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: poetry sandwiches, the long churn of time, naming the beast, the heaviness of the future, and much more. Enjoy.
Most of the week was dark, windy, and rainy, but for fifteen minutes we got to see the Northern Lights! I only got a couple of quick cell phone pictures because the clouds came in so quickly. My brother on the other side of town couldn’t see them at all.
Here is a poem I wrote the last time the Northern Lights appeared, which was published in The Normal School, “Aurora, or When Firefoxes Spark the Sky.”
We also discussed my late friend Martha Silano’s incredible book of poetry, Terminal Surreal [at the book club]. And the discussion was really amazing. An engineer in the group mapped the sections of the book to the five stages of grief, and someone talked about the idea of knowing something of the author’s life and how that can enhance the reading of the book. When I was in graduate school, biographical readings were very out of style, but I always talk about the culture, the time of the writing, some details of the author’s life—for instance, when we read Osamu Dazai’s Blue Bamboo, we talked about Japan in the 30s and the incredible stardom of Dazai in Japan. I only teared up once talking about Martha, and Glenn said he also teared up once. We still miss her! I had never thought about whether or not to discuss the context of the book and author at the book club, but I’ve always found that knowing more about the author enhanced, rather than hurt, my own readings. We’ve read poetry books several times now, but this was the first time we read poems out loud at the club, including poems that were referenced in the book (Stephen Crane’s “In the Desert” and Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”). I think we’ll try that again—hearing a poem out loud is a great way to really get a different dimension of the book.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Northern Lights, Book Club Revelations, Winter Blues and Winter Holiday
The fact of it is that I think about this poem daily and have for how many years I do not know. Filling the French press in the morning, I will think: Mixed ready to begin the morning right. I sit down at the desk and open a notebook, muttering I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, the iambs bouncing along like some sort of motivational poetry-coach speech: you can start simply, you can say a thing outright, you can bob up and down in a sea of simple syllables until something sparks. On a long run I will, for no reason whatsoever, start timing my steps with Dead wings carried like a paper kite. (I Am Fun.)
I loved to tell a class to turn to this poem in their textbooks and then recite it while writing the rhyme scheme on the board (Super Fun!); they would gradually look up and realize what was happening and be amazed someone could know a poem by heart despite having untold numbers of songs and movie monologues committed to their own memories. Sometimes I would perform this trick after referring to Robert Frost as “My uncle Robert,” a joke I ceased to make when I saw what appeared to be an innocent gen-ed student writing it down.
What I am saying is that I love this poem and it is so deeply embedded in my person that I do not go anywhere without it. Which is why I was so amazed to realize, earlier this week, that at some point between the Ah-ha! of my first reading and, like, Tuesday, I have changed my mind about the tone and therefore my entire sense of what is at stake in these 142 syllables.
Vanessa Stauffer, “Design” by Robert Frost
Ten members of Bath Writers and Artists met at The Hive Community Centre in Peasedown St John yesterday. I was teaching the other nine some Turkish map folds, but first we showed the books we’d made since our last meeting.
June Wentland‘s biscuit-books are poetry sandwiches. Her miniature-book-brooches are delightful. I’ve been waiting (and nagging) a long time for her pamphlet of Emily Dickinson-inspired poems and collages that I first saw at a meeting of the Tipi group. This group of six writers meets six times a year in a tipi in a walled garden on the edge of Bath. I feel hugely fortunate to be a member. We take it in turns to introduce a topic and set the homework. […]
And here is a book by Claire Coleman: photos and drawings from her garden, and poems about some of the birds that visit, or don’t. The tabs on the left are strips with the names of endangered species of garden birds: tear-off strips, so easy to tear off. It’s an emotional read. […]
It gladdened my heart to see how inventive everyone was! The last five photos were taken by Verona. They illustrate the industry, chaos and excitement of the session. At 3pm we cleared the table, swept the floor, and spent the time till 4 o’clock reading poems and reflecting on the day.
Ama Bolton, Another day of Art and Poetry at The Hive
This group is unlike any other I’ve ever worked with. I love the process we’ve evolved — brainstorm, create, workshop what we’ve created, revise, polish, curate, share with the world — and I love how what we co-create is always more than the sum of its parts. I know that I would never have written, on my own, the particular work I’ve generated as part of this collab. It has been a joy and a privilege to collaborate with this group on this body of work, and I can’t wait to see what we decide to do together next. Anyway, I hope what we’ve created here will speak to you.
