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: beach cobbles, resonating surfaces, ambiguous texts, imaginary friends, and much more. Enjoy.
South African President Nelson Mandela famously said “Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality—thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard.” I borrowed this quote when I applied for my Fulbright Fellowship to South Africa where I wanted to investigate the poetry of protest — South Africans who had written during the anti-Apartheid movement of primarily the 1970’s and 80’s.Poets such as Jeremy Cronin, Ingrid de Kok, Zakes Mda, Mazizi Kunene, Wally Serote and many others. I was fascinated.
Now, decades later, I am “back home” seeing my own country under siege. In the month of January, two American citizens were gunned down in broad daylight in Minneapolis, Minnesota—a city hitherto known for down home midwestern hospitality and as the birthplace of Prince. For years, I taught a class on the history and literature of the Holocaust. The years leading up to the final solution, look remarkably like what we are living through now. […]
Can a poem offer solace to a community? Can a few thoughtful lines calm a life? Alter the course of American history? Probably not. And yet poetry is what we look to in times of crisis. After September 11th, the New Yorker Magazine, published “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski.
I also think of William Yeat’s poems “The Second Coming” and Elizabeth Alexander’s poem, “Praise Song for the Day.” I think of Ross Gay’s poem “A Small Needful Fact,” and Maggie Smith’s poem, “Good Bones,” and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem “Running Orders” — all poems that spoke in the immediate wake of trauma but that also endure over years, decades.
These poems rise up from my subconscious unbidden during hard times. The power of the work continues on as documents of our times. All of these fall under the heading of documentary poetry. These works are also among my favorite poems written in the 21st century. They matter on an emotional register as well as a historical.
I don’t want to pretend that the poem I wrote last month has the same staying power. All I know is that these poems that come unbidden, out of great pain, matter.
As a working poet, the poems I’ve written about my human rights work in Bosnia Herzegovina, or Gaza and the West Bank, or post Apartheid South Africa are among the poems I’m happiest to have written.
Susan Rich, What Poetry Can and Cannot Do:
January was supposed to be quiet. Instead, it was a rollercoaster ride – atmospherically, emotionally, politically – a rocket-fuelled start to 2026. Weather patterns continued to see-saw. An oscillating Jet Stream travelled further, both north and south, dragging weather systems to unexpected latitudes. The perturbation and chaos continue to unfold. Impacts are becoming more extreme.
The Jet Stream is a thousand-mile-wide river of power, bigger than the Amazon, the Nile, the Ganges, greater than the sum of all these mighty flowing waters. The energy involved in moving masses of air so swiftly is almost incomprehensible. Warnings from science and voices of reason, already slow to enter our collective consciousnesses, are repeatedly overwritten by hollerings about politics, Epstein-omics, warmongering and military hardware. If only the strutting brawn, with their big tech, bags of dollars and guns, could perceive real planetary power, its truth, they might think differently.
Natural phenomena, geopolitical and socio-economic ‘landscapes’ are increasingly turbulent. I feel these ‘unsettlings’ increasingly and deeply. I watch my grandchildren play. My emotions swell and threaten to spill out. […]
The great dunes at Red Point were white with frost; the billion-year-old Torridonian sandstone boulders and beach cobbles shone purple and mauve. We sat and drank hot black coffee and watched dozens of divers float on a current of calm. At Mellon Udrigle we stood at the water’s edge while a group of seals swam and played nearby. At Opinan, the sea was flattened by wind power. Its surface seethed and writhed like thick paint being stirred. Further out, the Minch flexed sapphire and holly-green, bursting with diamond-white flecks. And every so often, small waves broke into spindrift, each one releasing a rainbow made of gauze.
Annie O’Garra Worsley, on light, time and mars
It all seems to be about trees at the moment. I picked up The Overstory by Richard Powers in the Huddersfield branch of Oxfam and am enjoying it hugely. Each chapter is really a short story, linked by the theme of trees, but that’s underselling it. Powers conveys the ups and downs of people’s lives with a deft brushstroke, a style that allows him to compress a character’s life into a few pages, without compromising on depth. And then I found myself at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park today, immersed in the light and sound experience of an installation called ‘Of the Oak’, effectively the life of a single tree, but the science behind it allows you to see and imagine the mesmerising beauty of it. If you every doubted it, trees are incredibly alive!
Hopefully a tree haiku will emerge from all this, although it has to be said, I need to slow down a little and make space for writing again – not the first time I’ve had this thought!
Julie Mellor, It all seems to be about trees …
I can stay in my chair
but when I let my ears
Rachel Barenblat, Listen
turn wild I hear
You shouting
in the winter wind
The world is a mess, we know that. Joseph Campbell said: “The Bodhisattva voluntarily came back into the world knowing that it’s a mess. He doesn’t come back “only if it’s sweet for me.” The Bodhisattva participates joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”
This doesn’t mean that we should give into the doom scrolling. We can know what the news of the world is without further traumatizing ourselves or seeing the same thing over and over. I’ve noticed that a lot of people are writing “signing off until spring” or some such posts on social media, and this might not be the worst idea. I’m on less right now, too. And I do believe in doing a two week or longer re-set with it all. It’s a tricky balance when you’re trying to promote your (or in my case your partner’s art and upcoming art show) work. […]
So, yes, I’ve been retreating to my sacred space, my study, as much as possible. And what I realized one morning after I’d spent (not kidding) over an hour writing correspondence where I basically just said no to 80 percent of the asks, was that my belated word of the year is: hermit. I’ve had years where my goal was to say yes, to embrace everything, the all. But this year, like many, I think I need to re-set. Read more books. Go more analog. Get into nature more. Garden more. (Once the ice ball that is our backyard at latitude 53 melts — somewhere in early May).
And though I am a firm believer in promoting and encouraging excellence, I also want to dabble more, as Karen Walrond would say. In her latest book she says that an amateur is defined as “one who loves.” And I think dabbling can make you even more appreciative of the art or craft you admire. Pick up some paints and you’ll certainly come to a new understanding of how Vermeer got the light on the pearl earring or how each petal was painted on a Rachel Ruysch flower. Walrond extolls the virtue of play, just like Campbell, and in her project to try new things she insists upon play, on curiosity, and to prioritize practice over perfection. We need to feel good! And dabbling can take us to good places mentally.
Shawna Lemay, Participating Joyfully in the Sorrows of the World
In my last post I declared that for me poetry was on hiatus. I intended to veer back to where it started, to the telling of short stories, the challenge of flash fiction.
