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: cobra mating season, the hand of a Medieval scribe, a riddling hermit guarding a magic portal, and much more. Enjoy.
It has been awhile friends and a lot has been going on in the world since I last posted here. These days I am trying to balance my life as best I can. Somedays I do that better than others. I am sure many of you feel the same way.
Writing and reading poetry helps. It focuses my attention to the long arc of history, gives solace, expresses what so many of us are feeling or thinking these days. I read poems written during times of upheaval and remember that humans have a long history of bad behavior and yet, and yet, the pink camellia in my backyard is bringing forth her blooms, the birds are still arguing who gets the best spot at the suet cube, and my husband once again has the coffee ready for me after my long night of sleep.
Recently my husband and I took the train from Portland to Seattle. We stayed two nights in the hotel where we had our wedding reception 37 years ago, walked the city, and took the monorail to the Opera. We met family for dinner, and even took in an exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. Seattle is not the city it was when I lived in the area 8 years ago. My favorite stores were gone, entire blocks are boarded up waiting for new tenants, there is still homelessness, and drug use on some streets. In general, it looked worn out, much like I feel these days. And yet, and yet, the Seahawks fans were out by the thousands, the Olympics in the West were as beautiful as they have ever been, and the coffee at Storyville was just as good as I remembered it.
I recently took a class with the poet Danusha Lameris, who shared that we often write to our “irritants”. Those things that get under our skin and keep rubbing at us. Today, I had a poem published in the online journal RADAR POETRY titled SEEN. It is a narrative poem about a young boy who lived in the same small coastal town I lived in as a kid. This is the second poem I have written about him, and I have wondered why I keep doing so. Why the memory of him is like a burr in my sock. I think in the end, I have a need for him to be seen like the image above, beyond the dark winter trees. I think somehow in these heavy days of heartbreak, I finally acknowledged his pain.
Carey Taylor, SEEN
Enlightened men are more likely to pump iron and own bitcoin stocks. Positivists and tech-bros are more likely to support the genocide of Palestinians. The possibility of greening the desert commits itself to banishing all nostalgia for the actual land as shepherded by its inhabitants for centuries. “We obviously don’t think nostalgia can cause a person to commit murder anymore, or advertising firms wouldn’t encourage companies to use nostalgia in their marketing,” writes Grafton Tanner. “The truth is, there actually isn’t much of a difference between the words of the positivists and Fabrik Brands. In fact, they’re both trying to accomplish the same thing: the eradication of longing.” […]
In the interest of poetry, I need to detach my brain from the exhausting emptiness of the commercialized present. Longing is what poetry does. Longing finds a loose solace in the “frequency of images of the moon,” that source of nostalgia that humans still cannot quite fix in their discourse. I love whatever it is about the moon that continues to escape us.
Alina Stefanescu, Notes on nostalgia
butter in the pan:
Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: February ’26
it sings its song
of browning
I also know there are so many poets who have died homeless in San Francisco, and that is not what I aspire to do, feeding pigeons in the dark. Near the end of Wanda Coleman’s life, we were giving her money to live and collecting more to support her. I called one friend, a poet, to ask him if he would be comfortable giving something. I felt kind of weird, thinking maybe he would say that she shouldn’t need help when she’d lived a grand poet’s life, but he said, “Kate, if you’re asking me if I understand that as poets, we don’t manage our money, and we might be someplace else in our heads, I know that.” And I thought, I got you. We might be building castles in the air, we might be writing the blues or drinking the stars, but we don’t spend our lives making, counting, or spending money.
For all of us writers and creatives, the wandering and the wooing of the muse is the substantial part of life, the nourishment of ideas. If you have kids, which I do, it gets tricky. You have to feed them. But when you aren’t young anymore, you have to think about the trajectory of the rest of your life. No one will be able to fully take care of you. In the end, I wish Wanda had been cared for better.
In writing, there are two ways to approach a story: plotting and pantsing (figuring it out as you go). I am not a plotter. I am a pantser. My husband and I are both writers, so we live in a plotless world. At times, it’s indecently plotless. But I am leaning into plotting and planning: write big books, build up the press, swim more, find another way to make a living so the hubby can work less. In April, for our birthdays, we’ve planned to visit my sister-in-law in Murrieta and go to sushi together. I plan for love, for family, the dream of a life of tranquil Sundays.
Kate Gale, A Dream of Tranquil Sundays: How We Value Our Lives
The cats sigh and briefly stretch, spreading
their toes apart, twitching their ears
as a gust kicks loose snow into a swirl—a kind of dust devil on the lawn,
Ann E. Michael, Tired
a devil made of icy crystals. Apparently,
winter is not as tired as we are.
It’s not a sun, or moon, but has something of their capacity to shine. It’s the colours and how they fell into place, randomly. This was a mat I made for my daughter, a rather wonderful photographer living in the Netherlands. [image]
This year my seventh collection of poems comes out with Salt Publishing. My first collection, Powder Tower, was published in 1994, the year she was born. In glorious ignorance when it was shortlisted for the 1995 TS Eliot prize I had no idea of how lucky I was. Well, two small children, freelance working – daily life was distracting.
But this collection’s title, Making the Wedding Dress, marks a lifetime of change from gunpowder to silk…and the wedding dress was real, for my daughter. My son played piano as she walked into the hall with her dad. The sequence about sewing that gave the book its title does feel like it’s summing up a lifetime making clothes, covers, mats, bags, costumes, you name it – whatever scraps and a machine can come up with. Zero waste, repurposing, there are new terms but I feel sewing’s about respect as well as meditation. And the rest of the book – there are strange poems about modern living, the tensions we exist among, about money, sadness about lost species that were part of my childhood and I thought would always be around, like snowy winters, watching age catch up and wring out memory. How lucky, though, to have a cover image from my fabulous friend Jane Fordham, whose work is continually surprising, revealing, unique.
Jackie Wills, Not a sun or moon
Across the lobby, in the bar and restaurant behind us, they are setting up for Valentine’s day. It’s all ruby balloons and red rose petals. It’s the kind of scene that Philip Larkin, the slippers and gin and pipe smoke poet of Hull would add a good doleful drone to as he watched the couples come in, as he watched the blokes slouch out. Only he’d probably do it tomorrow. He’d do it when the balloons were sagging, the roses wilting. It is Keats who’d be turning the volume up, adding pulse and throb to the occasion, Keats who’d be accused of making a fuss, of going over the top. And I’m not sure which team I support today, which game I want to see played. Is it flare and fancy footwork or composure and a solid work rate I’m after? There were 4000 Chelsea fans in Hull last singing in the snow and I thought about Keats saying, “Love is my religion – I could die for that.”