Rachel Barenblat, New poem at Bayit
Here we are, living these lives bright and perishable as a poppy, hard and shimmering as obsidian. We know that they are entirely improbable, that we bless that bright improbability with each flash of gratitude for it all, that if we pay attention closely and generously enough we are always repaid in gladness, that it is the handle of the door to the world. And yet over and over we choose to live in the cage of complaint, too preoccupied with how the will of life betrayed our wishes, the wanting monster always growling in the other corner of the cage.
Imagine parting the bars and stepping out. Imagine waking up with a rush of gladness at everything we were never promised but got anyway — trees and music, clouds and consciousness, the cobalt eye of the scallop, the golden fan of the gingko, the alabaster chandelier of the ghost pipe.
In our age of competitive prostration, this is a headstand hard to hold for long. But it is trainable. It is possible to become strong enough to be tender, it is.
Artist and poet Rachel Hébert offers a bright patch of training ground in The Book of Thanks: A Catalogue of Gratitudes — one of the most miraculous books I have ever encountered, trembling with tenacious tenderness for the bewilderment of being alive.
Radiating from the pages is an invitation, extended in paintings and poems, to open “the sunlit fort of your attention” and let the world rush in, in all its minute and majestic loveliness: stalactites and Spanish moss, spiderwebs and skylights, snow and the call of the snowy owl, the heart’s capacity for “an urgent, flashing, interrupting kind of love.”
What emerges is prayerful (“more cellos, touch, and rain, please”) and singing with praise (“roots gripping, canyon carved, spine woven of baleen a thousand years old”) — a manual for how to live in gratitude (“what is working wants your praise”) and a theological statement (“there is nothing you must do to belong”).
Maria Popova, How to Love the World More: Artist and Poet Rachel Hébert’s Breathtaking Catalogue of Gratitudes
When You found me I asked what You wanted:
I want you to eat at the fruits of my table.
And I came to learn
of famine’s savage offense, what
had truly been taken from me. The crops
burned, the fields salted, nothing
left but straw and maggots. I was
bewildered and ravenous. Never
had I witnessed such abundance.
I took first the bread,
then the wine, the living blood.Then the dates and wild honey. The garlic
Kristen McHenry, A New Poem
and mustard. Locusts, fish and cucumbers.
Since meeting the Four Quartets in English Literature A level, I’ve been fascinated by TS Eliot’s phrase ‘the still point of the turning world’. He captures in this metaphor the idea that, if you can get to the very middle of something (as with a wheel), you’ll find that the central point isn’t moving, though all around is turning. The point itself in physics terms (i.e. in terms that stretch the limits of my mind and imagination) is one atom big.
Saturday’s programming was audacious, in particular the second half bracketing of two new works (Kulning by Lefroy Watt and Murmurations by Johnson) around the Adagio from Bach’s Violin Sonata no.1 in G minor. This was exquisitely played by Zea Hunt, but (and especially, you may well think), how can two young composers in 2025 sit themselves either side of Bach? Then again, how can they not?
What this Jonty Lefroy Watt : JS Bach : Oran Johnson juxtaposition did was open up the Bach to newness. As I listened to the three pieces, surrounded by a warm, attentive audience, I felt myself gradually lulled out of time. It was as if the Bach was fresh as the pieces either side. I imagined what it would’ve been like to hear any of Bach’s compositions as a world premiere, and then realised I had: feeling on this occasion his composition as completely, viscerally original. This is the joy of live performance – it’s all new to us.
By the time we reached the sweeping shapes of Johnson’s Murmurations, I felt myself eternal (not immortal, nothing so grand). I think I mean eternal in the sense of experiencing my life as a singular life stretching backward and forwards within a collective of lives. It was like reaching right into the legacies and promises of creativity as fundamental as Bach’s and as vibrant as that of the young musicians in the church. I’m not sure if the still point atom was the quality of concentration given by the audience, or a singular note – let’s say G – of music. It doesn’t matter – as Eliot says elsewhere, ‘words strain, sometimes crack’ if we lay too much on them.
Liz Lefroy, I Travel In Time (this one’s not about swimming)
Now consider the text below, “Ethics of the Clown.” It is absurd and surreal (the narrator fits themselves inside a condom, for instance) and it is apparently about clowns, or clowns as a stand-in for human experience. It is absurd, certainly and perhaps funny. The pacing of the images and the rhythms of the piece are carefully and aesthetically controlled. However, for most readers, I’ve found, it’s too outré or odd to garner the kind of literary appreciation that other texts might evoke. I wonder why? Is it because many people would rather not mix absurdity and “low” content with art, because perhaps it tends to belie “deep” thought and feelings — i.e. for them it only evokes triviality or simple humour? Is it because most of us have been trained to appreciate the traditionally “poetic” (wherein we respond with “mmm” when we hear it)? I don’t really know. For me, my most profound experiences often mix “high” and “low,” the ridiculous and trivial with the luminous and numinous. And most of my life is a salmagundi of both at the same time. I might be only able to access trivilities when walking in the woods or attending a symphony yet might feel illumination or deep joy when on the toilet or cashing in a coupon at the drug store. I think our art should sometimes reflect this and we should be open to all of it. Trees, woods, discarded condoms, clowns and carbuncles all.
