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: an imagined history of the Green Man, anti-capitalist work poetry, the dactylic hexameter line, and much more. Enjoy.
If only I could sculpt the words to shape the lump in my throat every time I see the smiling faces and the flickering flags of the Global Sumud Flotilla as it heads east, picking up more boats, more people, a milquetoast military escort, as it goes.
They’re good at social media, across many organisational and personal Instagram accounts, and my window onto the digital collective mind is full of it. The soundtrack knocks the nail home. I cried when I watched a crew member playing ‘Bella Ciao’ on the violin, or another reel, with a beautiful Mediterranean sunset and Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’.
‘Love, love is a verb, love is a doing word.’
And we know they’re doing what we didn’t, or can’t, or won’t, wringing our hands at the unfolding massacre. I am as guilty of inaction as any shame-faced nation-state, hiding behind bleak poetry of witness, for what it’s worth, which might not be nothing. I wrote something about poetry sending ripples and ripples becoming waves, and know that it must be cold out there at night, under way over the ancient sea.
They thread between cities and the remnants of fallen civilizations, many the foundations of the West’s antiquity and its origin stories. Barcelona, Genoa, Catania, Tunis, Syros, then on to the ‘Holy Land’. Like lacing together a fishing net, they draw in more boats from across the sea, the Maghreb, and other oceans beyond. I was reading about the 1190 massacre of the Jews of York, then later, about the burning of the library of the Madrasa of Granada, a bitter, vengeful conflagration of knowledge and scholarly endeavour. A thousand years of burning books and the people who wrote them. It is a modern human triumph that the flotilla has members of all three ‘peoples of the book’; Christians, Muslims, Jews.
james mcconachie, Flickering Flags
I put my fist slightly off centre on my chest
Sue Finch, MANDALAS AND THE JOY OF THINKING
draw round it, with red marker pen,
make a Valentine’s heart.
It needs to be bolder.
I outline it again
with black.
I recall the pages of my old Gray’s Anatomy;
add in a fat aorta,
ventricles, atria
forget where the vena cava goes.
I leave it out
press lightly to feather in the valves
laugh when they look like ghosts.
Just to stay sane,
with warplanes
wounding the ancient sky,
I write
one more tanka.[…]
I’m aligning myself with what I stand for, what I long for. I want to recognise my own shortcomings, and continue to face them so that I never stop learning.
On love:
Kati Mohr, Makoto
pick no flowers
from open meadows,
from no one,
not any.
The monarchs I see in my garden may, if they are lucky enough to survive the trip, live up to 9 months, which is well past the life span of spring and early summer generations.
They are not even returning to a place they know or have ever been. Human science has never yet determined how monarch butterflies of the last summer generation find their way to Mexico. They just go adventuring, floating on air currents, supping on flowers as they travel.
I’m about to go adventuring, as well, traveling further east than I’ve ever been, in the company of one of my favorite persons in the world–my daughter. She and I had long talked about taking a mother-daughter trip together once I retired, and sooner is better than later! She found an environmentally-conscious adventure tour business that offers some really intriguing historical/archeological/environmental hike-and-bus options. We’ll find out whether the company is worth recommending & I’ll report back here, meanwhile keeping our destination unrevealed for now. A little mystery is fun.
While I am taking this trip for reasons beyond writing inspiration, I can’t help hoping it will act as a prompt and opportunity for drafting new poems. I’ve been working on new drafts, and revising older ones; but I have to admit that for awhile my creative mojo has been a bit off. Yes, this happens to any so-called “creative” occasionally, but it never feels terrific. One prefers the juicy, challenging urgency of creative flow. Wish me luck (and traveling mercies).
Ann E. Michael, Adventuring
I’ve been pondering why I’m so lacking in any impetus to write at the moment. After all, if the sun-drenched historic gorgeousness and energy of Sicily doesn’t inspire me, what the heck will? Actually, those fabulous mosaics at Villa Romana Casale of female bikini-clad athletes are pretty inspirational. But sometimes (usually, for me) it’s a small thing that pops out unexpectedly. Among the pile of publications and catalogues waiting for me to read when I got back was a copy of the new-look Times Literary Supplement, bigger and thicker than before and every two weeks rather than weekly. I had barely got into it when today the latest issue dropped though the letter box. A quick skim for poetry content revealed a poem by Jemma Borg called ‘Before & after the night’. (Apologies if this link takes you to a paywall.) As I read it, I felt little lights going off in my brain accompanied by the kind of ‘wish I’d written that’ feeling that can be inspirational but also saddening. Like Salieri in Amadeus, melting in the face of Mozart’s brilliance and at recognising that he himself will never be more than a reasonably good musician. Thankfully, Jemma’s poem had more of a positive than negative effect on me! So I’ve just ordered a copy of her collection Wilder and a already noodling through a few ideas.
