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: poems talking to poems, optional depth, the moon in a well of whisky, and much more. Enjoy.
Hiking with Wild Iris in my mind, the poem that opens with that line – at the end of my suffering – I saw my children stomping the dead leaves, and over them the trees holding what they had left like torches in mid-day.
A door, at the end of suffering.
What if – I had been that week testing the thought – there is no door.
It is terrible to survive.
The darkness comes early, the flowers (the wild iris) rests underground, the trees pull back to bare limbs.
Yet, I can’t deny or ignore –
some months later, at first with the faintest signs, a return.
Each year the death of winter, rebirth of spring. An inescapable metaphor for even the likes of me.
Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.
Renee Emerson, At the end of my suffering, there was a door…
And how does the writer’s life change during the holiday season? Do you find yourself writing more or less? Is shopping or holiday card sending taking up time you would usually spend investigating journals or publishers? I haven’t been writing as much as I would like lately, holiday or no holiday, but I did manage to get a few submissions out after a pretty brutal book rejection the day before Thanksgiving (kept for more than a year with a “sorry it took so long” message after I’d been a finalist there multiple times. Ouch.) I’m starting to feel less sure about this book, which I used to have so much confidence in, my best book yet (I thought), fun and maybe even necessary. It’s also a little feminist, a little speculative, and more open about disability, which may mean it doesn’t appeal to everyone, especially in these “risk-averse” times. Anyway, think good thoughts as I send the manuscript out yet again, along with some poems.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Thanksgiving, Holiday Times at The Nutcracker, Local Wineries, Mt Rainier and the Writing Life Holiday Edition
Thanksgiving morning, in a house with no wi-fi, and a writer determined not to use her hot spot until the last possible minute because she, unlike much of the U.S.A. does not want to pay for unlimited data on her cell phone. But she knows what to do. And so she writes the old-fashioned way, typed in a Word document that will be uploaded later.You thought the writer might use a pen? She’s not that old-fashioned—she still has electricity! And she’s willing to pay for the version of Microsoft Office that’s always available, regardless of Internet access.
That writer, of course, is me. I’m being cautious with my cell phone usage because one past Thanksgiving of reckless abandon showed me how much data can cost, when I left the hot spot function on overnight. I am educable.
But I’m also delighting in disconnecting. I’ve gotten a sermon written in the past hour since I got up. If I’d had connectivity, I’d have spent that hour looking at stuff on the Internet, and likely feeling dispirited. Now I am feeling virtuous!
Long ago, I did write with a pen and paper, and I do remember that I had to fend off distractions then, too. Back in those days, I might be tempted to read the newspaper before I started—the old-fashioned kind, that arrived on the doorstep, not on my computer screen. The world is always trying to pull us away or lull us into complacency or sedate us—or terrify us or make us feel inadequate.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Thanksgiving Morning
around one candle the whole of november has gathered.
a lost bird from the dark flutters against the window.
the eyes of the watchers look like seeds from the oldest branch of night.
Grant Hackett [no title]
When I tell people I have been to the precinct to sing I often follow this up with, “not randomly on my own”. And the thought of me rocking up just to stand there and sing by myself makes me laugh. This would most definitely not work! In the group I know when I can trust myself to belt it out. I also know when I am in danger of being out of tune, and need to pause my singing.
I love the feeling in my chest and soul when the voices of the more competent singers shine. And being part of that is magical. The high notes rise and I remember to come in with the lower part at the right time and I can feel the sparkle of what is being created by many voices coming together. Sometimes I zone out when singing and temporarily forget where I am. This is quite entertaining when I come to and find myself singing along in tune and inhabiting the song. It was however slightly embarrassing at a recent rehearsal when I came to and heard the familiar intro of ‘This is Me’ only to forget that it was solo part and definitely not my turn to be singing even though that’s what I did. Fortunately I was in tune and quickly realised I should stop.
This week I was also celebrating the cover of a new poetry anthology called ‘Safety in Numbers’. This is another powerful reminder of what can be done when people work together. The idea for the book came from Gill Connors, and each poet was sent a poem to respond to with a poem of their own. Thus the poems were written in chains… each poem inspiring the next… women talking to women… poems talking to poems. I am delighted that my poem Stunt Girl will be in these pages, and that it came into being because of Gill’s project.
Sue Finch, SOCK MONKEY
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
As a kid I wanted to write fiction, not poetry. I wrote some bad short stories. A turning point was picking up Raymond Carver’s collected poems and realising I preferred his poetry to his short stories. Then the bug bit me.I like the idea of poetry as literary popcorn, literary snacks, literary hors d’oeuvres. You can eat something mind-bending and delicious. Then another, but sadder. Then another, but funnier… and you never really get full. Just tired. […]
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?
My girlfriend teases me by describing my poetry as – ‘What if a chair was sad?’ – and really, can you think of any greater theoretical concern than that?
