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: intruding in Eden, remembering how to dream, the angel of history, a museum or diaspora of things, and much more. Enjoy.
The leaves are slowly shifting their colors, including the ones out near the street I catch sight of with a slight startle every once in a while. Last night, storms blew in and left more fall-ish weather in their wake, scattering a lot of the less tenacious leaves. Tonight, J is making beef stew, since it’s officially the season for it. We are loosely planning a trip north in a couple of weeks to go up to see fall color and maybe stay in a cabin or lodge, so fall is happening, so I am trying to hold on to the good, despite the madness of the headlines and the parade of videos featuring people being snatched off the street. […]
Work continues of edits for CLOVEN, and I should have a clean version before we hit November, which could mean a release in December if all goes well. Things are also progressing on the new book manuscript, AMERICAN CYCLORAMA. The one benefit of feeling higher-strung than usual is that it often means my writing comes swifter and more regularly, though it’s not always the best stuff I fear. Still, it’s something to focus on when everything else seems chaos and upheaval.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/7/2025
How Does the World Celebrate an End to Genocide?
Solemnly.
Michael Allyn Wells, How Does the World Celebrate an End of Genocide
With great caution.
Silently accepting each moment
that a cease fire holds.
Holding your jubilation deep inside.
Where fear still has a hold of emotions
that cannot quite be released to run free.
We pray for peace even if we don’t completely trust the people on either side of the negotiating table. Even if we aren’t sure it’s going to work. Even if we’re afraid a strong wind will blow everything sideways. So today I stand in my sideways sukkah with my lulav, and as I beckon blessing from every direction, I’m praying most of all for the blessing of peace.
May the blessing of peace rest on the city of Chicago, where ICE is using military equipment and tactics on civilians. [Source: The Guardian.] May the blessing of peace rest on Portland, which the administration claims is on fire due to “antifa,” but is actually populated with activists who oppose ICE (and fascism) dancing in animal suits. [Source: NYT, gift link.]
And may the blessing of peace rest over Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel.
Rachel Barenblat, And
We are all distracted.
We are told we are distracted.
We loop—inundated with dystopian messages within our chaotic feeds.
The script of the distracted = care about anything trivial in your algorithm (consume) to avoid.
Anyone at this point in the timeline is:
hyperfocused
hypernormalized (evangelizing consumption, practicing avoidance)
actively engaging in cognitive dissonance, apathy, lack of empathy
or has ADHD, PTSD, OCD, CPTSD, or
all of the above.
This is goal of hybrid soft power. War on the imagination, on the collective consciousness.
(And this is not a poem, btw. I’m writing this way because I can’t think anymore in paragraphs).
Propaganda for anti-propaganda works this way.
So along with my attention span being completely shot (thanks grief brain and menopause combined) deliberate action from day-to-day, for me, is useless.
I jump-cut from sobbing on my kitchen floor to hopping on an online work call pretending to be “normal” (whatever the f that means).
The other day, I used the last of our pancake mix (L and I used to make pancakes on Sunday. It’s the middle of the week). I made way too many pancakes, screamed, and threw out the rest of the mix because I can’t share it with him anymore.
I watch movies about the Holodomor and Hannah Arendt while I’m writing social media posts about synchronicities and watch reels of innocent people being disappeared off the streets of my hometown of Chicago.
I watch Adam Curtis videos while organizing Larry’s poems into a new manuscript.
I listen to records at 3 a.m. and try to conjure him like a witch (I am…but still).
I open the curtains every morning at 5:30, 6:00 a.m. so the sunrise can beam across his urn (he loved the sun, a cup of coffee, fresh air).
I wear his clothes to bed. I talk to him every night.
I am feral now. It’s fall. Full moons, eclipses…HEAVY things are happening everywhere.
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Attention: there is no attention.
Last night, as the sun was setting, I discovered that I had made my quilt top too wide. How could this have happened? Just last week-end, it wasn’t wide enough, and I didn’t think I added that much? My spouse and I devised a plan, and I set to work ripping out the seam of part of the quilt that was too wide; later I’ll add it to make the length of the quilt fit–it’s far from catastrophic, as discoveries go.
I looked at the sunset colors in the sky and thought about that time when the crew on one of Columbus’ ships saw land from a distance, that liminal time before all the changes got set into motion. I am now trying to create a poem about ripping out seams on Columbus Day. So far, it’s not working, but I wrote down some ideas and maybe they’ll come together.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Explorations and the Imagery of Those Interactions
In these two most recent pamphlets, Henry Gould continues his missives from the front line of Trump’s America, 2025 style. Shady Library and The Gate are billed as books 4 and 5 respectively of the ongoing Shield of Mnemosyne project, of which I’ve reviewed previous parts here and here. The poems published in these latest instalments are dated from May 21 to August 3 this year, and deal with both the contemporary and the timeless in Gould’s unique fashion.
Shady Library consists of seventeen individual poems in Gould’s characteristic mix of rhymed stanzas, from quatrains to nine-liners. Figures familiar from his earlier work appear: Parmenides, Roger Williams, the Mandelstams, Dante, and Columbia.
