put together as the result of a public call, provides an assemblage of first-person lyric narratives by some two dozen Canadian poets that shake to the roots of mental health and climate concern, providing both observational comfort and clarity to their sharpness. The collection includes contributions by Brandon Wint, Jennifer Wenn, Conal Smiley, Concetta Principe, Dominik Parisien, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammmadi, Kathryn Mockler, Tara McGowan-Ross, D.A. Lockhart, Grace Lau, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Aaron Kreuter, gregor Y kennedy, Maryam Gowralli, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Sydney Hegele, Karen Houle, Nina Jane Drystek, AJ Dolman, Conyer Clayton and Gary Barwin. There’s a precarity to these lyrics, these lines, one that writes directly into crisis […]
rob mclennan, SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, eds. Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland
The Dark, Howie Good, illustrations by Marcel Herms, Sacred Parasite, 2025, ISBN: 978-3-910822-11-5, ISBN: 978-3-910822-13-9, €20.00 […]
I’m a cancer survivor – for now, anyway.
Every three months, I must have blood drawn,
and my chest scanned, to determine if anycancer cells have migrated, nomads in search
of grass and water.
(from ‘The C Word’)These lines from somewhere near the middle of Howie Good’s The Dark serve as a keystone to the set of poems in verse and prose that surround them, a deep personal darkness. As the closing lines of the opening poem, ‘Subterranean Cancer Blues’ (with a hat-tip to Bob Dylan) spells out, the cancer patient acquires ‘the kind of knowledge that now/holds my eyes open to the dark.’
But the dark is not simply personal, or tied to present circumstances, as is seen in poems like ‘Elon Musk at Auschwitz’, in which the tech gobshite claims a kind of faux Jewishness, ‘Unholy Land’, whose title speaks for itself, or this:
Night of the Following Day
The person I went to sleep as wasn’t the same person I woke up as, half-drowned in sweat after traveling on motherless roads all night, seeing plants and animals bombed into submission, families forced to dig their own graves at gunpoint, tears evaporate on contact with the air, and only for me to arrive some six hours later back where I started but feeling barely present, like I was still miles and miles away from the redwing blackbird on the black branch.
For a poet living through personal and global extremes, the dark is not a metaphor, it’s a simple fact: ‘You stare into the dark for just so long before the dark begins staring back.’ It’s impossible in a short review to do justice to how Good receives that stare in these extraordinary short texts. You just have to read them.
Billy Mills, Six for the Pocket: A Small Pamphlets Review
Alice M. Fay (p. 1912-24, etc.), was a poet and illustrator from New York. She published her first book of poetry The Realm of Fancy: Poems & Pictures in 1912, and was featured in numerous ‘little magazines’ of the 1920s, including Rhythmus (edited by Oscar Williams) and Pegasus (edited by W.H. Lench). Other than this, little is known of her life.
into air—
the scent of a violet sings!Both Fay’s drawings and verse are comprised of accomplished line-work and subtle, suggestive forms, drawn from the ephemerality of the natural world. ‘Where’, for instance, is a delicate micro-treatise on poetics, in which the scent of flowers and vanishing smoke are compared to the songs of the singer: i.e. the poetry of the world is to be found in the invisible and ephemeral, rather than the visible and permanent. Echoing this, in ‘Near Crete’ the sound of the waves become poet: “whispering tales… of ships that come no more.” Again the image arrives and then disappears. Poetry: always vanishing.
serene as the mountains—
thy loveFay’s work also has feminist and queer undertones. In ‘Beyond’, for instance, Fay seeks a world “untenanted by men,” i.e. beyond patriarchy: “beyond the veil of future’s mystery.” In ‘All This Is Thy Love To Me’ Fay appears to be addressing another woman, and their “love” is described in terms that would have dominantly been read as “feminine” at that time (fair, calm, mysterious, angelic). Furthermore, as neither poet nor lover have textually definite genders, the subject-positions of the poem are left open to suggestion, able to be occupied by readers of any gender and sexuality.