And, as always happens, my inside has taken hold and now all these poems are emerging, and I can’t help but tell these stories by rhythm and line break and white space and even punctuation if I can get it right. I’m exploring emotion thanks to a poetry school course and it’s tough and awful and wonderful and magical. I’m getting feedback on my words and feedback on my feelings and people talk about a safe space and this relative anonymity makes me feel I’ve found it. And safety cushions danger, which make creativity and suddenly I don’t mind that this post will not be opened, read or shared or liked on here because 17 other people are reading what I write and they’re not commenting for algorithms or to make useful connections they’re comment because we each know how it feels to draw out words we hope will land.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, On the freedom of writing about everything with little care if it is read.
It’s been a long time since I have needed painkillers for six days in a row and I did a lot of talking to myself about this during the week. Lots of words about needing to be patient and wait for things to pass. Reminders to myself to look for the joy in those glimmering moments when putting the washing on felt doable, when different drinks soothed my sore throat in different ways, and giving myself a gentle cheer of encouragement when I had the desire to pick up a book and read.
In amongst the resting to recuperate elements of my week, I also had the wonderful joy of being invited to be a guest on a podcast. I loved so much about this… the being asked, the feeling of being recognised as having something to say, the thinking about what we might talk about and then the absolute joy of being in the moment of the conversation. I was able to hear myself think out loud and there was laughter, and those are truly lovely things to be gifted when you share time with someone.
Sue Finch, UNDER A BLANKET
Yesterday I drafted this blog from inside a very cold bongo drum. High winds rippled and banged our metal roof riotously: “Thumbing / the tin roof like a smoker who / cannot get the house to stay alight,” I wrote in Mycocosmic, in a poem about perimenopausal sleeplessness.
Even though hot flashes are rare now, I’m still not sleeping well. The radiators blast dry heat, a vaporizer blasts vapor in an attempt to counter the dry heat, and the dial on my brain’s worry machine is set to high. The U.S. is in very bad shape. Some beings I love are suffering. (The cats don’t mind if I violate their privacy, so I’ll say thyroid medication isn’t reversing the weight loss of our older cat, Poe; the young one, Vincent, has this condition where he’s allergic to his teeth. If you could use a reason for gratitude, there you go: you’re probably not allergic to your teeth. He’s the white cat pictured here in the bliss of painkillers.)
During Virginia’s uncharacteristic Big Freeze–just beginning to ease–I was unable to walk much, and losing that outlet affected my mood. In this tiny town unused to harsh weather, the snowplows do a lousy job, and many neighbors don’t shovel sidewalks, usually the rich ones in red brick mansions. Wealthy students slide their enormous SUVs into rare street spots, totally oblivious to the possibility that a local resident shoveled it with difficulty and wants it back when they return home with groceries. Small gripes. I think what’s getting to me is seeing so much cluelessness, people unaware of or indifferent to the needs of others–now, of all moments. Paying attention is an ethical obligation, a pretty minimal one. I know I’m not alone in that conviction–sending awed love to Minneapolis!–but so, so many people in my red county seem to have iced-in hearts.
So, as others have been blogging, I’m finding a sense of community where I can. I did two poetry events this week that made me feel genuine connection to others: the Bardic Trails virtual reading (an exceptionally warm, lovely group!) and a panel discussion of poetry and the environment in the nearest big town, hosted by the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont, which is just getting off the ground as a welcoming public space, an oasis amid development. I also tuned in by Zoom to a panel discussion hosted by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, just as a listener, and the panelists were SO smart. Poet Maya Jewell Zeller, talking about her forthcoming memoir Raised by Ferns, was one of them.
Lesley Wheeler, Winter bongos
Even the best poems have a habit of disappearing until the right person, at the right moment, presses them into our hands. When I first started reading, it was the introductions that drew me in: old Penguin anthologies, Faber’s Poet to Poet series, staple-bound pamphlets. Books you could carry in your pocket, chosen by an individual personality and introduced with style (and without condescension). Introductions are the way poetry survives. They are also, I think, something of an endangered art. Which is why I am starting a poetry press.
Headless Poet—more on the name below—will give writers and poets space to recommend poems and poets of the past, especially work which has been buried by time. It will also publish brief introductions to the best new poetry. There will be little-known early modern poems, reassessments of figures like Thomas Hood and Lilian Bowes Lyon, entirely new work—and more besides, with introductions on their way from Victoria Moul, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Alex Wong, Tristram Fane Saunders and Camille Ralphs. I am looking forward to sharing them all.
Jeremy Wikeley, Why I’m starting a poetry press (and how you can help)
Today’s post is mostly about Horace — with some Wyatt and Jonson at the end. As any keen Horatians among my readers will know, the dictum that poetry should be both beautiful and useful comes from Horace too, so it is appropriate that I heard just this morning that a little collection I’ve edited, Poems Beautiful & Useful, is now available for order from the very exciting new Headless Poet press run by Jem. This is a selection of the kind of poems that were most popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, drawn from both manuscript and the obscurer reaches of print. Several have not been published before, and most of them are not well-known. I am proud and delighted to be the editor of Headless Poet’s very first publication. Jem has a whole series of publications planned for this year, all ‘introductions’ of one kind or another — definitely worth keeping an eye on.
Victoria Moul, How come, Maecenas?
Jayant [Kashyap] was a winner in the 2024 Poetry Business New Poets Prize, judged by the brilliant poet Holly Hopkins. I was really pleased to see that Jayant had won, because I recognised his work and style from a previous year when I’d judged the competition and he’d been shortlisted. In the back of the pamphlet, it was interesting to read that when he won, it was his fourth time of submitting – proving again that sometimes being published is not just a matter of talent, but of persevering, of finding a way of dealing with setbacks and rejections.
Notes on Burials is a wonderful pamphlet – held together by a concern and interest in what we bury, what we carry with us and what we leave behind, how we die, and by extension of course how we live. There is sometimes a surreal touch to the poems – in ‘but dogs don’t want their puppies buried’ the poem talks about a mother dog carrying dead puppies around and finishes ‘once I buried two dead pups in shallow ground / and next morning they were back up out of the mound playing with her’. This image has really stayed with me, and it’s an unsettling poem in terms of thinking whether this is an unreliable narrator, or whether this is surrealism, or the simple truth of a mistake or something else. Whichever, it often feels as if that border between life and death is more permeable than we usually appreciate in many of these poems. […]
There is also a playfulness to language here – the roots of words are often examined closely and held up to the light, but I think Jayant is also interested in how words slip in and out of themselves and into other words. In “Oak” the speaker asks us to “Imagine it standing / at the edge of a forest – hermit/heretic/heritage”.