This last figure takes on a central importance: as Coulombe, dove of peace, as reminder of the explorer who ‘discovered’ America, as the District of Columbia, seat of American political power (and site of much activity by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, another Gouldian figure who resurfaces in The Gate), and, crucially, as the university that the Trump administration targeted over DEI and student support for the Palestinian people.
What have we done,
America? Columbia is figurehead for us
and pilot too. Buoyancy marks the end of rage.
(from ‘Equilibrium’)The sentiment in the last line echoing other explicit references elsewhere in the pamphlet:
Brute force can only outrage innocence.
There is no glory in such mega-gloom –
and shame concludes the reign of every tyrant.
(from ‘July’)and again, earlier in the same poem, this expression of the ideal Anti-MAGA position:
Love does not boast, or brag, or dominate;
love does not boss, or scold – or persecute
the weak, or curse the poor, or scapegoat
strangers, refugees… O Hypocrite.Those readers who have been following along will recognise love as Gould’s basis for justice and hope. And there is hope aplenty here:
Somewhere, a child is running towards the sun –
laughing with her light, feeling her strength.
Your summer, Psyche-dove, has just begun:
your ship floats in her sea of grass, full-length.
(from ‘Melissa Hortman: In Memoriam’ a poem, ‘after Osip Mandelstam)The fusion of Love’s bride and Coulombe in a poem dedicated to the assassinated Hortman, a Democrat from Gould’s home city, is a perfect bringing together of key elements in Gould’s belief in America’s ability to rein in its own worst tendencies by returning to its founding vision. You don’t have to share his optimism to admire the writing, or the intent behind it.
Billy Mills, Recent reading October 2025: A Review
I’ve been writing and revising as much as I can in recent weeks (some of it recommendation-writing because ’tis the season). A few nice poetry things have happened. About Place published a new issue containing a couple of my recent poems, “Innocent Murmur” and “At Tables.” Both poems sprang from EMDR insights–that’s the therapy I’ve been doing for almost a year, involving this strange eye-movement strategy to process old hurts that linger somatically, even when you’ve talked and written your way around, into, and through them for decades. (I’m good at the cognitive stuff, I’m just a giant head basically, but it turns out the body stores hurt in ways that reason can’t root out.) “At Tables” comes from a cascade of images that poured out in a poetic, associative way. Some of my father’s most frightening behavior occurred over the cherry dining table of my childhood; my boss frightened me into silence by poking my arm under the rim of a different cherry table; my department now meets at the latter table; I teach seminars around similar tables. No wonder I couldn’t feel safe at work. Therapy and poetry are NOT the same thing, but poetry often emerges from underworlds that rational thinking can’t plumb.
Lesley Wheeler, Washington-bound (the other one)
Since July, I’ve been pushing pretty hard on a new poetry manuscript, attempting to compose and accumulate a handful of lyric sequences into a book-length shape. I like the idea of a full-length poetry collection with only a dozen or so poems within, each poem some six or eight pages in length. It isn’t anything I’d attempted prior, although every poetry title I’ve composed since the late 1990s one could claim an exploration of the long poem, or at least through the book as unit of composition. […]
In July 2025, the Anglican Girls’ Choir of Ottawa’s Christ Church Cathedral toured Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, performing multiple times in Belfast, Galway and Dublin [I’m sure you caught my three travel reports: here, here and here]. As our daughter, Rose, was part of said group, Christine and I, along with our youngest, Aoife, played tag-along for the two week jaunt, accompanying and solo-touristing, and attending performances by the group at the Cathedral Church of St. Anne in Belfast, the ruins of the tenth century monastery Clonmacnoise (Cluain Mhic Nóis), Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas in Galway, the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, Christ Church Dublin and the National Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St. Patrick, Dublin.
Of course, two weeks away from my desk is no small thing, and it prompted me to work like a maniac for eight weeks prior to leaving home, to clear that thinking space for travel. I wasn’t suspending the blog while we travelled, after all, and I certainly wasn’t going to attempt writing and posting reviews, interviews or anything else on the road. I spent eight weeks pushing reviews, interviews and other posts nearly a month ahead on the blog, beyond our point of departure. I scheduled a half-dozen substack posts, chapbook posts and pushed a whole array of chapbook publication and mailing, so our adventuring in Ireland (plus at least a week or so after we returned) could be entirely free to focus on that particular experience. I wished to remain, even beyond the uncertainties of travel internet access, which was tricky at times, present.
On airplanes and bus rides, I read through longer works of prose, which seems another kind of rarity. With notebook in hand, I scribbled thoughts on what I was reading; scribbled notes on churches and monuments, Rose’s performances, scattered reading, architecture, and moments. I took a few hundred photos, and mailed more than two dozen postcards. I asked questions of tour guides, hostel and museum staff, bartenders, clergy. Why are there flags along the wall, clearly aged and falling to shreds? Why are the stones of that wall different colours? I looked up details and answers to things that prompted my curiosity. I asked questions of locals, and of the classics professor that was one of the tour organizers. How does Brexit affect the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland? Why was Belfast so young a city, and how does that reconcile with a graveyard going back to the 5th century? If Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke (c. 1130–1176), otherwise known as Strongbow, is buried in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral, where was his wife, Aoife? Why is the Cathedral in Belfast where Rose and her choir sang named for St. Anne, a figure not mentioned in the actual Bible, but only in the apocrypha, as mother of Mary? Through the process of questions (and internet queries), I learned that, unlike her husband, our wee Aoife’s namesake, Aoife MacMurrough of Leinster (c. 1153–c. 1188), is actually buried with her father-in-law at Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire, a ruin that sits along the Welsh bank of the River Wye.
