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: cave fish, unnamable muscles, the armpit of the fire, an abandoned glass factory, and much more. Enjoy.
My fingers press on these cold keys and shed
Lori Witzel, Shed
bits of skin too small to see. The wind presses,
too, slips through gaps in the window casings.
A busy wind, chilling my hands while ripping the
last of the winter abscission hold-outs on down.
Leaves shed, dropping off and piling, so slow to
dance. The scars on stems.
As a young BBC business reporter during the first Gulf War in 1991, I was attached to the rolling Radio News service known as ‘Scud FM’, a reference to Iraq’s powerful Scud missiles. Reporters like me (see the young me in pic) would scuttle down to the rolling Radio 4 studio and throw ourselves in front of a mic to answer the eternal question : what’s happening on the oil markets?
I would talk breathlessly about the latest price of Brent Crude and what had sent it up or down, prices at the pump, inflation and interest rates. […]
It is amazing to me how a few words from a news presenter can instil mild feelings of panic in so many of us.
That’s true even when the real economic effects of a headline have not been felt yet. We go through the same cycle of emotions, distress at the human disaster of war and muted fright for ourselves. And it is the familiarity, the repetition, that hits our neural buttons – we have felt it before and we will feel it again.
When I think calmly about the wider phenomenon of repetition, I see its potential as well as the downside.
It is sound and echo, expectation and confirmation. If you put it in a poetic context, we gladly use it all the time. It is one of our most important aural (and visual) tools. Think of tools such as villanelle, sestina, pantoum, anaphora and epistrophe.
It pushes powerful buttons in our minds and makes us listen more carefully. Something repeated is always going to be something significant. It may be a warning.
In the real world, when history repeats itself, it usually is.
Lesley Curwen, Repetition and Gulf Wars
The men who killed poetry
Hated silence . . . Now they have plenty.
Quoted from Larry Levis, “Garcia Lorca: A Photograph of the Granada Cemetery, 1966” in Larry Levis, The Selected Levis | Selected and With an Afterword by David St. John, Rev. Edition (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000, 2003), pp. 62-63
Maureen Doallas, The Sunday Quote
Sharp crack startles the room
vegetation maps forgotten
we regard each otherAnd then the fighter jet howl
Chris Clarke, Letter From the Desert: Ajo
and Tehran
suddenly seems next door
I keep returning to May Sarton’s description of the “poignant evening light,” and the strange shape of poignancy when pronounced — how it goes from the stillness of poignant to the shimmer of that added “ancy”, a sound that reminds me of a city called Nancy in Alsace-Lorraine.
My first glimpse of bears rutting occurred in a park in Nancy, not far from the lycee named after Chopin where I spent part of my seventh grade year unlearning the stability of language.
Today, the adjective “poignant” means “evoking a keenly felt sense of emotion, especially of bittersweet sadness or regret.” But the archaic meaning of this word — “sharp or pungent in taste or smell” — also appears regularly in poems.
And there is the prick of it as well . . .
Alina Stefanescu, “Poignant” in a poem by May Sarton
It is no surprise:
Dove flies,Startled
By an approaching human.Light, smooth as a pebble
Luciana Francis, Dove
Minus the few feathers discarded in fright —
Eight of us met in Bron’s print studio at the Dove on Saturday to critique new work and work-in-progress for our upcoming exhibition at ACEarts in Somerton, featuring new work by the nine active members of Artists’ Book Club Dove, and a selection from guest artist Fiona Hingston. If you’re in the area, do come to meet the artists on Saturday 21st April 11am to 1pm. […]
where nothing happens
the women worry
the men play golftwo colours going
down one side and up the other
a third is the overlapthis is the Grand Canyon
Ama Bolton, ABCD March 2026
put it on white
put it on black
I spent the weekend before last with my brother Adrian at his home in Bath, which is the longest period of time we’ve spent together for donkey’s years and was really lovely. I then caught a bus which travelled through the former mining areas of Somerset around Radstock and Midsomer Norton, before going through the Mendips, with Glastonbury Tor on the horizon, and descending to Wells, the (self-proclaimed) smallest city in England. Wells has a lovely centre – mainly but not only the beautiful Gothic cathedral and the adjoining, fully-moated Bishop’s Palace. […]
Ama Bolton and her group of like-minded folk, the Fountain Poets, were very welcoming, and read – and, in Rachael Clyne’s case, sang – some fine pieces. I read from both my collections plus a couple of new poems too. Ama has kindly invited me back for another reading next March, so I’d better write lots more poems in the next 11 and a half months. I must add the not-quite-random fact that both Ama and I have had poems published about dental hygienists!