Jan Noble, N°51 Love is my religion
Love is a lot
like physics:
It takes studyto understand
how masses —
yours, his —attract, how his body
heat conducts
and your heart rateaccelerates before
either has had time
to evaluate impact.You think you get
principles of velocity […]Radio station KPBX in Spokane, Washington, invited students of St. Andrews-Sewanee School, Sewanee, Tennessee, to select and read on the air (SAS owns and operates its own radio station, SASradio) poems with a science focus. In searching online for such poems, the students and their faculty sponsor came across my “Love Is a Lot Like Physics” and wrote to ask permission to read it on air. The poem was broadcast and recorded on “Poetry Moment” on Spokane Public Radio on October 5, 2023. It was read by student Kendall Elder.
Maureen Doallas, Love Is a Lot Like Physics
There is a difference […] between an editor stating that their journals are labors of love in order to make writers aware of the conditions under which their magazines are created, and editors stating their journals are labors of love in order to extract sympathy from writers and, as [Anandi] Mishra writes, “exploit earnest writers for cheap labor.”
Case in point:
Angel Food Mag: “This is a labor of love and unfortunately, we cannot pay writers.”
The Garlic Press: “Unfortunately, this magazine is a labor of love, and we cannot offer payment for publication at this time.”
“Whale Road Review is a labor of love and can’t offer monetary payment at this time, but we include a ‘tip the author’ feature so readers can send money directly to our writers.”
Obviously, most writers expect these conditions at literary magazines. Payment is unfortunately not the norm. But framing the inability to pay writers—which is the basic professional standard in every other market besides literary magazines—is like a tug on the heartstrings while getting robbed. It’s bad enough that most writers don’t get paid at literary magazines. Do we need to use love as a means to justify the practice?
Becky Tuch, Q: What’s with all the luvvy duv “labor of love” malarkey?
I didn’t have the highest hopes for Valentine’s Day, but we took the arduous trip downtown and back to attend the Spectacle du Petite show at Roq La Rue, which features a ton of wonderful artists including my current art crush, Dewi Plass, whose works Glenn photographed me with. Below are some of the pieces, including the fennec fox piece, for you to enjoy. However, I recommend a visit to the show! Glenn also took me to a downtown bookstore, so I could peruse lit mags and magazines not available to me on the East side. The whole thing wore me out, but I was happy I went. Glenn made duck and strawberry cupcakes, and we had dinner at home, which was lovely. (I also received two rejections—one book, one lit mag—on Valentine’s Day, which seems like a slap in the face. Not cool, places that reject on V-Day. It’s a hard day for a lot of people! Geeze!)
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Valentine’s Day and Artist Dates, Birds in the Cold, Melancholy, AI and Voting Rights
Even now, in my sixties, I keep falling
Luisa A. Igloria, Self Portrait, with Once-Lonely Sheep
in love with things. The crumpled
texture and weave of linen, the sharp
clean edge of a cotton collar, the soft
slouchy hems of bright socks.
In addition to eating way too many raspberry and lemon paczki for one person this week and the rest of February, my other treat was getting a new tattoo, a pair of fancy and decorative scissors. Lately I do more digital work than analogue (something I am vowing to change this year) but when I did work more with physical materials, I always preferred scissors over X-actos, which sometimes meant my cuts were unweildy, but I was just more used to them (though it depends on the scissors.) They are the first tattoo on my left arm, which I don’t plan to create a sleeve, so it stands alone on my forearm and is actually about the size of an actual pair.
And speaking of collage, the Februllage endeavors have been going well. Since we’ve been coming and going a lot, I’ve been doubling up and working ahead to make sure I can post daily, if not create daily (this is much easier with collages than NaPoWriMo poems.)
Kristy Bowen, notes & things: valentine’s edition | 2/14/2026
A stray barks: sharp, staccato, afraid.
Like she is shouting in a different language.She must have spotted another cobra.
They are everywhere now.
It is, after all, mating season.The other street dogs don’t come near.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Trying to make sense of the world – attempt #1
They are picking their battles.
Or the afternoon is too warm, too languorous,
too burdensome, to die.
“The Quiet Ear” is subtitled “An Investigation of Missing Sound”. Raymond Antrobus was diagnosed deaf at the age of six when it was discovered that he was missing sounds at certain frequencies, e.g. birdsong, and unable to hear certain letter combinations, particularly “is”, hearing “talisman” as “tal man” or “tally man”. Typically the teachers who’d written him off as slow didn’t apologise. […]
The book’s title comes from a chapter, which also is the title of a poetry anthology that contains a poem by Ted Hughes called “Deaf School”. Hughes had been commissioned by the National Theatre to research “how people live without language”; a bizarre commission given that the Deaf are not without language, but hearing. Hughes visited a Deaf school in London and the result was a problematic poem. The poem, in Antrobus’s words, “positions the speaker of the poem as a wise observer; there’s a tone of certainty that pathologises the deaf children, seeing them as passive amusements… The biggest irony is that Hughes is lazily describing something highly sophisticated, the language of sign… Seeing Hughes use his poetic gift to frame deaf children as animalistic simpletons was a double assault to me, disappointing and hurtful. What is the use of a poet who uses their talents to enforce harmful stereotypes on marginalised people and their language?”
Antrobus’s reaction was to write a poem that mirrored the language back at Hughes. To get it published, he needed permission from the Hughes’ estate which was denied. Antrobus then redacted the lines in the poem so you only see the title and then a series of black blocks. Showing it to some school children, one suggests that if you rotate the poem by ninety degrees, you can see the poem as bars on an audiologist’s chart.