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Guy Elston (rob mclennan)
I don’t see my poetry as truth-telling, proclamation, or a call to action. I see it more as storytelling, and I like being comfortable with ambivalence and uncertainty.
Here I am once more, sallying forth into a topic I am barely qualified to talk about, because I had an idea that I couldn’t let go of. But if you can accept my permanent status as an enthusiastic amateur, we shall begin.
I posted a poem over on Instagram on Monday, which had been written rather hurriedly in response to an exhibition of Gianni Versace’s designs and influences I’d seen the day before. It was way more interesting than I thought it would be, and the sculptural, structural quality of the clothes made me feel a bit sexy, and so this poem was the result.
The game of wrong pleats
After Gianni Versace
The game is to imagine wearing the dress
The game is to know he placed vertical interruptions
in the spaces a thumb would come to rest
The game is a slow thumb, ruffling the body
against itself
The game is to hold your thoughts aware, in plié
The game of the fold between structure, and release
The game is to whisper the words pleit /plicare / please
Now I don’t know whether this particular poem will do it for you, or not, but I did get to thinking about what it is that makes a poem sexy. What are the qualities of a good sexy poem — one that you have to hold your breath a little bit to read, one that makes you bite your lip involuntarily? I started to speculate to myself that a lot of it is about control, and restraint. As with poetry in general, but even more so in the case of the sexy poem, perhaps it relies heavily on what’s left unsaid, as much as what is said? It does indeed feel a bit like a game. The writer and the reader are playing truth or dare with each other — and also with the other person or persons in the poem if there are any (poetic polycule, anyone?) — and they’re each waiting to see how far the other will go, hoping it’s just far enough to keep them interested.
Victoria Spires, Ribs, ass and figs
In the Cummings poem, the growth of daisies in spring is associated with love and sex. This motif of spring (and especially April) is one of the most consistent elements of his poetry. Here’s another of my favourites:
yes is a pleasant country:
if’s wintry
( my lovely )
let’s open the yearboth is the very weather
( not either )
my treasure,
when violets appearlove is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
( and april’s where we’re )Cumming’s poems are so memorable and so delicious to say that it’s easy to miss their concision and the remarkable flexibility that he wrings out of supposedly rigid English word order. Cummings studied Latin and Greek at school and as an undergraduate and in the way he puts words together (if not in other respects) he is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the most convincingly Horatian of the English poets. Seven translations of Horatian odes made while a student at Harvard show many aspects of his style already in place and hint at how stimulated he was by Horatian language and metre. Two of those seven translations are of Horace’s “spring” odes 1.4 and 4.7.
Victoria Moul, Love is a deeper season: e. e. cummings and Horace the fascist
I heard someone say torch, and recalled
Luisa A. Igloria, Trousseau
my friend’s story about how, when her sister
was married, her new husband gathered all
her underwear and threw it into the fire.
This was supposed to show how his passion
for her meant all other loves before him
were to be incinerated. Some words eclipse
others in the wake of their arrival.
Every Sunday during Advent I will post a link to a poem by a leading Palestinian or Gazan poet.
Today’s poem is by the Palestinian poet and photographer Dareen Tatour.
Detaining a Poem, by Dareen Tatour, translated from the Arabic by Andrew Leber.
Dareen Tatour published her poem ‘Resist, My People, Resist Them’, on social media in 2015. She was subsequently arrested by Israeli police and charged with incitement to violence and supporting a terrorist organisation, which she has always denied. She then spent three years under house arrest, during which time she was barred from publishing her work and accessing the internet. After her trial in July 2018, she was handed a five-month prison sentence (with six months suspended), of which she served two months, being released in September 2018. Dareen is the author of I Sing From the Window of Exile (Drunk Muse Press, 2022) and My Threatening Poem – The Memoir of a Poet in Occupation Prisons (Drunk Muse Press, 2021).
Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 1: Detaining a poem, by Dareen Tatour
‘The Underground’ is written with the author’s usual muscular naturalism. Heaney didn’t have to resort to poetic metaphor nearly as often as the rest of us, because he always, somehow, found the word he needed. To adapt Trump, that heroic anti-poet: he really did know all the words, and the best words. I often find that have to compare something to something else to move it closer to what I intend; but the problem with that approach is that it’s too easy to break the spell of the poem. Randomly … Okay, it happens that I’m sitting here staring at a little curtain made of dark and starchy material. Suppose I wanted to describe it. In its weird, stiff folds it looks like … A ploughed field? A school skirt? A concertina? All of these might do fine, but each would introduce another domain to the poem – agriculture, childhood, music – that the poem would then have to justify to keep its integrity. A good question to ask on these occasions is ‘What would Seamus do?’ Well, Heaney might prefer ‘pleat’ to ‘fold’ because it has a sharper plosive edge; though he’d also know that ‘pleat’ was from the Latin plicare, to fold, from the old Indo-European pek root, and cognate with implicate, complicate, explicate, duplicate. So he might describe the curtain’s material as ‘pleated’, or perhaps ‘complicated’ – simple words which carry the old meanings along with them: complicated things are folded together. All Seamus’s simple words throw very long shadows, because how we use a word – in what way, in what common phrases, with what other words – is also the story of exactly how it got there. Heaney had a strong preference for the common word-hoard, i.e. the everyday vocabulary we draw from Anglo-Saxon, Norse or Norman sources. Many if not most poets share it, because these words are mostly mono- or disyllabic, and therefore introduce far more stressed vowel, i.e. song, into the poetic line. (Though some poets find plenty of music in the authoritative register of a more polysyllabic and Latinate vocabulary – Sean O’Brien, for example – or in the scientific precision of more Greek-leaning lexis, like Douglas Dunn).