Dick Whyte, Alice M. Fay – 5 Short Poems (1912-24)
I much admired Richard Scott’s second collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, Faber, published earlier this year. As in several of Pascale Petit’s collections, this contains work which very skilfully, and with a marvellous ear for musical cadence , transforms the pain of sexual abuse into beautiful poetry. Each of the 21 poems in the first section, Still Lifes, responds to a different still life painting by painters from the 1600s onwards to Bonnard. The second part, a response to Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’ felt less successful, as it employs Seventeenth Century language in a manner verging on parody. The third section contains 22 poems after types of crystals and gemstones, as refracted through Rimbaud’s Illuminations as translated by Wyatt Mason, and are, for me, the most successful in the book, because the prose-poem form allows Scott to give fuller vent to his gift for articulating emotion through vivid and sensuous imagery and language, as in this extract from ‘Emerald’:
The field is a body. Wild grass rippling over breasts and muscles, the jut of a hipbone. Some of the grass is trampled down into mud like a battlefield – screams catch the air. Some of the grass is spread over little hillocks like shallow graves. Some of the grass is cut into a bit, desire lines and goat paths, leading to all the places you ever dreamed of going but didn’t.
As I discovered from listening to his interview with Peter Kenny in Series 5, Episode 10 of the ever-excellent Planet Poetry podcast, here, Scott talks very thoughtfully and eloquently about his craft.
I’ve also been knee-deep in the poems of Wisława Szymborska, as translated by Clare Cavanagh and collected in Map, Houghton Miflin Harcourt, 2015, for the poetry book club I’m part of. My jury is still out thus far, but then it’s a heftily daunting tome.
Matthew Paul, July reading
“Hexentanz” (literally ‘witches’ dance’) has an epigraph from Mary Wigman a dancer in 1926, “But, after all, isn’t a bit of witch hidden in every female?”
“To be inside language – the body as prayer,
as incantation, a strike of lightning.
To be earthed and barefoot
to be creature; muscle and cells.
To fly: to know space beneath you.And who needs music when you have breath,
when you are the daughter to the Mother of Sighs?”Dancing has often been linked to sinful behaviour and the devil. Here it’s a prayer to understand the power of a woman’s body, to inhabit it free from society’s rules and regulations. Here, dancing is both a connection to earth and an ability to fly and it doesn’t even require music. Breathing has a rhythm, that’s all that’s needed. […]
Helen Ivory in “Constructing a Witch” explores the witch archetype and how woman, particularly those who don’t conform to society’s expectations, are cast as inferior, and pushed to society’s edges. An exploration that includes how patriarchal structures ignore the needs of women, left in ignorance about their own bodies because menstruation and menopause make them “too difficult” for medicine to study.
Emma Lee, “Constructing a Witch” Helen Ivory (Bloodaxe) – book review
The shortlist for the eco-poetry/nature poetry Laurel Prize 2025 has just been announced. The finalists – judged this year by the poets Kathleen Jamie (Chair), Daljit Nagra, and the former leader & co-leader, Green Party of England and Wales Caroline Lucas – are (in alphabetical order):
Judith Beveridge Tintinnabulum (Giramondo Publishing)
JR Carpenter Measures of Weather (Shearsman Books)Carol Watts
Eliza O’Toole A Cranic of Ordinaries (Shearsman Books)
Katrina Porteous Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books)
Carol Watts Mimic Pond (Shearsman Books)[…]
The premise of Eliza O’Toole’s superb debut collection, A Cranic of Ordinaries, is unpromising: a year’s cycle of diaristic pieces in which the poet walks her dog through the Stour valley. But the result is a sublime form of ecopoetry which is visionary, yet creaturely and incarnate, and to achieve this O’Toole channels two great nineteenth century writers. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ joys in the things of Nature which are always ‘here and but the beholder / Wanting’. When self and natural world do communicate, Hopkins named that flash of true relationship ‘instress’. O’Toole’s ‘Stour Owls’ records just such a moment, listening to the calls of a female tawny owl, the ‘slight pin-thin / hoot’ of the male, followed by a tense silence: ‘then the low slow of the barn owl as the / white slide of her glide brushes the air we / both hold & then breathe’ (12).
O’Toole also adopts Emerson’s idea of the ‘transparent eyeball’, seeing all, yet being itself ‘nothing’. The excision of the self’s perspective is systematically pursued. Seldom is the landscape ‘seen’ but is rather subject to plain statement: ‘It was a machine-gun of a morning’ (11), ‘a vixen-piss of a morning’ (13), ‘a muck spread of a morning’ (34). O’Toole has an extraordinarily observant eye, but this repeated trope counters any taint of the constructed picturesque, the human-centring of vanishing points and perspective. The observer grows ‘part or parcel’ of the world. Such a vision makes demands on language because in truth, ‘It is necessary / to write what cannot be written’ (94), and this yields one of the most exciting aspects of this collection as the poet deploys varieties of plain-speaking, scientific, ancient, and esoteric vocabularies as well as a Hopkinsesque ‘unruly syntax’. She describes ‘young buds. Just starting from / the line of life, phloem sap climbing, / a shoot apical meristem and post / zygotic. It was bud-set’ (26).
