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: listener poets, an undocumented sun, a mind full of scorpions, the whisper between things, and much more. Enjoy.
I met a poem that left without
saying a word. I still remember it by heart.Somewhere between the lake and
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Late dirge for the undead
the glass house on a nothing afternoon
in Lalbagh, a peepal tree fell.
Four dozen people never
heard it. Never looked up from
their phones. Did the tree fall?
TGLP is a nonprofit that works with hospitals and other healthcare organizations to reduce stress, anxiety, and burnout, and to increase human connection, using the tools of listening and poetry. The organization has been doing listener poet sessions since 2018 at places like Sibley Memorial Hospital at Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic, and Harvard Medical School’s Center for Primary Care. TGLP works with doctors, nurses, residents, medical students, patients, and family members, all to help people feel heard.
As soon as I heard about this practice, I had to learn more. I’ve been a listener and a poet my whole life, and these modes of being have played significant roles in my career. Being an active listener made me a better journalist, communicator, and leader. Being a poet (even a shy one, of “Barefoot Rank”) has helped me stay attuned to the power and dynamism of language, and it’s made me a better writer and editor. Listening has been an increasingly important part of my spiritual practice in the past decade. […]
The course was a profound experience. Over five weeks in June, ten of us came together twice a week, for three hours each time. Our cohort included a wide range of amazing and talented individuals with deep experience across both poetry and healthcare. Our instructor, Ravenna Raven, led the course with dedication, enthusiasm, expertise, and a terrific sense of emotional availability and vulnerability. She created a welcoming, nurturing, exciting space for learning. […]
We studied poetic techniques, listening skills, how to hold space, trauma-informed practices, crisis management skills, how to connect across difference, and more. We heard from guest speakers, all of them experienced listener poets, who inspired us with stories of healing and writing. We practiced listening to and writing poems for each other and for one remarkable guest, a neurologist with a love of poetry that he longed to share with his patients.
And then, during the course of July, we did a practicum: Each of us held six listening poetry sessions and wrote six poems for six different individuals. I had the honor of spending time with eight amazing “poemees” and writing poems for them (I did two extra because of scheduling complications). It gave me a window into the worlds of those I listened to, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be a therapist, a doctor, a nurse, a chaplain, or just a human being dealing with change, pain, and complexity. And they told me that the poems they received were moving, inspiring, and encouraging.
As for the course’s impact on me, reading Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry and Singing School and James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line sparked a personal renaissance in how I approach the music and meter of the mostly free verse I write. Learning how to distill interview notes into poems was the transformative practice I was looking for. I know how to hold a conversation, form a connection, and draw people out: I’ve practiced this for years. Now I can use those skills to write poems for them in addition to bylines.
As a listener poet, I can use my journalistic and poetic skills together in the service of helping people feel heard and helping them express deep emotions and experiences. Like other listener poets, I can bring gifts of presence and poetry to those who need them.
Dylan Tweney, When listening and poetry collide
I go to the hospital, come back wired up.
Bob Mee, WIRED UP, AND OTHER POEMS
They’re checking what my heart does if I pick up and carry a sack of pig feed,
haul dead branches to the boundary fence, what happens
if I become angry, disappointed, sad, ordinarily happy, ecstatically happy, calm, still.
If I shout. If I sing. In tune, out of tune. If I stay silent. Breathe normally. Hold my breath.
They already know my heart short-circuits and re-routes itself.
They want to check what I remember, what I forget.
They want to check who I’ve avoided, who I’ve embraced.
They want to know about love, faith, politics, education (self or formal).
They want to know how come I earned a living doing what I couldn’t understand.
This week’s revisit started in the unlikely inspo of a Pinterest account. A user decided it would be amusing to create a stylish and bougie faux child to populate her pages of decor, fashion, and other pins. It was intriguing, the idea of an imaginary kid, let alone one with incredibly unrealistic and elite tastes. As someone who did not plan to have actual children, and who often thinks of writing projects as strange and wordy offspring of sorts, I started writing prose poems that addressed my own mythical daughter, with an eye toward exploring how it feels to be childless by choice in a world that (even more now) finds that unusual. The series of poems wound up being one of my shorter collage zines, first in print, but you can also read an e-version now. Later, it was also included in FEED, which is all about mothers and mothering.
Kristy Bowen, throwback thursday | impossible objects
the booming of whale song
Jim Young, a poem for Salem’s poem
hooves across the savanna
the screech of a raptor
a breath at sunset
moonsong above
the crackle of a camp fire
the yes of locked eyes
yes
some words reverberate
homeless in the tome of the ear
We have a thing we call consciousness that we think nothing else has. This consciousness should make us “know better,” should make us able to monitor the results of our actions, and change them for the common “good,” to work against “evil,” for the benefit of our species, our environment, our future. But that is not how we, homo so-called sapiens, operate. We are a learning species, but we don’t grasp the lessons.
