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: a magic baby, the local megaliths, over two million lights, the way a poet blinks, and much more. Enjoy! See you in 2026.
The color of the year is charcoal, and these
PF Anderson, Sonnet
are the ashes with which we paint over this
sparkling holiday, dimming the fairy lights
into a gentle distance, glow to glimmer.
The poems are curious pinpoints set as a kind of sequence. They are minimalist, although less imagistic than narrative, offering narrative moments, albeit sans context but for themselves, and perhaps the suggesting of grouping, although more as a way to understand how to approach them, perhaps, as opposed to any kind of particular interconnection or narrative line. The pieces pinpoint, individual dots on an expansive grid, which can’t help but begin to form shapes, if even unconsciously, as any reader might go through. […] Davies’ poems are, each, individually complete in their incompleteness, fragmentary in nature, and less an exploration in density than a way of looking at narrative through a keyhole, perhaps.
rob mclennan, James Davies, it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall
Gabriel, if you like, be not afraid, to follow that shimmering orb
until you find a hurried and poetically humble stall, there a magic baby
waits to fisher stitch an empire’s myths. What if things were not
as we thought them? What if we were wrong, lost, lost in all of this?
james mcconachie, Yet Nothing You Dismay
I love these quieter days after Christmas. Today is the first day I’ve had entirely to myself since term ended, and I’m spending it by:
– finding new shelves for old bottles
– reading poetry by Morag Anderson and Maggie Milner, and choosing poems for January Writing Hours
– plotting with Kim by text and arranging our live events for paying subscribers for January, February and March
– arranging broken bits of pottery into categories which are obvious only to me
– making whisky liqueur so that the house is full of the smell I remember from Christmas Eve
– looking for the local megaliths I’ve been ignoring for years – until I discovered The Megalith Portal in Fiona Robertson’s “Stone Lands”. Then my partner bought me “The Old Stones” for Christmas, and now all of the big stones on the moors are transformed, and a new obsession is born!
I’m wishing you light, and I hope that however dark or busy your day, there’s time, however snatched, to do the things that make you happy, or comfortable, or warm.
Clare Shaw, If You Need More Light …
At the heart of Deryn Rees-Jones’ new collection Hôtel Amour (Seren), there is a sequence of twenty-four sonnets which flip for the first time into the first person – following the third person of the early section, ‘The Hotel’, and preceding the (mostly) third person of the later section, ‘The Garden’. And at the heart of this first-person sequence, there is a poem, Sonnet xii, in which the poet addresses her thoughts to her deceased husband, the memory of whom is anchoring her sense of self to her weakened and virus-riddled body. And at the heart of this sonnet, like all of them neatly bisected into seven-line stanzas, this clause straddles the whiteness of the central break:
…and me
(Sonnet xii)
like a kite flown from the beach as you look up to hold me…At the very heart of Hôtel Amour, then, is a ‘me’, and then a blank space, and then a metaphor, and then a ‘you’. And my reading of this collection is that it is an attempt – and a brilliant one – to fill in, or at least to give some definition to, that blank space that sits between the ‘me’ and the ‘you’ and which is therefore at the very centre, the unknowable centre, of the self. More specifically, this is the blank space between Rees-Jones and her husband, the poet Michael Murphy, who died of a brain tumour in 2009; but in taking on the project (started in 2019’s Erato – and earlier in the elegiac poems of Burying the Wren in 2012) of exploring her grief, she moves far beyond elegy, and builds a serious and profound meditation on what it means to be a human subject.
[…]
Towards the end of the period that I was reading and writing about Rees-Jones’ work, my mother-in-law passed away from pancreatic cancer. Watching and speaking to her in her final days as her body failed and witnessing the awesome spectacle of my wife taking on the full responsibility for the care of her mother at home, gave many of Rees-Jones’ words a new significance, especially those relating directly to her husband’s premature death. I returned to my essay on her work and found that I no longer thought some of the things I had thought before my mother-in-law died. New thoughts came to me, based in a fresh awareness of the bodiliness and the gravity – I might almost say the sanctity – of a human life ending. What had always seemed like a very good collection, had morphed into a profoundly serious and important one. This essay, then, is a substantially revised version of the one I originally wrote, and even now I am aware that my present reflections are also probably provisional, perhaps fleeting, but certainly contingent.
To return to the ‘me’, the blank space and the ‘you’, and the failed attempt to define the space between them through metaphor which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay; it seems to me that the world of meaning-making where this attempt takes place is the world that exists somewhere between the writer and the reader, fully belonging to neither but for which each bears responsibility, albeit of a different type.