Robin Houghton, Readings, writing, reviews & general catchup
Being of a certain age, I worry that the time will come when I stop writing poems. I’m constantly jotting down wee scraps of notes, on the flyleaf of whatever collection I happen to be reading at the time, or in a notebook, or on my phone, in the hope they’ll eventually spark something. Folk are always talking about where the next poem will come from or fretting that there are no more poems left in them, but I find it far more helpful to talk about the poem as being up ahead somewhere, and everything I’m doing now is to bring me closer to it.
There’s a fair amount of trust involved – moving from something tedious and dreadful towards something that intrigues. When I think of it, that’s probably my main criterion – does it interest me or bore me? When I already know where I’m heading, when I’m confident I understand what I want to say, I’m almost always disappointed with the outcome.
What can help me on the path to the next poem? Many years ago a young Louise Glück said there were four things she would teach aspiring poets: how to become better readers; knowledge of craft; an attitude of dedication and habits of scrutiny. In other words, read poetry, learn how a poem is put together, work bloody hard at it and don’t just look at the world, engage with it.
John Glenday, North Sea Line Caught #1
The lover and the writing exist in tension for the poet. Nothing will relieve or alter these intersections in his life— the duress of intimacy and its attendant conflicts. “Vulnerable and exposed” . . . like a man battered by winds on the cliffs near the Duino Castle, where his elegies would be finished. […]
Among my three copies of Stephen Mitchell’s Selected Rilke translations, there is one filled with color-markings, the text that peeks out from the rainbow of my Rilke readings. Yellow markings made in my 20’s. Green arrived my late 30’s during the nursing-while-returning-to-Rilke days. Rilke’s “Elegy” for Marina Tvsetaeva is a forever favorite in its form as well as its direction. His preemptive elegy to a friend would be matched by her own New Year’s elegy to Rilke, following the shock of his death.
It hurts to write. It hurts to not-write. This, too, is an unassailable rhythm that rocks the raft of a life.
Alina Stefanescu, Rilke’s testament.
I suppose it’s what all poets search for – the perfect poem.
It’s the quest that keeps writers writing. And for most of us, it’s an impossible dream that sometimes seems achievable, sometimes seems very far away.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve written something, leaned back and thought ‘That’s it, that’s the one, I can’t say it any better than that’ only to look again, in an hour, a day, a week, even a year and, with a sinking feeling in the throat, think ‘Oh’. […]
You can’t set out to write something perfect, of course. Or I can’t. I just feel I might be on to something, a line, a thought, a link of words, an image, and run with it. What understanding I have of what a piece of writing is becoming as I write is often instinctive. I trust in my ability to get it down, to find the better lines, to hold the theme or tone, or change the theme and tone, and finish it at the right place.
I think that sense of trust has evolved over time, has taken over from the arrogance of youth where I wrote something and wanted to tell the world about it because I believed it to be so very good. Now, life itself is in a more reflective place, but I also think my brain seems to operate in a different way to when I was young. While I still hold pretty much the same view of the humanity’s moral and physical crimes and persistent absurdities, the connections between words and images are not so clear. I don’t hear or feel the same rhythms. Poems arrive in different, less systematic, less easily controlled ways. I have a more relaxed attitude to whether or not something will be successful, am content to let the process take care of itself and hope those who read it find something thought-provoking, useful or entertaining in it – assuming I think it of any interest at all. If I don’t, then I scrap it and start again at another place, another line, thought, image.
Bob Mee, THE PERFECT POEM?
