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: digging up a dictionary, a covert translation, horror and fragmentation, baking an Elizabethan foole, and much more. Enjoy.
It takes grit to live a life. To stick with the unknown. To roll with it, once it becomes known. It occurs to me that writing a poem is similar. Writing anything. Painting too. Actually, now that I think about it, learning anything new is like that too. One step at a time. Sometimes, though, you can’t see the step. Is it up or down? Yikes.
My husband is having some balance issues, and I dragged him on a hike recently, and watched when he paused, a bit frightened, at a dry stream crossing over a tumble of rocks. And I realized he was doing that thing we all do when we’re scared — stiffen those legs, rear back just a bit, tense up. When what is required, often, is to loosen the knees, lower the center of gravity, scope out a strategy, then commit.
So I’m over here keeping a slight bend in my knee, breathing, centering. Once life — or a poem, or that terrible painting I just started — reveals what is required next, I’ll be ready. Or ready-ish. The mind-body connection is something to keep actively in mind. The mind also must keep a bend in its knees.
Marilyn McCabe, What flight of legs is always a thing falling?
But at some point you have to make the jump. How does this work in practice? First I am struck by the shift in my body as I walk the dog on the river-loop. I notice that more and more lines have been plopping into my head in the last two weeks and that I need to capture these, somehow, beyond the provisional kitchen scribbles on scraps of paper while keeping the whole process playful and light and not solemn. I re-read an essay by Mark Halliday on Kenneth Koch, in which he reminds us that Koch basically saw writing poems as a hugely fun activity. And I think to myself: I would like to have some of that writing fun back in my life and now might be the time.
But first I need to wash the dog. As the great Ailsa Holland reminds us, this is all writing. Then I make a cup of tea, ditto. And generally tidy the kitchen and remember that the car needs MOTing. And then I walk upstairs.
By now some extremely vicious voices from my schooling and early writing life have begun to intrude. The voices of certain teachers, with their emphasis on my uselessness. A particularly brutal review of my first book. That sort of thing. I place the mug on my desk and think about opening up my emails because suddenly they seem much more appealing than dealing with what others have chosen to label me, their eyes glinting with triumph. (If you know how much I detest doing my emails, you will know the scale of this paradox.) Then I remember that St Anne Lamott line about dropping the voices, like mice, one by one into a tall mason jar, turning the volume up for ten seconds, then turning it right back down to zero, and opening my notebooks.
Anthony Wilson, The jump
Somehow I wrote a lot this summer. I’m still going back through drafts, and it’s been a fun process. My recent method has been to draft a bunch of stuff as spontaneously and subconsciously as possible, and then put it aside until I’ve forgotten everything about it. Then, with clear eyes, I can see what’s trash and what’s not, but it also has the advantage of feeling like found material. And found material is easier to collage with, moving lines and pieces around, trying to arrive at something that pleases me.
It’s been a sort of relief to work this way (and I’ve had a few samples of similar poems come out in various places this year (including Mercury Firs, The Tiny, Capgras, and Noir Sauna)). After years of writing in an almost documentary style that tracked inhuman violence and horrors, it’s nice to make poetry that feels fun and intuitive and free (tho never totally immune to the wrongness of our times). I began to feel a need to do something else for a bit besides looking down on the pile of wreckage like the Angel of History. Some part of me began to feel like I was trapping myself as an artist by deferring too much to one mode of doing “political writing.” There’s room for all of it, and I am not prescribing anything for others, but on a personal level: I can’t just write about nightmarish shit for the rest of my life. […] And in an age of machine learning and LLM’s, in a society being trained and reshaped by bots and algorithmic thinking, it can be good to change your face, your speech, your way of entering the picture and the page. Sometimes it feels good to make the language say things in a spirit of delight—sometimes it even feels freeing.
RM Haines, PARADISE SELF-STORAGE
His poetry worked, as he might have put it himself, from rather than toward language. While his social realist contemporaries had something to say and found language and form with which to say it, he started with words and followed them to discover the shape they would make. This is not to say that he was engaged in some form of subconscious outpouring or automatic writing. [Dylan] Thomas was, from the beginning, a conscious craftsman who worked with the dual nature of language as both a ‘thing in the world’ and as a system of signs that stands apart from the world it is used to represent.
In practical terms this meant disrupting both the semantic continuities of unselfconscious language through the use of puns and other devices and its regular syntactic flow. The latter aspect of Thomas’s craft can be illustrated by looking at the line ‘Grief thief of time’, from the poem of that name. In an earlier draft this phrase was punctuated ‘Grief, thief of time’, the comma indicating that ‘thief of time’ was a truncated relative clause defining ‘grief’. By removing the comma, Thomas opened up the syntactical relationships between his words. The ‘original’ meaning is still present, but is augmented by the possibility of a multi-dimensional reading of the phrase. Is ‘grief thief’ to be understood in the same way that, for instance, ‘car thief’ might be? This kind of deliberate ambiguity is ever-present in the poems and is characteristic of a poetic that opens our reading minds to what one might think of as a multiplicity of uncertainty.
Billy Mills, On Dylan Thomas
Artificial Intelligence created A Practical Guide to Eating Paper
Bob Mee, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE STOLE MY FOOTBALL BOOTS and OTHER BITS AND PIECES
Artificial Intelligence stole all those voices you’ve not heard in so many years and it changed the accents and then the faces they spoke out of and gave the voices to nobody you ever wanted to know
Artificial Intelligence is a passionate genius
Artificial Intelligence is tragic, comic, humane
Artificial Intelligence stole my grandmother’s slippers, my grandfather’s pipe
Artificial Intelligence rewrote this poem
Recently I encountered the work of sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, whose Symbolic Capitalism is a Substack worth your time. In his book We Have Never Been Woke, he argues that symbolic capitalists—people who work with and produce ideas, information, and symbols rather than, say, shoes, pavement, and corn—comprise a new elite that has mobilized social justice in order to gain, for themselves, status and resources. The thing about ideas, of course, is that they are made of, and make, other ideas, and if you are using ideas to access status and resources, you will, if you are savvy, do your best to make some more of them.