It feels like the virus also let loose an epidemic of evil. It started with small refusals: to mask, to distance, to take heed, to be careful. But has blown into a worldwide festering of hate and fear, and a glory of violence, of willful ignorance. It is breathtaking, the velocity and breadth of this epidemic, and how meager the efforts against it, we conscious species the world over.
We are the belching spew, cyclical in our disasters.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, they say in French. The more things change, the more they are the same damn thing. Here is a poem from the recent issue of Blackbird.
Marilyn McCabe, teasing out a future that wouldn’t be
An undocumented sun flees gestapo horizon before morning’s first light.
Secret police riddle it with bullets, and the sun falls, sharing its blood-red light.
It’s just past the honeysuckle hour, and the scent hangs like the death of innocence.
Rich Ferguson, Just Past the Honeysuckle Hour
Another piece of bad news (which has to be read through the filter of even worse news, of course) came through—people who applied for the NEA got the notice that their applications would not be read and NEA grants to writers and artists were cancelled. America just keeps getting greater, right?
I have never won an NEA grant—but it seems like another chip at the arts and academia and anyone that might not tow the party line from the Republicans. Writers and artists are notoriously not easy to control, and that’s not okay in Trump’s fascist government, as it hasn’t been with many dictators—Chairman Mao, Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot. I had a friend post on Facebook that her lecture at an Air Force academy was cancelled after someone looked up her work online—although the people who invited her were apologetic, they were not in control. So, this government really is afraid of artists’ speech. Standing up to power has always been our job, but now there are more consequences. I posted on Facebook that Trump’s government is going to make all the talent with the means and energy to move leave the country, and someone commented that that was the point. Trump doesn’t want anyone here who dares to criticize.
Even though I’ve been fighting my health problems, I also feel like I’m fighting the anti-art forces as well, like a video game where you fight one boss, and six more appear. You know, writers and artists are already struggling to earn a living in a society that wants its art for free (or created by AI). Every little bit that’s taken away is a little bit of a chance for an artist to breathe easy, financially, for a little bit. I am struggling with how to earn a living as a writer and survive in a society that doesn’t value the sickly, or the disabled, and I am both. I mean, almost all of our writing heroes were sickly—not all, but a lot. I hope to keep writing, keep publishing, keep teaching and reading and mentoring. Maybe my body and my country throw up obstacles that sometimes feel insurmountable. As we head into a new season (though it’s still in the nineties here for some reason), I am looking for hope.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Parents Visit and Sibling Visit, Getting Sick Under Stress, and Writers and Artists Dumped by the NEA
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACHIEVE?
A gold medal pings into my mind as the question lands between us in the silence. But I can’t say gold medal because I don’t know exactly what I want it for. My mind pictures me standing there at the award ceremony, bowing my head forward a little in readiness for the presentation. The ribbon brushes my hair, and I feel the warmth of the fingers of the woman transferring the medal as her hands knock against my ears. My head is cumbersome. People with cumbersome heads shouldn’t be getting medals. The applause suddenly feels false, and I didn’t even hear the start of it. I need to hear the beginning of the congratulatory clap. I need to be in the moment. I change my wish. I want a gold medal that fits easily over my head. No, I know what I want… I want a head that fits through the gap in a medal ribbon without causing a kerfuffle for the person handling the ceremony. I want it all to look flawless so everyone remembers me standing on that podium being given a medal. Given, that’s an interesting word. Medals are won not given. Not in a tombola, one in a hundred chance kind of way. You earn a medal by setting a goal and working on it. Over and over again until you are the best you can be. There’s that question again, What would you like to achieve?
Sue Finch, NEW SHOES
My dog told me he had learned eighty-one languages on the internet.
They were Abkhaz, Acehnese, Acholi, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alur, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Avar, Awadhi, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Balinese, Baluchi, Bambara, Baoulé, Bashkir, Basque, Batak Belarusian, Bemba, Bengali, Betawi, Bhojpuri, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Buryat, Cantonese, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chechen, Chichewa, Chinese, Chuukese, Chuvash, Corsican, Crimean Tatar, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dhivehi, Dinka, Dogri, Dombe, Dutch, Dyula, Dzongkha, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Ewe, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, Fon, French, Frisian, Friulian, Fulani, Ga, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Guarani, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hakha Chin, Hausa, Hawaiian and Hebrew.
He admitted he still had much to learn. Still, it’s impressive, I said. What motived you? The desire, he said, to speak to all living things, whether creature or plant, chancellor or fern. Snails, rocks, tractors, clouds. Of course, what he really said was, Bark bark bark bark! because though I did high school French and a bit of Spanish in college, I never learned language beyond that of my own people, an insular and trepidatious tribe who cleaved to their tongue as if it were both a small fire and the inside of a tank.