Matthew Paul, Beetle in a box
When Kim and I set up Shaw & Moore, both of us were in the final stages of our next collections, and neither of us were convinced that we weren’t just seeking distraction from the monumental tasks of drafting, ordering, editing, setting out, proofreading and the hundred other vital jobs involved in finishing a book.
We probably were, but it’s worked out well all the same. We intended to share our journeys towards completion and publication, whilst reflecting on our lives as poets and parents and friends, our various enthusiasms, the challenges we face as poets with ADHD.
Inevitably, the Substack has evolved and expanded over the last two years to encompass many shiny, sharp or fascinating things which have distracted us along the way. As my therapist says, it’s not that I lack attention – it’s that I have too MUCH of it. I am constantly distracted by the world.
Kim’s new book “The House of Broken Things” is finished, and it’s due out on 23rd April. You can pre-order it here, or you could come to the afternoon launch in the Wainsgate Chapel on the hills above Hebden Bridge on 3rd May, where she’ll be supported with readings from me, Amanda Dalton, Carola Luther and Malika Booker. There’ll also be live music and cake – tickets available here.
Clare Shaw, You were the forest and you were my mother
Facebook, Twitter, Blue Sky, Instagram, TikTok, Substack…Which feel useful to you instead of like distractions, or worse, something that makes you feel worse, that drains you? I am contemplating this as I am trying to decide where to stay, which to cut, where to spend energy. As you can probably tell, I’ve been blogging for a long time, and I don’t really want to stop now. This is where I feel most comfortable.
I was thinking about how I follow writers, artists and musicians—like I learned about the Aimee Mann concert from a post of hers on Instagram and the last piece of art I got I learned about from an artist’s Instagram post as well. I hear about books from my writer friends mostly on Facebook—but books from authors I don’t know—it’s harder to pin down where I hear about them. The next time I have a new book, I’m not even sure what social media network will be working, not run by a supervillain, or where writers and readers congregate. I do know that I keep in touch with friends and family on various platforms—even LinkedIn sometimes (yes, I do have an old profile there). It shouldn’t be hard to cancel one social media or another, but somehow, I just keep hanging in there, posting once in a while.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Surprise Snow, Aimee Mann and Daffodils in Mt Vernon, and Social Media Musings
in a zen temple
near Arashiyma, an old man
dragged neat lines down soft gravelnothing else stirred
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Stuck on a hospital bed at fifty-six, mortality mixing with the saline in my IV, I wondered if writing poetry would be a good use of the time I had left
cloud and bird and leaf and eye and breath
paused to watch
though later, each one would swear
that they had seen something different
I gazed upon several astounding pieces, one after another encased in a glowing, golden light, a rotunda filled with Surrealist alchemy. My she-roes on full display, the intensity and intricacy of each painting and photograph I beheld with new eyes, though I’d seen a few of the Varo pieces up close at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen in Chicago many years prior.
And yet, one solitary painting stole my heart, captured it, and left me thinking for the rest of my journey: “The Inner City” by abstract expressionist / Surrealist, Alice Rahon.
Rahon (another Gemini) was a French-born Mexican poet and artist who used the technique of sgraffito (scratching into canvas or metal) in her work. Like Frida, Rahon suffered a serious childhood accident which put her in casts and affected the rest of her life: one of the injuries was a fracture in the right hip, which forced her to recuperate lying down for long periods of time (like Frida). Rahon was invited, with two other artists / writers, to visit Mexico by Andre Breton and Frida. (Rahon was the first female to be published in Editions Surréalistes in Paris in 1936; as well, she and Frida had become fast friends).