Poets, at least by contemporary reckoning, are mostly symbolic capitalists. They manipulate ideas, information, symbols, to gain publication, tenure, adoration, self-satisfaction, grants, likes, and all sorts of other things they value. Much of this is good, inevitable, perfectly fine; much of it is also easily and often perverted. Is there really a market for poems that are so esoterically conceived and executed as to be barely intelligible to even the average literate adult? There’s a perceived market for them, that’s for certain, but it’s worth thinking about where that perception comes from, and who is profiting—yes, profiting—from it.
I have been working lately on other creative pursuits under the guidance of a professional who possesses a combination of talent and experience that is so astounding it makes my head swim. I go off into my next attempt and develop some fixation on one detail or another, such that it subsumes both the rest of the effort and the larger purpose for it, and her feedback, inevitably, highlights how inconsequential my obsession truly is. Yesterday it struck me: this is just like contemporary poetry, just like symbolic capitalism, the isolated conviction that some dumb little thing is the thing itself. It’s not so much that the emperor has new clothes; it’s that he has the same old new ones.
Vanessa Stauffer, “Broadway” by Mark Doty
In truth, I read this book a while back — within days of a lovely afternoon tea when the author signed a copy and gifted it to me. This morning I’m rereading and appreciating the poems again for their agile wisdom, complexity, and artistry.
The Ocean Cannot Be Blue [by Kirsten Hampton] is comprised of 49 poems, some of which are in numbered parts that could stand alone, some of which are letters from the historic court case, Loving v. Virginia (1967), in which the Supreme Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the 14th amendment. With this story as its spine, the book offers a lens into history, but also into the poet’s own marriage, and to all the ways families weave themselves together. One poem is about a whale displayed in the Caroline County Visitor Center (“Excavated 1991, 14 million years old”), and, later, these lines: “She is a case closed, / then reopened, / in a quarry — / of chance find” where excavating a whale suddenly speaks to the precedent found to reopen the Loving case. One poem is a 2-page lexicon delineating the 1960s. How does it all work together? One word that comes to mind is an artist’s word: chiaroscuro. Dark and light dance together throughout this compelling collection. On a beach walk, “the sleeve of sunset” leads to these lines, running down the center of the page, like vertebrae:
Then darkness
then darkness
reveals
how seeing
outward
becomes the same
as looking
withinThe poems and the stories unfold in layers. Water is another theme running all the way through the book, from the gorgeous cover art and the title of the collection to beaches, rivers, the Chesapeake bay, blood, watercolor paintings. In one poem, “Portrait” — “Backwash, sea rise, tidal range, / groundwater” — the poem overflows with salt water that reshape a continent as human events reshape a country.
Bethany Reid, What I’m Reading Now
How will you spin fermented want into a poem?
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Transference
Is a poem that is high on its own words, still a poem?
Doesn’t ugliness propagate inside a clever turn of phrase?
Doesn’t emptiness multiply in the space between metered lines?
When I buried the book in the video below, I initially was thinking about the Jewish practice of giving ritual funerals for holy books and then burying them in sacred ground. Of the mystical, numinous, antinomial sense of the word. Although this book is a dictionary.
But now I’m thinking about exhumation, of the recovery and preservation of books. Of this book. What it means to unbury it: to bring it to light again, to rescue or resurrect it. Not to forget its words or allow them to be absorbed in the earth as worm word salad.
I don’t want to forget the meaning of words. I don’t want a tradition, my tradition or any other, to forget the knowledge and values it has come to from hard thinking, feeling and experience. From the collective wisdom of many. When the going gets tough, the tough should retain their values and not trade them for easier or more expedient interpretations.
Gary Barwin, Exhuming a book: unburying a dictionary
We aren’t just a sum of parts but the product of constant division and multiplication, constantly denying the erratic arithmetic and calling our denial self. The parts we live with are who we are, and those we cannot live with are the turbine of our suffering. The most difficult decisions in life are difficult precisely because we are unsummed, too divided to reconcile the desires of one part with those of another. We watch ourselves undergo overnight phase transitions of feeling as a different part seizes the dials of pleasure and pain that govern all human behavior, then pull the quilt of time and thinking over our head to maintain the illusion of coherence, disavowing entire regions of our own experience as if someone else lived them. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.),” wrote Whitman, knowing that we are each “of one phase and of all phases,” that within us each live the slaveholder and the slave, the woman being burned at the stake and the man striking the match.
Perhaps “god” is just how we name our yearning for a single truth, for an integrating voice to conciliate the contradictions, for something large and total to hold what we cannot hold.
Sixteen centuries before Whitman, the Gnostics — those spiritual visionaries who saw the wholeness of being before modern Christianity partitioned the body and the soul — channeled that voice in “The Thunder: Perfect Mind,” part of what is now known as the Nag Hammadi Library: a set of ancient texts discovered in a jar at the foot of a cliff by two illiterate Muslim brothers in 1945. The long poem of contrasts and conciliation “appears to derive from the female-centered Isis worship preceding Christianity,” writes poet and ordained Buddhist Jane Hirshfield in introducing her translation of it in Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (public library).
Maria Popova, Perfect Mind: The Gnostic Field Guide to Wholeness and Hearing the Voice of Truth
What does all this mean for Longley’s poem? How much of any of this do we need to know to appreciate the poem? I think we have to feel that he is teasing his readers (as he said himself, “a learned leg-pull”). He doesn’t tell us it’s a translation, and makes no effort to explain those obscure names. You can’t, I think, reasonably expect even a very educated and well-read late 20th century reader to identify the passage themselves, though you could, perhaps, expect them to note the odd discrepancy between the poets they have heard of and those they haven’t. It might, slightly slyly, be relying on the reader’s mild discomfort, as we ‘nod along’, assuming that we ought to know who Macer, Ponticus and Bassus actually are and not quite wanting to reveal that we don’t — sending up the earnest reader who doesn’t want to be caught out in ignorance.