Gary Barwin, My dog learned 81 languages on the Internet
Who are the grape poets? What are their grape poems? And is grape poetry possible any more? These are questions people often ask me — at least, I think that’s what they’re asking.
Grape poetry, of course, begins with the classical world. The opening lines of Virgil’s Georgics — here translated by John Dryden — promise us sound advice on growing our own:
What makes a plenteous Harvest, when to turn
The fruitful Soil, and when to sowe the Corn;
The Care of Sheep, of Oxen, and of Kine;
And how to raise on Elms the teeming Vine[…]
By the Victorian era, the pleasure of eating a bunch of grapes in polite society had become a trial of decorum. Grape scissors were invented for snipping off fruit from a bunch at the table, and a book called The Manners and Tone of Good Society (1879) described how to eat them gracefully, by performing a kind of conjuring trick:
When eating grapes, the half closed hand should be placed to the lips and the stones and skins adroitly allowed to fall into the fingers and quickly placed on the side of the plate, the back of the hand concealing the manoeuvre from view.
It was in such a context of delicacy and restraint that our next grape poet, Christina Rossetti, allowed the young Laura, in Goblin Market (1862), to be led into sensuous temptation by “pellucid grapes without one seed”:
How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes.Had “luscious” and “bushes” ever been rhymed before in the history of English verse? There’s something outrageous here about their casual pairing, which rewrites the more conventional rhyme associated with Laura’s more conventional sister, Lizzie, earlier in the same passage: “Among the brookside rushes, / […] /Lizzie veil’d her blushes”.
Where, though, can we find grape poetry in the modern era? J. Alfred Prufrock doesn’t dare to eat a peach, and there are no grapes to be had in The Waste Land (1922), although there is Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, with his “pocket full of currants” — one of Eliot’s many images of dryness, as well as one of his allusions to classical civilization (the etymology of “currants” takes us back to the ancient Greek city of Corinth).
This allusiveness is, I think, typical of the fate of grape poetry in the twentieth century. Like the plums in William Carlos Williams’ icebox, the grapes of the modern poet are both there and not there. So, Wallace Stevens calls a poem “In the Clear Season of Grapes” (1923), but the only fruit in it is “a platter of pears, / Vermilion smeared over green”. “The clear season of grapes” is, however, the poem’s subtly metonymic way of evoking a specific time and place: early autumn in north-east America (“This conjunction of mountains and sea and our lands”), where clear skies produce the “welter of frost” that sweetens the harvest of native grape varieties.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Who Are the Grape Poets?
Because sometimes our days don’t turn out as we planned. Because there are people who go to work every day to help the rest of us navigate the maladies of the body. Because modern pharmaceuticals not only reduce suffering but take us to a place we fondly remember from our youth. And because sometimes a poem is born in the unexpected places in which we find ourselves, I am thrilled to have my poem “Ode to the Emergency Room” published at The Poetry Lighthouse for the month of August. I hope you check it out here: The Poetry Lighthouse.
Carey Taylor, Ode to the Emergency Room
I was going to ask Sarah Corbett for permission to post her poem ‘View of a Badger on the Heights Road’ from her collection, A Perfect Mirror, but I didn’t get round to asking. However, here’s part of the first stanza.
It looks like a clean death, curled as you are
on the verge, almost relaxed, paws folded
over each other, head turned to the side.
Not a trace of earth on you, killed on a night
walk, perhaps, on this treacherous moor road.++++
I wanted to post this poem because a week or so ago Rachael and I were driving down to Dungeness and I saw a badger on the side of the road (M20, I think) that looked like someone had just pushed over a taxidermied badger. It looked stiff, but untouched.I was doing some quality Sunday driving, but still didn’t properly register it, so I sort of forgot about the badger until later that night when I picked out my copy of A Perfect Mirror from my TBR* pile. Well, blass me, thass a rumun‘ (Ask a person from Norfolk) I thought when I saw the aforementioned poem on page 15.
Mat Riches, Lodge (49) some dates in your memory
The memory of doing is the memory
Luisa A. Igloria, Memory of Doing
of exactitude broken up by lapses
in space. I relearn patience folding
pages into folios, making sure
the grain of paper runs in the same
direction. I stack them and prepare
to sew— concentrating as you push the needle
shaped like a smile into holes I’ve
made with an awl. Between breaths, the noise
of the world can seem to soften;
its edges waxed and cut into lengths like
linen thread. Someone filmed a rare
golden cicada in the moment it shrugged
itself loose from its shell,
and I marveled at such precision. Clean
seams, tiny beautiful ruffled wings.