There is a run of really moving poems towards the end of the pamphlet which finishes on “Prayer for My Mother As A Child”. This is a beautiful poem which starts “Let me carry myself like a quiet emptiness in her school bag”. This line almost made me cry – that wish as a child to go back to before you were born and see the mother as a person, before they carried you – both physically and metaphorically and spiritually. It’s a poem full of longing for the mother figure to live a life she did not get to live […]
Kim Moore, January Reading Diary
Shared Origins/A collaboration between three poets, Mike Jenkins, David Lloyd, and David Annwn, The Seventh Quarry Press, 2025, ISBN: 9781919610085, £6.99
Giraldus Redivivus, John Goodby and David Annwn, Incunabula Media, 2025, £12.00
The concept behind Shared Origins is both simple and intriguing. Take three poets who started their writing careers together as students in the 1970s at Aberystwyth University and put together a set of poems from each of them that, in part at least, reflects their relationship with Wales and Welshness. […] [It’s] a fascinating case study in how three poets can start out from much the same place and shared concerns, to one degree or another, but end up with radically different approaches to writing, From a personal perspective, it also introduced me to two poets whose work is new to me, which is always a good thing. Thank you The Seventh Quarry Press for making it happen.
Along with David Lloyd George and certain 1970’s rugby internationals, Gerald of Wales is almost certainly Ireland’s least-favourite Welshman, with his Topographia Hibernica being widely regarded as the spiritual forebear of Punch magazine’s caricatures of our 19th century ancestors. The Welsh, of course, may take a different view of his two Welsh books, the Journey through and Description of Wales.
Neither John Goodby not David Annwn is actually Welsh, but they both have long-standing relationships with that country, both personal and professional, and in Giraldus Redivivus they reinvent the Journey as a piece of 20th century intertextuality. In doing so, they take their lead from polyglot Gerald, who interleaved slices of French, Greek and Welsh into his Latin text, a text that contains quotations from classical and British authors, anecdotes (his own and reported), acute observations, smatterings of local history, and a sense of the hardships of travel all structured around a circuit clockwise from the south-east corner of Wales and back again. It’s a genuinely non-genre-specific work.
In their reimagining, Annwn and Goodby mirror the portmanteau, collage-like method of the original, with more-or less straight ‘found text’ sections, passages that weave phrases or images from the original into passages of their own making, and a variety of verbivocovisual pages that either concretise the shape of what’s happening or make actual the difficult experience of reading the manuscript original, with the large A4 page size put to good use.
Billy Mills, The Matter with Wales: Two Books
In 1976, twenty-three-year-old Joseph Bathanti began his “walk away from [his] past” in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That he’d earned a master’s degree but “wished to spend [his] days among criminals” left his parents confused and hushed. Bathanti knew nothing of the place he was heading to — North Carolina — or of the place to which he’d been assigned — a prison in Mecklenburg County. For this newly minted VISTA volunteer, any road out of Pittsburgh, to freedom, he was glad to take. That “[his] life was just starting” left Bathanti “near euphoria.” Driving south, he could never have guessed that it would take him more than three decades to articulate one of the most important lessons he learned as a “fugitive from [his] former life” up North: that we all, in our way — some by our choices, others by the misfortune of our circumstance — put in some “felon time.”
*
It was not until the fall of 2013 that Joseph Bathanti, formerly, Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-2014), published Concertina (Mercer University Press), a remarkable collection of narrative poems that, in language both colloquial and lyrical, relate his true introduction to life, not only inside prison but also outside the razor wire. […]
Time does not temper the truth Bathanti distills and documents on every page decades after his VISTA assignment ended. As he declares in another profound moment, “So help me God, there is no whole truth.” (”Jury Duty”)
Yet, there is respite from the ugliness and violence, for truth is never one-sided and life is never all-bad. Indeed, the brilliance of Concertina lies in its skillfully ingrained and repeated refrain about the dualities present in all of humanity, whether a “mother, shackled to a sweatshop / Singer in a dim downtown tailor shop” (”Faccia Tosta”) or the inmate “too exhausted to lift his heavy hands to protect himself” from the blows of his keeper. (”Cletis Pratt”) “A guard is not much different than a convict. / One hates the other, loves the other.” (”Transfer Day”)
The concertina, after all, can be played, too, and it’s possible to enjoy, as Bathanti does, the intermezzos — the downtime with Joan, the woman whose hand Bathanti clasped on “[his] first Sabbath out of the penitentiary,” who “lived in a boxy mill house on Moonlit Avenue” (”Moonlit Avenue”), with whom he enjoyed “miso soup and Roastaroma mocha, / the verse of Kim Chi-Ha.” (”This Mad Heart”) With Joan, the woman who was to become Bathanti’s wife, “[e]verything was crucial.”
The love that passes for poetry between Bathanti and Joan prevents hardening and cynicism. It makes it possible for Bathanti to draw on poignant moments for sustenance: visits to the women’s prison of children “in their perfect innocence and self-possession, / toddling dutifully into the arms of anyone // who reaches for them” (”Women’s Prison”); the sight of “project kids” practicing etudes in a church cellar while, upstairs, ex-cons partake of “soup kitchen food” (”ECO”); a reading lesson with an inmate whose “tragic flaw” is “the presence / of an extra 21st chromosome,” who, “[w]ith childish wonderment, / [. . .] whizzes through the drills.” (”Teaching an Inmate to Read”)
What comes clear in Concertina is this: where there is room for love and understanding, there is a place for hope and the possibility of redemption.
Maureen Doallas, Joseph Bathanti’s ‘Concertina’
squeaky snow
Tom Clausen, antler shed
nothing more to say
to myself
A mouth is two things, a conduit for food or a means to communicate. Mona Arshi’s “Mouth” focuses on the latter, or rather how something that should be used for communication can also be silenced. A shut mouth says nothing. Power and societal imbalances can make it dangerous to speak, particularly if the person being spoken to is minded to wilfully misinterpret what the powerless speaker is saying. […]
A mouth can be silenced, or it can speak lies when it is not safe to speak the truth. Eurydice feels compelled to diplomatically entertain in public but swear in private. She calls it “bragging”, talking up the King’s achievements and putting a positive spin on the negatives. From “experiments” to “expletives” the poem feels wordy and employs the rhythm of prose, deliberate strategies like Eurydice’s attempts to be diplomatic. The last four quoted lines employ more poetic devices such as consonance and the repetition of “o” mimicking an open mouth, usually a sign of surprise or horror.