Meanwhile, the implication, apparently encouraged by Longley himself, that these figures might map onto real contemporaries only extends the tease. What sort of contemporary poet could possibly stand in for Macer, whose work is almost entirely lost, or for Bassus and Ponticus, of whom nothing at all survives, and who may not have existed at all? (Not to mention the much-cancelled Gallus, deleted from this passages as he has been from literary history.) Longley’s ploy tempts the reader to behave as a kind of dogged scholiast, foolishly attempting to crack the “code” of his poetic whimsy. Overall, I think the poem is both much more and much less precise thatn we might think — much more, because it’s a relatively close translation of one particular passage; much less, because it’s more, as they say, ‘a mood’ than a code. A reminder that when a poet thinks about the other poets who have mattered to him he might be tender and sincere, but also self-important, selective, mischievous and even intentionally obscure.
Victoria Moul, The poet’s joke
Almost inevitably you feel, the elements of modern warfare seep into Huch’s poems. In the midst of another Hardyesque stanzaic poem, between the ‘honey-brown’ buds on the trees and the lark’s ‘music-making’, more familiar ‘war poem’ sounds provide the base notes: ‘The earth shakes with battle, the air with shellfire heaves’ (‘War Winter’). The ABAB quatrains of ‘The Young Fallen’ mourn those taken by war by first evoking the innocence of their childhoods, schooldays, their unfulfilled worldly ambitions. Then ‘War came’. And though much of the detail and imagery could be applied to wars fought anytime in the last few centuries, there are moments when the realities of the mid-twentieth century cannot be denied. The young men’s hands are a focus, as they ‘Not long ago reached out for toys and fun. / Those hands, conversant with the tools of murder, / Control the howitzer and grip the gun’.
In fact, Huch was living in Jena when the city was bombed by the Allies and ‘The Flying Death’ comes closer than any other poem in conveying her experiences of modern warfare. Though the Flying Death is an old-fashioned personification, its modus operandi is up to date: ‘The chimney reels, the roof-beams groan, / By distant thunder he is known’. Even as the air bombardment is imaged as approaching on ‘iron steeds’, its impact is plainly conveyed as ‘A whistling, hissing din, and more, / A jarring shriek is heard, a roar, / As if the earth would burst.’ This Poetry Salzberg publication unfortunately does not give the reader the original German, but Timothy Adès’ translations are quite brilliant in their preservation of form and rhyme, while at the same time conveying both the sweetness and the violence in Huch’s curious, powerful, under-appreciated poetry.
Martyn Crucefix, Review of ‘Autumn Fire’ by Ricarda Huch, tr. Timothy Adès
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
This was my favorite book when I was a child! Which may explain everything about me. Bradbury is the perfect mix of poetry and creepiness. He’s clearly a pantser (which means he doesn’t plan out his novels but writes them as they come—not that he pulls people’s pants down), and that sometimes shows—there are a few of his books where the poetic prose can feel a bit self-indulgent (I tried rereading Dandelion Wine and could not make it through).This book gets the balance just right. Two teenage boys – Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade – face a sinister carnival and the witches and magic that comes with it. It’s really the style of Bradbury’s writing that I love so much—it is what first awakened my mind to the beauty of language and made me want to become a writer—and his style, at its best, sweeps the reader along in a torrent of poetic imagery. It’s really no wonder that I fell into writing poetry once I hit the college years, having read so much Bradbury as a child.
Renee Emerson, October Favorites
I often joke that I owe my poetic sense of purpose and my literary understandings solely to horror movies and novels. While I’ve been writing poetry since I was 14, I’ve been reading and enjoying spooky forms of entertainment much longer. I’ve also been thinking about why some of the scariest stuff I’ve ever read wasn’t in horror novels at all, but in poetry. And not even horror poetry specifically. Just regular poems that happen to use fragmentation in ways that make your skin crawl. There’s something deeply unsettling about fragmented text. When a poem breaks apart on the page, when syntax splinters, when meaning refuses to cohere. That’s when things get genuinely creepy. It’s like your brain is trying to complete a puzzle but someone keeps hiding the pieces, and you start to suspect maybe there never was a complete picture to begin with.
A lot of horror works by withholding. The monster is scariest before you see it clearly. The threat is most terrifying when it’s implied, partial, fragmented. Poetry does this naturally. A poem doesn’t have to explain itself. It can give you three images, two sentence fragments, and a white space that screams louder than words ever could. Obviously T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” isn’t technically horror, but tell me that pile of broken images, those abrupt shifts, those voices cutting in and out like a radio losing signal ,is not the structure of a nightmare. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” might be one of the most horrifying lines in modern poetry precisely because it acknowledges that fragmentation isn’t a technique, it’s a condition. Everything’s already broken; we’re just picking through the wreckage.
Fragmented poetry mirrors the horror of disintegration—of minds, of reality, of meaning itself. When poets strategically use white space, when they let sentences trail off into nothing, when they juxtapose images without clear connection, they’re not being difficult for the sake of it. They’re showing us how consciousness actually fractures under pressure. And isn’t that what horror is about? The breakdown of the normal, the reliable, the coherent? I keep thinking about those found-footage horror movies, how they’re all jump cuts and static and missing scenes. That’s fragmentation as horror technique. When you skip lines, break syntax, scatter words across a page—you’re creating the same effect. The reader’s eye has to hunt for meaning, has to work to construct something whole from pieces that might not even fit together.
Where things really get interesting is inside and around the gaps. In fragmented poetry, what’s not there is as important as what is. Those blank spaces, those ellipses, those lines that stop mid-thought… That’s where the horror lives. Your imagination fills in those blanks, and your imagination is always going to conjure something worse than what the poet might have written. It’s like those old stories where they never quite describe the monster. The reader’s mind does the work. Fragmented poetry weaponizes that. Every break in the text is a place where something could be lurking.
Kristy Bowen, ON HORROR AND FRAGMENTATION
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?