There are lyrical poems in James Fenton’s Out of Danger, and then there are poems that are very nearly song lyrics. Both give pleasure, though arguably pleasure of different kinds. The book has keen observation, social conscience, and musical intelligence in abundance. Are the rhymes worn-out in places, like tires losing their treads? Maybe, but the Philippines and other South Pacific islands provide new rhymes and treads.
Pádraig Ó Tuama is a genial, acute, and personable guide to these 50 poems about a range of outward-looking subjects. It is a good snapshot of contemporary Anglo-American verse, with a few oldies thrown in. I did not think that all the poems were as good as Ó Tuama said, but it would be a big surprise if I did.
Jee Leong Koh, James Fenton’s OUT OF DANGER and Pádraig Ó Tuama’s POETRY UNBOUND
Mary Mulholland has been steadily building up an impressive body of work over the last decade and more: her latest publication, the elimination game, published by Broken Sleep Books and available here, is her second solo pamphlet, following her 2022 Live Canon debut What the sheep taught me, in addition to her two Nine Pens collaborations with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell. Mary is also the founder of the Red Door Poets (details here), of whom I was an original member; I can testify to Mary’s deep poetic intuition and generosity.
With intelligence, humour and carefully contained ire, the elimination game tackles the stereotypes, pitfalls and apparent invisibility of older women in contemporary British society. As a late-middle-aged man in the same society, I can’t, and don’t, pretend to know what it feels like to be an older woman in Britain today, but Mary’s poems provide a good idea.
The content contains a plethora of memorable lines and images, such as the eponymous hero of ‘The General’s Widow’ who, once ‘The funeral’s over’ finds ‘it’s such a relief, / she’ll spend the night making paper planes, / hurl them at his eyes, nose and brains’, and the title-poem in which a litany of misogynist and agist insulting terms for older women are rebuffed in no uncertain terms (‘kindly wait while i /find a bucket to list & puke in’) and then refuted by another, much more positive litany of achievements: ‘last year I swam in the / arctic trekked the sahara then / mastered roller-blading next up / i’m starting classes in mandarin’.
Matthew Paul, On Mary Mulholland’s ‘Stilling Time’
I’m sure there will be many readers whose knowledge of Margaret of Anjou is derived largely from Shakespeare’s histories in which she is portrayed as a hateful, ruthless and unfeminine figure, ‘the she-wolf of France’. In Daughter of Fire (Yaffle, 2025) Lucy Heuschen seeks to rehabilitate Margaret’s image. However, this is more than a poetic biography of a maligned historical figure, by giving voice to a woman of the past Heuschen seeks to explore the nature of womanhood and our society’s treatment of women both then and now.
There is no doubt that this collection is the product of considerable historical knowledge and a prodigious poetic talent. Based on primary historical sources, Heuschen creates a character very different to Shakespeare’s female villain. In Rough Crossing we meet first-hand the fifteen-year-old Margaret of Anjou travelling to meet her prospective husband, Henry VI. Understandably she is a little bewildered, (‘how is it I am here/ but not here’) and anxious (‘I tense’); she is in a new strange world (‘his accent makes me laugh’), and yet the poem ends with an assertion of an ambition surprising for one so young, when she says ‘I will/ tame you//my England.’ Note the possessive pronoun, this is a political marriage. She will be a wife and a queen. There is no hesitation: but rather acceptance and determination given emphasis here by the bluntness and simplicity of the statement.
We see the same ambition in Margaret and Suffolk at the chess board. This is clearly early in her reign. The description of her in the opening stanza is significant: ‘She skulks in her chair/ scowling at the state of play.’ The alliteration gives the verbs here particular emphasis: ‘skulk’ and ‘scowl’. Skulking suggests that Margaret is yet to reveal her true self, and the reason for this and her ‘scowl’ is made clear subsequently. As in the chess game, currently she lacks stratagem. This game is a symbol of her status: at the moment she lacks political skills, understanding of ‘Patterns she should predict, / sacrifices she could make’ and as a consequence ‘She watches him take/ piece after piece.’ It is also the case that the political system is loaded against women: she remarks at the end of the poem ‘It is silly, n’est-ce pas, this rule/ that only the King can leap.’ However, she is not prepared to accept her current position: she wants to learn the rules of the game to become an effective player: ‘She wants to see every move/ laid out to the checkmate.’ In doing so, she will defy the conventions of the time.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Daughter of Fire’ by Lucy Heuschen
Even on a quick initial reading, The Strongbox by Sasha Dugdale will take the reader’s imagination in many different directions and offer immediate pleasures of many kinds.