One of Alice’s poetry books, À même la terre (On The Ground), featured a poem in which a woman “removes her face / safe from the traps of mirrors”. And another line, almost describing the painting (done years later): “Like the ember with blue down / in the armpit of the fire / that speaks in sparks”.
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Inner synchro-cities.
Canadian winter is not the only reason we like to come to Mexico City in March. We love being here when the city’s iconic “purple trees”, the jacarandas, are in bloom. For northerners like us, the very idea of a purple-flowering full-size tree is astonishing, and enchanting.
Beth Adams, Jacaranda
HOPKINSON: There’s something surreal and completely sad about seeing a poem for only a second and then having it wiped away by technology. I think I’m crying and excited at the same time. What emotions do you hope participants will experience?
MEDSKER: Haha! I hope that people feel startled, then sad, then excited. It’s an exercise in being present. Something I’ve struggled with every day of my life. Ugh!
HOPKINSON: Why poetry?
MEDSKER: Poetry is sort of the way I think now. Condensing a slew of complex feelings and observations into as tight a space as possible. Their economy lends itself to accompanying a photo on a smartphone.
Composing the photos is the big feat for me. I’ve always wanted to be adept with visual art. Hopefully this will hone my eye!
HOPKINSON: This could be seen as commentary on the whole concept of social media, the lack of tangibility, the short attention span of humans, or the fleeting connection of life to art–is it any of these things?
MEDSKER: Absolutely. It’s a direct comment on the digital glut we live in. I don’t know about you, but I get overloaded with info very quickly. And it just turns my mind into a fragmented mess. It’s comforting, in a weird way, to know that these poems and pictures can be experienced but not held on to. I think that’s the real key… that these are meant to be experienced, not consumed. And there’s a difference between reading that statement and actually experiencing it in real time.
There’s this assumption that people have, I think, that we can stave off death if we work hard enough, care enough, consume enough… I hope this project helps people to be more contemplative about the fleeting nature of experience.
I have been doing a lot of pictures of flowers and wildlife. Sometimes I’ll throw a curveball like a thick metal chain on a gate or something. An old brick apartment blocks in the Bronx. The photos are often just something I think looks interesting and has a tangential relation to the words. Hopefully the juxtapositions are interesting to people.
I am always on the lookout for something to snap, and then I come up with the poem on the fly. I don’t like to fret too much about the lines. It’s a direct conversation between me and one other person, so I like to keep it intuitive.
Trish Hopkinson, Disappearing Poems on Instagram – Interview with Josh Medsker
Each of the poets involved in the project, which was designed by Gill Connors, was sent a poem as part of a chain and asked to write a poem in response to it. I remember being excited when I saw that a poem had arrived in my inbox. I purposefully did not open the email until I had time to be at my writing desk with a dedicated time to think and write because I was keen to capture my response as cleanly as possible.
Firstly, I read the poem on the page in the same way that I read all poems that I am meeting for the first time. Then to increase my interaction and feel for the poem I read it out loud to myself. My usual way of starting the drafting of a poem when I know I am going to write is to use a fountain pen and a notebook. On this occasion I jotted down the parts of the received poem that resonated with me most strongly and let my mind take these thoughts for a walk. I found myself focussed on plate spinning, things imagined, and the passing of time. An idea began to emerge around the comments related to the t-shirt and the fact I had invented a persona that was beautifully fantastical.
Once I have ideas for a poem, I like to swap to typing into a word document so I can chop and change words and lines easily as the poem takes shape. Forming the whole on a clean page helps me think. I used this method to form a solid draft before rereading the poem I had received to find out if I could sense a link. I decided that I could, and that the evolution of a new poem from one read was happening naturally and in that sense, it was good to just go with it. After spending a little more time drafting and editing my work and reading it aloud, I left it alone overnight.