If there are questions behind Glove Money, they are probably “What is a transamorous sapphic poetics?” and “Wow is it wild that love is charging down the avenue to destroy me and I have no desire to run or what?”The current question for most of us right now is probably, you know, what constitutes a human poetics, and what constitutes a machine poetics. And I’d say poets were working on those questions way before Language Learning Models were on the market.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think writers have a lot of roles in larger culture! We (I’m speaking for the larger culture here) need to constantly relearn how to listen to language, and we need our experiences and our values and our strategies worded. Not all poets are good at all of those things. Not everyone is June Jordan, though if you are, you probably should be. But we need writers who can take apart a sentence, and writers who look out the window and describe the miscarriages of the breeze, and writers who can say Free Palestine and Don’t talk to cops. […]14 – What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
My girlfriend Violet Spurlock is very important to my work. I like to praise her beauty and win our arguments in my poems.The Bay Area poets are kind of everything to me, by whom I mean the disorganized collective of leftist writers influenced by New Narrative, the New York School, Language Poetry, and Feminist Poetics here in the Bay who were already here hanging out when I moved to town a little before Occupy.
I learned how to be a poet in the world from them—which is, and this is my real advice for young writers: do it yourself, together. Make chapbooks, start a press, run a reading series, reading group, writing group. Forget the gods and dads and prizes that so rarely materialize, or ask too much of you when they do. Find comrades.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sophia Dahlin
In the foole recipe we use thin slices of ‘manchet’ a kind of wheaten bread, made in huge quantities in the Elizabethan Manor Houses. Elinor soaks them in boiled spiced cream, or what she refers to as ‘the top of the morning’s milk’. and this is where I get my first sense of the smell of the Elizabethan kitchen, like a low Christmas smell. If you think about the sort of fruity rich seasoning used in Christmas puddings, varieties of this spice complex are what the (wealthy) Elizabethans used as the base notes for their cookery. Gentle English herbs alongside imported dried fruits and spices, lemons and oranges. What I find is that it isn’t overwhelming, it is a much more gentle spiced mix.
There is a great deal of time spent waiting for things to soak up other things, which makes me think this sort of pudding is the sort that is made while making other things. I imagine the kitchen then, another dish prepped while the foole is soaking its manchet slices, the planning and organising that a big kitchen might need to make so many dishes at once, all served at once.
Then there is the sieving. Smooth puddings and clear coloured jellies were the absolute epitome of kitchen skill, highly prized and the cause of quite a lot of competition in Elizabethan kitchens, so I sieve the pudding for authenticity, and let me tell you, Elizabethan kitchen workers had good muscle tone. It is hard work, it takes forever. But the result is incredibly pleasing.
Elinor’s instructions here are that the consistency should be no thicker than batter. I’m very proud of my sieved pudding consistency. And then currants are added (raisons in this case as I had no currants) and into the oven it goes to bake for a long time, one and a half hours, which made me very nervous. But reader, it worked.
The top was crisp and sweet, the middle was light and fluffy and the fruit and the sherry and the spices were layered along the bottom in a sweet, rich, strata. I was very impressed by this natural layering of the pudding. The taste was somewhere between a bread and butter pudding and a clafoutis. A familiar and at the same time unfamiliar consistency.
What went into my writing from this exercise?
- The scent complex of the kitchen
- The strength of the cook
- The smell of spices on the skin long afterwards
- The sense of multitasking in a big kitchen
- The pride of a recipe that works well.
And something else, something less definable: the feeling that to stand here in my little modern kitchen and cook this Foole pudding was to stand elbow to elbow with the elizabethan cook, especially the women in the kitchen, passing along the legacy of the receipt book.
Wendy Pratt, Elbow to Elbow with my Elizabethan Sisters
Around 6200BC, a massive failure of the Norwegian continental shelf in the North Atlantic caused a giant tsunami which swept south and west for hundreds of miles. It reached the Angus coastline in a matter of hours, swamping estuaries and river valleys and barging far inland. As it seeped back, in what had been the grassy bed of a slow, meandering burn, it left a broad, scooped out bowl. Twice a day when the tide comes in, it is a shallow, temporary sea.
Needless to say it bristles with birdlife: all migrant species of the North Atlantic are present, sometimes en masse. Each October around 100,000 pinkfoot geese make landfall in the Montrose Basin as they head south from Iceland and the Faroes. Their call, clear amid the rattling of thousands of wings, is a streaming ‘ink-ink’ – giving rise maybe to their local name: kwink. There is a very satisfying glimpse here of the moment that the bird was named; of someone trying to fit their mouth to what they heard in their landscape, tuning consonants and vowels until they arrived at a deft, self-explanatory sound-image of that thing over there, that creature whose arrival alters the soundscape so significantly, and leaves with such clamour.
Such words have currency. Bird lists for countries round the North Sea rim show an alertness to their sound – the first and easiest means of identifying them at distance – and to sound-in-place. Kwink is also used of the greylag and Brent goose, klekk or claikis of the barnacle goose (less of a chiming, more of a squawk). Old Norse, the language of the Vikings and ancestor of modern Scandinavian languages, is the root of many peculiarly Shetlandic, Orcadian and Scots words. Names, like the birds, have also crossed the water. A seagull is a maa in Orkney and a meeuw in the Netherlands; the curlew a whaup in Caithness and Berwick and a wulp on the mudflats at Westhoek. And if you string their names together, you can almost hear the birds arriving and settling on these northern beaches as the tide turns and their feeding grounds are exposed:
fulmar mallimak – maali – mallemuk – qaqulluk
kittiwake facky – kitto – rittock – rita – krykkje
golden plover weeo – hjejle – heiđloa – ló – heilo
redshank pleep – weeweep – stellit – stelkur – tureluur
The intermingling of bird song and human speech is an ancient belief that still has currency. Norman MacCaig’s Aunt Julia spoke her Hebridean Gaelic with “a seagull’s voice”, her speech and movement growing out of the very matter of her island-world: “She was buckets / and water flouncing into them. / She was winds pouring wetly / round house-ends.” In recordings made in the 1950s and now stored in the online archive Tobar an Dualchais, Mrs Annie Johnston of Barra integrates what she calls the “conversation” of the thrush, the lark, the crow, the gull and the dove into her own Gaelic. In another, her husband, Mr Calum Johnston, sings a Pilliù, an ancient keening which mimics the long call and syllables of the redshank. Of these kinds of singing, says ethnologist Mairi McFadyen, “the dividing lines between bird song, music and speech are impossible to determine”.