“Meditation at Lagunitas” [by Robert Hass] is, I will argue near to the death, a perfect poem. Despite its 1979 publication in Praise—it is as old as I am—it remains as fresh and surprising for me as it was the first time I read it, an encounter I feel fortunate to remember; it’s not often you confidently recall, for instance, the moment a favourite person entered your ken. Nor is it necessarily typical to remember an exam question twenty-five years after you closed the blue book, but such was my undergraduate poetry education: singular and enduring. The essay prompt entailed a comparison-contrast between the Hass poem and Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Blackberries” (the audio is the man himself; give it a click). I don’t remember what argument I made—only the feeling of Hass’s meditation opening, the longer I looked, like a lotus.
All I knew of Helen Vendler at that time was her book On Extended Wings, on Wallace Stevens’s longer poems, with which I’d grappled in pursuit of an unwieldy high school essay on “Sunday Morning,” but what captivated me in “Meditation at Lagunitas,” I realize now, is embodied by her notion of the speech act as a means of accessing a poem. By recognizing the function of each utterance and observing the shifts from sentence to sentence, one gains a deeper understanding of a poem’s tones—its emotional attitudes. In part it’s simple rhetorical analysis. It’s also just being a good listener, attentive to the speaker in front of you, how his effort unfurls with ease or snags, catches or exhales, sets out an assertion or walks it back, tests an idea or insinuates it, waits for your response.
Vanessa Stauffer, “Meditation at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass
I wrote a tribute to my long-time poet friend, Martha Silano, that went up on the Poetry Foundation web site (and was in the newsletter) and I was very happy and hope this helps people remember her and her writing. Marty passed away of ALS in May of this year. Her last book, Terminal Surreal, just came out from Acre Books. I hope you will look up her work as it is very worth reading.
Here’s a link to the article: An Oracular Voice: Remembering Martha Silano | The Poetry Foundation
Here is a taste of the article:
“The last time I saw Marty—Martha Silano—in person, it was fall during a week of wildfire smoke and we decided to visit a local sunflower farm in my neighborhood of Woodinville, Washington. We got lucky—the haze lifted for a few hours, the air quality wasn’t too terrible, and the temperatures had dropped enough for us to be comfortable outside. We met at my house for a quick catch-up chat, snacks, and wine, and I noticed that she hadn’t eaten or drunk very much. I think the beginnings of her swallowing problems—her first ALS symptom—were already happening, though she didn’t complain about a thing that day. I have a picture of us smiling among red and yellow sunflowers, the sky blue but slightly hazy above us. She told me how glad she was to be able to get out into nature again, without the pervasive wildfire smoke. Soon afterward, she was diagnosed with ALS and such outings would become impossible. I am so glad to have the memory of that day, now.”
I wish you all a healthy and happy week, and be sure to find a way to tell your friends how much they mean to you.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Tribute to Martha Silano Up at the Poetry Foundation
With the sad news of the passing of Tony Harrison, who as a working class poet had a great impact on me during my formative years of writing in the 1980s, I went back to a piece I was commissioned to write for an OUP collection of essays on his writing – both poetic and dramatic – in 1997. […]
Harrison’s first full collection, entitled The Loiners after the inhabitants of his native Leeds, was published in 1970 and contained this limerick:
There was a young man from Leeds
Who swallowed a packet of seeds.
A pure white rose grew out of his nose
And his arse was covered in weeds.Without losing sight of the essential comedy of this snatch, it can be seen as suggestive of aspects of Harrison’s career. For example, the comic inappropriateness of the Leeds boy swallowing seeds becomes the poet’s own ironic image of his classical grammar school education. As a result of this, in a deliberately grotesque image, arises the growth of the white rose of poetry – from the boy’s nose, of course, since Harrison in the same volume gave credence to the idea that the true poet is born without a mouth. The bizarrely contrasting weed-covered arse owes less to the intake of seeds (rose seeds wherever transplanted will never yield weeds) than to the harsh conditions Harrison premises in the Loiner’s life, as indicated in an early introduction to his work, where he defines the term as referring to “citizens of Leeds, citizens who bear their loins through the terrors of life, ‘loners’”.