I think about the revisions and reworkings in Rees-Jones’ work, I think about her celebration of the necessary failures in art and life, and I think about her speaker’s fragmentary voice speaking brokenly into a whiteness of blank paper. Then I think about my own revisions, my own failures.
I think about the still point of the turning world, where the dance is.
And without my fully understanding why, the people around me – both in my memory and as physical presences in my life now – suddenly seem more important.
Chris Edgoose, Revised reflections on Hôtel Amour by Deryn Rees-Jones
My friend and collaborator Arnold McBay is an artist and musician. He frequently makes intriguing short films exploring very elemental objects such as clouds and branches. These often move slowly, change slowly, emerge to be only more themselves. He is always finding the surprising and mysterious quiddity of things with perfectly simple means.
Last night he sent me a short film (1 minute long) of branches moving as if they were the hands of a clock. This is exactly my kind of thing and I couldn’t resist and so asked if I could write some text and make the audio for it. So I did. I wrote a short poems and made an audio track from the sounds of breaking sticks and a typewriter (since the poem refers to the trees “writing” and the repeated sounds of the sticks breaking sounded like a typewriter.)I was intrigued by the idea of a tree “writing” in time by growing. How a tree is a kind of writing in time. Of time.
I wrote the poem and it was ok, but line to line, a bit flat. So then I had the idea of mixing up the lines in order to create more energy between lines. I remembered how a student had showed me how she randomized lines using Excel and a sorting procedure. (You create random numbers using the RAND function in a second column and then sort the numbers from high to low, bringing the lines you’ve inserted in the first column with them and thus into random order.)
Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that random was more interesting than my original order. Thank you, Mr. Cage. But part of the reason is that it breaks apart the logical chain between lines that is initially created. Sometimes I run a poem backwards for the same reason, though it maintains another kind of order. But the leaps between lines are larger and therefore have more energy. The mind leaps like a squirrel between branches in order to form the poem. Always more exciting to get the reader more involved and/or thinking like a squirrel.
Gary Barwin, Set the Alarm for Spring: why random is better
Last week Peter and I sent a new episode of Planet Poetry out into the world, featuring our interview with Niall Campbell about his excellent Bloodaxe book The Island in the Sound, plus various festive shenanigans. Yippee! We’re still going strong, even though fewer new episodes this season. We’re both enjoying the reduced pressure, to be honest!
I had a fabulous time reading at the Poets Cafe in Reading a couple of weeks ago. Hosts Vic and Katie were so welcoming, and the audience was warm and very switched-on. There was an impressive open mic. I sold a few books, both The Mayday Diaries and Yo-Yo, now well into its second edition.
I’m not writing a great deal at the moment, but I’ve been making an effort to send a few poems out. Gratitude to The Frogmore Papers which will publish a new poem of mine in the Spring. And I’m thrilled to have The Mayday Diaries as the current featured publication at Atrium. Huge thanks to editors Holly and Claire.
Meanwhile I’ve been working on new ideas for my quarterly spreadsheet which seems to have a life of its own these days. I’m frequently surprised and touched by the messages of support I get for producing it. It seems the poetry magazine landscape is a sprawling and confusing space and people are thankful for a tool that helps with both navigation and motivation to keep going.
Robin Houghton, Seasons Greetings
I wasn’t going to do a chart for the end of the year…all a bit of a busman’s holiday and the like, but the arrival this week of the wonderful new issue of Finished Creatures containing a new poem by me made me reconsider…Thanks to Jan for taking a new new poem from me…A poem written and finished in 2025 as well which is good work; looking back at my notes I can see the first scribbled notes/draft was 30th January and the final draft was sorted on 4th August. […]
The collected data would suggest that 2025 has seen an overall increase in the number of poems sent out, and certainly an increase on recent years. I’ve crunched the numbers and the number of unique submissions has gone up YoY again – which is good, I think.
But it comes down to the success rate (or does it?)
Maybe it’s working (maybe it’s Maybelline, etc), but we’ve seen a 100% increase on 2024 in successes. It looks a little different if we present this as counts, but either way the numbers are up. And I thought this had been a crap year (for many reasons).
Mat Riches, What a count…
Bless the Christmas Number One.
Thank you for the nightmare in which they
deny using white phosphorus,
deny they shot a man who was emptying a bin,
deny they shot a woman who was mending a carpet,
deny they bulldozed a tent filled with the chronically sick,
deny mass graves.Bless the turkey and all its trimmings.
Bless the Boxing Day breakfast of buttered toast, eggs, bacon and beans.
Bless the football match we’re going to later.
Bless both teams.
Bless the abyss of the human mind.