Lesley Harrison, ‘Kwink’
Let us go back, okay? Back to the squirrel-and-frog breath. Back to the gleaming teeth. There she is, sitting on the edge of the bed. Book in their mouth, a coyote throws it across the room like a toy. Another coyote yelps at the door and she somehow knows (because we all somehow just know things in our dreams, don’t we?) that they want for her to open the door. So she does. She admires the grays and reds in their fur as they enter the hallway lit by a smart night-light. They clamber down the weird hillside that she calls stairs. She descends the stairs slowly, watching the feral and fearless animals as they move in and out of the shadows of her dining and living rooms. She hears their bodies brush up against table leg. They knock over a chair. They stick their noses in her shoes. One scratches madly at the pull-out drawer that houses the garbage can. One stands regal on the couch as if on the edge of a cliff. All of them sing because that is what she decides that they are doing. She knows she must open the door so she does. And as she does, they all flow past her, a river of fur and bone and breath. Coyote wind. She steps off her porch and is shocked that her bare foot against the grass does not feel like real life. A coyote runs back, circles her, runs out, and back again. She realizes that this is an escort. She walks to the edge of the property, to the ecotone where grass meets woodland. She steps into it, stones, sticks, and leaves greeting the pads of her feet. She sees their quick bodies moving in the moonlit understory. She follows them without question until the house behind her becomes a moon.
Sarah Lada, House of the Rising Moon
Moon’s got the sun in its back pocket. Sun’s got the moon on a locket.
In dark hearts, storms find more welcome shelter.
Certain worries are too heavy to hashtag.
Sometimes you can find a small, sweet melody stuck between the teeth of misery.
Rich Ferguson, Lessons I’ve learned along the way
I write a lot. I just don’t publish a lot — of my own work, that is. Partly because much of it takes a long, long time to fully crystallise — I’m still regularly pulling up and rethinking poems that were first drafted well over a decade ago. But also, I find I drift further and further from the general trend. Easy, I know, to fixate on what doesn’t suit you and disparagingly label it ‘the general trend’, but I think it’s not unkind or too reductive to say that the majority of poetry sought and published by English-language editors today constitutes first-hand accounts of relatable experiences taking place in something like the real contemporary world, in which the poet — or someone you can well believe is the poet — is reassuringly present.
You don’t have to look far, of course, to find complaints about UK poetry being dominated by identity politics. But if we only slightly expand that category to include any poem which revolves around, or circles back to, a persona of the poet conveying something of their values, then I suspect most complainants are caught in their own net.
Work of a different kind is permitted, even celebrated, but less readily, I sense, when the editor or critic does not know the poet from Adam. On the performance circuit, you do find more in the way of fantastical conceits — these, however, are mostly either comically ludicrous or intended as satire. The ‘general trend’, as far as there is one, is surely to look on poetry as, primarily, a performance of the self. […]
So what do I think I’m doing that’s so damned different?
Well, one thing I’ve done this summer is make four more A8 microbooks to sell blind-bagged for £2 at book fairs. Each one is made of a single piece of A4 paper, folded and cut into a booklet, held together with a cover jacket folded from an A6 sheet. They’re tiny examples of ‘amalgamatic writing’, in that the contents are a mixture of quotes from various media, very short scholarly extracts, lists and poetry.
The theme for this latest set is ‘Action Princesses’ — a short explanation on the inner back page reads “exploring cult evocations of feminine power and sexuality”. I wrote one new piece for each book, and all of them are the kind of poems I would estimate as having a close-to-zero chance of being considered by editors of most journals. They’re mostly in third-person, and where there’s a speaker, it’s definitely not me. They also belong utterly to the cult genres their protagonists inhabit, even as they (mildly) spoof them. There’s no zoom-out to Cambridge, UK, 2025. This is from ‘Space Princesses’:
One is pinned by her skirt to a cosmic dartboard.
One is lashed by her heart to a handsome meathead.
One is trapped in a shrinking skintight spacesuit.
One is frogged, one spatchcocked, sputnikked, splayed out.
Not for long, though – nothing can hold them forever.
No beam, no jaw, no kiss rolled over and over.See what I mean? The 21st century’s rejection of b-movie mash-up is Caliban’s fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.
Jon Stone, “I goon-march and glide”, Part 3
I’m happy to share that I have two poems in Revolution John, my second pub with them. Many thanks to Editor Neil Smith, Assistant Editor AnneMarie Miles, and EiC and Beloved Founder Sheldon Lee Compton.
I really like their aesthetic of gritty, dark, and often rural. My first poem, “Abracadabra!”, is an alternate outcome for Thelma and Louise. I’m not cool with the end of that film, so I (loosely) reimagined their journey and how it ended. The second poem, “You lied to me” is a Cento I created from extraordinary lines from the poems of seven poets I admire, exploring rejection and distrust. I think they’re pretty dark. And don’t we just love dark.
Here’s the link. Thanks if you read and bigger thanks for supporting my work and independent litmags like Revolution John!
Charlotte Hamrick, Two Poems in Revolution John
John Lucas died recently. He was in his late eighties and had been unwell for some time.
John was a busy man and in his very full and well lived life, he was many things to many people. A father and husband, a Fulbright Scholar, academic, reviewer (for New Statesman, TLS, Poetry Review and elsewhere), a novelist, poet, editor, publisher, visiting professor, jazz trumpeter and memoirist. He is the author of studies on John Clare, Dickens, Blake, Ivor Gurney and many others. He wrote collections of essays on subjects such as Irish poetry, as well as an award-winning travel book. He was once appointed chair of The Poetry Book Society, and was a judge on the panel of the first T.S Eliot Prize in 1993.
That’s the straight bio stuff. What was he like? After news of John’s passing broke, many people spontaneously offered tributes, and what is clear is that he was regarded as generous, straight talking (to the point of occasional bluntness), affectionate, brilliant, and a great friend to those women and men fortunate enough to have known him well.