Emma Lee, “The Quiet Ear” Raymond Antrobus (Weidenfeld and Nicholson) – book review
The palaeography sessions are weekly, on zoom, from America. I have access to them through my fellowship with the Folger. They have become something I treasure: a quiet, thoughtful place of puzzle solving and companionship amongst my otherwise chaotic days of caring and freelancing and trying to write the book. I value the ritual of it. I value the feeling of joining the group and being welcomed. Usually we begin by going over the alphabet, looking at the way that secretary hand can be formed, always with the reminder that the scribes that wrote the documents are people, and each person has their own handwriting. We are reminded of context, that there is a world of difference between a son writing a letter home from university, and a letter from a spy in a royal house. Then we open a document that all the group can see and we transcribe it together, slowly moving along, a word at a time. We are shown how to enter the transcription for scholarly use and although this is not why I am here – I know I will never have the confidence or skill to transcribe anything in the archives – I enjoy the way that knowledge of how it is done brings me closer to the transcribers when I am roaming down the rabbit holes of archive work.
The stories of people are not just embedded in the text that is written. It’s in how it’s written. When we come across letters that are obviously more ornate than they should be, we can see that this is a throw back to an older medieval style and I can imagine someone who learned to write in a medieval hand passing down a habit of over exaggeration of majuscules through the family, the old ways being slowly rubbed away at the edges as each new generation learns to write. I am reminded of how I used to copy the way my mum wrote her capital Es in a double curled sweep, though I had never been taught to do that by my teachers.
Learning to read 16th and 17th century documents is so much more than learning the shape of the letters. Much of the spelling is phonetic, sometimes I think I can detect accent in the way that words are spelled. To learn the hand of a scribe you write the letters out, looking at the ink on the original page to follow the direction of the quill, getting a feel for the direction of the crosses, the way an ‘a’ merges into the minims of an n or an m, and this way you get a feel for their habits, their positioning, the way they might lean a quill on a knuckle joint, the way they get distracted and bunch a letter too close to the edge of a page, or miss a word out and have to go back and stick it in on a slant. A manuscript becomes a moment in a life, then, the dipping of a quill and the fattening of the letters with ink, the thin pale words at the end of a long line where the quill needs re dipping, the drip, the smudge where a sleeve has caught.
Wendy Pratt, The Butcher’s Hook and the Hot Cross Bun
This is the notebook of one William Lynnet (or Lynnett), born around 1622, who was admitted to Trinity as a student the year before, in 1641. William’s notebook contains various bits of Latin and English verse, some of his own composition and several addressed to prominent Cambridge contemporaries, as well as Donne’s translation of Psalm 137, the popular translation of Herbert’s ‘Aethiopissa’ (which I discussed here) and its ‘answer’ by Henry King, and an English poem by the poet Richard Crashaw, who was at Pembroke College, Cambridge until 1635 and thereafter at Peterhouse. Many items are dated to 1642 or 1643 and several describe or respond to the tumultuous political events of those years.
All of this is relevant because this manuscript also contains two copies of a good Latin poem which is ascribed, when it first appears, to ‘A. C.’. The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts takes this to be Abraham Cowley — who was also at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1642/3, and duly appears in William’s list (in the image above, you can see his name about half way down the right-hand column). Although CELMS accepts the attribution to Cowley, as far as I know this poem has never been published. […]
The poet compares himself to a singing bird who, her nest destroyed in a storm, no longer has the heart for song, and struggles to know what to do:
At si prosternit nidum fors saeva tepentem,
Et nova tempestas quaerere tecta iuvet,
Maesta silet; metuit suspiria mittere, cantus
Ne possit gemitu mixtus inesse suo.
Flebiliter pressis circum vaga cursitat alis,
Et cui adesse nequit nescit abesse loco.But if cruel fate destroys her cosy nest,
And a storm means she needs a new house,
In sorrow she falls silent, afraid to mourn
In case her song be spoilt by her lament.
Weeping she dashes back and forth, her wings
Close-pressed, she cannot either stay or go.This situation is compared to that of the poet who, having lain long secure and singing joyful songs in ‘your shade’, now faces the possibility of being forced into exile as a result of the ‘storm’ — that is, of course, the storm of Civil War, which broke out fully in this year, 1642. The ‘you’ of the poem might refer to a particular individual, but I think it is most likely that it refers to the university itself. Cowley was indeed eventually forced to leave Cambridge in 1644 to take refuge first in Oxford and later in France.
Victoria Moul, With hope into the lists: Cowley on the eve of civil war
What I love about “Nostos” is what I love about so much of Glück’s work: the intensity of focus, and the sensation of entering another’s consciousness so completely that it feels like your own, both effects accomplished by careful management of the line, by the way enjambment can cut across syntax to enact the movement of the mind.
The opening five lines establish the logic that structures the rest of the poem, its pattern of incompletion and association, continuity and rupture. The opening line alone give us a microcosm of this tension:
There was an apple tree in the yard—
It’s a complete sentence—and yet not, the em dash denoting fragmentation, the statement breaking off. More accurately, a breaking away from, as line 2 directs us into a new temporality:
this would have been
forty years ago—The shift from the simple past “there was” to “this would have been” is weirdly complicated. It was forty years ago, and there’s no conditionality implied by the usage, but the idiomatic construction evokes demotic speech—the sense that we are being spoken to, or perhaps speaking to ourselves. It’s a storytelling gesture that shifts our sense of time, from past recollection to present-tense situating of the image. And it colours mood as well, introducing the minor chord of “would”: a word of longing, of distance on its own. This distance is revealed as temporal when line 3 opens with the unit of time—forty years—but abruptly turns spatial as another interruptive em dash is followed by the preposition “behind,” pulling us again into the realm of the concrete, letting us hang there for an instant in uncertainty: behind what?
So there is a lot going on, if you track the movement line by line and word by word, attentive to the subtlest shifts in verb tense, grammatical mood, intonation, and to read Glück I think you must be. But I find this concentration so rewarding, and the precision, ironically, disarming. In this instance, it’s how it captures the way we tell stories, which is also the way memory works. An image arises, unanchored, and the mind finds a place for it, slots it back into a larger narrative.
Vanessa Stauffer, “Nostos” by Louise Glück
Overall, the amount of white space, the amount of enjambment, and the short lines slow the poem down. We’re getting plenty of time to parse the syntax and savor each line. The poem either begins with a single line or as a couplet that includes the title, depending on how you look at it, but the last line is certainly on its own. It’s emphasized because it’s all by itself, cushioned in white space. The question is also emphasized by the repetition of “my hands”:
Tell me what to do
with my hands—my hands—
what can my hands do now?The speaker is pleading. There’s a sense of desperation and a deep desire to be useful. To be a helper. The repetition three times here also mirrors an earlier repetition: the anaphora in stanza three. Anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, lines, sentences. In this stanza, “come” is repeated three times:
Come hurricane, come rip current,
come toxic algal bloom.This poem is full of surprises, reconsiderations, and switchbacks. Form and content are working in tandem. The speaker of “A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem” wonders aloud about what it can do to be a helper. And, I’d argue, in its articulation, and in its witnessing, it is a helper. I hope if you enjoyed this poem, you’ll seek out more work by Rachel Dillon.
Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look
Copies of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology are going out to the media, for review requests, and to the contributors. I received a box of books a week or so ago, and I am thrilled with how it’s turned out. Donna Kile’s gorgeous cover photography, the tactile matte finish on the cover, and even the fonts. And, of course, the poems by our fantastic contributors. We really can’t wait for these to start shipping out to readers in May. […]
In other news, I shared the stage with fellow poets and long-time friends Franklin Abbott and Cleo Creech on Jan. 8 as part of an exhibition of panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt at the Decatur Library. It was a moving evening of poetry and I – and the audience – were verklempt for most of it. I don’t do that many in-person readings anymore, but I’m glad I did this one.
Collin Kelley, The Big Reveal: “White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology
I’m excited to share that I have a podcast episode out with Meg of Meg’s Reading Room. I can’t say enough about Meg. She is such a calm, gentle presence in this world. I love her podcast about books, and was so honored when she invited me on.
You can listen to our episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. At the very end, I share a poem from the book that I have not shared anywhere else, so go check it out!Here’s Meg’s description of the episode:
Allison Mei-Li, A Few Love PoemsIn our conversation, Allison shares why motherhood gave her the courage to start sharing her work with the world, how connecting with her own voice has helped shape her work as a speech-language pathologist, and why going deep through her writing and creative workshops has been bringing her joy in this season.
NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (Volume 2), ed. Philip Rowland, Isobar Press, 2025, ISBN 978-4-907359-52-2, £12.00
Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets, ed. Neil P. Doherty, Dedalus Press, 2025, ISBN PB 978191562933, €14.50
The first time I reviewed two anthologies together here, one of them was the first volume of the NOON one. You can imagine my surprise when Volume 2 arrived with a quote from that review on the back cover:
The work in NOON is poetry tending towards the ideal condition of silence, which is a kind of music, and the visual element, not only within but in the space around each poem, is key to eliciting the quality of attention required from the reader when a poem places so much weight on so few words.
I could use exactly the same words in reviewing this second volume, but I won’t. Instead I want to look in a bit more depth at Rowland’s explanation of his method as explained in his Preface:
As in every issue, as well as the first anthology, the poems in this volume have been arranged in a renga-like sequence. Besides being a creative aspect of the editorial process, this is meant to allow for a range of short-form poetry to resonate in stimulating and sometimes surprising ways for the reader.
…
This is, then, much more an anthology of poems than poets.
In practice, because, with just one exception, poems by each poet are grouped together, this involves resonances within a poet’s work and across the works of the preceding or subsequent contributor. […]
What also emerges is the flexibility around what Rowland means by a short poem, defined as anything under 14 lines. While NOON tends towards the haiku, there’s room for anything that fits, really, including a couple of tiny haibun (or at least that’s how I read them), like this one by Sabine Miller:
VESSEL
If you were a vessel, what shape would you be? I say urn and she says murmuration. I am filled with dusty blue marbles; she is filled with sky.
the dark rock
a darker bird
alightingIn the Preface, Rowland says the book is ‘short enough to be read from start to finish at one sitting’. I can confirm that this is the case, and that at the end the temptation is to go back to the beginning and read it again. And again. Each reading revealing new delights. It’s a delight in ways that few anthologies (or single books of poetry) manage. I’ll finish off with a poem from Caroline Clark that, for me, sums up the experience of reading the book:
Can I be with you
while you read this?
Don’t look up
or say anything.It’s a book to keep by you, to read and read again, to savour like fine wine.
Billy Mills, A review of two anthologies
There’s been a shift at night. Used to be I’d forget to attend class until exam time. Sometimes my primary school or secondary school or university graduations were rescinded because I missed a class. Pretty common dream among people I understand.
Or I searched a toilet and all would be out of service. I’d show up for meals and it was all eaten. I’d be lost, disoriented. I hid, evaded, be pursued, shot at. I’d run through cities forests in primeval fear. I’d stash myself under furniture, in heating ducts. I’d almost always escape. Sometimes I was a disembodied observer of other people and did nothing in my own dreams but watch chaos unfold.
There were non-stress dreams of course. But the shift is this: on waking, say, that was stupid, I should have this or that. I broke into my own dreams lucidly.
In dreams I started asking for other student’s notes, asking the front desk to confirm my schedule, chatting with professors, being in lectures, graduating.
I started asking directions to a working washroom, pee anyway even if the only one was a urinal in a crowded hallway. I started showing up at buffets before the crowd or before opening. Being lost in another souk, I said in my dream, no not this again, so bored, walked past the vendor, threw up the flap of the tent and hailed a cab.
Being lost and locked in a museum or store at night I started stealing stuff. Or exploring, finding new underground tunnels, and new rooftops to observe from.
My run in the forest became a joy of running and watching the neighbourhood sprout houses and businesses and I started talking with these familiar fictional neighbours, each dream a next time lapse.
Being held hostage, I started to huff, disgusted with fellow prisoners, getting up, telling off the gunmen until he reddened. I demanded cash for damages, or snatched his gun, taking him out and the marksmen.
The shifts have mostly happened over the last year, some spreading back a decade. […]
The dreams are starting to echo being a member of community, taking roles as protector, saviour, competent, self-serving. I move from inaction and reaction to action.
Twenty years pass and I don’t feel cringe for existing. I ask what I want and instead of writing down goals and sub-steps, on some deep level I give permission instead of self-flogging. I don’t try to manage others or bow to others. There’s some equality. There’s some interdependence. There is something opening. Out of the forest, into the plain. New options.
Pearl Pirie, Agency
i think we should install more doors to nowhere.
Robin Gow, wild zillow
more windows full of bricks.
i am sick of functionality. i want
the nest to be as absurd as it is to be
alive right now while people are being stolen
from their ice cream places. from their schools.