Later the “Blind Prophet Tiresias Warns Queen Eurydice She Will Be Collateral Damage”. He notes, “Prophets are translators./ The first rule of a bloodthirsty regime/ is to bury translators. It’s a fact.”
Emma Lee, “Mouth” Mona Arshi (Chatto & Windus) – book review
Eavan Boland’s Eurydice opens her silence in song, a counter-song if you will, to that of Orpheus’ lament, a lyric that gives us reason to believe that knowing one another is fundamentally impossible. The lovers lament different things. […]
Boland’s poem reminded [me] of a wonderful essay by Jack Foley on Gertrude Stein’s portraits, and how he notes that time “is not only a subject but a condition of the piece,” a text which was also a portrait.
Foley thinks Stein deploys palindromes as a sort of mirror for which “the line runs out and then runs back.” The idea of recognition that Boland’s poem engages aligns somehow with Foley’s description of Stein’s palindromic relationality:
The first half is identical to the second half—except that the second half is backwards. She has a phrase in still another portrait, “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson”: “Idem the Same.” The word “Idem” is Latin and means “the same,” so the two halves of the phrase are saying the same thing—but they are saying them in two different languages. Stein’s relationship to the people she makes portraits of is like that. She and Picasso are “Idem the Same”—the same but different; they are like words which mean the same thing but exist in two different languages. Together, they constitute a kind of palindrome; they are full of the same elements, but one of them is running one way and the other is reversing that movement.
Similitude meets me in my daily life as a lyric of resonating surfaces, or patches of sound that connect the world across languages, linking the experience of being as I apprehend it in the fluidity of Romanian and the more rigid, consonant-heavy textures of English.
Alina Stefanescu, Eavan Boland’s Eurydice.
Who now reads him, who now cares? George Meredith (1828–1909) was once a name to conjure with, one of the last great High Victorian writers, a peer of Thomas Hardy and Henry James. His 1859 novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel brought him public fame. His 1879 The Egoist and 1885 Diana of the Crossways were considered additions to the canon of classic novels. His poetry was successful too.
His 1883 poem “Lucifer in Starlight,” for example. His 1881 poem “The Lark Ascending,” describing a bird in flight, inspired Ralph Vaughan Williams to write a 1914 instrumental work with the same title.
And then there is Modern Love, Meredith’s 1862 sequence of fifty poems about a failing marriage. Written in a curious pseudo-sonnet form, the 16-line poems trace out in pentameter the incidents, the words spoken and unspoken, that reveal the collapse of love, sympathy, and any desire for mutual understanding in a couple.
In today’s Poem of the Day, for example — the 35th in the sequence, beginning with the husband’s mean-spirited resignation when he realizes that “Madam would speak with me” — that husband in Meredith’s near novel-in-verse knows that his wife’s “quivering under-lip” means that she is near to bursting into either tears or raging anger (“The Deluge or else Fire,” “Niagara or Vesuvius”).
And he is concerned only to circumvent any such meaningful exchange. They speak in platitudes about their health and the news — so that “With commonplace I freeze her, tongue and sense,” and thereby the husband escapes the drama he can no longer feel worth the effort.
The 16-line stanza — built of four quatrains with an envelope rhyme: abba-cddc-effe-ghhg — is a sharp performance of Meredith’s skill at describing envenomed human interaction, and it reminds us that maybe the fading of the Victorian writer is a loss for us. And yet, I cannot bring myself to like the poem much. The commonplace meanness of the husband, the manipulative mood of the wife: just a little local unpleasantness that gives me a shiver and makes me wheel away, turning my collar up against the chill.
Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Madam would speak with me
I’m immediately struck by the poems in Los Angeles, California poet and translator Youna Kwak’s second full-length collection, For This and Other Cruelties (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2025), the first of her work I’ve seen, and an apparent follow-up to her debut, sur vie (Fathom Books, 2020). Across four sections of first-person lyrics—“DEATH OF THE MOTHER,” “LIKENESS,” “AS IF” and “SECOND LIFE”—the poems are dense and intense, graceful and substantive. “I am preparing to write a book,” begins the first stanza of the eleven-stanza opening poem, a piece that pushes, swirls and loops in a remarkably dense yet nimble pattern. As the two-page piece ends: “Or lacking all these / to write the book about the death / of the mother you simply need / a mother, who is dead.” The opening poem immediately sets the tone and tenor for the book as a whole, writing out a bursting, bubbling grief of graceful and substative gestures, offering a light touch of lyric through lines thick with emotional heft. “We all know Mother means / I was born from your body but I too / guaranteed your living. // In the mothering reign where / you are always alive,” opens the poem ‘PREULOGY,” “alone and evenly / breathing, a place // of exile where you remain / a figure leaning lazy on a rock, / black spot of ink bored into sand, [.]” Her poems are collaged and purposeful, direct and layered, writing out all the mess and contradictions of mothers, of family, of grief and sentences. Offering a marvellous and subtle fluidity, these poems are delicately crafted with such utter grace and punch.
rob mclennan, Youna Kwak, For This and Other Cruelties
When I take my first clear breath after illness,
Luisa A. Igloria, Everyday Ciphers
the world smells both sharp and tender.
I remember echoes in stairwells, and streetcorners where
small flames were tended in the service of our hungers.
There are flowers that don’t recognize boundaries.
On Tuesday evening I finally started reading my copy of Harry Man’s ‘Popular Song‘. It’s taken me a while to get to reading it, having bought it at the London Launch at the Torriano Meeting Rooms. Harry was a very entertaining reader that evening. I know he read with Matt Bryden, Tom Weir, Tiffany Ann Tondut and Michael Brown too…I’m sure I’ve written about it here before). Christ, it was nearly 2 years ago. Sorry Harry. However, we move…as the young folks don’t say anymore.
I was working my way through Harry’s book and got to his poem ‘I waterskied lonely as a clownfish’, and more importantly I got to Line 5 of the first stanza and knew I a) was reading a great poem and b) I had my blog post ready to go..
Mat Riches, Harry the Man
When Auden wrote his poem, the war economy that had won the Western Powers their victory was only just metamorphosing into what would become known as ‘late capitalism’. But he is already meditating on what is happening to society, and the world of work, in those lines about the “unimportant clerk”. As Hecht points out, Auden’s definition of a ‘worker’ (in his commonplace book, A Certain World) is that of someone who is “personally interested in the job which society pays him to do”, and not that of a “wage slave”. For Auden’s worker, “what from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his own point of view voluntary play”. With that as context, Auden goes on to ask a question first published over a half a century ago, in 1970:
What percentage of the population in a modern technological society are, like myself, in the fortunate position of being workers? At a guess I would say sixteen percent, and I do not think that figure is likely to get much bigger in the future.