Gary Barwin, Not Stand-Up but Stand-in Comedy: the Venn diagram of profound and ridiculous
1. a lava lamp and Nag Champa.
2. a blossoming Joshua tree.
3. a Ventura Boulevard bus stop bench.
4. a Pilates machine, a yogurt machine.
5. a stranger’s IQ test results.
6. a leading man’s jawline.
7. a dinner party hosted by a coyote.
Rich Ferguson, Various ways I’ve accessorized my boredom
A bridge too far for many people, and until recently I would have included myself in this, would be the alleged incidents of abduction by extra-terrestrials. This is obviously the most fertile territory for the lonely attention seeker, or a good hook for a book that might make it on to the NYT best seller list. Exploring the UFO/UAP rabbit hole and its torrent of content, not to mention the considerable demand for such content, I watched endless hours of people talking about their ‘abduction experiences’. Many of them are easy to disbelieve; we’ve all met a few Walter Mitty characters in our lives, or just pathological liars, and it’s not difficult to sense an ulterior motive behind any given fantastical story. […]
It isn’t necessarily my intention to convince you of anything here, I suspect we will all shortly come to accept the nature of this, even if we don’t understand it. My conviction that poetry’s job is to address the human condition led me into this mad sonnet project and I thought Shakespeare would do this justice, so elected Shakespearean sonnets as the form, with the boundaries and the significant space within. Poetry allows for the layering of implication and ambiguity, one can pull at multiple threads and see what unravels, in what better way could a writer hope to probe the borders of existential unease?
james mcconachie, Holding Them in the Light
Sprouting gills and lizards’ tails, rebel angels
Luisa A. Igloria, The Grief of Angels
change in their fall from the shining walls of heaven—
becoming horned and feathered beasts, hybrids
of irregular size. Poisons of the puffer fish, the scaled,
the seven-headed; and though they’re meant to stand for
what is dark and evil, their beauty still is terrible
to behold. Pistil or tulip bulb, zebra swallowtail
butterfly with a body of burnished hair; the gleam
of shields and swords raised for lethal strike.
I’ve read Poetry London on and off for a long time, but I really like what the new editor, Niall Campbell, has done with it, so I’m delighted to have two poems in the most recent issue — one is a translation from the contemporary French poet Gérard Bocholier, an untitled poem from his 2016 collection Nuits. The other is a funny little poem, or perhaps actually two linked poems, called ‘Counterfactual’, imagining Moses gone unfound. Here is the first part of that poem:
Moses aging in his basket,
unfound, unloved amid the rushes,
withering in reedy splendour:
king of the frogs, prince pond-skater.I mentioned briefly how I came to write the Moses poems in an interview with Greg Allum which was published on Monday, and which you can read here.
Victoria Moul, Two poems in Poetry London
When I was a child I read a magazine article about a man who could hold photographic plates to his head and think images on to the paper. The resulting fuzzy dream like black and white images fascinated me. Years later I wrote a poem about it. […]
I think that a common theme of my work is the act of searching for another who is not there. The poem is too fresh for me to assess. Watch this space, it might well return.
Paul Tobin, THOUGHTOGRAPHY
I’m the sole survivor of a cohort of ten prostituted women/sex workers who are now all dead murdered, suicides or disappeared. Until now I’ve avoided talking about this text, as a way of keeping a safe distance from the subject matter, but the subject matter refuses to play ball.
Recently I was delighted to hear that poet and writer Richard Skinner had included a review of In an Ideal World I’d Not Be Murdered in his publication Undercurrents, released by Broken Sleep (2025). Richard stated that he thought Coup de Maître was ‘… the most powerful poem in the book…’. I really value this contribution and hope that all comments, reviews and conversations around this poem, and its subject matter, will go some way towards extending and critiquing the narrative around prostitution and the power dynamics inherent in the sex industry. As Richard so astutely pointed out:
… the act of devouring a shellfish is made explicitly like the act of emotional evisceration during paid sex. The power is only one way, and it is brutal, total destruction.