I would add that John was a man with the biggest bullshit detector and aversion to empty flattery it was possible to have. He had a mischievous sense of humour, but would never use it to ‘punch down’. Politically, he was a generous humanitarian and socialist who was true to his principles in his every day actions. An intellectual colossus who could put his learning and knowledge into words anyone could understand. A champion of underdogs and swift disparager of bullies. I know that on one of his last visits to hospital, he told a horrible racist who had abused a nurse to fuck off. He had a brain faster than light with access to a massive library of literature and music and personal anecdotes and jokes. His love for his wife Pauline was clear for all to see. They had met as students at art college in the nineteen fifties . On one of the last occasions that we spoke on the phone, John shared something with me and added that when he had said the same thing to her she had told him ‘not to talk balls’.
As my editor, publisher and friend, he championed, supported and encouraged me, and always said what he thought. When it came to editing, he had a light touch, and I could always see straight away that his pencilled comments and suggestions and questions were going to benefit the poem. Above all, he was kind. […]
Don’t feel you have to write me an elegy,
there are probably far too many
Roy Marshall, John Lucas, 1937- 2025
on the go already. I’d rather you told
a joke or raised a glass with friends.
Don’t feel you have to say anything
now, or share that stuff I said about
the use and misuse of a certain word,
mention our last conversation where
I briefly gave my reasons for loving
George Herbert, expressed a view
on what fame did to poor Chet Baker
or shared an anecdote about a poet
that had us both in stiches until
I brought things to a close with a brisk
right, good to hear from you, better go
Now, we won’t dwell on the loss of a few poets recently; plenty has been written abut them all by far better people than me, but I will say I was especially gutted about Brian Patten going. He was one of the gateways into poetry for me..(some say we should blame him..some would be right). And I’ve read his now well known poem, How Many Lengths of Time at at least two funerals, including my dad’s…
I regret not trying to see Brian live again in recent years, but I have fond memories of being probably one of about 3 people to have ever taken out his third collection, The Irrelevant Song, from North Walsham library (and I had it on near constant loan for a year or so). I was lucky enough to see him read and say hello, and to get his autograph on a couple of books a couple of times. I’m pretty sure there was a Patten/Henri doubleheader at Norwich Arts centre a million years ago now. I can’t recall if Roger McGough was there.
After I heard about his death, I went to dig out a letter I had from him from many, many years ago. I can’t have been more than 18 or 19 when it was sent…I’m not sure how to date it, but…hang on, it has a telephone number he gives me for someone on Norwich with the area code as 0603…not 01603. That must narrow things down to pre 1995. which would make me 18 or 19. Crikey. Anyhoo, I could’t find the letter, despite it being a prized possession.
I’ve not taken Brian’s books off the shelf for a while, and while I was hoping for another book from him, it’s fair to say I thought his last book, The Book of Forgetting, wasn’t his finest work by a long stretch, so it took an email from another poet (Hi, Roy) that mentioned a poem by Patten I didn’t know to send me back to my book shelf to check if I had this poem…and would you Adam and Eve it, the letter was there tucked inside my copy of Little Johnny’s Confession. Thanks again, Roy
I won’t repeat all of the letter here, but having solicited advice from him on what I will freely confess were some dreadful juvenilia that I sincerely meant at the time, he was kind enough tosa y he like a couple of them and then said“There’s not much I can say about poems that come from the heart; as yours do. I think you will find which work and which have clumsy parts that stop them working if you give readings yourself”
Mat Riches, Weather rocks and kangaroos
Last week I went to a panel at my city library dedicated to publishing. The setup was interesting: Rather than have one moderator asking questions to the five panelists, each panelist came with their own question. They directed their question toward the others in the group.
Right out of the gate, the first panelist asked the others, “Do you experience imposter syndrome?”
The question came from a poet who is trying to branch out into novel-writing. I was not surprised when every other person on the panel—the author of a newly released nonfiction book, the author of a newly released novel, the author of four novels, and one writer whose work has as yet appeared exclusively in literary magazines—said “Yes.”
Becky Tuch, Q: What is imposter syndrome & how do you handle it?
This week at Book Club we discussed early cyberpunk and the newly translated Japanese classic short story collection Terminal Boredom and had a costume contest with a cyberpunk theme. We’re reading poetry—Martha Silano’s Terminal Surreal—for November, meeting on the 12th at J. Bookwalter’s Woodinville Tasting Studio, if you want to attend. Then we’ll be reading Solarpunk—Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower—in December.
I’m doing a tutorial for Writer’s Digest next week on the history and practice of horror poetry, which seems appropriate for spooky season (and also, you know, the political atmosphere these days). It’s been fun seeking out older horror poems as well as thinking about what makes a poem technically a horror poem. I’m also doing a talk the day before Halloween at the University of New Orleans about publicity and poetry, which is its own kind of horror, right? […]
Speaking of appearances, my friend, excellent poet and fiction writer Lesley Wheeler is in town and doing a reading and Q&A with us at J. Bookwalter’s Winery this Thursday at 6:30, followed by an open mic. I’ll be introducing her and reading a few spooky poems to get us in the mood for the season. Then Lesley will read from her new book about the underworld of mushrooms, Mycocosmic. Our Q&A will feature both Mycocosmic and her novel Unbecoming. It’ll be worth your time to come out, because Lesley doesn’t make it often to the West Coast, as she lives in Virginia, where she teaches at Washington and Lee and is the editor of Shenandoah Literary Magazine.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Upcoming Appearances and Poet Friend Visits to Woodinville, Halloween and Horror Poetry, and The Big Dark Begins
Back in the day, we used to create mix tapes for our mates. Of course, they were really made up of the music we enjoyed listening to ourselves!
Well, when Mat and I are working out what poets to invite to read with us at Rogue Strands events, it feels like we’re generating our own Live Poetry Mix Tapes. We’re choosing poets whose poetry we love, who read brilliantly. And we’re not doing so just for our audiences, but also for our own, utterly selfish listening pleasure.
This is why I’m so looking forward to our Rogue Strands reading at the Devereux in London next Wednesday, because it’s a terrific chance for me (and you!!!) to catch some of the best poets around in the U.K. right now: Jonathan Davidson, Hannah Copley, Fiona Larkin and Philip Hancock (oh, and Mat and me) for your delectation. What’s more, it’s all free! See you there…?