Without belabouring the point, for what passes as a member of the literati today, crushed on all sides by dwindling sales and diminished retail space, by shortened attention spans and FAKE NEWS, it might be understandable to cultivate an “imaginary friend”, or in other words, an ideal sense of ‘the reader’. That goes double for the poets.
There are some people (particularly in poetry, with its aesthetic pretensions and apparent disdain for marketing) who claim writing for a reader is a mistake, that it imposes unreasonable objective expectations on their subjective artistic expression, that one should place primacy on the writing impulse and leave the audience to organise themselves. As even Auden seems to concede, writing is “voluntary play”. It is possible these people are kidding themselves, and others, but if they are being sincere then they are playing on their own, without any imaginary friends. Just ask any small child if that’s a good idea.
If, on the other hand, writing for a reader imposes some rules on the play, perhaps that’s for the best. They are the rules of friendship, after all. In this reading, all the literati should indeed keep an imaginary friend. It makes the writing more likely to be any or all of the following: to be entertaining, to be edifying, to be … excellent.
And here’s the thing. Poets have always written for an imaginary friend, and not just in the specific mode of literary address that Anthony Hecht refers to. Poets write, in a conversation of influence and allusion, with poets that went before them – and given those poets tend to be dead, any friendship being forged is by definition imaginary. At the same time, implicit in the idea of posterity is the sense of writing for readers that are not yet born. Whose “sleeping head”, in his ‘Lullaby’, is being asked to lie, “human”, on Auden’s “faithless arm”? Or, to use perhaps the single best example in literature, who do you think John Keats is holding out his “living hand, now warm and capable” towards? Clue: he only goes and tells you.
Andrew Neilson, Auden’s ‘Imaginary Friends’
Written in 1947, Thomas’s masterpiece was published for the first time in the Italian literary journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and soon included in his 1952 poetry collection In Country Sleep, And Other Poems. In the fall of the following year, Thomas — a self-described “roistering, drunken and doomed poet” — drank himself into a coma while on a reading and lecture tour in America organized by the American poet and literary critic John Brinnin, who would later become his biographer of sorts. That spring, Brinnin had famously asked his assistant, Liz Reitell — who had had a three-week romance with Thomas — to lock the poet into a room in order to meet a deadline for the completion of his radio drama turned stage play Under Milk Wood.
In early November of 1953, as New York suffered a burst of air pollution that exacerbated his chronic chest illness, Thomas succumbed to a round of particularly heavy drinking. When he fell ill, Reitell and her doctor attempted to manage his symptoms, but he deteriorated rapidly. At midnight on November 5, an ambulance took the comatose Thomas to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His wife, Caitlin Macnamara, flew from England and spun into a drunken rage upon arriving at the hospital where the poet lay dying. After threatening to kill Brinnin, she was put into a straitjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility.
When Thomas died at noon on November 9, it fell on New Directions founder James Laughlin to identify the poet’s body at the morgue. Just a few weeks later, New Directions published The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (public library), containing the work Thomas himself had considered most representative of his voice as a poet and, now, of his legacy — a legacy that has continued to influence generations of writers, artists, and creative mavericks: Bob Dylan changed his last name from Zimmerman in an homage to the poet, The Beatles drew his likeness onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Christopher Nolan made “Do not go gentle into that good night” a narrative centerpiece of his film Interstellar.
Maria Popova, The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece
Is there, then, room to be made for a cultural space where the individual, their identity, and all their baggage, are left to one side? Might this be part of a movement that begins to redress the balance of this (actually quite precious, for all its faults) liberal democracy? I think there is, although what it would look like I’m not sure. I imagine an online platform where a weekly anonymous poem is shared, and anonymous commenters are welcome to leave their thoughts. A community of poets and readers who know nothing about one another. There may be some rudeness if the poem met with disapproval, but how long would such rudeness last if the nymity of the poem was denied? Where is the fun in trolling if you don’t know who it is you’re trolling? And might, at last, some form of trust ensue?
The second argument comes from a feeling I have that many (perhaps all) of us tend to base our judgements of poems as much on the identity of the poet and what other people have already said about a poem, as we do on the objective ‘thereness’ of the words on the page. This is part of the function of the blurbs on book covers; they’re partly there to sell the book, obviously, but also, I feel, to tell people what to think: oh, X says this is great; then it will be okay for me to think it’s great too. And this focus on context and nymity also leads (I suspect, although I’m not sure I could prove it) to a slightly cowardly tendency of some online reviewers to wait until a collection has been well reviewed by a couple of other critics, so they know whether they are safe to like or dislike it.
As I say, context is important; but there is also a sense in which critics’ views are both formed and then validated by the identity of the poet. A new poem from a much-admired, multiple TS Eliot Prize winner sits in a different spot in a reader’s brain from one by an unknown – or known and disliked – poet. And can we really say we read a poem we know to be written by a man in the same way as one we know to be written by a woman? Likewise race and sexual preference.
There is a fair rebuttal of this argument, which is: of course we read these works differently, and so we should. There is language that is appropriate for some groups and not for others. In fact, you can probably go further and say we need to know as much as we can discover about a poet’s cultural identity so that we have the information we need in order to form an appropriate opinion of their work.
But this argument only goes so far.
The need expressed in the previous paragraph is only a need if your approach to poetry is extractive and judgemental: one in which you ask yourself, ‘What can I take from this work, and what opinion can I form about it?’. But there is another approach, and one I prefer, which where the reader asks: ‘What can I give of myself to this work, and what can I learn from it?’
If I take the second approach, my own identity and context are key, because I cannot escape them. Outside that… there are words; and there is what occurs when those words meet my own particular outlook on the world. This is my reading; and I must ask myself, what happens to my outlook on the world, now I have encountered these words? What aspects of my Self must I open up, and scrutinise, and change? This process could be seen as a gift I receive from the poem and my encounter with it. I am not so much extracting from the words, but in opening myself up to them, they respond by giving themselves to me.
Chris Edgoose, On Anon: the case against ‘Nymity’
Radoslav Rochallyi is a poet, essayist, and interdisciplinary artist living in Prague, Czech Republic — and the author of eight books of poetry. Recently I found his work featured here in Math Values, an online publication of the MAA (Mathematical Association of America).