Bob Mee, A CHRISTMAS POEM FROM TWO YEARS AGO…
From across the boulevard, crowds stream
Luisa A. Igloria, Light Show
toward the entrance to the battleship whose nine
16-inch guns, three triple-gun turrets, twenty
5-inch dual purpose guns and forty-nine 8-inch
Oerlikon auto cannons are decked out in over two
million lights. To get to the main deck, the lines
(single file) must navigate two bridges, but only
after walking through the museum converted into
a white wilderness. In one hall, an animated
tree. In another, strung on wires from
the ceiling, a polar bear treads air.
To visit (or live) in a country that is not yours by birth is an enlivening and sometimes, bewildering experience. A student came up to me at the festival and told me I had an excellent personality (!) and someone else told me I was the best poet that they’d ever heard read — it was a time out of time experience.
Now, typing this post in the quiet of my Seattle home, the cold wind beating the trees and electrical wires outside, it all seems unreal. A world where poets and poetry take center stage. A place where poets from all over the world come together? Yes, dear reader, this exists.
After the festival finished, I visited my friend, the fabulous poet and educator, Anil Oomen, who was on sabbatical, conducting research in Southern India. Anil is from Kerala, a state in the south of India with the highest literacy rate in the world. It is also famous as a home for writers, painters, filmmakers, and fabulous fish.
How did we meet? Nearly 29 years ago, Anil took a poetry class with me in Eugene, Oregon. I was a newly minted MFA graduate and he was a stay at home dad who needed to get out of the house. In that little class of seven, held after hours in Black Sun Books, Anil brought in a poem (a palindrome) about his first language, Malayalam. The language of Kerala where he was born and lived his first five years. All of a sudden, he was teaching me about this incredible language and culture. From that poem (later published in the South African journal, Carapace, that I was guest editing at the time) the idea came to me that someday Anil and I would travel together in Kerala. 29 years later, we have.
I think bringing poets together to generate new work in beautiful places might be my dream for retirement.
Susan Rich, Elizabeth Bishop Travels to India for the Kolkata International Poetry Festival
Today’s Christmas poem is by R. S. Thomas, not generally known as the most celebratory of poets and offering an appropriately chilly version of festive spirit here. One for anyone who’s feeling a bit Christmas-ed out by this point!
Victoria Moul, A Christmas poem, no. 2Blind Noel
Christmas; the themes are exhausted.
Yet there is always room
on the heart for another
snowflake to reveal a pattern.Love knocks with such frosted fingers.
I look out. In the shadow
of so vast a God I shiver, unable
to detect the child for the whiteness.
I’m only on Chapter 4 but am finding, in the etymological tracings of the words that intersect in meaning(s) for play–game, contest, gambol, gamble, dallying, tournament, match, riddle, performance, frolic, pretending, folly, fun, sport, etc.–fruitful stuff for poetry, for thinking about poems and about how poems work as craft, as poems, and as works of art and imagination. And also, what roles poems may play in culture today, and whether that differs at all from the role poetry played in ancient times. Huizinga writes:
“In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually ‘sparking’ between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.”
Language may not be necessary for play but can easily be incorporated into it, and language can become play. Or playful. I don’t know much about Wittgenstein, but I find myself thinking of his theory about words having “family resemblances” that often connect, overlap, shade meanings. So we get jokes, puns, flirting, mocking, and new “rules” for our language use that culture constantly shifts in all kinds of directions. Language is a game-changer, and poets make use of that.
Ann E. Michael, Play’s the thing
It’s a shame we can’t embed playable text into Substack, isn’t it?
Also a shame that I didn’t have time to make a new version of Ice Dive, as I’d been planning to. This version is a little buggy, the mechanics are unbalanced and many of the lines need further shaping and shuffling.
But I wanted to end the advent calendar on a ludokinetic poem and this is the only ice-themed one I have — even counting the many pieces sitting around in various states of completion in the workshop. It was originally devised so as to be playable over a Zoom call — the player merely has to shout “Stop!” when they want to come up for air, whereupon I (the person in control of the game) click once to bring them back to the surface.
For what it’s worth, it is possible to finish the game, collecting all seven pieces of the ‘something’ it is you’re collecting. I’ve only managed it once, though.
Jon Stone, 10-Day Ice Advent Calendar #10: Ice Dive
Hatfield is foggy this morning, and most of the snow has melted off. My adult kids have returned to their towns, and the holiday leftovers eaten or tossed. I’ve got some books to mail, some poems to send to the black hole of Submittable, and a few new drafts to sit with.