Martyn Crucefix, Laurel Prize Shortlist 2025 – My Favourite Is….!
The promise was
PF Anderson, Once upon a time there was a promise
graceful, writing a book made up of leaves
(birch, catalpa, magnolia, maple);
made up of leaves and love and hands and words
choked out in last breaths exhaled in dark nights,
made up of whispers woven together
from the humid tenderness of two dear
embodied beings tangling their breath.
The encouragement to Tell It Slant! has become popular among many CW lecturers and workshop leaders over the last few years, seemingly as a natural extension of the old favourite, Show, Don’t Tell!, but what does it actually mean?
Matthew Stewart, Telling It Slant
Well, it refers to an approach to writing that veers away from dealing with stuff head-on. Its inherent attraction lies in the opportunity it provides for the poet to explore new perspectives and fresh takes on seemingly tired subjects by coming at them via unusual angles, often omitting bits that would be obvious if treated directly, thus intriguing and challenging the reader. As such, its use is widely seen to be lending the poem extra gravitas and depth.
However, there are also consequent risks in its deployment. One is the accusation that the poet is being wilfully obtuse, frustrating the reader, playing a pointless game by holding back information, the absence of which creates the false impression of extra layers to the poem that actually don’t exist. And another is its tempting propensity for enabling emotional shortcuts that skirt round the potential core of the poem.
From my perspective, Tell It Slant! is useful as a weapon in a creative armoury. However, its overuse in contemporary poetry as an all-encompassing method leads poets down a blind alley, causing many poems to fizzle out before they can take their reader on a journey. And for my money, that journey is where poetic truth is found.
I have experienced some great times in the company of poets. Mostly, poets on their own, having a drink or a chat. Obviously, there is joy in experiencing a ‘good’ reading or book launch.
I am glad for anyone who has ‘a community’, whether this consists of one other weirdo who writes poems, or a group who gather regularly to do something communal, or people who move in circles where they feel supported and connected and perhaps mutually celebrated and facilitated.
I don’t feel particularly connected myself, but never set out to be, and am not sure I want or need to be, and it has always been a ‘bonus’ rather than a central aspect of my writing and publishing and (occasional) teaching that their are individuals whom I know and like who do the same thing, and I hope they are well and flourishing ‘out there’ somewhere. […]
Why do people communicate online as if I am privy to backstories and assumptions about themselves and others that I have no knowledge of? I believe issues and people are complex, but encounter anger and simplicity all the time on the internet, and it leaves me none the wiser. Where is the poetry in this? […]
What if, when I check out substack etc, I find there are poets and publishers attacking poets and publishers? What if there are personal battles being conducted online that are disturbing and polarising, and watching them unfold might become as addictive an unproductive as watching car crashes, or as unfulfilling and spiritually nourishing as listening to gossip?
Roy Marshall, ‘Poetry is about community.’
Many magazines these days offer writers a chance to get feedback on their submitted work for an additional cost. The cost typically ranges from $25- $40. When I posted my series about scammy lit mags, almost all of them had one thing in common: They offered feedback to writers who paid for it. However, many reputable magazines offer this option too. So, should you go for it? If so, whom should you trust?
Firstly, I want to talk about why this is happening, a trend that seems to be recent, as I do not recall so many journals offering this option ten or more years ago. Costs of running a lit mag, as we all know, can be high. Many editors seem to be taking on editing/consulting work as a way to offset those rising fees.
It also seems to be a response to a workforce that is ever more precarious. Few and far between are the stable academic jobs for writers. Meanwhile the professional competition is stiffer than ever. Writers don’t just have MFAs; they have PhDs. There are more people seeking careers related to writing, and fewer secure opportunities, than ever before.
So we hustle. Any writer/editor who does not have a full-time job is likely making a living from piecing together a variety of income streams. Teaching. Consulting. Website development. Copywriting. Editing. And so on. Very few lit mag editors are able to make their living solely as magazine editors.