In Rochallyi’s article — entitled “Vector Poetry” — he shows us three different illustrations of poetry portrayed using vectors. He takes a phrase that he would like to communicate poetically and offers three examples of how it could be portrayed using vector poetry. The phrase is:
“Time is pouring out of my broken watch glass. You look ahead, and you’re right. Because the potential of the past is just … a sandcastle.”
Here is a link to Rochallyi’s complete article.
JoAnne Growney, Vector Poetry
Why should people with money get to use a special lane? That’s not fair. Yeah, yeah, life isn’t fair, people with money use special lanes all the time. Still. This road was supposed to be for everybody! Now, as if the grind of traffic wasn’t bad enough, you have to sit in your old junky Toyota and stare at those mofos in their Lexuses gliding along the interstate with their SmoothPasses? What fresh hell is this?!
Not to mention, now the lanes for everyone else are even more congested! Where before this interstate had four lanes, now there are just three. The city gave that fourth lane to the SmoothPass drivers! They built a Lexus Lane!
So, okay, yes, the commute has gotten better, but only better for some people, the ones who can pay for it. The rest not only have to wait but have to wait even longer. The city has privatized a public problem, sloughed off financial solutions onto its citizens, and officially made things worse for the majority of people.
Crimminy.
There has to be a better way.
*
By now you’ve probably guessed that I am not writing exclusively about interstate travel. This is not, after all, Highway News.
What I am talking about here is the recent trend of magazines offering expedited response times to their submissions. In a recent weekend column, I stated that this was unusual, generally not done. Several readers pointed out that I was incorrect.
Over the past week, I’ve learned that these readers are right. Numerous magazines have adopted this practice. In exchange for a response anywhere from three days to two weeks, writers can now pay between $5 – $25.
Becky Tuch, Q: Are literary magazines building Lexus Lanes?
The judges, I could tell, were very interested
In what I had to say. They let me speak
More than others; they rarely interrupted.Continue down a road for long enough:
Eventually, to turn aside requires
An act of will beyond your reach.Some power must remove the rotten things
Brad Skow, Walther Funk Interviewed at Nuremberg
And all the dirt that’s settled on this world;
And some new instrument must be created.
I compared this video Why Your Brain Learns Better than Paper to my own experience of reading a lot of ebooks and a lot of traditional books.
And then I tried to compare whether the books were poetry, lit crit, social sciences or physics.
The results don’t fit the patterns this guy is describing, and I tend to think therefore that he’s talking about a certain genre of book (fiction and certain kinds of informational book) that I don’t read but that are all that many or most readers read.
I feel he was good at describing the pleasure of reading real books, but he had to do so by denigrating reading eBooks. Obviously books have a tactile feel and a smell, and yes you can go back to something you’ve read by flicking back and forth and remembering where the sentence was, recto or verso, top or middle or bottom.
But you can also do word searches on ebooks, and I for one use these all the time, with very satisfying results. Because I’m interested in ambiguous and layered texts, with subconscious meanings, I find that word searching flushes things out. I find the eye makes a SUMMARY, and then on several occasions has told me that such and such a page, in total, means only the SUMMARY. I am then quite surprised, by changing the font or the text size, or coming at a text via search, by something very specific that I have been overlooking – but which is now impossible to overlook when it’s distorted or magnified or sticking out like a sore thumb by these “linear and scrolling” ebook habits.
Above all, I would point to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Because it was written by a professional singer and lover of music, and also a lover of signage and words in visual designs, on buildings and in newspapers, it is in some ways a collage and in other ways a symphony. The collage and symphony aspects tend, as all good paintings and music do, to feel different on different hearings and hung differently in different light with different neighbours. Ebook reading of Ulysses offered me this. It took away from the literally awe inspiring look that printers (guided by Joyce) gave the novel on the page. Awe can blind us, and create fetishism. Ebooks give a flow back, and resist certain stuck habits.
And a book like Ulysses, like a poem, is about much more than the rational business world, or the creation of a world and drama in average fiction. A poem can be much more spiritual, about life lived on many levels. And poets often write to aficionados (either other poets or the trained reader) for a reason, the same reason that a composer writes a chamber piece; or you shouldn’t attend Wimbledon hoping for test cricket. There are expectations, there is fancy footwork to be admired, as well as a certain metronome (but not a rhythm as such, not merely more of the same, in the same rhythm, as we got in the venue the previous day).
Ira Lightman, Why Your Brain Learns Better than Paper (a critique)
I have been thinking about the artifices of art, the superficial surfaces, the pleasing semblances. “It looks just like a photograph,” said someone approvingly of a realistic scene painted in oils. (No one says of the photograph, “It looks just like the real thing.” They might say, “It looks like a painting.”) And the so-called “real thing”? What does it look like? And a misty version of that realistic scene? Is that integrating something of emotion, or the murkiness of memory? And the impressionistic version, is that closer to how the brain grabs at colors and edges and scents and sounds and forgets all kinds of details? And if the surface of the scene is nubbled with thick paint, what then? Are we disappointed to find that the painting is a painting? Or does it enhance the experience with its tactility, its boldness? And if there are other substances on the surface — tissue paper, string? And if someone sticks a sticker of a dinosaur and calls it absurdist? That too can be pleasing. Or not. What does it mean to “enter” an artwork? What does it mean that something of the work prevents entry? I’m reading a collection of poems that have a lot of…er…words in them, but I can’t quite make sense of it all. I can’t gain entry. A poem is all artifice. Text and space and form. No one mistakes a poem for a photograph or for the “real thing.” But I can get lost in fiction. Can look up suddenly from the page, disoriented to time and place and even myself. Isn’t that funny? And music — it’s all artifice! Banging and strums and dingledingle. And it can make me cry. What is up with that? Fool me once. Fool me forever. Please.
Marilyn McCabe, Tell me, train-sound
I attended a talk on Sylvia Plath and Mysticism and Witches by someone who is publishing a book on the subject. Almost everyone in the Zoom room had a Dr. before their name (except me), but I felt so comfortable during the talk—after all, I’ve been studying Plath for over thirty years, before it was cool! The talk itself really inspired my thinking about witchy poets, too. And about whether or not I should go get that darn PhD, health issues be darned. I really could use more intellectual stimulation—after all, I might have limitations in my body, but my mind gets really bored with limitations. […]
This also caused me to take another look at the relative witchiness of the manuscript I’m currently circulating to publishers. […] I did work with changing the manuscript’s title again. How do you land on your titles when you’re sending out your books? Do you fiddle with them, adjusting them to what you think a particular publisher might like, or do you just stick with one until it’s taken? I’m afraid I am a fiddler. But it is good to step back and look at a manuscript as a whole and ask—what story is this book telling? What characters are central? What are the general vibes? Are there too many books out there with a certain title already?