First, it works on a remarkably broad canvas. Drawing on the myth of Troy and related ancient Greek material, it’s epic in scale and effect in a way that develops from the work of Ezra Pound and other Modernist poets. Fragmenting the ancient Troy story, Dugdale rewrites incidents from it in anachronistic ways and mashes them up with incidents from other stories in a range of scenarios. Already in the first section – ‘Anatomy of an Abduction’ – we see the special kind of breadth this gives: a rain of vivid glimpses of domestic life, domestic violence, war, flight, seduction, abduction, rape, sometimes in nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-first century incarnations, sometimes in a Homeric one, sometimes hovering between, as when a soldier sent to collect a girl – perhaps Helen of Troy, perhaps a modern trafficking victim – drives past bullet-holed road signs but carries a bow. Breadth, then, is partly a matter of historical range, partly a matter of emotional variety. The poet moves us from scene to scene with a speed that I would call dazzling except that the scenes we move between are so solidly and clearly established in themselves. This combination of speed and clarity depends on the vivid economy of Dugdale’s images and the sureness of her rhythms. What makes it moving is the quiet empathy with which she presents many of her characters, and the way humble lives, sometimes caught in devastating circumstances, are given weight by the epic context and style of various sections.
The impression of breadth and scale also comes from Dugdale’s virtuoso handling of different forms. There are fourteen numbered sections, varying in length from one to nineteen pages. Most are in verse, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not, but II, IV and VII are short drama scripts in prose with stage directions. II – titled ‘In the Rehearsal Room’ – is a brilliantly comic dramatic monologue, spoken by a patronisingly self-satisfied theatre director presumably putting on a play about Troy. VII, a stage or screen passage in which Helen tells her dreams to a bored, then jealous Paris, is equally funny. It’s more haunting than II, though, because other tones are interwoven with the satire, glimmers of wistful yearning and (this being a dialogue, not a monologue) a frustrated desire for communication on Helen’s part. This section, in other words, is much more layered than the second. For readers of ancient Greek literature, there’s even an apparent allusion to one of the most poignant moments in Pindar’s victory odes.
Edmund Prestwich, Sasha Dugdale, The Strongbox – review
It is as a poet writing in Gaelic that [Aonghas] MacNeacail – who died in 2022 – is most well-known, though he would himself provide translations of his work into English, what, in the poem ‘last night’, he refers to as Gaelic’s ‘sister tongue’. There were also poems written in Scots and these variants give an insight into what Colin Bramwell here calls ‘the language situation in Scotland’ within which MacNeacail worked all his life. For a number of years, MacNeacail lived and wrote under the anglicised name Angus Nicolson, but always considered himself a tri-lingualist and antagonistic to the kind of divisiveness such a ‘situation’ might give rise to. His natural inclination was democratic, pacifist, anti-authoritarian, and modernist. Now, the collection, beyond (eds. Colin Bramwell with Gerda Stevenson (Shearsman Books, 2024)) gives readers a selection of poems written in English by Aonghas MacNeacail over the past 30 years. One of the implications of the book’s title is his deeply held wish to look ‘beyond’ division, not to anything transcendental (MacNeacail’s focus was always this world, not some other), but to the next term in an on-going dialectical process. One of the little gems from ‘the notebook’, included here, imagines a cup of knowledge, the liquor within, also knowledge, a grain is added and stirred, and the grain then consumes the liquor and continues to ‘grow, root, sprout / find elbows, crack the cup // find clay’.
MacNeacail’s modernism took its key lessons from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Olson, and Creeley and most of the poems here have that fluid, unpunctuated (hence pointed by the breath), often short lined, often indented formal shape we associate with the Black Mountain. He was a member of one of Phillip Hobsbaum’s fertile ‘groups’ (along with Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard) and the advice given was to go back to his roots, to ‘write about what you know’. In part, this took MacNeacail back to his childhood, growing up in Uig, on the Isle of Skye, speaking only Gaelic. It also made it clear what he wanted to escape from: Gerda Stevenson describes this as ‘the confines of the proscriptive Free Church of Scotland’. Several childhood poems, illustrate the stifling force of religion, on his mother, for example, ‘strapped down tightly / by a darkly warding book thick with orders that drove / and hedged her way’ (‘missing’). The church governed education too, the teacher little more than a ‘stern presence’, who demanded ‘psalms / from memory’ (‘crofter, not’).
Martyn Crucefix, Aonghas MacNeacail’s English Language Poems Reviewed
The collection “I Am Not Light” ends in “Openhanded” with a final phrase “at last, my heart is full.” A line that signals a closure. However there’s a further section labelled “Bonus Poems” – as if poetry books get to do an encore – among which is “Scorpions” inspired by a quote from Macbeth, “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.” and the scorpions,
They travel the weave of fine veins
padding cushions of shame
with vesicles of acute remembering:
predators of opportunity
inebriated by time ̶
dark and sweet and threatening.The metaphorical scorpions roam into recesses of buried memory, bring shame to the surface but these are offerings of darker emotions and events to facilitate learning and understanding. It returns to the collection’s theme of meeting life full-on.