‘The Underground’ is as densely folded and woven – ‘implicated’? – a piece of language as I know. As well as Heaney’s deep knowledge of word origins, the poem is also enriched by his signature use of allusion: he’ll allow every tiny event in the poem sing back into the culture to seek out its mythic, historical or literary echo. Typically, ‘The Underground’ presents these allusions with the kind of grace and surface fluency that can leave them going undiscovered by the reader. We might say the poem possesses ‘optional depth’ – a highly desirable quality, I think; one I first heard identified by Michael Alexander in a lecture he was giving on Four Quartets. ‘Optional depth’ requires a poet confident enough in themselves not to demand applause for their cleverest effects, though it also assumes a patient reader. But at this stage of his career Heaney knew he’d won them; his readers trusted him to be worth their effort. (This is one reason I think the dismissal of ‘reputation’, when it’s been fairly won, to be utterly fatuous. ‘Reputation’ is not a licence to write badly but differently, since the poet’s relationship to the reader is configured differently, and based on more trust than an unknown poet has yet earned. The best poems of ‘poets of high repute’ would win no prizes in a poetry competition, where every single poem has to prove itself solely on its own terms. You might think this situation ideal, but it’s a recipe for mostly hysterical performance. I’ll write on the ethics of the poetry competition some other day.)
Don Paterson, Heaney on the Underground
Sitting on the steps, I’m eating ice cream
Liz Lefroy, I Do Happy
when a dog goes past and it seems we’re each in need
of the way he stops and the way I scratch his ears.
The ice cream is my for-now-favourite flavour.
The dog, caramel brown, looks with his chocolate eyes
at the ice cream, then up his lead towards you,
as if to say,
Hey! This – my ears, the ice cream,
this perfect blue and sunshine ice cream day.
This.
I like to describe Aleda Shirley as the best poet you’ve never heard of. I adore her work and wish there weren’t so little of it: three books along with a chapbook, the latter an extremely curious object that exists for reasons entirely beyond me. Titled Rilke’s Children, it was printed and hand-sewn by Gray Zeitz at Larkspur Press and published by the Frankfort Arts Council; Shirley shares author billing with another favourite of mine, David Wojahn, and the book also contains a selection of poems by some other Kentucky poets and an introduction by Guy Davenport. I’ve had it since I was in college: it was the first book I ever bought from Abebooks. I can only assume I ordered it for the Wojahn poems and was accidentally rewarded with another lodestar.
What’s to like about “White Center”? It’s the driving rhythm that lingers, the litany and its application to an uncompromising insistence on metaphor. This is one of those poems that gets straight at the ancient heart of the whole endeavour, the sense of poiesis from which poetry derives: a bringing forth, a conjuring. Here, it’s the felt sense of time, Shirley’s effort to bring the conceptual into the embodied realm, to bear the intangible across the divide and into phenomenological experience. Like Lynda Hull’s “The Window,” which concludes Hull’s third and final book, “White Center” is the last poem in Shirley’s collection Dark Familiar, also her third and her last. This is meaningful to me in some way I can’t articulate; it causes me to number spines, seeking out the final final final poem: surely there must be a third.
Vanessa Stauffer, “White Center” by Aleda Shirley
The final poem turns to Chaucer and “The Canterbury Tales”, in “All Together Now”,
“The spirit of the Wife of Bath will stir no porridge
but three husband shades around the pan
will jockey for the right to hold the spoon.
I hear more queueing at my door. Do you always
have so many spirits about your person?My head is full of fun and frolic,
Of sorrow and shame, of triumph and tragedy.
This is the rule inside any scribbler’s brain.
Know that I can never sup alone.
Bring your spirits, let them blend with mine
And all shall dance.”The rhythm bounces. It’s a jocular poem. And it sums up the quiet optimism that runs through “Rainbow Candles”. At times, there seems to be an acceptance of the way things are without a desire to make significant changes. That might be a frustration when you wish Cinderella could know that life’s about to get better for her. Readers might want the speaker to have more agency, protest against the baseball bat wielding thugs. But in “Rainbow Candles”, Challis draws attention to the small wins, the strength of solidarity, the courage that comes from being true to yourself.