I am also grateful to Nigel for giving me this opportunity to write about this poem.
Even though it has been called a ‘difficult poem to read, but a necessary one …’ the irony is that it was a relatively easy poem to write – written on auto pilot (I think) and almost fully formed (possibly). I’m acutely aware that trauma memories are often fragmented and therefore slippery and there is nothing linear or straightforward about how poems develop.
However, what I do remember is that I did not set out to write about a crustacean with jointed legs, a hard shell and no backbone. I did not set out to write about the qualities of fine dining. But I did set out to attempt to articulate and investigate issues around power dynamics that play out between escort and punter. I could only do that by using my own experience.
While researching the poem I found that the paraphernalia around the cooking and consumption of crab is complex and highly disturbing, involving extraordinary violence. For example, the tools used are crab mallets, seafood crackers, picks, kitchen shears, and knives. Alongside, these instruments, I came across details and videos where consumers expressed pleasure over breaking joints, ripping bodies apart, and savouring the experience.
I remember being struck by the terminology used and the violence which resonated and appeared familiar. Indeed, it seemed an accurate metaphor to describe prostitution. The act of consuming and destroying this aquatic crustacean calls attention to the impact and consequences of prostitution on the body, while also highlighting the complex power dynamics within the sex industry.
Drop-in by Chaucer Cameron (Nigel Kent)
裸木や何でも聞こえそうな空 なつはづき
hadakagi ya nandemo kikoesōna sora
bare trees
the sky likely hears
everything
Hazuki Natsu
from Gendai Haiku (Modern Haiku). #722, October 2025 issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 13, 2025)
This week my internet became unstable. No great drama you might think, but this is me and I was at an event where I was reading! It has taken me some time to develop my reading confidence, and to have the right kind of self-talk when things seem to be going wrong.
And now I take a bow because I did not panic! Not only that, I also did not panic in the moments before this when my wife inadvertently switched the internet off at the start of the meeting and I was no longer even in the zoom room. It definitely felt weird to be staring at a screen and realising that despite not physically going anywhere I was no longer present. Like a kind of out of body experience in a dreamlike waiting room that didn’t even exist. […]
It was a good week for poetry… I loved being invited to read at Stephen Paul Wren’s Blood Women book launch, I enjoyed a whole day of editing and drafting some work, and when I landed in my chair after the journey back from the yarn show I found a lovely acceptance in my inbox.
Here’s to zoom rooms, to words and to the people who invite us to share time and space.
Sue Finch, ON HAVING AN UNSTABLE CONNECTION
One advantage of later-life publishing is that older writers seldom need resume fodder. In my own case, and I suspect in many cases, this means I can write more honestly, or at least, I think I’m writing more honestly. I feel freer to write what and how (and when) I want to write. Also, I’m less concerned (never unconcerned, however) with competition or with fitting my work into literary trends or traditions. Part of this is hereditary stubbornness and rebellion; if confessional “I” poems are all the rage, I’ll put together an entire manuscript of 3rd-person, observational limericks, thank you very much.
Another plus as an older poet is that I’m no longer operating under my grad-school-days misconception that I would someday be a “famous” writer. I was never good at math, but I should have figured out those percentages much sooner than I did. I’ve since made peace with my lack of recognition—no pressure, no ladder-climbing, no hobnobbing unless I feel like it, no jetting off for another one-night reading (she says, pretending she wouldn’t just ADORE that)—and I can simply enjoy and appreciate the act of writing itself.
One of the most important things about older poets is that they add perspective to the depth and breadth of poetry. I’m glad for the passion, idealism, energy, and unabashed in-your-faceness of many younger poets’ work. We need it. But we need ALL the voices. We need the less-panicked historical perspective, the longer, sometimes more comprehensive, panoramic view. We need the more outward-facing, less me-centric voice that older writers sometimes bring to the poetic landscape.
In Defense of Later-Life Publishing – guest post by Marcella Remund (Trish Hopkinson)
Lana Hechtman Ayers is a one-woman poetry dynamo. She is the managing editor of three Pacific Northwest poetry presses: MoonPath Press, Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, and World Enough Writers. She also leads generative workshops, helps people assemble their books of poems, teaches at conferences, and writes her own poetry. To borrow the phrasing from the end of her poem, “A Blue True Dream,” her writing mantra must be “yes and yes and / illimitably yes.”
In The Autobiography of Rain, her eleventh and most recent collection of poems, rain patters in and out of the poems, welcome, relieving. “The rain is my best friend,” she writes in “Nineteen Things No One Knows about Me (And One They Do)”: “She knows how to keep a secret / and wash away the evidence.” Humor, sometimes, but rain also shows up hand-in-hand with grief. In “Landscape in Dreams”:
Where is it you go
when I lose sight of you in fog?