Louise Machen’s poems are full of life, positives, negatives and the need to experience. Decorum may be limiting and caution is not recommended. “I Am Not Light” is not light and cheerful, although there is some wry, observational humour, and it unapologetically explores the darker side of human life, the break-ups, a miscarriage, grief and bereavement while offering a torch so the end of the tunnel can be seen.
Emma Lee, “I Am Not Light” Louise Machen (Black Bough Press) – book review
The Madrid Review is out at the end of August. Excited to see some of my poetry translated into Spanish in this edition. At the heart of this edition are Poems for Palestine – a poignant, powerful series of poems written by poets from around the world, addressed directly to the people of Palestine and Ukraine. These poems speak with urgency and compassion, weaving together voices of solidarity, hope, grief, and resistance. Haia Mohammed, a 22-year-old poet from Gaza whose debut pamphlet, The Age of Olive Trees (Out-Spoken Press) has been lauded for its raw honesty and lyrical strength, helped co-edit the issue and there’s an interview with her too.
Salena Godden, New books
A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight, by Elisa Gabbert:
“But for him it was not an important failure” — this, I think, is the crux of [Auden’s “Musée Des Baux Arts] disaster’s in the eye of the beholder, and if the eye does not behold, it’s not disaster at all.
Gabbert does a deep dive into this poem, which is, nominally, a response to Breughel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
A summary of the poem does not do it justice—it is about the significance of the fact that Icarus’s fall, which Auden uses to represent human suffering on a much larger scale, is a minor, insignificant part of the painting that you would easily miss if the title didn’t tell you to look for it in the lower right hand corner, the point being that the suffering of others is something we have to choose to pay attention to, that it is something we can look away from all too easily. Here are the first few lines:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;And here are the lines specifically referencing Breughel’s painting:
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure;Gabbert’s digital tour through the poem is well worth paying close attention to. She makes the poem’s underlying mechanics visible and accessible and shows how Auden constructed them to arrive at the poem’s “meaning.” She also illuminates the poem’s ekphrastic nature by uncovering paintings it refers to in addition to the one Auden names. What struck me most, however, and made me want to include her article here is the way her analysis arrives at this:
“Musée des Beaux Arts”…offers no comforting slogans or rallying cries, no assurance that suffering comes to an end or happens for a reason…What the poem really does is ask questions. The truth, we might infer, cannot be told — the truth is always changing; the truth is an ongoing inquiry…It asks us to question our place in the world — to ask what we might be missing…Do we spare a thought for…suffering, or sail calmly on? Moral absolution is available, the poem seems to say. That doesn’t mean we deserve it.
We often ask what good poems can do in the face of the suffering inflicted by, for example, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or the famine in Sudan—not to mention the Trump administration’s attacks on migrants, women, and people who are trans and queer. (That list could, obviously, go on.) Gabbert’s piece, it seems to me, embodies one answer to that question. Poems, good poems—in both the aesthetic and moral/ethical senses of good—offer us emotional and intellectual access to the complex interiority of what it means that we have a choice whether or not to bear witness to suffering, much less to take whatever action we can to end it. Gabbert’s essay is worth reading and talking about and I think it is especially worth teaching.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #45
Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), Earth (2019), and Ultraviolet of the Genuine (2025), as well as chapbooks from the Song Cave, arrow as aarow, and The Year. She lives in western Massachusetts. […]
6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
One concern is with poetry’s rescue of discourse, where the poem, or the kind of thinking a poem is, can be a true statement, albeit one that we only very briefly inhabit or are allowed. Recently, I’m invested—to my surprise—in rehabilitating the old quarrel between Shelley and Wordsworth, via Mill, poems of the head vs poems of the heart, to ask: why choose? As in, why is that the choice we are asked to make again and again? There’s (always) questions of what reading is good for; in what ways does poetry do a kind of (moral) philosophizing; interest in humans, their behaviors and reasons (actual, believed), and the lives of creatures.
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?
Writers and artists and thinkers I admire tend to believe in some different or other reality, the pursuit and discovery of which language, image, aesthetic expression uniquely allow. Art is a bridge one walks on and toward—an earthy, clumsy substance and a spiritual, extravagant one. It often encodes a personal longing but it’s also social, environmental, historical, political. Who but writers and artists will honor these stubborn, modest, generous dreams?