Emma Lee, “Rainbow Candles” Tony Challis (Five Leaves Publications) – book review
This is to confess my untold delight in the postal service’s delivery of a book titled workshop of silence, containing poems by Jean D’Amérique, as translated by Conor Bracken.
In his translator’s introduction, Bracken notes that Jean D’Amérique’s lived experience is unsettled by the boundaries of nation-states: “As a transnational person who splits his time between Haiti, France, and Belgium, not to mention a Black transnational person transiting through and living in historically white countries, he is subject to the rough, reductive, and at times lethally armed gaze of bureaucracy.” Borders, as written by this poet, “are not meant to be stopped at”; their existence is arbitrary and alienating.
Since D’Amerique began as a slam poet, Bracken says that “retaining this transgressive, playful, and dexterous attention to sound” was one of the primary goals of his translation— a goal that frequently leads him to slight departures from the denotative meaning of the original words. Translation is an art. As such, translators make choices about what to emphasize and convey across languages. Bracken elects the “enlivening of language” that restores “its fundamental slipperiness,” or, in his own words:
It is based as much in play and wit as it is in the political dimensions of the work that he’s doing with these poems, which sometimes announces itself without embroidery, as in “moment of silence,” wherein he situates his poems in the political tradition of Nazim Hikmet, and at other times is more recondite, as in “under the bridges what springs (up),” where he points out through elaborate wordplay the continued but unexamined presence of the lexicon of shipping and chattel slavery in economic chatter.
I hear this subversive jouissance trickling upwards through the sap of “solar brass,” a poem that tingled all the way to the tips of my fingertips when I first read it.
solar brass
my rhapsody
a cactus in the night-call’s portfor sale for tropical cents
I am a solarpowered brassy jacket
the horizon
looks punk to meD’Amérique’s poems have a purpose in daily life: they process the banalities and polish the repetitions.
Alina Stefanescu, Workshop of Silence.
It was bound to happen. The recent revelations around Jeffrey Epstein have now implicated poetry in America—well, Poetry in America, a PBS program created by Elisa New, a Harvard professor of literature and wife of Epstein’s friend, Larry Summers (the two also honeymooned on Little St. James, flying there with Ghislaine Maxwell). Poetry in America is, according to its website, “a multi-platform educational initiative and public television series that brings poetry into classrooms and living rooms around the world.” On this program, New hosted conversations with numerous celebrities and poets, and at some point she accepted over $100k dollars in funding from Epstein for all this (at one point negotiating for $500,000). She also seems to have relied on his personal support and appreciated his esteem, and all this well after he was a registered sex offender. In fact, shortly before Epstein’s arrest, New was emailing him about how best to persuade Venus Williams to appear on her program. Mistakes were, as they say, made. It’s just a shame that we may never get to see the shelved episode in which she discussed poetry with none other than Woody Allen, a man introduced to her by Epstein.
Yes, the dunks could go on. And well they should. But I’m afraid there is more significant news to attend to regarding (little “p”) poetry in America. […]
In late October, the Mellon Foundation has announced the formation of the Literary Arts Fund. In the creation of this fund, Mellon has joined with “the Ford Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation” to distribute $50 million into literary non-profits across the next five years. Significantly, the president of the Mellon Foundation is Elizabeth Robinson, former US poet laureate—arguably the most influential person in American poetry, strictly in terms of economic power. And I have written about her before in connection to money given to the Poetry Coalition. The Poetry Coalition is comprised of roughly thirty major literary organizations and is very closely tied to the Academy of American Poets. And as of today, if you go to the Academy’s web site, you can still find a page for its PBS program, Elisa New’s Poetry in America.
Now, none of this is to imply a connection between Epstein and the Literary Arts Fund (lol). But these two stories happening at once, in the same backyard, means that I cannot pass up the opportunity to, once again, talk about the funding of poetry in America. And perhaps I’m too much of an idealist, but I feel like we should be wary of extremely centralized wealth—regardless of where it comes from—meddling in the culture of poetry. Such wealth is inseparable from the worker exploitation and systemic violence inescapably built into the heart of the capitalist system. Under the guise of “supporting the arts,” there are any number of motives that institutions, organizations, foundations, or super-rich individuals might have in pouring money into some quadrant of “poetry in America.” And all of this says nothing of the fact that many, many poets are also debtors, and the establishment of student debt was essential to their being able to obtain the credentials necessary for access to this world of funds.
Ultimately, my position is that this money funds a culture whose credentialed professionalism in fact serves to condition it, train it, and limit its capacity for imagining or enacting another world.