Perhaps most minds might not go there, but a reference to Tintern immediately returned me to “Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798” by English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850). It was this example that prompted my own series of title-attempts: “Lines composed in St. Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast,” “Lines composed a few kilometres past Clonmacnoise, County Offaly, on the banks of the River Shannon,” “Lines composed at Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, Galway,” and “Lines composed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Christ Church, Dublin.” For each piece, I held the title as a kind of umbrella, working to compose a sequence of small clusters of lyric underneath the protection and stretch of those titles; pulling apart sentences and fragments to stretch the narrative into a sequence of small cluster-points that constellate the physical space of each page.
I’ve now composed a handful of “Lines composed…” poems, set as foundation for the collection, with further pieces set around this particular core. So far, other poems in the manuscript-in-progress include “Epithalamium , a consortium,” a piece composed after the recent nuptuals of Ottawa poets Jennifer Baker and David Currie, and “Lines composed once landing at Al Purdy’s A-Frame, Ameliasburgh,” after a recent visit we made to Ameliasburg, driving by the late Canadian poet Al Purdy’s infamous house, a site that now hosts a sequence of writing residencies. Ameliasburg, a Loyalist territory, of course, named for Hanover Princess Amelia, the youngest daughter of English King George III. These are poems for occasions, it would seem, almost in the Robert Creeley sense, which, arguably, I have always done. Poems to mark or document moments of time, of activity; of thinking, across or within the broader spectrum of daily activity.
rob mclennan, The Museum of Practical Things
I like when something is really sour and nothing except that sourness exists for that instant. I like my crooked teeth even though I try not to smile in photographs. It’s comforting to know that, when I am sleeping, my hair grows like grass. I like that since I am not plastic, I will die someday. In a forest, I am flesh and a tiger can actually eat me. I find it thrilling that there is not much difference between me and a dog or a zebra.
It’s nice that, like an apple, I have skin.
Saudamini Deo, I like having a body
Last month, I posted an invitation to “Ask Me Anything” over on Instagram. I had so much fun chatting all things creativity, community, books, behind-the-scenes, etc. I want to share some of the questions with you here, too. […]
Q: How do you get over the “ugh, I wish I’d written this!” when you read another poet?
I actually love that feeling. It tells me I’m ready to write. It clues me into craft choices or emotions or maybe new forms that I want to try. Ask yourself what you love about the poem. Why are you so inspired by it?
My friend and I say “I hate you” when the other one writes a poem we wish we’d written. Jillian also says she wants to set those poems on fire. 😂
I’m too scared to set fires, so I just go write poems. […]
Q: Fave communities or resources that have helped you fine tune your poetry?
I’ll start with books: Dear Writer — Maggie Smith, The Poetry Home Repair Manual — Ted Kooser, A Poetry Handbook — Mary Oliver, Poetry Unbound — Pádraig Ó Tuama
I also take workshops whenever I can. Here are some of my favorite workshop leaders: Kelly Grace Thomas, Joy Sullivan, Isabelle Correa, Lexi Pelle, Two Sylvias Press
And community is everything. There are paid communities, of course, that can speed up the process of connecting with other writers. A few favorites are: Gather Poets, Exhale Creativity, and Blue Sky Black Sheep. But I’ve also met and cultivated relationships with other writers simply by connecting on platforms like IG and Substack. I formed a friendship with poet Christen Lee simply by reaching out after reading her poem in Dulcet Lit Mag. Be brave, say hello, and ask to swap work for feedback. It’s so valuable, and much more fun than doing this all on your own!
Allison Mei-Li, You Asked, I Answered
I’ve always been the kind of person who slips easily into dark moods, and the doubt inherent in being a 53-year-old STILL SEEKING her debut poetry collection is a natural portal for that darkness. Instead, however, this revision cycle has made me — and my book — bolder, brighter, and more defiant than ever.
I am incredibly proud of the deep, consistent effort and delighted by the results.
Doubt hasn’t been entirely absent, of course. The ferocity that defined the summer of revision has been book-ended by periods of frustration. In May, on the heels of yet another rejection and just ahead of digging back into the manuscript, I entertained the idea that there just wasn’t a space for me in the poetry publishing universe. And in September, which is the period covered in this blog post, my energy for revision started to flag, and I grew frustrated with a section that just wasn’t coming together as I’d hoped.
I began to wonder if I was failing my vision for the book. Maybe it was time to admit defeat?
Enter the wisdom of writing community… Y’all have been there and done that, and you swooped in to remind me that the process ebbs and flows. Also, so many of you believe in this book in moments when I lose faith. Your guidance and encouragement frequently saves me, including the message I heard loud and clear in September: Girl, it’s OK to take a break.