Across her three Comma Press collections – Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (2006), Lifting the Piano with One Hand (2013) and, especially, Where the Road Runs Out (2018) – Gaia Holmes’s poetry has burned with a unique free spirit, content-, form- and sensibility-wise. Her poems are unlike anyone else’s, filled with unlikely, netherworldly events frequently set on the fringes of society but which are real and compelling.
In this collection of 19 stories, Holmes’s first foray into fiction, many of the characters are neurodivergent and/or getting a raw deal out of life: bullying, toxic relationships, domestic violence, bereavement, conception difficulties, loneliness, terrible neighbours and a general sense of passivity which these problems cause or exacerbate. However, many of the stories concern ways in which those characters, through their own willpower or with some magical realist intervention, circumvent their circumstances. In her writing, Holmes is careful to avoid the trap of overtly feeling sorry for her characters and often does so by employing a first-person narrator who just tells it as it is.
Matthew Paul, Review of Gaia Holmes’s He Used to Do Dangerous Things
Yesterday I was thinking about how being an athlete is unlike being a writer. I watch the Olympics, and I have no illusions that I will ever be at that level, and worse–the window for that level of skill is tied to youth. With writing, I can continue to improve.
I thought about this off and on throughout the week, as I have walked from my office to my classrooms and observed clusters of students who are talking about their creative writing. I don’t think these projects are for a class. I think they’re just students who like to write and have found each other. I love the building where most humanities classes are taught. It was built 15 years ago, so it’s a very different building than any other building where I’ve taught. There’s more natural light, for one thing, and less decay. The common area has spaces for informal gathering/studying, spaces that look like a small living room, spaces that look like a kitchen table, and two tables of barstool height, with higher chairs. There’s a charging station beside one of them, and plenty of plugs throughout the common space. There are some backless couches that look like waves outside of each classroom.
Some of the students hang out as they wait for classes to start, but other students hang out all day. As I overhear conversations, I feel inordinately happy. There’s the creative writing discussions and the students helping each other in a variety of classes. There are students scrolling through their phones, and others staring at laptops, but more often than not, they’re interacting.
As I walk back and forth, I sometimes feel wistful, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes sad about how long ago my own undergrad days have become. I can also be prone to the sadness of feeling like I haven’t lived up to my potential. Yesterday I laughed at myself a bit–I can still keep working on writing projects, and I can keep doing it deep into old age, barring some kind of injury. In terms of athletic prowess, I’m not going to be skiing ever again; fear of breaking a bone is just too much of a deterrent.
Happily, I’m fine with that. I didn’t like skiing when I did it in my younger years, so no great loss. Aging must be much more difficult if what brings one joy is not something one can do with an aging body.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing Life, Olympian Life
I’m always surprised when talking with another poet, and they say something along the lines of I should see more modern dance, but I don’t really know what to make of it. This, of course, is another version of what we frustratingly hear all the time as poets—I want to read poetry, but I don’t understand it. I feel like the emphasis on understanding is preventing so many people from enjoying and experiencing not just poetry but the variety of art that exists in the world, such as dance, experimental music, or abstract painting. Even those of us who spend our time immersed and versed in one discipline and recognize that every artwork need not tell a story or be representational, still often find ourselves trapped by the false idea of needing to understand a piece of art if it’s in a realm outside our own.
Here’s my plea. Let’s free ourselves of this idea.
For me, what makes modern dance amazing is that it strips dance down to its fundamental ingredients—the shapes that bodies can take and the motions that bodies can make—and reimagines it front and center. When I watch a dance piece, I observe the architecture of the dance—both for individual dancers and as a group—and I notice repeating and building patterns of gestures, undulations, or transfers of weight. All of this, of course, is anchored by the music and lighting, set and costumes, or lack thereof (some of the best pieces shine because of their spareness, by letting the dancer just dance). Together, it’s about creating an energy, a feeling that you take in, that you open yourself to. And maybe, just maybe, if you just let it happen, Emily Dickinson’s “cleaving of the mind” will come.
When I stand in front of a Rothko painting, such as the Seagram murals, I feel myself vibrate, physically and emotionally. That’s the ultimate for me. Like modern dance, modern painting is painting stripped down to its essential ingredients—color and texture. It isn’t about sense, but the senses. We don’t make something of it; instead, it makes something of us.
As my bedtime reading, I’ve been traveling through Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, which speaks to how Stein similarly sought to make poetry new by experimenting with its very textual and grammatical building blocks.
“Each word in [Stein’s] Tender Buttons . . . was recognizable in itself, but here words follow others not to advance any story, but to propel the text forward through verbal echo, surprise, or pure insistence. . . . Tender Buttons is a celebration of mutability, a rejoinder to the rules, where words are set free from the shackles of meaning and grammatical function, made unfamilar, and charged with power to make the world afresh.”
Whether you’re reading a poem or listening to a drone composition that reverbates with found sounds, it is precisely the allure of surprise and the unfamiliar that makes them successful, powerful, and engaging. If we stop asking what it means and start asking what we feel, perhaps we’ll all find our way to the forms of art that we didn’t realize we needed and that speak to us even though we thought they were beyond our grasp.
Carrie Olivia Adams, Celebrating the Ingredients
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?
I’m trying to write a poetry of “what is”, at the risk of seeming like some kind of antiquated rational materialist. (Guilty.) What you believe has consequences: if you believe in the literal existence of Santa, you need to wrestle with the existence of the surveillance apparatus implied by that belief, you need to acknowledge that this authority in which you believe prefers rich kids, and so on.
So I’m trying to write about the marvellous world we live in, which means that I write about natural phenomena, often through the explanatory lens of science. I deliberately avoid mysticism, metaphysics, spiritualism, and other forms of woo that are pretty commonplace in contemporary poetry. But I don’t think that the transcendent and the numinous — the truly wonderful — are the property of those modes of thinking. I’m trying to write about what it’s like to be in this world, to live in it, to experience its aesthetics and poetics. This is a bit different than the way that many poets write about science and nature: either the natural phenomenon is used solely as a metaphor, as in “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, or the poem is a hymn to the phenomenon. (Grossly oversimplifying here.) I’m trying to do something different with my poetry, to write about the world as it is and about our experience of it.