R.M. Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 5)
I only read the news — I don’t watch or listen to it — so I can take in the melodrama in measured glances, the calm of a punctuated sentence, a nicely contained paragraph. It occurs to me that life is that mix of unanticipated stimulation and the striving to make sense of it and react in some reasonable way that allows survival until the next surprise. Art is important to me both as stimulus and as companion on the path to survival. This poem by Peter Gizzi feels like good company today, as I stagger into the gray day with its subtly shifting clouds.
Marilyn McCabe, the future I’m reaching for
i am sibling to the
Robin Gow, lost & lost
orphaned mitten & the charging cable
once plugged into a breakup machine.
mother to the acorns who could not
figure out how to sprout & the eggs
who went rotten in the coop.
we can call it the lost & lost. like a zoo
that you can only enter if you too have
been left behind.
So there’s AI now. It’s HEEEEEEERE. A brain- and intellectual-property-eating water and energy guzzling zombie. Or vampire. There are so many ethical issues to confront. I hear my educator and writing friends decrying it and calling for absolutely abstention. I get that. But I am left to wonder what to do beyond that. We can’t just try to ignore it. Legislation. Yes. Rules, guidelines, restrictions. Yes. Teaching our students and advocating for deeper understanding of what it is, what it is doing. Absolutely. But we can’t ignore it and must do more than just say “stay away from it.” Just like, “fentanyl is bad. Don’t do it.” But obviously, that doesn’t work and is too simplistic.
In terms of AI, we must engage with the social and structural issues around it when we talk to “users” and “pushers” of A.I. Address it as a symptom. Of what? Well, capitalism, for one, but also a kind of fear, insecurity and lack of feeling centred, of not trusting in one’s own abilities, feeling the need to outsource. Of a kind of alienation from the non-mediated world. (Mediated by capital, by technology, by a kind of “culture is out there” thinking.) Not trusting oneself and not feeling safe to fail. I think we need to address all these things. We’re being capitalismplained and fearsplained. But I need language more than “Trust yourself. Be authentic” to talk to my students. It needs to be deeper than that. More than “Just don’t do it,” or “It’s wrong.” And publicly, I feel as writers we need to explain more about what it actually means and where the desire to use it comes from more than a kind of moralizing and shaming, because, as with the case of so many other things, that never works.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, A.I.: brain- and intellectual-property-eating water and energy guzzling zombie or vampire?
One crisp autumn day, on a whim, I started sending haiku to a few friends via email and text message. I had a new phone and was interested in its SMS capabilities. The only things I found that I could get via SMS were sports scores and stock updates. Boring! I thought: 160 characters — that’s probably enough for a tiny poem. If I could subscribe and get a daily haiku on my phone, that would be pretty cool!
Of course, nothing like that existed yet. I soon learned about email to SMS gateways that would let me email text messages to phones, if I just formatted the To: address properly, and that sparked an idea: To start a haiku by SMS service.
One thing led to another, and pretty soon I had a little mailing list going. At first I borrowed haiku from library books. I added a few of my own early efforts. In time, I started accepting submissions.
Before long, tinywords had become a daily magazine of haiku and micro poetry. That was over 25 years ago, and tinywords now has over 3,000 subscribers, making it one of the biggest haiku/micropoetry publications in the world. We’ve published over 4,400 haiku by almost 1,000 different poets, including some big names in the haiku world, some big names in the larger poetry world, and some people who are just regular lovers of poetry without particularly big names at all, like me. I’m not even the editor anymore. For more than a decade, Kathe Palka and Peter Newton have been making all the editorial decisions. I am, happily, the publisher, technical support guy, and customer service rep.
In September, we celebrated tinywords.com’s 25th anniversary by sponsoring a reception at Haiku North America 2025, the big biannual haiku conference. It was a joy to meet and celebrate with almost 200 haiku poets, many of whom have appeared on our site over the years.
Along the way I learned that haiku are about more than just syllable counts: Haiku are a tool for mindfulness, a vehicle to bring us into presence and awareness of the world, a literary form that sharpens our powers of observation and description, and a writing practice that helps us cut away the fluff.
As one of the most concise literary genres, haiku have helped me to be a sharper, more direct writer. They’ve helped make my headlines and email subject lines more concrete and pithier. (My email bodies are still too long, though — my excuse is that they’re prose!)
It’s no exaggeration to say that haiku have made me a better writer and editor, and they have certainly helped my career.
But it’s the haiku philosophy of awareness, close observation, mindfulness, and concision that has made the biggest difference in my life. Haiku are steeped in Zen, and over time, practicing haiku-like awareness, day after day, has helped me to show up better for my own life.
Dylan Tweney, Haiku changed my life
And each eye is a new world
to be examined in turnOne then the other
this is one then thatConsumed by more than silence
he floats untetheredThe difficulty I had was that the poem was very wordy and needed to be pared back. There were a number of lines that I liked that fell by the wayside. I used to keep these separate convinced I could use them somewhere. I haven’t yet.