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Hannah Brooks-Motl
Winkles are small molluscs, around the size of a 5 pence coin, and you need to collect them by the hundreds for them to be worth even a small amount. My brother David and I, as the two eldest, took a handle each of the faded, red plastic bucket that served as a receptacle for coal, peat, potatoes – and that day, winkles. My mother would lead the way, holding the hand of a younger brother. When we stopped, it was always her hand that lifted the dark weeds from the face of the rock. I remember she always parted it neatly, up and over. It was graceful and methodical. How an islander might lift the veil of his bride. The action set sandhoppers skittering in the disturbed sand. Sometimes it would uncover green crabs with soft, young shells. But the rock exposed, the purpose was to pick the ten or so winkles from where they hidden beneath the weeds, wetly dark as black pearls.
On that day, approaching one especially large outpost stone, our bucket already half-full, my mother pulled back the seaweed and revealed the large surface of a rock covered completely, every inch, with winkles. Even decades later, they laugh about my reaction – I jumped around the beach proclaiming that we were rich. Of course, we were not.
All children are conscious of their situation. I knew our need not as something necessarily shameful but as a cloud over things. But still, I’d maintain that my reaction was less to do with the potential for being rich and having our problems alleviated, but more to do with that other thing that I have been thinking about, the idea of the world as a place that responds – a place that understands the want or the need of the person, and reacts. Back then, the world was alive – and in more than just the way of animals and plants, lapwings and bog cotton. It was a place that might listen. Now, returning to Uist, it is hard to feel that old belief. Once, it seemed the hard wind blew the body in a certain direction because it was serving as a guide. Now, mostly, the gale is just the gale. That old faith has all but elapsed.
Which brings me to John Ruskin’s definition of a poet as a person to whom things speak. I understand it is a less subscribed-to position. My contemporaries seem admirable as types who follow that idea of Shelley’s, where the poet is the setters of standards and rules, ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. I saw Alice Oswald recently and thought about the strength of such a stance. Praise difference, perhaps – I feel my own life lean more towards Ruskin’s definition than Shelley’s. For me – what the poem can be, now and then, rarely and seldomly, seems linked to this act of hearing the world speak back. It hears the whisper between things.
Niall Campbell, On the World That Calls Back
we have one chicken who cracks her own eggs.
Robin Gow, a thousand fractures
i find them, not smashed but with tiny holes.
at first i thought they might be hatching
but i always found the eggs empty of creature.
runny gold yolk. the white, like a fresh halo.
the more i care for animals, the more i am certain
they all write poetry. this is hers, a little fracture
in the dark of the coop.
Even in a world as calamitously greed-ravaged as ours, redeeming beauty may be found outside of our narrow, anthropocentric philosophies.
But for how much longer? The world has already diminished from that which poets described only decades ago. The ice caps are rapidly shrinking, the soil is blighted and fatigued, and conservative estimates indicate that hundreds of species vanish annually. Meanwhile, those with the power to ameliorate the situation do nothing — unless they make it worse. They’d clearly rather incarcerate the vulnerable, criminalize our joyous differences, wage eternal wars, and weaken our already meager environmental protections.
What should the nature poet do in times like these? I don’t think any single answer is equal to this question. The tragedy is too immense for an individual to fully grasp. But for what little it’s worth, here’s my answer: perpetually renew people’s love for whatever is left, even as it opens them up to the pain of loss. As we face the destruction of so many things that make life worth living, as we turn paradise into our own unmarked grave, I believe that cultivating an anguished love for the fading world lays the groundwork necessary for whatever change remains possible.
If we’re to meaningfully reverse course in this eleventh hour, I think one of the first hurdles we have to overcome is the ubiquitous nihilism that breeds inaction. Upon learning of the profound threats to the environment, the power of those reaping short-term benefits, and our culpability in it all, many feel helpless and (understandably) give up, closing off their hearts and looking away. Despair is the thing with feathers, plucked. But loving the world through each loss keeps your skin in the game. It keeps you from letting it all pass undefended and unmourned. It keeps your eyes fixed on what’s happening. By loving the world even as we confront its dying, I believe we can conquer our paralyzing despondency that only serves the status quo.
Writing Nature Poetry as the Earth Dies Screaming – guest post by Joe Roberts (Trish Hopkinson)
Thanks to Devin Kelly’s Ordinary Plots, I have been reading The Inextinguishable, poems by Michael Lavers and it is exactly what I needed right now. There are in fact three poems in the book with the title “The Happiest Day of Your Life.” Right there, I’m delighted. Read Lavers for lines like “and since chaos so often wins / let’s demand what we can.” Another poem ends, “This is not an argument or an idea. / It’s just a feeling, and these days feelings / are all I have. Feelings are everything.” And they are, aren’t they?
I was reminded of a post from days gone by on the word “tenderness” and of Galway Kinnell’s line: “The secret title of every good poem might be ‘Tenderness.’”
And maybe the secret title behind “The Happiest Day of Your Life” is “Tenderness.” This book felt very human to me at a time when I think we crave the very human more than ever. I would honestly love a book where every single poem is titled “The Happiest Day of Your Life.” Please feel free to write it for me.