Matthew Stewart, A Live Poetry Mix Tape
Alt text says this week’s photo is a chocolate cake with sprinkles on the top. It is indeed. And to add to this description I would also say it is a birthday cake for my lovely wife. For this bake, I fine-tuned the recipe after making a cake for my debut poetry collection Magnifying Glass which had its fifth birthday last week. The book cake was delicious, but a little rustic looking after I piled on the buttercream and forked the number five on the top because I hadn’t really considered how I was going to finish it off! It was a good reason to enjoy cake, and it also gave me the perfect opportunity to enjoy the feelings of gratitude to have worked with Black Eyes Publishing UK to enable the book to have its place in the world.
I am also taking forward the lesson that it is useful to have an image of the end product in mind whether it’s cake or poetry so that the whole is not just delicious it is fully finished. When polishing poems I am pausing to remind myself the drafts are at the rustic stage until they do the whole job of saying what they want to say. For me sometimes the poem doesn’t know exactly what it is going to say until it has been written longer, other times it says it but it fizzles out instead of sparking. For a while I thought my trick was to look at the drafts as if they weren’t mine, but I found I was looking at them to assess whether they were a finished Sue Finch poem or still lingering in Sue Finch draft stage. I laughed at my feeling of indignation when I thought I was pretending they weren’t mine whilst I was editing. I definitely didn’t want them to not be mine; I wanted to be the author in a different stage of writing. I don’t think I have felt that switch quite so strongly before, so I am enjoying that and see it as a sign of having an extended patience and desire to craft my work.
The perfect poem almost happened in real time on one of my walks this week. Common features of this week’s walks have included the horse with the blue coat whinnying as I approach (but not when I talk to it or try to video it making the sound) acorns dropping from the oak trees, gusts of wind sending flurries of leaves from the branches. There was a moment on Saturday as I was pacing along when the horse whinnied just as the wind picked up and I watched a mini whirlpool of brown leaves drop through the air. If, at that exact moment, an acorn had detached and dropped onto my head I think that would have been a moment of pure poetry. I was slightly disappointed that it didn’t happen, but I will carry all of that as a wordless visual/sound poem in my head on my walks in the coming weeks.
Sue Finch, A CHOCOLATE CAKE WITH SPRINKLES
I will never forget walking through the doors and the spectacle of what we saw – a woman on a stage in front of us, dressed in a huge black dress singing. Lamenting, really. And behind her and to the right, another woman, younger, dressed all in red and standing at the top of a pillar. The colours, the music, the expansiveness of it took my breath away.
I didn’t think I would last for four hours – for the first hour, I think I wandered a bit too much. It takes a while to get into the rhythm of it, and to understand that each of the thirteen ‘acts’ that made up the exhibition are performances in and of themselves. Some of them had an arc – there was a resolution, things changed. But some of my favourite ones didn’t.
A heavily pregnant woman in a red strappy dress, stands in a shower and dances in Act 12: Wedding Rituals whilst having milk ladled over her by another woman. According to the programme notes, this is a ritual to prepare a bride for her wedding day. The dance is sensual, playful. The programme notes say that this is a ritual performed on pregnant women. I think I could have sat and watched her all night. There was something so compelling about it. Now I think it was because she was so there, so present. She refused to disappear behind the pregnancy, behind her bump.
When I was pregnant, I couldn’t work out how to make myself present to the world. I was present only to myself, and it felt as if I was standing behind a pane of glass, watching my life happen on the other side. I couldn’t work out how to feel like myself again when I was pregnant, because of course I wasn’t myself. I was two selves. I wrote a poem which will be in my next collection with the lines “you’re living in the shadow of a baby, you are a doorway/ for a baby, a flag stretched out in the wind and shouting baby”.
I stood and watched the pregnant woman dancing for a long time, the milk running in streams over her skin, the way she seemed to delight in the feel of it, in the attention, the way she was so herself, the way she refused to disappear behind the pregnancy, behind the bump. And this made me realise that I had always been both things – I was self, and I exceeded my self.
Kim Moore, Marina Abramović Balkan Erotic Epic
God, You knew
I would rather know
than not.
Give me a door,
I’ll go through.Were I telling the tale
the questionable one
would be Adam
who didn’t think
of wanting more.You made that tree
so gorgeous
my mouth watered.
I heard You murmur,
know Me.I knew I wanted
to be like that tree:
blooming,
touched,
ripe with fruit.My first book of poetry, which came out in 2011 from Phoenicia Publishing, is 70 faces: Torah poems — published the day I became a rabbi, and announced here the very next day. I still love that collection deeply, and I’m grateful to editor Beth Adams (who still blogs about creative and contemplative life at The Cassandra Pages) for publishing it.
On this summer’s Bayit Board retreat, one of my dear friends mentioned that as good as that book is, in a way it’s incomplete. It features one poem arising out of / in conversation with each parsha, but… most parshiyot contain multiple things. As a result, much of what unfolds in Torah is unmentioned or un-commented-on. What if I created a bigger collection, one that lifts up more of Torah (and maybe includes occasional footnotes to classical midrash, which I wish now I had included all those years ago?)
This is my new creative project. This year as we work our way through each week in the cycle of Torah, I’ll study the parsha anew. And then I’ll work on new poems arising out of parts of the text that I haven’t explored in poetry before. Anyway, this is one of the poems I’ve been working on this week for Bereshit. I hope it speaks to you.
Rachel Barenblat, Knowing
I decided to experiment with blackout/erasure poetry and collage. […] I photocopied some pages from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, along with a selection of entries from her journal, including the passage about her dreams of her dead baby. Each student got three sheets, with 6 pages total. I had a variety of markers, both colored and black, fine tipped and thicker.