Paul Tobin, HE TOOK UP MIRRORS
Lately I’ve been revising some old poems and have realized I no longer recall what their incipience was. Which can be a good thing, because I am no longer wedded to the “reason” I wrote them and can instead consider whether they can be crafted into decent poems.
I am also working on a manuscript that I let sit for at least six years. An idea got into my mind after reading Robert Burton’s 17th-century book on depression, The Anatomy of Melancholy, quite some time ago (2017, perhaps?). I took a stab at writing what seemed to be evolving into a historical fiction story, which is not my usual approach (I have zero practice at plot and dialogue). Then, I stopped. As one does. But the topic lodged in me somewhere, I suppose, and early this year I returned to it. What if, I wondered, the draft could be restructured into a series of prose poems? There might be a sort of hybrid novella-poem in the earlier draft.
That’s more or less what I’m developing, at least for now, and we’ll see what if anything emerges. It’s keeping me interested, which I like, and the experiment feels fresh compared with “writing what I know,” or writing “how” I know. Because yes, of course we ought to write what we know; but we also know about human beings, and we have imaginations, and anything is possible.
Ann E. Michael, Source material
I can’t quite believe that my poem ‘The Last Carry’ has now reached over a thousand likes on Bluesky, many of them from people beyond the poetry bubble. Oh, and a fair few of those likes have then gone on to generate sales of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t. All in all, a terrific example of how social media, when functioning at its best, can generate new readers for poetry.
Matthew Stewart, A thousand likes
To date, Lit Mag News has nearly 17,000 subscribers. Just typing that figure makes my eyes well up. I can’t believe it. I really can’t. That’s…a lot of people thinking and caring about literary magazines. That’s a lot of people, right here, in this space.
And now I must tell you this: It has been one of the greatest pleasures of my professional life to make Lit Mag News.
It has been an honor to be entrusted with your questions, your experiences, your confidences, and to serve as a reliable means for you to get the information and inspiration you need in order to continue along your literary paths.
It is not always easy to feel a sense of connection on the internet. Heck, it’s not always easy to feel a sense of connection, period. But I feel that here. I feel it because of the ways that you, all of you, contribute to this space.
Thank you.
Becky Tuch, A Message For You
To celebrate Small Business Saturday, preorders of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology are LIVE today at Madville Publishing. Preorder here.
We’re also thrilled to reveal the back cover, featuring photography by Donna Kile and stellar blurbs from Simon Morrison, Annie Zaleski, and Denise Duhamel.
“Collin Kelley and Megan Volpert present a dazzling collection of poems, reflections, and ruminations on the diva’s diva, Stevie Nicks. She would be the first to admit that her magic comes from her fans, and White Winged Doves is the proof. Here she is the inscrutable enchantress, queen of the queer pitch, your father’s favorite and Taylor Swift’s too as comforter, protector, and avenger.” — Simon Morrison, author of Mirror in the Sky: The Life and Music of Stevie Nicks
Collin Kelley, Preorder & back cover reveal for the Stevie Nicks poetry anthology
I was hanging up some clothing and found a coat I’d knitted when I was in my early thirties. It’s a gorgeous Kaffe Fasset design, one of two I’ve made. A third used to be in the attic, waiting for me to get it back out. I could be knitting while I watch TV all winter.
And then I remembered what happened to that sweater. It became a poem.
Ravel
Leslie Fuquinay Miller, I Should Be Knitting
It’s not as easy as you think
to unravel the half-done coat—
the mohair enmeshed with wool,
the intertwined tweed and Wintuck
(in colors so promising you use it
though you know it pills).
It’s not as easy as you think
to unravel a foot of coat
with so much time invested […]
So, my book is now available! You can find all the information about it here on my website :).
I received two fantastic submissions in response to my call on social media to share a haiku or tanka about the moon or the night – and both poets will receive a free copy of ‘Don’t Write About The Moon’ <3. Their haiku inspired me to weave them into a haibun. Enjoy reading!
THICKETS
(John Hawkhead, t.j. zhang, Makoto)
there it is again
that harvest moon in the well
of my whisky glassJohn Hawkhead, Presence 50
A hazy Saturday night. My thoughts have pulled me onward, though the shapes ahead are still hard to make out. The landscape breaks into mosaic fragments as I try to reassemble it once more: long, slender poplars overshadow the ground—why do I wander again to the thickets?
in a dream
over a field of irises
the moont.j. zhang, kurokuro.art
I halt, watch my breaths in the cold autumn air. What brought me here?
It’s beautiful. This purple, delicate streak in midnight blue, where does it end, where does it begin? Where do I? Let me walk on with hope on my soles.
I hear the grass straightening itself behind me.