I woke this morning with the remnant of a dream in which I was talking with a famous poet (I won’t say who) about how heavy poems were. Lately I’ve been working on a poem about trains. I have my father’s old Lionel train set, which he gave me a couple years ago (I can’t say inherited, because he’s still living, but inherited feels more accurate). While I didn’t really care for toy trains when I was a kid (I had a Tyco racecar track instead), they seem important to me now because it was important to him that I or my brother take the set rather than let it go to a stranger. It’s a post-war classic train set about 75-years old, and amazingly still mostly works. I even added two new cars myself, and the old engine manages to pull them. This year it chugged a circle under my Christmas tree.
Grant Clauser, The Weight of Poetry
I am the superior
officer who loses the paperwork
or makes up the statistics.
I am the one who ignores
your e-mails, who cannot be reached
by text or phone, the one
with a full inbox.When the wise ones
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Border Lands
come, as they do, full of dreams,
babbling about the stars
that lead them or messages
from gods or angels,
I open the gates. I don’t alert
the authorities up the road.
Let the kings and emperors
pay for their own intelligence.
This was the year that finally convinced me that humanity is devolving as a species and that we are past due for an extinction-level event, so Earth can hit the reset button. Nihilistic, perhaps, but if you’ve been watching world events – especially the U.S. descent into authoritarianism and isolation – then you know exactly what I mean.
The deaths of David Lynch, Diane Keaton, Robert Redford, and Rob Reiner hit me especially hard, since I remain an unrepentant film buff and those [four] were among my favorites. Every year, more and more of my icons pass away, which also brings my own mortality into focus.
Maybe that’s why much of this year was dedicated to what Kate Bush refers to as “archive work.” I’ve got another box of materials almost ready for the Georgia State University Library Archive, which is the repository for my papers, manuscripts, and ephemera related to my writing life. While this will be an ongoing process until I kick the bucket (and beyond), I’m nearing the end of culling through 40 years of writing.
During the most recent dig, I uncovered a small grouping of poems – some dating back to the 1980s – that I’m currently sorting through to see if anything is worth revising or will just go to the archive. I also found handwritten pages of another story that belongs with my long-simmering collection of tales in the fictional town of Cottonwood, GA (the first four of them are in Kiss Shot, which was published as an ebook back in 2012). Of course, this has me eager to get back to work on this collection, but at the expense of the fourth Venus novel.
Collin Kelley, A look back at 2025
Still a couple days left to read but I’m adding to best of list now,
The Garbage Poems by Anna Swanson, illustrated by April White (Brick Books, 2025) which gave so many aha moments on chronic illness and concussion, and consumer culture, and pure amazement at her rendering poems from trash container text.
and from backlist titles,
But Then I Thought by Kyla Houbolt (above/ground, 2023) which impels me to buy her book too. What a crisp, alert alive mind!
Pearl Pirie, Fav Reads 2025, Addendum
[…] He knew they were important, even if
he couldn’t quite recall which one was which,
or how he’d landed in this unknown bed
this perfectly nice place that wasn’t home.
*
Another poem from my current project, an expanded volume of Torah poetry. This poem arises out of parashat Vayechi, in which Jacob — now in Egypt — blesses his grandsons and his sons.When I imagined Yakov nearing the end of his life, I remembered visits with my father in his last months and weeks. I remember what he had forgotten and what stayed with him. I remember trying to steer away from my mother’s absence. (No reason to make him grieve her loss again.)
After my siblings and I had moved him into assisted living (with his approval; he understood, at least in flashes, that he couldn’t live alone any more) he lost track of things more quickly. That’s normal, I know.
I remember a visit when he said, “I’m not sure where this is? It’s not home, it’s just — the place where I stay now.” I can imagine Jacob, away from his familiar surroundings, maybe feeling the same way.
Rachel Barenblat, Not home
Ben Lerner describes one of his dreams involving Keith Waldrop. In this dream, Ben is an undergrad “trying to impress Keith by saying something about Olson’s ‘Projective Verse.’ When I finish my little speech Keith is quiet for a moment and then says: “It’s always seemed to me that lines of poetry are broken less by the way a poet breathes than by the way a poet blinks his eyes.”
Alina Stefanescu, Guston and allegory.
I’ve been tossing my phone aside a lot, which, in essence, is a surreal way of tossing aside an entire universe. Because I read books, I am often faced with a deluge of reels where highly-curated humans talk about the same 15-30 books. Because I write in journals, ads show up in my feed of highly-curated humans who look and act out the part of an observant human pontificating their surroundings, pen in hand. Because I go on walks, reels and reels of highly-curated humans talk at me about living an “analogue life”, off the phone. Journals, books, puzzles, watercolors, and all the things that I see when I look up from my phone are romantically and aesthetically displayed on my screen. Because I do not engage in or click anything, the algorithm has only a vague nebula to work with. I do not know how many pages of a book a person could read in the time that it takes to curate, create, and edit a reel about annotating a book. The cogs and wheels of the manufactured lifestyles and hot-takes continue. When I toss my phone aside, so do I.