Best pal Jill Crammond put it in the clearest terms: “I think you should take a nap,” she said. And so that’s how I ended the month. Not stalled out with revisions, but resting. Taking a short pause. Letting some shit go.
We can work so hard we stop seeing straight.
Carolee Bennett, When We Remember How to Dream
Thinking out loud about things that block us in one of Claire Pedrick’s supervision groups this week also had me thinking about focusing and about being temporarily stuck. I have some great strategies for getting unstuck and tackling things that are blocking the way to my next steps or simply getting something done, and I was happy to share these. But I found that I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something particular I needed to find out about being blocked when it comes to editing a set of a poems. How could I have these strategies and still be stuck?
Two kinds of being blocked came to mind – the ‘not wanting to do a thing’ kind and the ‘joy-blocked’ kind. These are the kind of blocks I need to climb over or go round. But here they were showing themselves to both be at play at the same time making the block seem huge.
I didn’t want to edit the poems and I wasn’t finding joy when I did sit down to do it. Thinking out loud with others and then allowing myself time to continue the think enabled me to hear the real stuff going on. Firstly, I had to admit they weren’t all great poems and those that had been sent back instead of being published did need work. I needed to kick into touch the hurry up driver that wanted a set of poems to work on and had pulled them together too quickly. I also had to take on board the feedback I had asked for and respond to it. I also realised that having an overarching theme to the work was hugely important to me, and I had been pushing this aside.
Having leant into all of that I was gifted time to truly focus at a body doubling session. I took along three poems, and during the session I binned one and polished the other two. Without another person sharing time and space it would have taken me much longer to get this sorted. It wasn’t easy, and I felt the twitch of wanting to give in or to check social media to avoid the difficult, but what a wonderful feeling to have cracked the blocks and squeezed through onto the poetry path again.
Here’s to the kind of focus that comes when you stay with something even though it’s hard. And to the joy of being inspired to write fresh poems.
Sue Finch, FOCUSING
Silence is often a cue
that apologies are in order.
Perhaps it is perverse to kneel here
like an intruder in eden
and ask for more.
Nature does this,
weighing down one end of a seesaw
holding me high – precarious, captive, impotent.I paint a golden eagle in the sky
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Where one road ends
its six-foot wingspan blocking the sun
the lake turning purple
wind scattering into the branches —
as if imperfection improves the scene
improves me
makes it all bearable
allows me to pray.
I have never been to the mountains in the fall. Teaching always meant vacations were taken during winter break or during the summer months, but those restrictions no longer apply. Two friends and I took a four day trip to hike and drive Rocky Mountain National Park, and autumn did not disappoint. The number of elk was incredible (the last time my husband and I visited, we did not see even one.) Our hikes led us to spectacular views and everyone we looked, the aspens were jangling their gold. Majesty is a word that is thrown around about mountains, and it is decidedly not hyperbole. Coming from the flat Midwest, there’s something magical about mountains that cannot be beat. […]
Unrivered, my fourth poetry collection with Sundress Publications is now in the world. I’ve been busy promoting it and starting to read from it, so I want to thank and highlight those people who have graciously given me the space to do so over the first couple weeks of the book’s life.
- A Wild and Precious Life Series -I was privileged to read with Taylor Byas and Ashley M. Jones on September 24, and host Dustin Brookshire creates such a welcoming atmosphere. (I think there was a video somewhere on Instagram, but I can’t find it now.)
- Of Poetry Podcast with Han VanderHart – It’s always a pleasure to talk poems with someone as smart as Han, and this was no exception. You can listen at the link
- A Word? with Roi Faineant Press and Kellie Scott Reed. This short video conversation with Kellie was so much fun. We talked about the book, yes, but also about music and memory, everything from Jesus Christ Superstar to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” and its effect on driving speed.
- Verse Virtual – Hosted by Robbi Nester and Jim Lewis, who create a lovely welcoming space. I got to read with Jane Zwart, whose work I adore, and the open mic readers were all talented as well. Video should be up soon.
- My Bad Poetry Podcast – I always enjoy listening to Aaron and Dave and their guests, and I had a blast bringing some of my own bad poems to this conversation. Want to hear a poem about nothing, a really odd metaphor for religion, a low-rent Millay imitation? Episode coming soon, and you’ll be able to find it at the link.
I’m reading online for NAWP this Tuesday evening, and my in-person, in real life book launch will be this upcoming Saturday at Yellow Bird Books in Aurora, IL, where I will read and be in conversation with my good friend and fellow poet Kristin LaTour, who runs the Aurora Writer’s Workshop, a wonderful local conference held in June.
Donna Vorreyer, Three Months Later…
My goal for the last few years has been to review 10% of the titles read. I did it last year, nearly did it the year before.
By now, that would be about 24 reviews for 2025. And I am at 12 reviews.
So can I go for broke and do 12 more in 2 months? (I could add to the count one line raves at AO3. Hardly equivalent.) To keep pacing under my own control, I could do the remainder here, rather than a magazine that may plan 6 months or a year ahead. Am I talking to myself? Very well, I am talking with myself.
The point of reading, writing, reviewing, living is the exploration and engagement, the being present and attentive, not the numbers racked up. (Kind of sounds like a relationship instead of collecting followers online doesn’t it. )
I want to go deeper rather than bigger.