Harrison’s now-legendary seed-master on the staff of Leeds Grammar School was the one who humiliated him for reciting Keats in a Yorkshire accent, who felt it more appropriate if the boy played the garrulous, drunken Porter in Macbeth.(3) The truth is that the master’s attitudes determined the kind of poetic rose that grew, in particular its technical facility which Harrison worked at to show his ‘betters’ that Loiners could do it as well as (better than?) they could. Yet this was no sterile technical exercise and Harrison’s success lies in the integrity with which he has remained true to those regions “covered with weeds” and in the fact that his work has always struggled to find ways to unite the weed and the rose. Perhaps the most important of these, as the limerick’s anatomical geography already predicted in 1970, is via the rhythms of his own body.
Martyn Crucefix, RIP Tony Harrison – a piece on metre and voice in his poetry
Lesley Wheeler, Voices in my head
- My actual birthday arrives and I attend a reading by two visiting poets, Julia Kolchinsky and Jaswinder Bolina. The reading is fire. At dinner after, Shenandoah editor Beth Staples urges me to get dessert and I sheepishly order a fruit cup. It arrives with a lit candle shoved into a slice of banana and the waiters serenade me.
- Fifty bazillion people wish me happy birthday on FB, which is so kind although I feel guilty again because I have NOT been keeping up with distant friends’ special days. I navigate to the site to finish reading the messages. I learn through the many shocked posts on my timeline that Jennifer Martelli has died.
- I think of Frank O’Hara’s elegy for Billie Holiday’s voice: “Everyone and I stopped breathing”
- I last saw Jenn in late spring, twice. First was at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival where she spoke memorably on a panel about shame. My notes don’t quote her but I think she said something about not giving shame the time of day, being done with it after a childhood steeped in it. I was admiringly gobsmacked.
- A poet who was supposed to do a reading/ interview with me in Cambridge MA shortly after the festival suddenly canceled (long story). I panicked hard. Then I thought of Jenn’s generous social media posts about my book, the kind that showed she’d really engaged with it. She lived not so far from there. I wrote and asked her if she’d be game to step in. She swiftly said yes with only a week to prepare (a week that also involved, for her, two festival presentations).
- As I wrote about that Porter Square Books event in a diary-style blog shortly after returning home: “The amazing Jennifer Martelli (who’d spoken so powerfully on the shame panel) reads with me then runs a staged conversation about Mycocosmic, having prepared spectacularly with insightful and high-stakes questions.”
- I had no idea she’d been coping with pancreatic cancer for months. In her honor, I am resisting feeling ashamed about having asked her. She seemed unburdened and 110% alive.
- I watched her post joyous pictures on social media from a trip to Iceland, and when she’d returned home I sent her a few little gifts from a local lavender farm with a thank-you note. I received a lovely message back claiming that I had accidentally discovered her obsession with tea towels.
- I was far from Jenn’s inner circle so I don’t have any right to say this, but sometimes I feel a spirit-connection with a poet when I spend time with their books. I do in her case. She wrote inventively and autobiographically about addiction, violence, and being a woman in a profoundly misogynist world–often with witchiness and references to Tarot. (Her work suggests that she was both an atheist and kinda psychic, although I’ve never confirmed either.) The poems are spare, the language tight, but they simultaneously convey a mind in the process of probing experience with self-interrogating honesty. What’s not to love?
- My Tarantella is near my desk–it was the only Martelli book for sale at Porter Square that I didn’t already own–so Friday morning, I put aside the recommendation letters and read it. In life, she had a strong and distinctive voice that tended to delight people–you knew where she was from! It’s good to hear it in my head, to know she survives this way. I often tell students that the poems that move us most say what seems scary, self-exposing, dangerous. My Tarantella probes the poet’s obsession with the life and death of Kitty Genovese. It’s powerfully riveting because it brims with risk and revelation.
On Tuesday night, I travelled to the London launch of “The Wildest Dream: an imagined history of the Green Man” by the much-missed David Gee (Ember Press 2025). It was strange to be at a launch when the author was absent; strange to celebrate when grief was such a strong presence in the room. But the beauty of the book still shone, and listening to it, I remembered- for the first time in these tumultuous weeks – something of the calm I found on the Coast to Coast, something about how words can lead the way into brighter, wider places. “Green without, green within”, said David, finding wildness not just in mountains and rivers, but also in tap water, weather, small acts of love and care. Fitting then that his final book – finished just weeks before his far-too-soon-death – should be an act of community, crowdfunded and published by people who loved him and his work, with half of all proceeds donated to Asylum Welcome.