Adjacent to this is a technical question I’m interested in, which has to do with how poems might be constructed differently. If we imagine that words and lines are the atoms and molecules, respectively, of poetry, what happens if we do chemistry with these? If we pull them apart and put them together. This experiment already exists in poetry, of course, in, for example, enjambment or Manley Hopkins-esque portmanteaux. But how far can this be pushed? To what poetic end? Do there exist poetic polymers and macromolecules? What do they look like? What are they for? […]
If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I’ve been a math teacher, and I’m currently a physician. I should have been a physicist, but fear and laziness prevented this. Some days I think I’d like to be a Zamboni driver, or the guy who drives the rake around the infield at a baseball stadium.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Paul Moorehead
The poem was written on March 26, 1802, while Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were at Dove Cottage in the Lake District. “While I was getting into bed,” Dorothy notes in diary, “he wrote the Rainbow” — which does suggest a rapid composition (albeit with later days’ entries in the diary revealing his agonizing about the poem, building toward the move he would make with the Immortality Ode).
We should note too, I suppose, her reference to the poem as “the Rainbow.” Without falling fully down the rabbit hole (exploring, for example, how much Wordsworth meant a wordplay with pi, π, for the semi-circle of the rainbow and the “piety” of the last line), we can still remember that the clash of science and poetry was in the air — and particularly in discussions of rainbows and Newton’s 1704 Opticks.
In the 1728 “Spring” section of his Four Seasons, James Thomson speaks of the rainbow as
. . . refracted from yon eastern cloud,
Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bow
Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds,
In fair proportion running from the red
To where the violet fades into the sky.
Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds
Form, fronting on the sun, thy showery prism;
And to the sage instructed eye unfold
The various twine of light, by thee disclosed
From the white mingling maze.But — anticipating Wordsworth — he adds:
. . . Not so the boy;
He wondering views the bright enchantment bend,
Delightful o’er the radiant fields, and runs
To catch the falling gloryThomas Campbell post-Wordsworthian 1819 “To The Rainbow” makes explicit the opposition of science and childhood:
Can all that Optics teach unfold
Thy form to please me so,
As when I dreamt of gems and gold
Hid in thy radiant bow?Charles and Mary Lamb in their 1809 Poetry for Children, admit the conflict but offer a more ameliorative take:
. . . If I were
A natural philosopher,
I would tell you what does make
This meteor every colour take:
But an unlearned eye may view
Nature’s rare sights, and love them too.And so on. The question of the nature of rainbows does set up, however, the question I find most interesting about the poem: the meaning of the final phrase, “natural piety.”
In marginalia scribbled in his copy of the 1815 edition of Wordsworth’s Poems, William Blake would take aim at the phrase: “There is no such Thing as Natural Piety Because the Natural Man is at Enmity with God” — adding “I see in Wordsworth the natural man rising up against the spiritual man continually; and then he is no poet, but a heathen philosopher, at enmity with all true poetry or inspiration.”
And it’s possible that Wordsworth meant the word natural in the way that Blake supposed — a declaration of human nature as filled with a native piety and goodness, in rejection of the Christian idea of the Fall.
But a better reading, I think, would take natural to be about external phenomena. The nature here is not human nature, which darkens as we age (hence the Immortality Ode’s “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy”). It is rather Nature’s own piety — both, I think, in the sense that Nature herself is pious, reveling in her creation, and in the sense that Nature, seen correctly, is an occasion of grace. The natural world wants us to be pious, to grasp heart-leapingly in the experience of a rainbow the transcendental characteristics of created being: beauty, truth, and goodness.
Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: My Heart Leaps Up
Basil Bunting’s long modernist poem Briggflatts (1966) was published sixty years ago this winter — first in Poetry magazine and then as a book from Fulcrum Press. It was subtitled “An Autobiography”, but Bunting denied that it was “a record of fact”, saying “the truth of the poem is of another kind”. Despite the often abstruse allusions, he also felt that “no notes are needed”. But he provided a handful nevertheless, on the grounds that “a few may spare diligent readers the pains of research”.
Bunting’s notes were titled “Afterthoughts”, and most relate to the Northumbrian landscape and language of his early twentieth-century youth, where the poem is primarily set (Briggflatts, the Quaker meeting house of the title, is actually over towards the west in Cumbria, but Bunting saw this as part of the old Northumbria). He had returned to North East England after travelling widely, and wrote the poem in his sixties, filling notebooks on the train as he commuted to his sub-editing job on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle.
Like T.S. Eliot’s Notes to The Waste Land, Bunting’s “Afterthoughts” have the air of a riddling hermit guarding a magic portal. The first warns that “the Northumbrian tongue” may sound strange to non-natives, and that “Southrons” — those from the south of England — “would maul the music of many lines of Briggflatts”. Further on, we are told to “piece […] together” the story of the Viking king, Eric Bloodaxe, “from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the Orkneyinga Saga, and Heimskringla, as you fancy”. By the time we get to the word “skerry”, Bunting’s only comment is “O, come on, you know that one” (it’s a small rocky island, covered at high tide). “Scone”, meanwhile, is singled out so that we can be told to “rhyme it with ‘on’, not, for heaven’s sake, ‘own’” (on the question of whether to apply jam or cream first, however, he is silent).
I had a new experience of Briggflatts recently when I read it alongside the much more extensive annotations that have been available for the past ten years at the back of Don Share’s excellent edition of The Poems of Basil Bunting (2016). One of the things I appreciated about how Share lays out these notes for the reader is that, as well as interleaving Bunting’s original “Afterthoughts”, he also uses bold type to pick out everything the poet said elsewhere about the poem: interviews, letters, conversations. So it’s possible at a glance to follow an extended authorial commentary on particular words and lines.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #40: How It Feels Rubbing Down a Gravestone
Rebuff, repulsion, lacking allure – it’s a risk to call an anthology of poetry The Opposite of Seduction and perhaps Nicola Thomas’ brief Introduction to this book of new German poetry in translation suspects as much. She concedes, ‘poems here . . . may test the boundaries of Anglophone tastes’. But that depends on your taste and for most readers this anthology will seem a vigorous enjoyable collection of young(ish) voices, most hardly ever heard in English before like Nadja Küchenmeister’s delicate, flowing lyrics of existential uncertainty (tr. Aimee Chor), or Anja Utler’s sole contribution, a re-writing of the Daphne myth, exploiting the white page, a choppy fragmentation, exclamation, and a suitably headlong, hectic delivery. A different note is struck by Uljana Wolf, in her whimsical teasing away at self-awareness, waking at four in the morning, or down on hands and knees with an English-speaking partner, to consider dust bunnies (in German ‘Wollmaus’); ‘our little creatures, how they swap their fluffy, moon-gray names’ (tr. Sophie Seita). […]
Technique dominates rather than subject matter, though the selection is organised by subjects such as Heart, Body, Soul, Beast, Season, Machine, Home. Oswald Egger writes lush, musical celebrations of the natural world which in Ian Galbraith’s renderings evoke Hopkins, even Dylan Thomas. Dinçer Güçyeter brings material from the migrant experience (tr. Caroline Wilcox Reul) and Ulrike Almut Sandig creates a genuine split-screen reading experience, playing poem texts off against story board instructions either side of the page (tr. Karen Leeder). Given the breadth of experimentation going on here, there are inevitable failures. These are poets working to free both writer and reader from conventions, to open up novel realms of human experience, a liberation from history. Occasionally, Jan Kuhlbrodt’s nightmare vision of a man hoarding books and newspapers hovers behind some poems, so intent on their own language are they, perhaps in need of a ‘reminder of a reality that knows more than paper’ (tr. Alexander Kappe).