I provide this bit of context because when I first began to consider this trend of editors offering feedback, it got me worried. How can they possibly have time to read submissions, I wondered, if they’re also consulting on particular submissions in great detail? Why would editors think they are the ones who know what’s best for a particular work and a particular writer? Shouldn’t their focus be on their magazines?
Then I took a step back and looked at the larger picture. No, I realized. Sadly, the majority of editors cannot afford to be solely focused on their magazines because that work does not pay. With that in mind, I came around to viewing these additional editorial offerings as a good thing. The workforce for writers is grinding indeed (and most lit mag editors are also writers.) Anything anyone can do to honestly and ethically sustain oneself in this environment is commendable.
Becky Tuch, Q: Should you pay for editorial feedback from lit mag editors?
A lavish and wonderful celebration of connections between mathematics and the arts is the annual international BRIDGES, Mathematics and the Arts Conference. This year’s conference took place last month (July, 2025 in Eindhoven, Netherlands) and one of its special events was a poetry reading.
Information about the poets and sample poems are available here at the website of Sarah Glaz (mathematician-poet and coordinator of the BRIDGES readings). Below I have included one of these very special poems:
View no Fiery Night by Marian Christie
No
one
went to
the tower
to vie with the foe.
Fretting, worn, we rove in night fog ––
the ring, the theft, the vow forgotten. Hovering high
over the town, the frightening wyvern, whirr of her winging interwoven with fire.First published in Christie’s collection Sky, Earth, Other (Penteract Press, 2024). Note that this is a Fibonacci poem — with the syllable counts for the lines following the Fibonacci numbers. ALSO, each line is formed from letters found in the English words for the Fibonacci numbers up to the line count — one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty one; Christie uses the term “sequential lipogram” to describe this pattern.
For lots more wonderful stuff by Marian Christie, you may visit her blog, Poetry and Mathematics.
JoAnne Growney, Celebrating Poetry at 2025 BRIDGES Conference
Of course, it is still summer. Another month or more of summer. Please, let us make no mistake about that! But why is it that as soon as the calendar turns a page over to August, the sense of new socks and homemade soup come back to the front in my mind.
But I’m not there yet. There are still manuscripts to edit, a garden to care for, and a 15th Anniversary Poets on the Coast to finish planning. And what a POTC it will be!
Kelli Russell Agodon and I began this retreat for women poets because we felt that we could create a poetry community based on generosity and abundance —of writing prompts, of snacks, and poetry gifts. Fifteen years later, it looks like we were right. Women who began committing to their writing, to themselves, have gone on to publish their first books, earn MFA’s, become poet laureates, and even win a National Book Award. Sure, these capable women might not have “needed” Poets on the Coast to begin their journeys, but I like to think we helped at least in small measure.
Susan Rich, What I Did (Am Doing) On My Summer Vacation
I feel like every year at this point in the summer, I start thinking about fall and musing endlessly about how much I am going to get done. It’s harder this year to feel hopeful and productive in a nation under siege by idiots, but I am trying to hang in there, writing silly little poems that feel like they can save my soul a little and grinding at the grind that keeps the gears rolling.
Mostly, I am pushing through toward a little trip up to Wisconsin end of this week. We’re visiting family for a day up at the campgrond where my grandmother used to keep her RV, the site of most of my childhood summer memories. I have been back occasionally since (my aunt & uncle had their place parked there for decades, and now so do my older cousins on my dad’s side) but haven’t really been in about a decade. The beach nearby we used to go to is gone now and replaced by a boat launch, but the air, last time we were there, was much the same. I could almost smell the Coppertone and the rubber of pink innertubes.
This week has bought some rejections and at least once acceptance, plus a new poem in Fantastic Other from winged. I am finding, now that I am submitting work more regularly, that my rejection/acceptance rate is still about the same. 4:12, so about 1/3, which isn’t terrible, but has remained pretty consistent from other times when I was submitting a lot of work into the wilds (though it waxes and wanes depending on the competitiveness and/or age of the journal (I do like submitting to brand new publications, or at least new to me, so that rate is sometimes a little higher.)
Right now, I am sending out a mix of different projects, including the Iphigenia poems as I compile them into the book, winged, another little oceanic series, some early pieces from the midnight garden, plus fragments from the sci-fi-ish series I finished up earlier this year.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 8/11/2025
I saw her smile.