Clare Shaw, Celebrating New Books
The wide canvases of Shadow Reader and The Strongbox embrace many lives, some sharply realised as individuals, others sketchily included in panoramic views. In this way, both books offer many of the satisfactions of fiction in a concentrated and distilled form. Michelene Wandor’s chapbook Ergo represents a very different poetic. My general sense is that moving from Dugdale’s and Dharker’s books to hers is like turning from oil paintings – crowded, impasto canvases in The Strongbox, more thinly layered ones in Shadow Reader – to an album of delicate, almost transparent, semi-abstract watercolours. Most of her poems are very short and all use minimalist imagistic techniques to hint at emotions, narratives and situations in a way that’s often almost ethereally bare of human presence. […]
The distinctive beauty of these poems seems to me to depend on two things; the harmonious flow and sensitive patterning of their sounds and the combination of vividness and elusiveness in the imagery. More than pointing out to the surrounding world, they induce a dreamlike state focused on the movement of the mind between the impressions forming and reforming themselves within it.
Edmund Prestwich, Michelene Wandor, Ergo – review
One of the pleasures of living where I do is its proximity to Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, home of a vibrant poetry festival. One of its star turns last year was Cirencester poet, Frank McMahon. I have heard him read his poetry on several occasions. More recently he has been performing poems from his fourth collection, The Canticles of Spring, (Tim Saunders Publications, 2025). I couldn’t wait to review it.
The first thing that strikes you about McMahon’s poems in this collection is the polymathic knowledge that underpins them. There is a familiarity with ancient history that informs the poems in the Museum section, such as Market Opportunities and Neolithic Axe-Head. There is the knowledge of myths that is most notably deployed in Ancient Music, a retelling of the Orpheus-Eurydice story, which imagines her relentless pursuit of a reunion with him through the ages and culminating in the present. There is the understanding of classical music and jazz that is so movingly deployed in the war poem, Pastoral, after Symphony no 3 by Ralph Vaughan Williams and in other poems specifically on the subject, such as Jazz Variations. Three Voices. There’s the rich botanical knowledge that makes for vivid descriptions in nature poems, such as Where I walked. And, of course there are the intertextual references in poems such as The Periodic Table (In Memoriam Primo Levi) and in Du Fu Comes to our Home, the latter a work which imagines a conversation with the 8th Century, Chinese poet, Du Fu.
This impressive, broad frame of reference supports poems that seek to make sense of human experience. The range of themes explored is equally diverse. At a time when the fashion is for collections and pamphlets on a specific theme, I found this a refreshing change. All poetry’s universal concerns are here.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Canticles of Spring’ by Frank McMahon
The latest from Philadelphia poet Gina Myers [see my review of her prior collection here] is the book-length suite, Works & Days (Philadelphia PA: Radiator Press, 2025), a collection that plays off the dailyness and immediate title of Works and Days (New York NY: New Directions, 2016) by the late American poet Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022). Instead of articulating the dailyness of being, Myers works through, as Marie Buck offers in their back cover blurb, “[…] all the hours we’ve lost to working; it also registers the continuous urge to want more from life than just sustaining oneself with a paycheck.” “Once I commit to writing a long poem about work,” Myers writes, near the end of the collection, “I decide to read a number of books about work / And this too becomes work, thankless and unpaid / And it begins to make me feel worse / And I begin to dread the work of reading about work [.]”