Martyn Crucefix, Review: The Opposite of Seduction: New Poetry in German (Shearsman Books, 2025)
My fourth collection Grey Time (Nine Arches Press, 2025) circles around the themes of grief and loss. These are subjects that I have touched on in my previous collections, but with this collection I decided to give my attention over to it more fully, to read around the subject area and to more fully explore what grief is, and how it affects us and changes – not just in the aftermath of a loss but over the years that follow. I also wanted to explore how our relationship with those we have lost changes over time. Loss in the collection is not just confined to death though; there are other losses too – losses that can be equally devastating. The poem ‘owl birth’ touches on one such loss.
To give some context: when my mother was a teenager, she got pregnant and was subsequently sent to a home for young single mothers. The baby was to be put up for adoption but she was initially allowed to bring the baby home from hospital allowing her to bond with her. This made the handing over even harder and she never really recovered from this loss and she spent the rest of her life looking for that lost daughter. I only learned of this other child after I had already left home. The effects on me were two-fold. Firstly, it changed my view of myself – I had always been the first/oldest child, and secondly, it made sense of some of my mum’s behaviour – her mental and physical absences, her hot and coldness. I was struck by how cruel it was to let a young mother spend so long bonding with their child only to then whisk it away.
I didn’t actually set out to write a poem about this particular loss. The poem came out almost fully formed while I was on a writing retreat. Each night as I was trying to get to sleep, I was disturbed by the sound of owls screeching. Many of my poems contain animals or other things from the natural world, and those owls made their way into several poems in this collection. The pine forest also is a recurring trope in my poems – I grew up in small town surrounded by pine forest and its very particular atmosphere seeps into a lot of my writing.
Drop-in by Julia Webb (Nigel Kent)
Form – what is it good for? Quite a lot, it turns out. The poetic focus and concision, for example, of being required to work within a particular rhyme scheme, or within a certain number of lines. Traditional form engages us in a conversation with a poetic history; it places us within a shared poetic culture and heritage. Poetic form can act as a scaffolding for thought and experience; a container for intense emotion. It is of course, a great way to develop poetic discipline, whilst conversely being a fun and exciting way of playing – trying things we’re not used to, finding new possibilities, taking risks, stepping beyond the habitual and discovering new directions. And perhaps most importantly – for me, anyway – form offers a powerful means of expression, exploration and discovery, deepening the meaning which hovers under the surface of our conscious poetic intentions.
On Tuesday night, Kim and I – aka the Laurel and Hardy of poetry – delivered an online workshop on poetic form. For our paying subscribers, you’ll find a recording of that session in your substack inbox, along with Kim’s powerpoint and sestina template. Yes, Kim bravely and beautifully led us through one of the most complex forms, despite my claim that it was the metaphorical equivalent of bringing cabbage to the shared poetry meal. And of course, Kim proved me entirely wrong – using a stunning example by Kathryn Maris to show how sestinas can offer us all a fluid and powerful receptacle for our obsessions. Which, in Kim’s case, is currently hamsters.
Clare Shaw, FORM!
Some days all I can say is ay yi yi. Or oy. Or fuuuuuuuuck. You know, those wordless expressions of mostly-vowel sounds the outbreathing of which, the offgassing of which you hope will take away some of the poison, some of the poison you’ve inhaled inadvertently from the world, the sorrows, the woe and strife, the basic are-you-kidding-me’s that tumble into our faces, singular and collective, big picture and small. At the level of finding-a-parking-space or the level of world-peace. Oof. That’s another one of my exhales. Jeeesh. Yeesh. Ach du liebe. Eventually I’ll gather my words together and make a coherent sentence. But I won’t be sure about it. It’ll be mostly noise created by consonants, as if I know what I’m talking about. But it’s the vowels. It’s the vowels that carry the spiritual truths, the hopes and dreams, terror and aghastness, the weariness.
I like this poem for how confident it is. Here’s the deal, the poem says. Here’s what’s gonna go down. I don’t know this poet, but I’ll follow her anywhere.
Marilyn McCabe, or maybe things were not communicated clearly.
Think of all the work the weather can do in a poem: symbol and foreshadowing; metonymy, for the spirit of a place or time; a metaphor for the poet’s inner state; a frame for the poem’s cinematography; an event, a catalyst. Sometimes weather functions allegorically, as a sign of divine intervention. Latterly, in its climate-change variants, it seems sent to punish human stupidity and greed. Weather often signals how little control humans have over our lives. We are at the mercy of this world, not vice-versa.
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wetTill day rose; then under an orange sky
Ted Hughes, ‘Wind’
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.To talk of the weather is often to describe our quotidian struggle or ease with our ‘circumstances’. The seasons, though, provide a larger frame for understanding what happens when circumstance – landscape and settlement, and all the human endeavour it hosts – meets time and its changes. Can we grow what we need? Will we thrive or be thwarted?