Sarah Lada, American Idiot
My father would have none of it
“China elephants as holiday gifts?
Oh no, they always bring bad luck.”
And who would openly court misfortune?When a child there were moments
Paul Tobin, WE TIPTOED AROUND
I sensed elephants in the living room
the drum taut tension of things unsaid
We tiptoed around their slumbering forms.
One of my favorite books, in spite of its flaws, is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. One of my love languages is giving gifts. I love the exchange of gifts, especially when you find something you’re certain the other person will love.
In his book, Hyde says:
- A true gift loses its power if it is hoarded or sold. Gifts should be like a river. You should always feel like you can pass them on when you don’t need them. (I like to think that he’s a big fan of white elephant parties.)
- Art, he says, is a spiritual act. It creates a sense that we are alive and belong to the world. I like to think that the work I do is part of that circle of creation, not just a bounce of profit; that we are in the sacred fire.
- Market economies thrive on strangers, on isolation. Gift-giving builds communities with stories and myths, and when they are shared, they create a kind of magic. Red Hen’s supporters feel like that to me. You enter a circle, and when you contribute to our growth, you become a part of our family.
- The cultural commons—the shared arts, literature, dance, gardens, museums, public spaces, and all else created by those of us in the creative spaces—become more and more integrated into our being the more we participate in them.
- The more we give and expect gifts, the more we create a world where gift-giving is the norm, and we build trust that we can rely on others for support.
- Artists are stewards of the creative spirit; we sit in the well of the collective unconscious and drink.
Hyde’s examples of artists who participated in this lifelong sharing include Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. If I were to suggest a rewrite of The Gift, which I wouldn’t, I would suggest replacing Pound with Toni Morrison. Pound, despite being a celebrated poet, went to prison for treason, hated the Jewish people, and had an utter contempt for women and people of color, neither of which he would support in publishing.
I am a fan of literary citizens. Toni Morrison is one. She built community by taking time from her own wildly important writing to mentor, teach, and sit with young writers, discussing their creative lives. Her students loved her. They said she was spellbinding in the classroom and an amazing mentor. This kind of literary citizenship is what Red Hen Press is built on—the idea that the arts can only exist and thrive in community.
Kate Gale, In Which I Step Away from My Cliff and Ride a Horse
alone in the waiting room
waiting by tom clausen
checking the plant
for reality
I know you’re supposed to size up the previous year and set goals for the next, but I feel like 2025 was somehow rougher than it could have been—the bathroom renovation was a too-long-and-too-expensive nightmare (I’m glad to have the disability-friendly bathroom, but it took a LOT of time and money and took a toll on both my health and Glenn’s)—rejection on the writing front, an increase in MS symptoms for the last six months (hence the brain MRI), and the political nightmare that is America right now—I want to be grateful and count my blessings, but for now, I just feel like shutting the door on the last few years and hoping for some more normalcy—for myself and my country—in 2026. Just wishing doesn’t make it so, of course. I know a lot of people who had a difficult holiday season—health emergencies, layoffs, losing parents and loved ones, divorces, or learning to care for parents who are getting older. I am sending good thoughts to all who are struggling right now.
If I have some positive hopes for the new year, it’s maybe a trip to Europe and a residency in spring on San Juan Island, maybe to find a good publisher for my seventh book, maybe a part-time regular job I could count on instead of scrambling for freelance stuff all the time, better health for me and my family? Less drama, more fun. Less spending, more appreciating the things I have. More time for friendship, adventure, inspiration? At my age and with so many things out of my control, I don’t do “goal setting” per se like I used to for each new year, but I do try to envision something positive—small joys, the chance to reset, a chance to embrace something new.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Stressful Christmas, Thinking about 2025, and the Year Ahead
The snow makes it all quiet. Away from the windows, away from the dinner, there is a blanket over the earth, the air is scrubbed clean, and nothing is moving. I wish it would snow for a year, and the telly breaks. Then the radio goes off, and we forget to talk, and we get a year of this crispy breathing quiet.
John Siddique, A Christmas Poem
日記買ふ白く輝く日々を買ふ 内村恭子
nikki kau shiroku kagayaku hibi o kau
I buy a diary…
I buy days
shining whiteKyoko Uchimura
from Tashin (Gods), a haiku collection of Kyoko Uchimura, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo, 2025
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 26, 2025)