There has been an interesting anti-capitalist work poetry emerging from Philadelphia for some time, centred, as my awareness provides, around the work of Myers and Ryan Eckes [see my review of his latest here], offering a kind of continuation of the 1970s “work poetry” ethos worked through by Canadian poets Tom Wayman, Kate Braid, Erín Moure and Phil Hall, and furthered by poets including the late Vancouver poet Peter Culley (1958-2015) and other elements of The Kootenay School of Writing (Wayman being one of the founders), to more recent examples, whether Vancouver poet Michael Turner (think Company Town, for example), Chicago poet Andrew Cantrell or Vancouver poet Ivan Drury [see my review of his full-length debut here]. Whereas those early Vancouver days of “work poetry” championed the idea that labour was worth articulating as literary subject matter, an idea that evolved through poets such as language-specific interrogations and pro-labour criticisms of capitalist culture—leaning into the work of poets such as Jeff Derksen, Louis Cabri, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Clint Burnham, Colin Smith, ryan fitzpatrick and others—Myers employs numerous of those same threads with the added flavour of general frustrations, one that I know she shares with numerous other writers (few who ever discuss such in their writing): the mere fact that requiring employment takes time away from actually writing. […]
Not everyone holds the same physical requirements, the same mental load, for employment, which can allow for a very different level of post or pre-work energy. We all know about Frank O’Hara working poems during his lunch break, Dr. William Carlos Williams sketching upon prescription pads, or Toronto poet bpNichol, who used to compose his thoughts directly into a tape machine, during his long commutes from downtown Toronto to his lay-work at Therafields. Vancouver poet George Stanley composed a long poem while commuting around on BC Transit. Minneapolis poet Mary Austin Speaker composed The Bridge (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], her accumulation of untitled, stand-alone poems as she made her daily commute across New York’s Manhattan Bridge. I also know of writers too exhausted to even think about writing, once they leave the physical threshold of work.
In a cohesive collection of accumulated, first-person lyric interrogations, Myers writes on writing and work. She writes on writing and not writing, and offering her best energies and time to what she cares less about than other elements of her life, and of wanting to keep her writing life and writing time separate from ideas of “product,” a notion she feels enough pressure, put upon through capitalism, to resist.
rob mclennan, Gina Myers, Works & Days
“Home is a Place that Visits Me” does end on a note of hope: that trauma has been acknowledged and is being worked through. Hannah Hull has achieved an empathetic, compassionate long poem that captures a child’s view of abuse without graphic detail. Effectively a house readers journey through with space for them to imagine how they might have lived there and what the previous occupants experienced. It also asks questions about what makes a home. It’s not the building but how we occupy and use the building, the people we invite in and the people we keep out. Ultimately, it’s about agency and bodily autonomy: the house may be real or metaphoric. How we treat the most vulnerable who don’t have the capacity to bodily autonomy is a measure of humanity.
Emma Lee, “Home is a Place that Visits Me” Hannah Hull (Arachne Press) – book review
Last week Jeremy Wikeley (Jem) wrote an excellent, thought-provoking piece on the near-disappearance of what he calls the ‘middle-distance poem’ — the sort of thing exemplified by Larkin’s ‘Whitsun Weddings’ and Yeats’ ‘Among School Children’. These are fairly long poems — often of around 100 lines — which, according to Jeremy’s piece, have a consistent, often stanzaic form, are strongly felt and “go on a journey”. […]
Jeremy’s piece hit my inbox at a busy moment, so I read it very quickly, and immediately had three thoughts but no chance to comment properly. The first thought was that, actually, I have noticed at least one long poem of roughly the kind of shape and ambition that he describes in most of the collections I’ve admired recently, and in several cases these were among the poems I liked best in the book — I’m thinking of pieces like the impressive ‘What the Buddha saw’ poems at the end of Carola Luther’s Walking the Animals; the title poems of Alex Wylie’s Secular Games and Joshua Mehigan’s Accepting the Disaster; Peter Davidson’s ‘The Mourning Virtuoso’ from Arctic Elegies, and A. E. Stalling’s long poem ‘Lost and Found’ (from Like). (Most of these poems are not available online: in those cases, the links in the previous sentence take you to pieces where I have quoted from them.)
I don’t think this invalidates Jeremy’s point at all, because you certainly don’t see poems like this in magazines very often and I think he’s right that they occupy a much less prominent place in the wider poetry “scene” than they once did. (Perhaps contemporary poets who want to write in this sort of way are now more likely to turn to the prose poem or lyric essay rather than verse?) I certainly can’t offhand think of a contemporary poet who is really “known” for writing poems of this general type, in the way that Larkin is and was.