Kati Mohr, Get your copy of Don’t Write About The Moon :)
The man who had stared at me throughout the workshop came up to me and handed me a piece of folded paper. He said “Don’t read it until you are at home, alone.” If I’m honest, I thought it was a poem or something. I said “Ok” and then carried on saying goodbye to people, packing up my things. I shoved the piece of paper into my pocket and forgot about it until later on that night when I was getting changed for the evening reading.
The piece of paper fell out of my pocket. I didn’t keep a copy of it, but my memory of what it said was something like ‘Do you really think your poems are going to be read after you are dead?” The man had drawn a scale with ‘shit poetry’ at one end and ‘memorable poetry’ at the other. I think there may have been a list of ingredients that make a good poem – rhyme etc. There was an arrow with a little picture of me at the shit end. He’d left his name and number on the paper and asked me to get in touch.
I felt more irritated than angry or upset, but I thought about what this might have felt like ten years ago, when I was first starting to write. I felt pleased that his behaviour and his words didn’t have the power to wound me in the way that they might have once upon a time.
After the reading, on impulse, I gave the piece of paper to one of the organisers and asked if I could talk to them after the festival was over. The organisers rang me the next day and were really supportive. They said they would ring and email the man concerned to tell him he was banned from attending any future readings. They also said they would review their safeguarding proceedings to ensure authors were not left unaccompanied at the end of events.
In the meantime, the man had contacted me through my website with this message:
I was the guy that gave you that note in ____ You seem8 to have a mischievous air about you which interests me. I have written some poems that nobody has seen. I wonder, would you like to meet for a coffee and I could read you two or three? I had some heart trouble last year and so don’t know how much time I’ve left?
I forwarded this onto the organisers without replying. After that he left some abusive comments online – calling me a nasty person – randomly, one is on a Reddit forum. I found out recently that the festival organisers had to report him to the police because he turned up at other events, managed to get inside said event (even though his description had been circulated) and then harassed other women writers. When they did report him to the police, they found out he was already known to them.
When I found this out, that he went on to harass other women, my first feeling was relief. Not that other women had been harassed, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone – but I think the relief was something to do with realising that this man was a damaged individual who wanted to hurt women, and that I did the right thing in reporting him. That I wasn’t being over sensitive, or not taking a joke. That I didn’t do anything wrong. That I wasn’t asking for it, that I didn’t do something that provoked him – even though the logical part of my brain knows all these things, I didn’t know it in my body until I heard he’d done it to other women as well.
I am sharing this now because I found out through the organisers that the man in question died not long ago so I feel safe to tell this story now – knowing that I’m not going to draw his attention to me again. Of course there are much worse things happening than this to women in our country and all around the world, but that is also kind of the point – I didn’t know whether this man would stop at a note and a few abusive messages, or whether he would become a full blown stalker.
Kim Moore, Day 5: 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence: On Speaking Out
Should we ever consider our reader’s comfort when we write? “You can say anything, but are you saying anything?” If we discard the reader, who should the work connect with? Are we ever saying anything important and socially engaged, if we relinquish our care for the person the art reaches out to, the effect on them.
Aren’t poems meant to make us feel something? And what of the poet? Can we ever hold a poet responsible for their poem’s effect on the reader? As poets, aren’t we predisposed to accept that once a poem is published/in print/in the public eye, it no longer belongs to us – once in the reader’s hands, doesn’t the poem now live with their interpretations, their myriad experiences, their feelings rendered, their epiphanies, inspiration, disgust, discomfort?
Though the tone is crude and verging on aggressive, the sestet makes playful reference to Shakespearean metre with lines ten and eleven’s enjambement:
‘speak the bard’s measured iambic tight pent-/ a meter…’
The intentional spacing in the final line is breakaway from traditional sonnet metre to balance the rhetoric question in a space of its own, as if a multiplicity of answers all occupy the space together: a poet is responsible for the poem, the reader is responsible for feelings evoked, the speaker is responsible for their reactions, the speaker is responsible for awareness of their own arousal, the reader is responsible for awareness of embodied experience.
In that beautiful sense, poetry is society’s way marker. Poets have the joy of bringing all these soft grey contradictions to light, playing the role of both speaker and reader. What we say, we might be saying to ourselves, to another, to society, or to no one in particular. And when you hear a poet insist their words are ‘not a protest’ the glint of resistance is sure to be found.
Drop-in by Katrina Moinet (Nigel Kent)
A couple of weeks ago there was an excellent radio programme on about dealing with Writer’s Block – I’m buggered if I can remember the name of it at the mo, but it will come to me. Anyhoo, it popped back into mind while reading some John Clare the other night. I’m slowly working my way through a Selected of his…And that book includes selected passages from a wider poem called To the Rural Muse
Here’s the second stanza (that they include)Muse of the pasture brook, on they calm sea
Of poesy I’ve sailed, and though the will
To speed were greater than the prowess be,
I’ve ventured with much fear of usage ill,
Yet more of joy. Though timid be my skill,
As not to dare the depths of mightier streams,
Yet rocks abide in shallow ways and I
Have much of fear its mingle with my dreams.