I’m certain I’ve seen you in dreams
that smell of burnt toast
On rainy days your laughter chimes
raindrops against roof gutter (27)Oliver de la Paz uses these words to praise the book: “The fickle and atmospheric weather of losses, revelations, and heartbreak shifts and shimmers.” In poems such as “Reasons to Live,” and “On the Nature of Grief,” I was reminded that indeed this is poetry that “shifts and shimmers,” that encompasses, becomes a voice talking back to you on a suicide hotline, sits beside you, faithful as a loved dog.
Bethany Reid, The Autobiography of Rain
It’s not easy for a poet to find a new angle on daffodils after Wordsworth, but [Julie] Burke gives it a shot in “The promise of daffodils (Spring 2020)”. The date being the beginning of covid,
“Outside, the daffodils find their own bed
wherever they have sprouted, heaving
aside any pebbly impediment, shred
of carrier bag, tin can, or leavings
of take-away. They peek from under hedges,
squirt out of pots, bluster along carriageways.
They are ground level pledges
of sunshine when our heads are too heavy to raise.”Even flowers can grow from discards and stony ground. Burke’s poems are daffodil-like too: they broach tricky subjects but a note of renewal and optimism reverberates through each poem. A reminder that life is not monotone, but full of harmony if we allow ourselves to hear it.
Emma Lee, “Kindling” Julie Burke (Five Leaves Publications) – book review
Vanishing Points, by Lucija Stupica, is a translation from the Slovene (by Andrej Peric, published by Arc Publications in 2024) of the poet’s fourth collection, published in 2019, and is her first book to appear in English. Like Krisztina Tóth, whose book My Secret Life (translated by George Szirtes) I reviewed here, Stupica began publishing in the early 1990s, after the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and Slovenian independence. Also like Tóth, this book suggests a searching restlessness, perhaps a carrying of deep scars that continue to affect a life. The book’s epigraph is taken from Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem, ‘Questions of Travel’ (1965): ‘Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?’ The Vanishing Points Stupica seems to have in mind are those to do with distance, diminishment, travel and perspective. This has been stimulated by (or has itself provoked) her leaving Slovenia to live on the tiny island of Oaxen, near Stockholm, in 2012. This experiment in ‘island living’ proved unhappy and short-lived, as she and her family moved to Stockholm itself three years later and many of these poems explore this experience. […]
Bishop (like early Lowell) manages the trick of making personal experiences resonate far beyond the merely autobiographical. I don’t think Stupica has the same magic for the most part. In ‘North’, there is something more narrowly personal in the differing wishes of the man and woman. He wishes for a lake, darkness, spruce trees, while she wishes for the sea and light. The re-location to Oaxen seems to provoke a divergence of views. The woman experiences boredom, a sense of death (the demise of a beetle in one poem, a toad in another) and a brief prose poem evokes a stultifying routine: ‘You’ve become heavy as a rock. Move it. Eat up your meal. Do the cleaning. Talk to the neighbour. Smile. Brush your teeth’. A more extended meditation on the fascination with islands, ‘Islomania’, presents some of the more attractive aspects of the wintry landscape, the wild orchids, seal spotting, but the midnight sun and the summer’s tourist invasion, convince the narrator that those who bear the ‘affliction’ of islomania have contacted a rare disease, an intoxication, even a ‘sort of scar until the end of time’.
Martyn Crucefix, Review of ‘Vanishing Points’ by Lucija Stupica, tr. Andrej Peric
Set with opening poem, “Before We Begin …,” and six sections—“Psychotic Notebooks,” “Purgatorial Imagery,” “There Needs to Be More to This Than Nostalgia,” “A Harmonious Armageddon,” “An Autobiography” and “Consonants* A Book of Visions*: A Book of Illuminations*: A Chorus of* L*ght: Against L*ght: Against L*ght”—The Book of Interruptions extends Mohammadi’s accumulations of space and spacings, writing a sequence of interruptions and disturbances, hiccups and self-sabotage, writing the possibility and impossibly of words, language and meaning. “my mouth bubbling under water // the narrator mentions me by name,” the opening of the sequence “Psychotic Notebooks” begins, “I am the cliffhanger // for one of a thousand nights before slaughter // having asked more questions than I have answered // in the city within the city I swerve // among the cacophony of the tunnel // an ocean within an ocean [.]”