I have been doing my small press since 2007. (That means it’s an adult press as of November.) I have been doing a reader’s log since 2012. Next year will be 14 years.
It’s funny how there are no constants in this chaotic universe. Sure, spiders have 8 legs, except when they’ve lost 3 and continue on. Water freezes at 0 degrees, unless salty. I read Feel Happier in nine seconds: poems by Linda Besner (Coach House, 2017) and I couldn’t enter it. I return the better part of a decade later and it isn’t hard. I has a sort of Eunoia about it. Constraints cinched hard. Still a pointing.
I read To Assemble an Absence by John Levy (above/ground, 2024) and was utterly wowed. How hadn’t read this before? Except I had 18 months before and it was kinda meh then. I wonder if I should reread Guest Book for People in My Dreams by John Levy (Proper Tales Press, 2024) and it too might improve from very good.
Pearl Pirie, Anniversaries
There’s a never too late writing award for the over 60s, an elder fest somewhere and probably enough silver tagged onto old peoples’ events to heat our homes.
In my city library there’s also a book display for the ‘ageing well’ festival. Mmm…crafting, menopause, gardening, birdwatching. I approach a woman on the desk with purple hair. We’re around the same age. That stand, I say…..it’s so depressing. She keeps quiet. I go on…brilliant women novelists over 60, poets, artists, actors, singers and musicians….composers, inventors and women of history. We laugh. She promises to tell the person who’s done the display, gently, that it could be more ambitious. That ‘gently’ is telling. It reminds me of words I researched for age in the historical thesaurus (a place to browse on a par with an old-style, ramshackle charity shop).
Ripe, wintered, strucken, far, oldish, grey, eld, crusted, long in the tooth, over the hill, grandevous, antiquated and my all-time favourite, badgerly. (Someone once shouted ‘badger’ at me when the stripes on the side of my head appeared and much of the rest of my hair was still dark.) It appears in a poem in A Friable Earth.
Jackie Wills, Pantywaist looking for work
As a midlife, mid-career writer, it seems like a good time to take a moment and think about the habits and goals I’ve become accustomed to since starting to write and submit in my teens. Am I trying to support myself with my writing (and if so, how do I do that better than I’m doing it now?) Am I trying to reach the right audiences? How do I determine whether I say yes or no to an assignment or request? How do I find the right publisher (because it would be nice to find the right publisher that I could stay with the rest of my writing career?) […]
Our J. Bookwalter’s book club is reading a book that just came out in English translation (but the stories were written and published in the seventies and eighties in Japan), Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki. It made me think about Philip K. Dick’s sixties-era Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in that it plumbs strangely prescient subject matter – population collapse vs overpopulation, teens obsessed with screens to the point of violence, and a very 2020’s kind of detachment and way of examining gender and class. It also has things in common with Yoko Ogawa, a Japanese writer I very much admire, and Osamu Dazai’s whose ironic detachment in his many books the 1930s set a standard for Japanese literature. It’s interesting to think what people in the past thought the future would be like – and how much they got right or wrong. I’ve been investigating Solarpunk over the past year, partially because I believe if you can’t imagine a better future, you won’t get one, and the relentless oppressiveness of recent dystopian writings, I’m trying to think of how to write a way to a better future for people and nature. I’m trying to be brave and face some things – like disability and chronic illness – more directly in my writing, and in doing that, to maybe make things better (?)
Jeannine Hall Gailey, October – Trip to Skagit, Application Anxieties and the Mid-Career Writer, Reading Early Cyberpunk
Literature cannot save you, but it can accompany you on the quest for meaning.
Quests send us out into the world, send us through trials, send us into the dark lands of wilderness and despair. Quests teach us that we were really seeking virtue, not gold, true love, not a princess. A quest is a cycle to help us see the world and ourselves afresh. It is a long process of moral reformation. All quest is self-discovery, aspiration, virtue riding in the wilderness.
Shakespeare wrote about the journey of the mind. Elizabeth Bishop wrote of the journey to the interior. Those are the journeys on which great authors are our companions in the struggle. It takes a great deal of reading to go on such a quest of the spirit.
Literature is not trying to save you. It is calling to you. The great works of civilisation are trying to show you your life as a quest for meaning.
A lot of people find themselves midway on the path, wandering the wilderness of the world, and they are now turning to literature.
Good. Welcome. Enchantment is the start of change.
Now the journey begins.
Henry Oliver, Literature can’t save you.
It is night walk season and I don my florescent vest. It is night walk season and for whatever reason, the dried-up river rumbles loud amidst the insect song. Perhaps it is the change in temperature. Perhaps it is the body’s tuning into the dark. With darkness comes more sound. And the pupil—that dark aperture—widens like wells ever-ready to receive a message like a dropped coin. And as my eyes begin to adjust to the darkness, rhodopsin is produced in my eyes, promoting night-vision. The racoon or skunk is indeed litter. The intriguing dark hole up ahead on the road that looks like a deep void into the earth—like Wiley Coyote’s convenient trap—is indeed a piece of cardboard. This is the kind of darkness, though, where the coyote trots, head down, between the trees.