I like anything that puts my work in a different light, that helps me think of it in a different way.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Superbowls and Sunshine, Witchy Poets, Wordclouds and Titling, Changing Perspectives and Losing Control
When Red Hen began growing, I went to New York, and for the first time, I met with a few agents with the idea that in some glorious future, we might be significant enough to take books from them. I met with one well-known agent, Georges Borchardt, who told energetic stories about his years in the business. “When I was first working with Sammy,” he said. “Sammy wasn’t that famous.” I didn’t know who Sammy was, but as he kept going about the times that Sammy flipped between French and English, I looked behind him on the wall, where he’d hung a large picture of Samuel Beckett receiving the Nobel Prize. Sammy!
I was fascinated. I asked about Marguerite Duras, the French author whose work I knew he had introduced to Americans. He spoke about her like he’d just talked with her yesterday, like she was a dear old friend. Speaking of T.C. Boyle made him light up. He loved talking about his legendary boots, the California rush of his books. Then he started on Eli Wiesel, one of the most notable voices in Holocaust literature. After Wiesel became famous, they held parties in his honor, and he asked Georges to come along. At some point, Georges would decide to leave, and as he stood by the elevator, Eli’s footsteps would rush up behind him.
“The party is for you,” said Georges. “You have to go back!”
“I’m coming with you,” Eli would say.
“No, you’re not. You have to stay.”
After an hour of meeting, Georges invited me to dinner at his home. His wife, Anne, made a lovely soup, and I marveled at their two libraries: one in English, one in French.
After that, I thought maybe we should try to last longer as a publishing house, meet more people like Georges Borchardt. But there was no one else quite like him: erudite, well-read, generous. He was curious about what I was reading, what books I liked, what authors I had met and wanted to meet. Being in the room with him was like a crash course in publishing. He explained to me that the whole publishing business used to be built on midlist books—those that weren’t blockbusters but were still viable and worthwhile to publish—but then it changed, and it was all about the big sellers. Mid-list was an easier category, he said. Ian McKuen and T.C. Boyle started as midlist. They had breakout books, books that took longer to catch on, but Georges stayed with them.
Across all these years, I’ve still never met anyone quite like him. He just died at ninety-eight, and his daughter, Valerie, has taken over his agency. He will be missed. […]
Publishing is a kind of madness. Anything else would be easier. But we remain in the hard work and tumble, thinking bigger, building our legacy. Borchardt stayed in the thrum of it until the end. A hero of literature.
Kate Gale, On Georges Borchardt & The Maddening Dream of Publishing
I wrote this poem for the late Richard Sanger, with whom I had the pleasure to work on his last collection, Way to Go (Biblioasis, 2023). It was published posthumously, which Richard knew would likely be the case while we were working, and I remember how inspiring I found his patience about this fact. By that point I’d seen the publishing industry rush enough books to press for one reason or another, few of them matters of life and death. That he remained more committed to making the best poems he could make than to whatever personal edification or pleasure he might take from seeing them published was rare, and inspiring. I admired him very much. Here in the uncertainty of my own illness, his conviction about how a poet lives—how a poet dies—is even more profoundly moving to me.
I don’t much care for opining about my own work insofar as intent or, ack, interpretation, but in the spirit of engaging with all of the poems I share in this newsletter, a bit of context. At Richard’s memorial, speaker after speaker got up and remarked on his humour and playfulness and irrepressible verve, but I noted how a handful of remarks—mine included—commented on the seriousness with which he regarded poetry, in both his teaching and his own work. A young woman who’d been his student remembered being advised to set a draft in blank verse, and that it had unlocked an entirely new dimension in her writing, and so, for both of them, this one is blank verse as well: five beats per line, which alternate between rising—the iambic da DUM—and falling—trochaic: DA dum—rhythms. I didn’t undertake the last part consciously, but I’d hazard that my ear was appreciating the tension between fear and acceptance: the pounding of the fearful heart, the gentle acquiescence of the resting.
Vanessa Stauffer, “Elegy for Richard”
January was a blast, despite the year’s first rejection winging its way to me on only the 5th: I’ve been far more productive, poems-wise, than usual. That may in part be due to reading the long, elegant, syntactically-gorgeous lines of C.K. Williams’s poetry at bedtime, which seems to have unlocked a part of my brain hitherto securely bolted. I’ve been to two fantastic weekend workshops, at both of which the other participants wrote amazing, inspiring poems. In editing my own, I’ve found, not for the first time in the last year or two, that I’ve spent at least as much time adding to the poems as I have deleting or tweaking phrases and lines; for me, that’s a very happy place.
I’ve been delighted to see some poetry pals buoyed by recent successes, a reminder, if one were needed, that the poetry world has room enough for everyone with flair, imagination and a willingness to work hard at their craft.
Something else which has made me think a lot about the use of language is learning Italian: I’m in the second year of evening classes and I’m at the point now where I relish the challenge of rendering Italian into idiomatic English. (Or even idiotic.) I can’t say that I’m speaking Italian with great confidence, but I like having a go and I enjoy how the words flow into one another more seamlessly than English words do.
Matthew Paul, February update
Jayanta Mahapatra is one of the architects of post-independence anglophone poetry in India. With 18 books of poetry over 5 decades, his work is exemplary in the way it is located in his immediate landscape – physical, social and political – and in its ability to overcome all linguistic hurdles to evoke deep Indian sensibilities. But he was also unsparing of himself, bringing a brutal honesty to his poetry. His poem ‘A tale, to begin with’ is one of his many attempts to articulate what he saw within. It starts with this line:
“Jayanta Mahapatra never did anything worthwhile’
When did a line like that not make the reader hold their breath till the conclusion? When did the end of such a poem not become the beginning of a thought experiment? I was moved to write something that was not as much response as it was salutation, not as much “shalI I” as it was “do I dare.”
Here’s the poem I wrote. I hope you will be kind to it!
*
The poem expands in the hollows inside me
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Of love and self and a poet and poem
like sacredness slowly builds up to ten-
dimensional rapture. Silence echoes like
a refrain. I imagine the poet must have dipped
his pen deep into atmosphere and amygdala,
into myth and maelstrom, into singularity
and solitude, to find these words. Or he
writes like the river flows: through physics
and compulsion and irrepressible love.