Gestural and expansive, there is an element of worldbuilding to [Khashayar “Kess”] Mohammadi’s lyric, one that returns the structure to the crossed-out (or interrupted) vowel through their use of the * symbol from prior work (specifically), writing a narrative structure concurrently fragmented, populated and isolated, swirling amid staccato struggles with faith and cities, queer experience and a litany of restless, thoughtful observations around feeling unsettled in a secular Toronto, while holding on to a cultural history of the poem that connects to that stretches back thousands of years. With each collection, Mohammadi furthers a complexity of their engagement with the long poem, the book-length accumulated lyric, a trajectory that is as striking as it is propulsive. And yet, each work begins fresh, composed with an open curiosity, and an array of questions, some new, and others, that need to be asked more than once, for the sake of a broader, even ongoing, response.
rob mclennan, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, The Book of Interruptions
At one of the many events I attended this fall, a magazine editor, reflecting on downsides of a generally rewarding job, sighed and said something like “so many bad poems.” What’s hardest for me about selecting poems for Shenandoah is how many good poems I receive, way more than I can accept, given a limited budget and small production staff. “Good” can encompass a lot of values, but I think what I mean here is not only skill–the sense that someone has read a lot of poetry and is crafting their diction, linebreaks, etc. with care and knowledge of the options–but something like sincerity. I sometimes roll my eyes at the word “sincerity” when applied to literature, because art isn’t life. Yet it matters when a reader can sense a person behind the poem, when the piece conveys vulnerability or a sharp mind in motion or searching honesty, especially in this AI-blighted moment. I often feel moved and intrigued by submissions that don’t quite make the difficult final cut. It’s both beautiful and heart-piercing to know how many dedicated writers are trying to deliver their work to readerships.
With all of these feelings, I’ve been whittling down a pool of entries for the Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Prize during the past few weeks–I try to give at least the small mercy of a timely decision–and finished late Friday. Some of the poems I rejected are staying with me, as well as the terrific pieces on the finalist list.
Editing has both steeled and tenderized me. Sometimes knowing what it’s like on the other side of Submittable dulls my will to try–how does anybody ever rise to the top? Should I even bother drafting a poem if I don’t have a shiny, high-stakes idea? (The answer to that is yes: the process has to matter more than the product.) But I understand now that when I’m rejected, I may still have reached one or a few appreciative readers who lingered over the work, thought about it for a while. That’s not nothing. Reading submissions reminds me, too, that persistence matters. As an editor who has rejected good writers multiple times, I root for those stalwart subbers to break through with a poem I cannot pass up. I also respect poets who are just done with the discouraging struggle to be published in traditional ways–or perhaps done with my rejections specifically! There are many ways to write a “good” poem and many ways to share it. As often as I think “this poem has strengths but isn’t in its best possible version yet,” the writer might counter, validly, that I’m just not the right reader.
Lesley Wheeler, The knife
I know very little about opera, but I think “Recitativo secco” is what opera singers sometimes do between songs – minimal orchestration: more talking than singing. In musicals they would talk.
I can’t find much online about the pros/cons of recitative. It can involve a few instruments. “secco” (dry) is the most minimal style. Here are a few quotes –
- “It increases the interest of Scenes which, deprived of the resources of the Orchestra, might become tedious: but it seriously diminishes the amount of contrast attainable in effects of colouring and chiaroscuro” (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Music_and_Musicians/Secco_Recitative)
- secco recitative gave way to full recitative by 1820 in serious operas, and became standard in comic operas during the following decade (New Grove Dictionary)
- “Typically, the earlier the opera is, the easier it is to distinguish between recitative and other operatic sections, such as arias or ensemble pieces” (https://www.operasense.com/tag/recitativo-secco/
In books like Tim Steele’s “Towards a winter solstice” the rhyme/meter keeps ticking over even when the poetry’s having a rest. In free verse books like “Bycatch” (Caroline Smith) (a good book) there are stanzas (indeed, whole poems) where the line-breaks carry on even though the text is prose. It’s like those joggers who run on the spot waiting for the lights to turn green.
So what’s wrong with talking instead of (gratuitous?) singing? What’s wrong with passages of prose? Maybe
Tim Love, Recitativo secco and poetry
- the work feels more of a unified whole if the music/form is sustained
- there is a hierarchy of arts – music is higher than words; poetry is higher than prose – and people prefer the higher arts
- there’s a thin-end-of-the-wedge fear – if you start leaving out line-breaks where will it end? Flash?