Sarah Lada, Make Big Shadows I Can Move In
Tonight I’m trying something new: a fighting game and poetry night for students. They can take turns at 4-player arena battles on Power Stone 2 or team up for 2-player ‘Dramatic Battle’ mode in Street Fighter Alpha 3 (both from the recently released Capcom Fighting Collection 2 ). I’m bringing some thematically linked poems for volunteers to read aloud in between bouts. Here they are:
‘Wrestling’ by Louise S. Bevington
Jon Stone, VS. Night Mini-Anthology
‘Duel’ by Helena Nelson
‘The Boxers’ by Michael Longley
‘Last Round’ by Kim Addonizio
‘Sonnets to Morpheus [“I know kung fu”]’ by John Beer
‘Elegy for Bruce Lee’ by W. Todd Kaneko
‘Fist of the North Star’ by Kayo Chingonyi (available/first published in Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge!)
‘To fight aloud is very brave’ by Emily Dickinson
‘Duellum’ (‘The Duel’) by Baudelaire (I’ve picked the LeClercq translation)
‘Mortal Combat’ by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
I’m so jet lagged I should have a lock on my laptop right now. Writing exhausted and with my internal clock set to no discernible time zone at all is probably not advisable. And yet, here we are! Bear with me.
I spent the last week in Greece at Rosemary’s House, mentoring a cohort of writers—poets, memoirists, essayists, and fiction writers—and eating more feta than one human should ingest in an eight-day period. I highly recommend both. Working with writers across genres is a joy and a privilege no matter where I am, but doing that work in such a beautiful place, with such a supportive group? I kept turning to my friend Megan Stielstra and saying, “This is work,” to remind myself.
It was work, and it was pleasure, and I hope to be back.
Maggie Smith, On Growing Up & Leaning In
More often than seems sensible, I dwell on comparisons between building and poetry. That there is poetry in these bricks is undeniable. They might carry a faded provenance of lime-wash, or azulete; the lime tinted with washing blue, said to keep away flies and the evil eye. (There’s a window surround in azulete in the photo of my house above, also flat bricks forming the sill and capping the buttress at the foot of the wall).
Sometimes the brick might be blackened from a fire surround or even a chimney, and cutting them with an angle grinder releases the scent of an ancient fire to rise with the dust. The unmistakeable sweet vanillin smell of oak is pungent and lingering and occasionally, if the sun falls on one of these faintly charred bricks, I might catch the whiff of another home’s hearth. I wonder what was said around it, and in which language, or languages. […]
So many bricks and tiles, so many words and so many people, been and gone. At a zoom poetry event, a poet remarked rather pointedly that she thought using a foreign language in a poem was ‘showing off’ and I was a little taken aback. I did think about this on and off for quite a while, concluding I was and am happy to throw in Spanish, Catalan, Ladino or even Arabic words into poetry. It means I get to do things like rhyme ‘ever’ with ‘cueva’ and because as someone pointed out, these languages are a part of my ‘lived experience’. Just like the bricks and the roof tiles and the honey-coloured stone, they are the linguistic palette of the land and its lingering traces. They are the raw material from which the words arise, passed hand to hand through Roman Hispania, or the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, proudly Mudéjar, a product of Teruel, where I live. I may be English, but here in Spain, when our heads settle into their pillows to rest and dream, they are still cradled through the night by the almohada, from the Hispanic Arabic: al-Muhádda.
james mcconachie, Mudéjar
This week, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis was published by Faber & Faber. It contains uncollected and unpublished poems, and extensive notes on the writing and publication of Heaney’s twelve collections. For anyone who grew up reading Heaney, as I did, it’s an addictive, behind-the-scenes kind of volume. Here are some notes on what I’ve found so far. […]
One of Heaney’s strokes of luck as a poet was to be taught in schools for decades. Next year, however, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of an incident that almost got him cancelled in the right-wing press. In 1976, an “outraged mother” from Suffolk wrote to her local Conservative MP, Eldon Griffiths, to complain that the “The Early Purges” had been set as an “unseen” poem that year. It describes the drowning of unwanted kittens as a coldly practical matter on the family farm:
I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, “the scraggy wee shits”,
Into a bucket; a frail metal soundGriffiths contacted the Daily Telegraph, who obligingly ran with the headline “POEM FOR O-LEVEL ‘SICK’”, and — in a different kind of sic — identified the poet responsible as “Sean Heany”.
What I like most about this episode— apart from the fact that a secondary school exam board was willing to set an unseen poem that contained (as the Telegraph put it) “language not encouraged in most homes” — is the calm indifference with which the head of the exam board, Dr. F. Wyld, responded to the trouble-making politician:
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #37: The Melancholy Spouts of TractorsDr. Wyld said: “I replied to Mr. Griffiths pointing out that the function of examination boards is to examine. We try to test candidates fairly, without giving offence, and I am sorry that we seem to have given offence in this case.”
As for Mr. Heany [sic], Dr. Wyld said: “I have to confess that I have never heard of him. I gather that he is one of the modern poets.”