Sitting alone on a green park bench.As if she was dreaming a happy poem.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, The poem at 16:00 on a random Thursday
(But what is that?)
Or had found the right words for something
more desperate, more evil, more macabre.
Or had remembered a woolly line from a poem that
was fully formed in the middle of the night
but had vanished with its commas before the sun.
A trip to Manchester for Liz Gibson’s book launch resulted in me receiving a new description of my hair. Wait for it… “anti-gravity hair”. A chance encounter whilst queuing for tea and cake meant a man took the opportunity to tell me he liked my anti-gravity hair. I am adding that description to “You always have really surprised hair,” and they both make me chuckle.
The book launch was a delight from start to finish. I have always loved liz’s poetry and to have a whole collection to enjoy is celebratory. It was wonderful to hear them read by the author and I love the additional immersion in words this brings. The evening included guest readers and an interview with the artist who designed the cover for ‘A Love the Weight of An Animal’. A perfect way to launch this well written collection.
I am the ‘Silver Branch’ featured writer this month for Black Bough so I thought I would share a poem from the ones celebrated there…
Sue Finch – August 2025 | Mysite
It’s a prose poem to celebrate the fact I love prose poems and that Kath recently exclaimed, “You mean there are poets who write whole books of prose poems?”
GOING TO THE CAVES
I am in a long queue for the cave tour. Stalagmites and stalactites are promised. I fear tightness, and more than that, being trapped. The guide tells us that we will see crystals the like of which we’ve never seen before. Then he warns us that there are times when it smells like multi-storey car park stairwells and sometimes all the torches fail. When I look at him, he reaches into his pocket. Here, he says, as if reading my mind, if you can’t get out, take one of these. He offers me a circular, chalky-white tablet which I accept as he nods. It will kill you painlessly, almost instantly. I follow him, wondering if I will swallow the pill.
Sue Finch, EVENING SUN
Why do I keep scrolling when it so often leaves me feeling disheartened or disgusted or in despair?
Because in the scroll I keep discovering new voices saying things I want and need to hear. Because that’s how I often see words from writers who always give me comfort. Because through it I have found kindred spirits in places geographically far from me, and those connections matter and count. (Physical proximity does not guarantee honesty or transparency or an ability to know who someone is. Believe me on that one.) Because it is often in disembodied digital spaces that I find knowledge and understanding I might not acquire through print books or my IRL relationships and activities. Because our online world is its own kind of real. The idea of cutting myself entirely off from it feels like the equivalent of fantasizing about living off-grid in a secluded forest cabin: Sounds kinda dreamy, but I know that I would not last a winter in such a place. Because inside the cacophony of the trivial, the mundane, the hucksterish, the phony, the ridiculous, and the fear-mongering voices, there are others telling truths that build a fire in the cold.
In response to one of my questions, a writer/friend tells me: “Everything feels fluid right now. And a bit unreal. We can just check in on the voices that feel authentic and know that we’re OK.”
Another offers: “I am a big believer in retreat. Sometimes it’s exactly what we need.” She then points me to Andrea Gibson’s “Instead of Depression,” and tears rise at, “Sleep through the alarm/of the world. Name your hopelessness/a quiet hollow, a place you go/to heal…”
Another (or maybe one of these, it is easy to get lost in the bread crumb trails) points me to Elizabeth Kleinfeld, whose recent words in “Grieving My Beautiful Before” knocked the wind out of me:
The grief I felt for my old life hit me. I kind of put off grieving for it by pretending I was going to get back to it, but now that I’m practicing radical acceptance, I realize I can’t get back to it. I can only build a great new life, which leaves me free to grieve that old life. It is knocking the wind out of me.
I trust these voices.
(I still have trust. I refuse to lose trust. That’s a choice I’m making.) […]
Don’t we all, like Whitman, contain multitudes? Aren’t we all sometimes the person running the stop sign and sometimes the person getting hit and sometimes the person recording from the sidewalk and sometimes the person stopping to call 911? Aren’t we all sometimes the tide rushing in and sometimes the waves ebbing in retreat and sometimes the swimmer not waving but drowning and sometimes the person floating on their back, letting the water hold them, because they need a reprieve from kicking?
Rita Ott Ramstad, Letting the salty flood wash over me
seagulls laughing all day long
Kati Mohr, A Touch of Teal, No, Blue
two smooth stones in my pocket