Since to be engaged with poetry is to be engaged, endlessly, in this business of working out how things are like other things (thank you, James Mcconachie, for that one), it stands to reason that a poet might wonder about the things-as-things of poems, themselves. What is a poem? I’ve been thinking about this question a lot again recently, after reading Jon Stone’s excellent essay ‘The Amalgamist’s Workshop’, published here. In this essay, Stone sets out what he calls “a new-ish statement of intent” as to the how and why of his writing. The whole essay makes me fizz with excitement and possibility and new ways of thinking (and isn’t that the point?), but especially this part:
“To characterise poems as ‘toys’, meanwhile, is to suggest (in what I hope is a friendly way) that the reader is also part of the amalgamatic process – that a poem is something to get involved with, not just observe or absorb. “Here is a toy. Do something with it. We learn through play.””
Poems are toys. Well, of course they are. I’ve been groping about in the dark for a while now with the idea of the act of poetry as play (perhaps serious play, but play nonetheless), but reading this statement was like a torch beam illuminating something at my feet that I was just about to stumble over. Poems are toys. They are things the reader brings their own imagination, openness and capacity for surprise to bear on. Like a toy, a poem can be played with in an endless variety of ways, not even remotely limited to the functional and physical constraints of the thing itself. Like a toy, successive readers will play with different facets of the poem and derive different results with it. One reader really enjoys pressing that button that makes a loud ding; another enjoys making the twinkling lights flash; one likes shaking it to see what words fall out; another just wants to wrap it up in a makeshift blanket and cuddle it like a teddy bear.
You might say – well, what is special about toys, anyway? Any random object can be a toy. Yes, it can. But when it’s being played with as a toy, its function changes, from the function of the object to that of a toy. Toys have a special status that is different to other kinds of objects and it’s in the act of playing with them that this status is conferred. Is the same true of poems, and reading?
Victoria Spires, Egg rolls off a table
our town was big enough to consume me.
Robin Gow, 11/15
now that i am older i seek out larger monsters
to devour me bone by bone but then
it was just the overpass & the red truck.
the old factory by the train station
without any windows.
I was just working on a blog post for Patreon on titling your work, and while I reined it in to be more informational and practical, it had me thinking of all the ways I’ve titled works, both individually and as collections. While I have very little problem coming up with book titles (well, barring one recent project I will get to in a minute) individual poems have always been rough for me. It may in fact be why I rarely title the smaller bits and pieces of larger projects, instead leaving them without titles or adding numbers/letters and other typographical elements to denote separate pieces.
It wasn’t always this way, and my first book, THE FEVER ALMANAC is an excellent example of my early poet days, when I titled individual pieces much more frequently. I was pretty good at it, and usually the title was something I sussed out of the poem as I drafted it, or it was a word or phrase I had scribbled down in a notebook. The real challenge was the overall collection, which had many titles and versions in those couple of years I was pulling together that first full-length and submitting it. In the fall of 2003, it was titled “Almanac”, and was arranged by seasons, Later, it merged with a second manuscript of poems written between 2004-2005 I was calling “The Fever Poems.” During that summer of revision, right before the combined version that was eventually accepted, I mended the two titles together and it stuck.
My second book, IN THE BIRD MUSEUM, was not always called that. When I queried and sent the book to Dusie Press, it was still called “Instabilities, ” after another one of the poems. It was a title that reflected the ideas of knowledge and transgression well. My editor suggested I change it to “In the Bird Museum” which was the title of another one of the poems and I was amenable to the change.
GIRL SHOW, however, was always GIRL SHOW, even before I had written a single poem. I pulled it from a non-fiction historical book I had on my desk in the library with the same title that was all about women sideshow performers. When I wrote the first poem, this was its title and the guiding force behind the book as it took shape over the next couple of years, even enduring my MFA, where I completed the manuscript as my thesis project. The title of my next book, THE SHARED PROPERTIES OF WATER AND STARS, if I remember correctly, came from something scribbled in my notebook. At the time an editor requested to see the manuscript in the fall of 2012, I vaguely remember slapping the title on it and seeing if they thought it worked. When the book came out less than a year later, that was the title.
Kristy Bowen, naming the beast
Some days I feel I’m getting quieter and quieter. Have less that demands to be barked [at] anywhere outside my head, or less worth saying, less worth the effort toward affecting the world order, or the small world, anyway, in which I roam. I’m a wizard, often, at conversing. The idle chitchat I can do when required. I don’t mind small talk. (I don’t trust people who do. It is a small courtesy in an often discourteous world, this world of humans we cannot escape.) But I’m more apt these days to remain quiet. Sometimes it feels like a defeat. Other times it feels like new wisdom. Both could be true, of course, depending on the context of my silence. Some silence is a being-with, some is a withdrawal-from. Some verbiage is a combat. Some a defense. Some a nervous habit. More and more I am trying to learn all the differences among the types of talk and the sorts of silences. More and more I am trying to empathize with each.