Highly Commended in Forward Prizes
Thanks to Bad Betty Press for submitting a video of my performance with the Bad Betty crew in Nottingham. Check out the whole list, my poem is in great company, and I’m sending congratulations and appreciation to all. Thanks especially to the judges for sharing this undiluted fury, it is one of the most fierce protest poems in the With Love, Grief and Fury collection. Huge thanks to Bad Betty, Amy and Jake, for this surprise, for their support and outstanding contribution to poetry as a whole.
On a personal note – I feel heavy-hearted taking any praise and applause for this particular poem. It was written a while back now, however, today we see the dirtiest of Dirty Old Men gaining more power, wealth, votes and momentum, whilst lying to our faces, stripping human rights and profiteering in the deaths of people and planet.
Salena Godden, With Love, Grief and Fury
In Jonson’s poem, it is not the ‘balanced mind’ of self-knowledge and equanimity that proves reliable, but death itself; the final lines of the English epigram are a moving variation upon the structure of the Latin ending: ‘Which shows, wherever death doth please t’appear, / Seas, serenes, swords, shot, sickness, all are there.’
The emphasis upon the location (wherever . . . there) rather than, as we might rather expect, the unanticipated timing of death connects the end of the epigram with Horace’s point about the unimportance of location for virtue and wisdom. But this insiginificance, which is offered as a source of comfort for Bullatius, is the root of Jonson’s sorrow and loss: when death strikes home, it makes no difference where we are.
Jonson very often used Horace’s epistles as the starting point for poems about friendship, and the epistle to which he returns more often than any other is not in fact the quite brief 1.11 but the much longer Epistles 1.18, addressed to Lollius, which is concerned with how the poet should handle and relate to powerful friends — how to find the delicate mid-point between respect and honesty. […]
It’s been rather a trying week here in Paris. My husband and I are both bogged down in seemingly endless and fruitless domestic admin; two of us (including me) have been unwell on and off all week; and French politics has become completely absurd — comedic, very distracting, and also a bit worrying. But as Jonson, Horace, or Roe would all have said, whatever else is going on, there is always one thing that you can do: my constant mind, I will prepare myself.
Victoria Moul, When I am down at Hackney Brook
You worked as a chemical engineer, a biomedical scientist, and a forensic scientist. I think that’s impressive. Let’s start with chemical engineering. What kind of chemicals did you work with? What are some key things you’ve learned about this career field? How has your work as a chemical engineer informed your lifestyle, life perspectives, and your poetry?
Instead of listing chemicals, let me offer a metaphor: the haiku mind as a chemical plant. The real estate (including the reaction vessel) is the mind. The reactants are images, memories, kigo, cutting words. The catalyst is a flash of insight or a prompt. The reaction vessel—the brain—responds under pressure (a deadline) and temperature (mood). The distillation column is editing. We purify the product, strip the excess, and maybe collect unused images as reflux for later use. My professors might groan, but haiku really is a high-purity product.
As a biomedical scientist, what were your specialties? What did you enjoy the most about working as a biomedical scientist? What were some of the challenges? How has your work as a biomedical scientist informed your life perspectives and your poetry?
I was often tasked with translating technical ideas into plain language. One job involved a 10-year modernization plan for fifteen hospitals during the early days of digital radiography—when some physicians still thought it was witchcraft. Another project developed a handheld molecular biology tool to identify pathogens in hours, not days—this was before most medical schools even taught the technology.
As an occupational health consultant, I observed hundreds of industrial processes, assessed health risks, and translated findings into terms both workers and managers could understand. It was all about clarity and credibility—skills that carry into poetry.
What inspired you to work as a forensic scientist? What did you enjoy the most about this position? What were some of the challenges? What are the key things you learned? How has your work as a forensic scientist informed your life perspectives and your poetry?
Forensics focuses on trace evidence, attribution, comparison. Did the dyed hair come from a suspect? Is that chemical from the scene or just background contamination?
Locard’s Exchange Principle teaches that when two things meet, something is transferred. That’s haiku. You step into nature, and you carry something away—in memory, in your boots, in your notebook. Hopefully, nature is okay with what we leave behind.
Jacob D. Salzer, Richard L. Matta
They are circling, as they do. Something is dead somewhere in the neighborhood. Or dying. So as much as I like these giant hideous creatures whose very existence thrills me with their alienness, they also seem foreboding. Death is nigh. And, of course, it is. It always is. But with their wingspan and their wattley heads and knobby knees they are so damnably alive, these guys. I thrill to the juxtaposition: life/death, hunger/dying, “civilized” streets/wild life, my earthbound body/their unlikely grace in flight. Turkey vultures jolt me out of my earthbound concerns, sneer at my little anxieties. And in so doing, relieve me, for a moment, of the claustrophobia of my me-centered vision and my you-centered fears, and open for me the sky, where eternity drifts like mares’ tail clouds and peace abides in blue.
Here is a lovely and taut poem by Bertha Rogers, also a vulture appreciator.