Shawna Lemay, The Happiest Day of Your Life
Who can say anything definitive about the United States? It is chequered with the complexities of a self-governing people: one nation, perhaps, but not one set of rules or laws. From the condo board to the state legislature to the President there are dozens and dozens and hundreds and hundreds of Americas. Everyone knows this: it is foundational to American culture. And yet, the Americans never tire of telling you this. Every time I write about America, I am reminded of this fact by someone. Even the briefest note, a passing observation about my neighbourhood, elicits the response: “ah, but not everywhere in America.” Perhaps this is what the Americans fear most. It is not tyranny they scent on every breeze, but the fear of being mistaken for their neighbours. […]
On Sunday evening, children fed, wife in bed eating plain crackers, I walked up to the diner and read the paper. I came home through the woods reciting Robert Frost. I saw a rabbit and a series of unfamiliar birds: bright yellow, speckled grey, a flash of red. It was a brief outing, but a splendidly American one. The Washington Post had a good article about how George Washington became America’s first great leader. There is something perfect about the combination of reading the paper in the diner and walking home through some (brief, tame, with a path) woodland.
Henry Oliver, Cigarettes in the pharmacy
This is a good
place for walking. Getting from island to island
absorbs all your attention. Hop from a rounded stone
to a flat one without crushing an orchid or
twisting an ankle, move across a whole field
like this, away from the portal tomb, the sad bones.“The Burren” was published more than ten years ago in Hampden-Sydney Review, then in my 2015 collection Radioland. I fell in love with the Burren, a karst landscape in the west of Ireland, not far from Galway, during my first trip to that country, and something about the stark beauty of the place helped me move from angry poems about my father’s death to a more peaceful one.
That was a gray, cold June day; on a brilliant August one, the last day of our recent, second trip to Ireland, we revisited the place. In 2025 certain locations, especially the Poulnabrone portal tomb, are much more heavily touristed (I can’t remember it being roped off before). Wildflowers bloomed everywhere, though, and there were lots of quiet places, too. We dodged and hopped through a field of cow poop, for instance, to climb down to the ruins of a twelfth-century church, where a couple of people had tied red rags on trees in hope of healing or some other magic: an ash, a hawthorn. I can’t take long hikes at the moment, between the sprained ankle and sciatica, but I was in good enough shape for short walks, and they were again restorative.
Lesley Wheeler, Hawthorns, bogs, & undersongs
As I rolled out the dough, in a way that I rarely do for just myself, I thought of that quote attributed to Martin Luther, about the world ending tomorrow. I thought, if the world was ending tomorrow, I’d be making these kind of luxurious pumpkin cinnamon rolls.
I looked up the Martin Luther quote, ignored the debate over whether or not Luther actually said such a thing, and found a quote at an environmental stewardship website: “As the story goes, when Martin Luther was asked what he would do if the world were to end tomorrow, he answered, ‘I would plant an apple tree today.’”
I thought, if the world were to end tomorrow, I would make a batch of cinnamon rolls–two batches, one for today, and one for tomorrow.
I decided to use extra pecans and sugar because my friend was coming over for coffee, and a poem started to sprout in my brain. I wrote down these lines:
If the world was on schedule to end
tomorrow, some of us would plant
an apple tree. Others would spend
the evening phoning every friend.I would make two pans
of cinnamon rolls, one for tonight,
and one for the morning of the day
the world was on schedule to end.I wrote a few more stanzas and let the poem sit (or rise, perhaps) overnight. This morning, I added another line here or there, and I’ll let it sit longer.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Cinnamon Roll at the End of the World
calendar
only nowwristwatch
only nowthis moment
only nowdrop of rain
only nowcat stretches
Jason Crane, POEM: only now
only now
It seems to me that one path forward for each of us is to examine our own innocence and the reasons and ways in which we shy away from being more inclusive, open, and generous. We can begin to take small steps toward an embrace of “radical hospitality” and to learn from those who are not like us. We should neither waste time mourning the loss of programs and protections, nor wait for the large systems to correct themselves; it is up to each one of us to do what we can to make a better world in the spaces closest to us, here and now.
Beth Adams, Radical Hospitality
I’ve been aghast these many months
the months bunch up,
like a patient upon a table
anesthetized,
on half-burned grass,
aghast again, at August’s endSo many months with broken breath,
now snot rags, ragweed,
wheezing; the peeved grass,
having lost what was naïve
also clotted in a sneezebut think, the patient, I, anesthetized,
Jill Pearlman, Aghast
might salvage breath for what’s ahead
the ghast extending out in time
to breathe, to lay a hand upon a head
to pay respect to a flattened bird
the breath to bike around its head
the rag we hold, so dear, to make it
last, to count no matter what