Marilyn McCabe, be visited by a dream of the world as kind
The poem is sitting opposite you, watching while you read it through. Once you raise your eyes from the page, it catches your glance. Takes a sip of its glass of Tempranillo. Lets you think. Then sends you back to the beginning to reread it again in light of the ending.
You draw up some more chairs: one for your memory, one for your dreams, another for your imagination. The poem pours them all a glass of that Tempranillo. They swirl it and sniff. Clink glasses in a silent toast. Start talking among themselves. You even dare to join their conversation.
And that’s when the poem stands up, drains its glass, and quietly leaves. Its job is done.
Matthew Stewart, The poem and you
Imagine, at this age, to have brought beginner’s mind to California. Where have I been? In the land of the skeptic, in France. But what luck to have had California before me. Full-on sensory discovery.
Enthusiasm has a way of being boundless. (Forgive me for walking naively into known mythologies.)
Rocky cliffs and water that rolls with a steady rhythm that gathers, then completely releases with an assured swagger, somehow embarrassing the Atlantic.
Painting after painting in a grand sfumato that no matter how many times you clean your glasses, is real and before you.
Sad lady of the lake and her plangent guitar at a hillside café.
Looking, looking, I became entranced by planes and screens.
Jill Pearlman, Be Here Now, California (gaps included)
Here were tall lines of stone men and women, arranged in rows and circles, as if preparing to dance. Around the small hill on which they stood, cloud had fallen into the hollows of wide-open peat country, a land where lochs and lochans, hills and hillocks morph into creatures of fantasy, illusions created by the pouring and shifting mists and rains, by light and shade.
I was speechless in the company of these stones. My ears rang. R and I walked around, together then apart, each trying to make sense of them, of the wider landscape in which they stood. From standing stones to distant hills the space was filled with hollows and hummocks. Each loch was a bowl filled with milk. Each hill trailed fogs made of silk. The effect was unsettling and unnerving. I lost my balance a few times when my feet should have been sure. […]
Our modern world is febrile with anxiety, paranoia and conflict, addled with gut-wrenching concern for the future. But shadows on pale sand, white shells and crisped seaweed and fragments of ancient rock grounded me. I thought of remote lives, the long churn of time and the relentless natural processes governing Planet Earth, of how people knew their natural landscape, understood the local geology, found comfort in using stone to observe change across seasons and years, and calculate the motions of the stars. Perhaps they knew the deep time memories held within rock. Perhaps a sense of permanence and meaning came from the process of construction. Perhaps the standing stones gave reassurance to the builders and their families about their own place in the universe, and enabled them to imagine distant futures.
Annie O’Garra Worsley, The comfort of rock
They chant the same Psalms, the same tones
used for centuries. Modern minds scoff,
but the monks, yoked together
into a process both mystical and practical,
do as they’ve been commanded.Their graves, as unadorned as their robes,
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Armistice Day with Monastic Poem
stretch out in rows of white crosses, reminiscent
of a distant French field. We might ponder
the futility of belief in a new covenant,
when all around us old enemies clash,
or we might show up for prayer, light
a candle, and simply submit.
In life, in a marriage, in a community, in a company, in a story, there is a moment when you can see the light ahead. You clearly see what’s going to happen. You know: danger. Democracy-ending danger. You see the lanterns flickering. There was a time when this mobilized people, made them understand that it was time to rise to action.
I feel the heaviness of the future pushing against my own door. This year, our press has withstood an extreme funding crisis, springtime fires, and now, emergency flooding that has left half our space unusable. In 2015, we were nearly ready to close the press, and now, after the government has consistently reinforced that the arts are useless, we are looking into the same abyss. But we continue ahead with the knowledge that now, more than ever, narratives rooted in truth and experience must be uplifted. Despite widespread hopelessness, I know we can achieve a different story. I feel the breath of the gods. Overcoming this, and doing so in community, will be the joy of a lifetime.
Kate Gale, One if by Land, Two if by Sea: Misinformation in a Burning Country
This morning the beech leaves I carried home have curled into themselves. Rather like us in front of the log-burner at night or when we climb under the plump duvet. We sigh before we fall asleep, the brilliance of autumn folding up behind our eyes, packing itself away for another year.
We are ready now, for whenever it comes: the first frost, or even, perhaps, one morning that strange flat silence marking the arrival of snow.
tree-pose
Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Towards December
going deeper
into myself