Lisa Brockwell, South of my Days
Lent starts this week, and as I was thinking about the intersection of poetry and my relatively new reversion to Catholicism, I got a little over my skis and came up with the grand idea to write forty poems in forty days. After some reflection, I have since whittled that down to seven poems in seven weeks, which is far more realistic. I’ve noticed a tendency to want to Lent-max and I’m not sure what drives that. It’s certainly not any kind of innate holiness. Perhaps something about all of the sacrifice, asceticism, and general austere feeling of the season incentives a kind of perverse competitiveness in me. But it’s more likely that I’m just trying to prove to God how good I can be so He will love me. I still sometimes cling to the illusion that I’m in the driver’s seat and that I can earn His love as long I complete some arbitrary, self-created to-do list and wave it up at Him, going, “See? I checked everything off!” Yes, I fully realize how ridiculous I am. The bottom line is, watch this space for a poem a week during Lent. These will be exploratory drafts, so no promises on quality, depth, or literary value.
Kristen McHenry, Rounding Down, Arguing with Robots, Dreams of a Watery Sun
Previous-Bethany (who hangs around) likes to curl into a fetal position (a lot) and say things like, “I have no talent for this!” “I can’t do this!” But I am changing. I’ve attended a No Kings protest, I’ve written to senators and congress people, I’m getting a new roof (right now in fact, much hammering overhead), and new flooring (much needed but on hold), and dealing with a wet, rotted sub-floor in the kitchen (not sure how that’s going to turn out). I asked my therapist, “Am I going to get through this?” And she said, “You are getting through it.”
And, miracle of miracles, I have a new review up at EIL — of Matthew Murrey’s Little Joy.
And, other kinds of writing keep seeping out, in part thanks to Sheila Bender’s on-line class about writing grief. In addition to Sheila’s books and my classmates’ posts, I’ve also been reading an anthology, The Language of Loss: Poetry and Prose for Grieving and Celebrating the Love of Your Life, edited by Barbara Abercrombie; and Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief, by David Kessler, which The Los Angeles Times calls the very best kind of self-help book.
My typical strategy now would be share a poem or short prose section from one of these books (so many excellent choices). Instead I’m going to share my own new poem. Excuse any hammering or thumping that creeps into the audio. And thank you for listening.
Grief wakes me in the morning
Bethany Reid, What Am I Doing Here?
and puts me to bed at night.
She stirs sorrow into my oatmeal.
She fusses, adjusting the light
as I read, offering a blanket.
When I leave the house,
she grabs her shoes and goes with me,
walks fast, takes my hand. […]
These are my first gigs for 2026: Catch me if you can, please come, say hello. Not long now, spring soon come, soon come. I sense a big shift for all of us in March. I can feel it, taste it, the world is turning, changing, the universe is shifting. I know prayers will be answered, and this dark shadow will pass, winter will end, so for now please keep on keeping on, keep reaching for the light, and remember to eat your greens and lead with love, always, lots of love xxsg
Salena Godden, Gigs & Festivals & Fundraisers, March 2026
It is worth taking the time to look at a photograph. That instant holds so much. If you have read my favourite book, Lispector’s The Stream of Life, then, you will have thought of the “now-instant.” “Each thing has an instant in which it is.” “Is my theme the instant? my life theme. I try to keep up with it, I divide myself thousands of times, into as many times as the seconds that pass, fragmentary as I am and precarious the moments…”
Mama! O Life! What is the heart? What is it to be human? This instant is already the next instant. What divine frequency are you on so that I might connect to you with my own divine frequency. Hello, I am here! In a world where we paint blue hearts on walls by photo booths and dress them in protective vests. Someone else comes along and writes Gaza in a small black heart.
Nothing will be forgotten though it will take some time to see.
Shawna Lemay, We Live in Time
I thought we’d get to do all sorts of things that we never got to do, travel some, a lot more time out and about. We did get to be at Jaipur Literature Festival and I did some amazing work there, but before that I was hit with the most crazy flu-like thing, and then when that passed and I thought, aha, all good now, and we did Jaipur, a few days after we got back I woke up with a funky neck and then lost all power in my right arm and was bent over so that I could not straighten up. Thankfully, I found perhaps the best physiotherapist in the land, just down the road from me, but it was so bad for a couple of weeks that any walking had me in shards of pain. The medication I ended up on squashed my sense of being in my body, and it’s only a few days since, but something shifted and about 80% of the pain has lifted.
But this is Karma Country. In these three weeks I’ve had to meet my body with absolute tenderness and kindness, accepting what it can and can’t do each day, and, in its way, this has found its way into the new writing. I have to write at a Joycean pace, perhaps slower even, but having to be immobile so much, and with no place or position in which there wasn’t some pain, and no amount of determination from my rough, irascible, Irish, determined side that I tend to lean into when I need to push through would do anything to help or advance the situation, I had to simply allow everything to be as it was, is. Once I did this, the spirit of the writing began to grow, show me avenues and routes that I’d never have thought of in years of black coffees. Yet there is something even greater that has come from this enforced period of tenderness and acceptance. The clarity again of being the author I am. Given some of the dimensions of the world I move through, I do observe many an author, some world-stage famous, operating as a kind of story of themselves that they have to keep up. Either that, or recent reading has shown me that many books of the last couple of generations are a kind of bourgeois level of agreement that uses form as a blanket of consensus of what we mistake literature for. It showed me that I’m not part of that, and the writers and books I truly love are not part of this deepening egregore. I’ll perhaps say more in an essay about this.
While I also observe that I, and the authors who, by whatever means, have managed to stay free, pay for dearly not walking in this valley of vasana. The joy my heart feels at being the insistence to be free to write whatever I want, and that there are books and other authors across human time who have done the same, who have not done what is expected of them by the virality of that cultural conditioning that has reduced art so greatly across every form. As I’ve said before, it may mean these works never get published, never get to you, the reader, in the way I would love them to, but know they are being written, mostly by tenderness and patience rather than any force or pressure. I just keep tuning up in tenderness and the words are there. They are not even pushed to fit a narrative, or fit a genre, or style of deference, they are just there. Calliope is coming to the edge of the field each night to play her flute and my heart has learned to listen better than it ever did when I was almost the famous poetry guy who thankfully spotted the trap ahead of me when I was offered Professor of Poetry at Oxford some years back. That, as they say, is another story, and I know some of you know it, and my why for saying no.
Keep on reading, dear reader, and keep on writing if you write, and as I always I’d love to hear your thoughts, what book you are reading, what you love.
John Siddique, Valentine’s Day Weather Report
some of spring’s small teeth shall be my own
Grant Hacket [no title]