Marilyn McCabe, most exalted fixture, an angel
Some readers of this publication will have been wondering when a Lynda Hull poem would appear, so vast and long has been my adoration of this poet, and since another reader casually asked me today when she’d see the next post, and it happens that I once attempted to order said reader a copy of Hull’s Collected Poems1 as a birthday gift only for it to never materialize, the time, it seems, for Lynda Hull is nigh. I’ve been relearning, these days, to not ignore auspicious signs, even when it means I might embarrass myself by publicly declaiming that in fact I do still adore the work of Lynda Hull, and you may roll your eyes all you want. She is not the reason I started writing poems, but she may well be the reason I never fell out of love with them. What I’m saying is, I’d like to be her when I grow up.
Hull is a poet of furious intensity and lyricism, fiercely engaged with the social world at both the micro- and macrocosmic level. Her work is driven by an intoxicating tangle of sorrow and praise, reverence and despair. She is an ecstatic elegiac, or an elegiac ecstatic, and her too-short life left Planet Earth with just three volumes of poetry, each more restlessly felt and original than the last. “The Window” is the last poem in her final collection, The Only World, which was published after her death in 1994. She was forty years old. I am a little stunned tonight to realize, for the first time, that I have outlived her. I guess I’ll have to be myself when I grow up instead.
Vanessa Stauffer, “The Window” by Lynda Hull
This week a friend introduced me to a quote by Walter Benjamin about his idea of the Angel of History, the being who surveys and weighs the actions of the past. It is only a slice of Benjamin’s vignette, but here are the select lines he sent:
‘…the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe…’
The extract almost shivered on the first reading, possessing that little vibration common to all things that are alive. Benjamin was said to have been inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), that odd and not entirely appealing monoprint. Reading the extract, I was reminded how we are always looking for ways to understand the past, and this figure felt instantaneously apt; I imagined it large and looming over all our important incidents.
For me at least, the resonance was only momentary, and I found by the second reading of the lines that my heart disagreed. Would any Angel of History really see overarching catastrophe? I have my doubts. I think it is the human habit, rather than any angel’s, to see catastrophe everywhere.
How would I alter the line? I would risk outlining it as this: ‘…the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of catastrophes, he sees one single act of…’ What? Beauty? Grace? Something like this? I think so.
The terror is that this angel would see a chain-link of sadness after sadness and would perceive not a whole sorrow. How incomprehensible to us. This is the terror, and the hope – that all this suffering is not just suffering.
Niall Campbell, On What The Angel of History Might See
stars pound on the roof but no one hears.
a lost soul settles to the benthic floor. polished
darkness. weight of silence. have mercy.
Grant Hackett [no title]
Erasing Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari’s metaphysical classic A Thousand Plateaus page by page, until only tanka and haiku remain. Follow Deleuzian Haiku on BlueSky for regular updates.
“All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of consistency of multiplicities. The plane of consistency is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills, [while] flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency, regardless of their number of dimensions.” (D&G, p9) […]
16
speak:
transformed by a line
of ants[…]
18
microfascisms
Dick Whyte, Delezuian Erasure Haiku Vol. 2
just waiting to crystallize . . .
i become cat
When I was a teen, I used to sneak out of the house and play music in the woods or, especially, at the loading dock of the local mall because I loved the echoey sound and the sense of being alone, “out there,” playing music as if I were Sonny Rollins on the Brooklyn Bridge or some other improviser reckoning with self and the numinous. Later, I’d play in the outdoor concert hall at my arts high school. In fact, the night before graduation, a friend and I snuck out of our dorms at 3am and I played saxophone and he played the organ which was set up for the ceremony. Badasses, I know. I love playing music at night, and especially outside. I still do this, sometimes playing under the bridge to the 403 Highway near me. I like the susurration of the cars above and the otherwise stillness of the night.
Gary Barwin, Playing Music at Night under the Bridge
Never mind the half moons of cemetery dirt beneath its fingernails. Now, time means you no harm.
Those late-night drives when a familiar voice and a cup of coffee get you so much further down the line.
Up ahead,
a sign reads, You Are Here,
but you know there are still many miles left to go.
Rich Ferguson, Just One of the Many Adventures St. Christopher Remembers
In the distance, lakes black
as tar; the clang of instruments for bindingand shattering. The harp of the world
is strung to the point of breaking.What hope there might be is a small
Luisa A. Igloria, The Last Judgment
bubble, a spacecraft with limited seating.
I’m becoming a real fan of poetry read aloud. I love to hear words animated. Silence falls, and the voice, with its hypnotic or musical or walking tones, steps in. Now that I’ve had the chance to read several times from “Diaspora of Things,” I’m fascinated. Self-conscious at the start, I was careful to put emphasis here, pause between stanzas where I penciled in “pause.” Then I slid into a rhythm. The words took over, released from the page. I hoped those words, riding on the point of a vibrating arrow, attached to wings, knew how to do what they do.
Homer called it, “winged words,” how poetry is in flight and comes alive, like airborne birds, like carrier pigeons, conveying meaning and power. In Hebrew, words and things are conveyed by the same word – devar. In “Diaspora,” things become released “from the gaze of possession” – so why not words? If they pierce the reader, go directly from one inner self to another, I ask for nothing more.
Jill Pearlman, Poetry’s “Winged Words”
the cold finale
Kati Mohr, Oración de Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes
of a crime series:
even the softest sofa becomes
uncomfortable, unidentified,
a simple thing