Yes, lovely muse, I still believe thee by
And think I see thee smile and so forget I sigh.When the Words Leave…that was the name of the show; seems ironic somehow…Give the show a listen. I enjoyed it.
I think Mr C (not that one) is dealing with some writer’s block brought on by fear of being able to say the things he wants throughout this poem..among other things.
Mat Riches, Rocks abide in shallow ways
It is not easy, in these lives haunted by loneliness and loss, menaced by war and heartbreak, witness to genocides and commonplace cruelties, to live in gratitude. And yet it may be the only thing that saves us from mere survival. In these blamethirsty times, to praise is an act of courage and resistance. To insist on what is beautiful without turning away from the broken. To bless what is simply for being, knowing that none of it had to be.
My recent love affair with artist and poet Rachel Hébert’s almost unbearably beautiful Book of Thanks reminded me of a poem by W.S. Merwin (September 30, 1927–March 15, 2019), found in his collection Migration: New & Selected Poems (public library) — a book that lodges itself in the deepest recesses of your soul and stays with you for life.
Maria Popova, Thanks: W.S. Merwin’s Ode to the Defiant Courage of Gratitude in a Broken World
The highlight of my writing year has been this week and has nothing to do with my own writing. I was invited to the St Andrew’s Day Ceilidh hosted by the Scottish Government’s Nordic Office, a well-kept little secret. I was invited through my connection with the Finnish Scottish Society who I help out every year with their annual Burns Supper and a ceilidh. We had no idea of what to expect, but it was the most amazing night. The guest stars were former Scotland Makar Jackie Kay and current Edinburgh Makar Michael Pedersen and the presenter and cultural commentator Ally Heather. I thought it might be a formal affair but it was far from that.
It was introduced as a Highland lock-in with music and poetry and tons and tons of whisky which is exactly what it felt like. Ally welcomed us in and spent the evening wandering around topping up everyone’s glasses. All three were delightful to talk to. The musicians and poets on stage kept it casual and fun and joined in with the drinking and chat off. My mate even had to eject a too-drunk Finn during the first session by Scotland’s 2025 Young Traditional Musician Ellie Beaton. Had to happen at a Scottish event. Michael and Jackie’s performance were fun and full of energy. I’ve books by them both this year including Michael’s amazing Muckle Flugga which is a rollercoaster of a read. And listening to him perform you understand why. I wish I had taken photos, but to be honest, I was a bit star-struck. Luckily, my friend was thinking on his feet.
Unfortunately, the lock-in didn’t happen, but we decanted to another pub down the road. I couldn’t stay as long as I’d like as I had work in the morning and kids waiting at home, but it was an absolute blast. It really made me miss the Scottish literary scene I used to dip my toes into. The mild hangover I took to school the next morning was totally worth it.
Gerry Stewart, St Andrew’s Day 2025
ラストシーンならこの町この枯木 大牧 広
lasuto shiin nara kono machi kono kareki
for the movie’s last scene
this town
and this withered treeHiroshi Ohmaki
from Haiku, November 2025 issue, Kadokawa Zaidan, Tokyo
Fay’s Note: Hiroshi Ohmaki (1931-2019)
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 28, 2025)
November is historically a month of losses and grief, proven just this week by losing two of our cats to age and illness and spending a part of the holiday at an emergency vets office instead of sitting down to turkey dinner. While November takes a lot each year (things I love, the daylight, the mild weather, and occasionally my own health—lest we forget last November’s bout of tendonitus in my foot that had me hobbling a significant portion of last winter. ) it has, on occasion given good things as well. in the past these included book acceptances and new job opportunities, though this past month, it may just be a sense of order and calm, as well as good progress on something entirely new—a play! that is proving to be an enjoyable writing endeavor given my recent and renewed theatre fervor. While poetry is always my favorite child, stepping away from it has birthed some interesting side projects nevertheless. We are on the cusp of December, which brings a wrapping up and taking stock of the creative year, which I will be sharing in the next few weeks, so keep an eye over on the blog for that. Otherwise, until then, may the darkness not swallow you before the solstice…
Kristy Bowen, November Paper Boat
That pungent vinaigrette in the little dish:
pour the rest over the poem.
It will taste delicious.Push that boulder which is also a word
over the poem’s hillside.
See how much moss, grass and other worlds it gathers.Read this dream article on your subject.
We offer you your essential point, in dream
language. Use it.That shovel. On the blackish background.
Jill Pearlman, Thanksgiving Dreamed My Poem
In the center. Here, you. Dreamer, poet, person.
Start digging.