I become a figure by his window, behind
his retina, inside his nights. I can see where
my shadows intersect with his shadows. [….]
I’ve written a lot of poems based on fairytales in the past. In fact, I often chide myself for doing so almost too heavily in my early work (things like literature, folklore, art, and history are great subject matter when you haven’t yet lived enough or learned to harvest your own life for poetic material). In some ways, it felt like a crutch. In others, writing about cultural touchpoints can be a great way to connect with readers and explore retellings of stories they already know. These iterations can sometimes offer more in-depth examinations of themes–those drawn out by the author or already there in abundance. I tend to also gravitate to works, both as a reader and editor for the dgp series, that work and re-work fairy tales and folklore. One of my first artist book projects was a series on Little Red Riding Hood called THE BOOK OF RED. My third full-length book THE SHARED PROPERTIES OF WATER AND STARS had, at its heart, the Goldilocks tale. Later, I wrote a more witch-sympathetic interpretation of Hansel and Gretel with PLUMP. There are also other loose poems that do similar things with existing stories.
As someone newly married, Bluebeard has been on my mind. Probably because the first couple years we were seeing each other, I had not been to J’s home and was completely convinced he was too good to be true. So obviously had to have a basement full of dead women he was hiding somewhere. It’s also especially funny since he actually eventually moved in with me, so all the secrets and locked rooms had to be mine. (I did tell him to avoid the entryway closet with its ever-avalanching mounds of press and art supplies I shoved in there when I moved out of my studio space and just haven’t found a home for elsewhere in the apartment.) For this project, I was also a little inspired by the musical SIX, which details Henry VIII’s wives and their mishaps, which, while all did not die at his hand, can be an interesting correlative in terms of the powerlessness of women historically.
The poems are going well, and I will be sharing bits from them in the coming weeks. They will also be part of the Patreon offerings for February (still working on what that will look like. I decided the epistolary was a perfect form for them, as in letters from the last wife to Bluebeard himself, though she becomes a chorus of other fragmented voices of dead wives.
Kristy Bowen, the abattoir letters
In stories, you’ve learned that the blackbird of what holds all of us together sings when we’ve lost our voice.
That the blackbird of our shared joy lends us wings when we’ve forgotten how to fly.
Sometimes in sleep, you see your other half.
You ask one another what the weather is like in your different states of being.
You ask one another what the world looked like before guns, before hate,
before all those broken mirrors ago.
Rich Ferguson, Somewhere in the World
Before yesterday, I had planned a snow/winter weather theme for my Advanced Creative Writing class, and having snow drifting by the window was the perfect touch. On Tuesday, I read Dave Bonta’s Poetry Blog Digest, on his Via Negativa site, as I do most Tuesdays. He linked to this post by Kristy Bowen, which concluded with ten wonderful poetry prompts for winter. They’re the best kind of prompts, the kind that work not only for poetry but for all kinds of creative thought.
I put each prompt on a slip of paper and had them put the slips of paper face down on their desks. Every five minutes, they turned over another slip and wrote for five minutes. At the end of five minutes, they could keep going, or they could turn over a new slip.
They were all writing on laptops, which was fine with me, although I did realize that I had no way of knowing if they were really working on prompts. But from observing them, they did seem engaged, and they did turn over slips. At the end of the process, I had them select one line from their writing and put it on a blank slip–and then I read all the slips as one poem, an interesting experiment.
I did a variation of the writing too, although since I was the timekeeper, I couldn’t lose myself in my writing the way I might have. I did come up with some interesting lines that I hope to continue to work into a unified poem.
By the time I got on the road to drive home, the sun was shining, and while it wasn’t warm, I wasn’t afraid that the roads would freeze–it’s the best kind of winter weather, the kind that doesn’t disrupt but does inspire.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Winter Weather and Writing Prompts
I haven’t posted a good stuff round-up in a while—and frankly, the news feels like a relentless round-up of bad stuff, so I need to shift my attention. Last night was some very, very good stuff, between Bad Bunny’s joyful celebration of the Americas and Brandi Carlile’s moving performance of “America, the Beautiful.” I don’t know about you, but I needed that. My kids did, too.
What else is good these days? My birthday is this Friday, and my fifth book of poems, A Suit or a Suitcase, is out next month! […]
That opening couplet of “A Suit or a Suitcase” has me thinking a lot about my country right now.
You ask what I’ll miss about this life.
Everything but cruelty, I think.The cruelty has been devastating to witness. We have a long way to go and a lot to learn—about ourselves, our history, and each other. In these harrowing times, I’m so grateful for writers, artists, and educators, and for their work—films, plays, books, and music—that teaches us about ourselves, our history, and each other, and that reminds us of what it is to be human.
Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff
i am the idea of a limb.
Robin Gow, dog toy
you can chew on me
until you’re bored. you can
give me a little hat. tear the clouds
out of my chest. make a sky.
I’ve given myself a difficult task. Yet we learn through difficulty, do we not? Often, too, the unlovely poems are those that deal with how rotten human beings can be, or illuminate the worst of times and offer us insight and information that we had not been taught, hidden horrors, trauma, all of the above. I have written many lovely poems about lovely things. The world, however, manages to be far more complicated than beautiful, a mixed bag of joys and miseries, and it seems to me that literature and art ought to reflect that fact sometimes.
What I’m posting below is a very rough draft, just to demonstrate how I begin a difficult poem, a poem based upon historical facts that I’m learning myself. It’s a completely different process from when I write from an image or observation of my own. For example, the “Librarian” poem, which is about 15 pages long, took me a couple of years and a visit to the United States Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC) at Carlisle Barracks, PA! First I pull some quotes, make a lot of notes, highlight images or place names that seem most resonant. Then I develop these into what I call “jottings” and fragments, and start setting them into an initial sequence–which I often change later.
Stanzas? Line breaks? Metaphors? Meter? All of that can wait; I like to work on structuring the narrative first when I try something in this vein, and I want to find images that might speak to a reader. So it is clear to me that this poem is not one I’ll have finished before the end of the 5-meetings-long workshop. Assuming I ever do finish it. Yes, poetry is hard work.
Ann E. Michael, Unlovely drafts
And the seeds under our steps sleep in vernalization.
Sarah Lada, Vernalization
It is a patience I wish I had, staying hard until things turn.
Until the snowmelt and soil-shift are messages beckoning warmth.
And the smallest tendrils inside us crack through the crust of ourselves,
and shove granules aside, one instant at a time.