I also had a variety of popular magazines and old crafting magazines. They were on tables, but first, we did the blacking out. I explained the process and then showed them what I had done with the pages from Mary Shelley’s journal. Then we sank into the work. […]
They all seemed to enjoy it, both the ones who zipped through it, and the ones who spent all of their time carefully blacking out lines.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Erasure Poems, Mary Shelley, and a Creative Writing Class
silence in a poem grows with not one
mystery less than needed. guardian of what
least understands. heart open to all. and to none.
Grant Hackett [no title]
Last week I attended a reading by author Karen Walrond, whose latest book is In Defense of Dabbling: The Brilliance of Being a Total Amateur. Thanks to Walrond and her work, I’ve got a deeper understanding of why I’ve come to treasure my sewing nights. (She also has a Substack publication, The Make Light Journal.)
Walrond identifies 7 attributes of what she calls intentional amatuerism: curiosity, mindfulness, self-compassion, play, stretch zone, connection, and wonder & awe. Listening to her, I was able to identify exactly what my sewing class is giving me. It satisfies my curiosity; I’m learning about something I’ve long wanted to know more about. It is an exercise in mindfulness (I will never forget the time I was not mindful as a child and ran my thumb right under the machine’s needle), and it provides lots of opportunities to learn self-compassion. My seams are never as straight as I’d like them to be, and that’s OK. I’m doing something in person with other humans, and I’ll be taking my next session of classes from a former colleague, both of which fosters feelings of connection.
I began writing Rootsie with the idea of exploring what it means to live a “small, creative life,” but Walrond is helping me understand that perhaps what I’ve meant by “small” can be more accurately understood as “amateur”—and that amateurism is a worthy pursuit. She notes that despite the ways in which we use “amateur” to diminish or denigrate, the root of the word means “love.” She makes the case that we don’t have to be experts at something or monetize something or achieve great levels of accomplishment to justify the time we give to a pursuit. We can do something simply because we love it—or, in the case of my exploration of sewing, because we might love it. […]
I am completely on board with pursuits that do not have to have a practical purpose, full stop. And, this is where I feel it necessary to acknowledge the time we are living through. Part of my motivation in learning new sewing skills is wanting to develop practical knowledge that might serve me/others as the world I’ve always known is collapsing. (A reason I’m also dabbling with growing food and cooking/baking.) But I do not want to engage in creative endeavors only from some place of grim purpose. I want to engage in them as I engage with my friends, family, and community—from a place of love. From places of play and joy and curiosity, which have practical uses, too.
Horrific things are happening in the US. I live in a city that’s being targeted and lied about by our federal government, and I’m learning a lot from watching the responses of my community. Those protesting at our ICE facility are doing so for serious reasons, and they are taking serious risks, but they are engaging from places of play, joy, and love. They are wearing inflatable animal costumes! They are riding bikes naked in the rain! There is a strategic purpose to this kind of protest, and it also reminds us what our lives are for (satisfying curiosity, stretching our comfort zones, connecting with others, playing, experiencing wonder & awe). This has got to be a practical purpose of protest, too.
To be clear: I do not think that my sewing is an act of resistance. Resilience, yes, but resistance, no. Both are important (can’t have the latter without the former), and so is the distinction. Engaging in personal pursuits with joy, play, and love are not going to stop the harm being done. So, today I will sew. Tomorrow, I hope you’ll be with me in the streets.
Rita Ott Ramstad, What if you aren’t any good at it?
I come from poverty. I have never had just one job, and I expect to continue working at least two jobs for the rest of my life, but I am lucky because I like much of my work.
Still, I often feel buried. I have spent the last year and a half trying to solve the problem of keeping Red Hen’s poetry program afloat without adequate funding. The National Endowment for the Arts is gone. I have a challenging press to run. I have a family. A writing life. It’s like swimming upstream. Sometimes there’s water, and sometimes there’s rocks. But, no matter how hard I work, there is shame.
I want a joy life. A shared joy life. I can’t accomplish this by steeping in shame. None of us can. Those in power hope we will feel too defeated by our shame—our deep judgment of ourselves and one another—to turn our energy against them, towards improving this country we share. I want to resist this urge in all the ways I can.
So I tell the women around me, whether they are in my life or not, how beautiful they are. I compliment their shoes, coats, gloves, hair, sometimes even their socks. I congratulate people on their work, on their art, on their progress. I start and end my day by writing in my journal what I am grateful for. With these small but vital steps, I am building a practice that centers hope. When we honor, celebrate, and believe in one another, we learn to believe in ourselves, too. We must.
Kate Gale, Beyond Comparison: On Grace, Judgement, and Surrendering Shame
So many filaments
in the canopy, tugged
by an unseen force.Where the sun begins
to disappear from the world,
the light is briefly gold.I too have opened
Luisa A. Igloria, Snapdragons
my mouth even when
it was not asked.
April may be poetry month, but fall is the season for walking down the street reading a book of poetry, sitting on a park bench, doing same. And let’s not forget the classic sitting under a tree and watching the leaves fall and memorizing a poem. I suppose in reality these things don’t happen quite so often any more, but they could! They nowadays sound like things people perform for a TikTok video or Instagram reel, but doing them and not posting is becoming way more of a vibe.
To date myself, when I was an undergraduate doing my 5 year degree, I did walk down the street with a book and sit under trees and certainly on park benches. Hilariously, I remember when email started to be a thing, and of course we still had dial-up, but near the end of my degree once in a blue moon a professor would EMAIL you. And it would stay in your mind for DAYS. In fact, this was the case for pretty much every email. So you were very careful when emailing knowing that this was how it affected people. You were mindful of how it would occupy one’s mind. It could throw off my writing morning, heaven forbid, so a day before I would make sure to not dial-up, even though the likelihood of there even being an email was small.
I recently saw someone walking down a street reading a paperback, and it delighted me beyond delight. It was not a performance, and no one was trailing them filming them walking down the street with an iPhone. I’m extremely nostalgic these days for Julie Wilson’s Seen Reading, which started as a blog.
Maybe it is the season to be seen reading poetry.
Shawna Lemay, Fall is for Poetry
i dream new rings for us.
Robin Gow, shot gun wedding
ones made of headlights & wind.
i want wild vows. no cheesy, “i do”
instead the old language of mountains.
a stillness that fills each other’s sky.