My second thought was that these are, in classical terms, ‘hexameter’ rather than lyric poems. In classical Latin and Greek, the dactylic hexameter (six-foot) line was widely used not only for epic, which is perhaps what we tend to associate it with today, but also for medium length ‘conversational’ poems, such as satires and epistles. The satires and epistles of Horace, for example, are all in hexameter and range between 13 and over 300 lines long, but are mostly around 100. (Classical “satire” in this generic sense can be, but is not necessarily, “satiric” in the modern sense: the Latin term for both verse satires and epistles was sermones, ‘conversations’.) These are poems that are characterised by their ‘speaking voice’, even in cases where they do not have a specific addressee. Though they have moments of great intensity or beauty, they are typically pitched at a lower key than we associate with lyric, and they are (broadly speaking) closer to ordinary speech and more outward looking.
Poets raised on a classical literary framework, whatever their native language, have always tended to reproduce this distinction — in the sixteenth-century you find it very clearly in both Wyatt and (in French) Marot, for example, as well as in all the Latin poets of the period; and Jonson and Donne both wrote dozens of satires, epistles and other sorts of medium-length ‘conversational’ poems alongside lyric. (This perhaps goes a small way to answering one of Jeremy’s very interesting ‘Questions to follow up’, “What, if anything, have the metaphysical poets got to do with it [i.e., the middle-distance poem]?”). And even among 20th century poets, there is a clear sense of the difference between lyric and ‘hexameter’/sermo in the poetry of, for example, Thom Gunn and Anthony Hecht, as well as in Larkin. (Who, as has often been pointed out, had a kind of genius for concealing, or perhaps just fully digesting, the more high-flown elements and sources of his deeply-rooted style.)
Victoria Moul, Middle-distance death
— I’ve spent some time this week, as one does, comparing two translations of the same line from Tomas Tranströmer.
This is by Patty Crane, from the book Bright Scythe:
“We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don’t know about.”
This one by Robin Fulton in The Great Enigma:
“We look almost happy out in the sun, while we are bleeding fatally from wounds we don’t know about.”
— They resonate in different ways, and I’m grateful for them both. I like the word fatally, in the second, but I like the finality of the sounds in words bleed, death, wounds, together. And I’m sure each translator mulled over these possibilities. Meanwhile, we look almost happy out in the sun. Worth a life’s work to have written something so true.
— Teju Cole on Tranströmer upon his Nobel win: “Reading him, one is also reminded of American poets like Charles Simic (for his surrealism) and Jim Harrison, Gary Snyder, and W. S. Merwin (for their plain speech and koan-like wisdom). But Tranströmer casts a spell all his own, and in fact the strongest associations he brings to my mind are the music of Arvo Pärt and the photography of Saul Leiter.”
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Overwintering
–You wake up tomorrow morning, and you discover that you are a tree, outside there, on the quad of the campus. Describe how you feel and what you see.
–The next morning, you wake up, and you are a single leaf on the tree. Describe life from the viewpoint of that leaf.
–The next morning, you are soil, the dirt beneath the tree.
–The next morning, you are a bird.
–The next morning, you are the bird’s nest.
–The next morning, you are this door, made of wood that was once a tree.
–The next morning, you are the blade of the saw mill that transformed the tree into wood for boards to make doors and furniture and lumber.
–The next morning, you are a saw mill. Are you abandoned? Transformed into something else? Or are you still transforming trees into boards?
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, You Are the Tree, You Are the Board, You Are the Sawmill Blade
When I was in middle school, my family took a trip to Western Ireland. It was my first time in Europe, and the first time I walked around inside structures more than—at most—150 years old. Being in the presence of these timeworn stone castles, Celtic earthworks and burial mounds, churches built a 1,000 years ago or more, I felt a sense of vertigo as time expanded and deepened around me, an uncanny feeling of the now—of my own thirteen year old self—suddenly touching history, being inside of it. Rather than learning about the past as some outside observer, I realized that I too was riding the same winding river as the other real people from long ago who had walked the same land, stood among the same rooms.
I was already a budding poet then, and I wrote a poem during that trip trying to capture this new sense of time I was experiencing. Like most middle-school poems, it reads as cringey to me in retrospect, but it still puts me back into that place of vertigo when I remember the lines “I placed a rock on the old stone wall/ to put myself in history.” Thirty years on, I can feel that mossy stone in my hand as I lifted it from the moss, feel the electric surge in my spine as I nestled it onto the crumbling wall that had veined that particular green hill in Connemara for God knows how many years. In that act, I felt my hands joining the other hands that had built the wall. I wondered how long my stone would stay where I placed it.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Deep Time
i lose my head & live a tiny green life.
Robin Gow, orchid keeper
in my house-sitting days every place
had orchids. they liked to speak in parables.
once, i sat down & a white & blush orchid
told me, “there was a girl
without any parents. she emerged
from the earth.” i thought the flower
was talking about me so i ran away
& did not get to hear the end of the story.
what happened to her? is that why
there’s always dirt under my fingernails?
i think politics are awful & i would rather
just sit with the orchids & try to not die.
ChatGPT will respond by predicting what words are most likely to follow in a helpful, coherent way. Utilizing semantics and context, possible responses will be considered. If I had been talking about a stressful day, ChatGPT may consider responding with “That sounds like a restorative plan—long walks are great for grounding” or “That sounds nourishing. Do you usually find walks help you reset?”
When I say “I need to go for a long walk. Respond as if you are May Sarton”, ChatGPT responds as if it were the poet/writer May Sarton:
“Ah—yes. Go. The long walk is not a luxury but a necessity, a way to restore the soul’s fragile balance. Out there, in the hush of the natural world, the mind loosens its tight grip, and the body remembers its rhythm. Each step is a kind of prayer, each breath an opening. Do not hurry; let the walk take you as much as you take it. In the quiet, you may find the threads of yourself weaving back together.
“Would you like me to shape this into something closer to her journal style, almost like an entry from Journal of a Solitude?”
A fluffy response, followed by what feels like an advertisement. More, more, more.
Sarah Lada, (Really, I 3 You) (Do you wish to believe I 3 you)
To dream.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, To have the sky on speed dial
To have the sky on speed dial:
please more stars, less rain;
please more wildfowl in a skein,
less death please, less disarray.
In Chicago, I walked around the hushed library of the Poetry Foundation. In an ongoing period of artistic suppression, The Poetry Foundation has helped us maintain a literary community. As a young person, I dove into poetry and decided that was my way of life. When I was in college, I only wanted to read either queer women or African American poets. I could not bear reading white men. I was convinced their poetry sprang from privileged lives safe from my guttered existence, completely outside of my experience of the world.
When I think of the extremes of poetry, the poems you can’t really read because the words are stomping over each other on the page, or the poems you have to read many times to understand their kind of music, I recognize how humans like extremes in our universe, in our communities. Maybe because America is moving toward such a dark place, I’m giving thought to all the ways a person—a country—can die and be buried. […]
Living is difficult work. In Chicago, I didn’t eat. I worked. I drank water and coffee and, when I could, I saw art. At my next stop, Nashville, I caught my breath. Carrying an independent publishing press through a country on fire—a country that will not prioritize the survival of the arts—feels like a wild task. Some days, I wonder if I am too old for this. Or too young. Or not impressive enough. Or too female. One of my advisors says a man could do it better.
And so? God is a woman, I say. My God, at any rate. Women get things done. Just wait. Right now, I am in D.C., heading to Baltimore to plan for AWP, to New York to fundraise, then to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Red Hen Press is women-led, queer leaning. We women carry water. We sustain our communities.
In the immediate moment, when I’ve caught my breath, I am off to do wild, great things, as we must in times of great peril. I am not disappearing. Some days, I feel that I am. But I am here, ready to do the great work that art requires of me. I believe in the survival of America. We will unbury this country. We will find our way to the sky.
Kate Gale, Visibility and Vanishing: Unburying the Dream of America
Somewhere, the click of high heels becomes rosary beads, sending well-worn prayers up to a starry heaven dazzled by mercy and moonlight.
All around, the onyx-eyed gaze of darkened apartment windows.
Alleyways looking for nothing pretty, just enough shadows to cloak them in mystery.
Hotels, rooming houses, bungalows, and mansions whisper secrets of the lucky and lowdown, the famished and famous.
Above it all, lovers are parked along Mulholland.
Their fingers upon the heated pulse of a promise yet to be kept.
Rich Ferguson, Along the Boulevard
But sunsets still stun with their overflow of spun
candied gold; dust pooled in clouds, at last.Thieves walk the streets in statement suits—
brazenly believing this is their time at last.Who’ll remember when and where and what
survived, when the trials end at last.On our very last day, before our departure,
Luisa A. Igloria, Eventually
will there be a break in the rain at last?