Sue Finch, STUNT GIRL
As there is habitat loss in the world, so my sense of the habitat of my body feels reduced. Fragmented. The points of contact feel diminished. I’m virtual, a ghost floating over place, even as I understand how my body is written on by its environment. That what my body is is a result of its entanglement, its symbiosis with the ubiquitous network of materials and forces it lives in.
I look to language to help me understand. By putting pressure on the language I have access to, I hope to gain insight into how I am entangled in environment. I use language for points of contact with the world, points of interpretation for that contact. Speaking or reading my way into a more aware connection with the world. My habitat is being lost, so I attempt to rebuild it by finding a home in the words that help me relate to it. Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt becomes Umwort. The environment constructed through an organism’s awareness of words.
Gary Barwin, Language as habitat, as ecotone,
According to Lawrence Beaston in Talking To a Silent God: Donne’s Holy Sonnets and The Via Negativa, the Holy Sonnets, which Donne wrote between 1609 and 1610, render a spiritual struggle that many contemporary readers find troubling. For these readers, Beaston asserts, the “note of despair” the poems consistently strike is “out of keeping” with Donne’s position not just as an Anglican priest, but also as the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Given the spiritual leadership Donne was expected to provide, Beaston goes on, these readers expect the Holy Sonnets to arrive at some version of “spiritual health.” Since the poems explicitly do not do that, he argues, since they actively resist such a reading, to find them wanting on this account is to fail read them on their own terms.
Instead, Beaston proposes a reading that places the poems in the “long tradition of Christian mysticism,” known as the via negativa, which “insists upon…the vast difference” between God and humans not as a reason for despair, but as evidence that God “work[s] to effect the salvation of his believers even in their experience of his silence, his apparent absence.” In this view, Donne’s speaker becomes a “penitent individual…beseeching God for some spiritual grace,” despite the fact that he receives “no apparent response;” and God’s silence becomes not an occasion for the speaker’s “despair,” but rather the poet’s way of representing God’s “radical otherness”—the impossibility of rendering God’s presence in words. Read in this context, the homosexual violence the speaker calls down upon himself, metaphorical though it may be, becomes a final, desperate act of abject surrender, offered in full knowledge that God will neither accept nor reject it; and the speaker should be understood as being fine with that, in the sense that God’s response is not his goal. Having arrived at the point where he can surrender himself in this way is.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Power We Pretend Not To See – 4
Cruel, needless death: arms, legs, dismembered
Brad Skow, Prelude to a Storm
Bodies, all blasted in a heavy cloud of dirt
And blood. The wounded horses we could shoot,
But for the human beings we had nothing.
This was the enemy that we would fight.
We made our camp, and after darkness fell,
By lamplight our commanding officer said
Heads down, my boys, spirits high, you’ve trained for this.
We’re now at war. When you shoot, shoot to kill.
We stood, and grabbed our packs, and marched into the night.
The latest title by Montreal-born Olivia Tapiero [performing virtually next week as part of VERSeFest] is Nothing at All (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2026), translated into English by Kit Schluter, and published with a Foreword by Anne Boyer. Nothing at All is a collection that Boyer describes as “a vital, accruing, distributed process.” “The threat precedes me. The chkoumoune,” Tapiero writes, via Schluter’s translation, mid-way through the collection, “the shour, which my grandmother pronounces zhor when she tells me about the spells the crumpled spirits impose on those women who attract the evil eye. One morning, in a village where the wind drives people mad, her mother wakes her up screaming, forbidding her to look in the mirror: the zhor has disfigured her, her childlike features have drained from the right side of her face.” Nothing at All reads as an expansive lyric gesture of shadow and liquid, relaying story and trauma across an expansive suite of fragments composed via an accumulation of prose poems, prose poem sections, writing of endings and beginnings; writing history and its devastations, accumulations; its ripples, and its waves. Set in sections of self-contained but interconnected prose sections—“Black Hole,” “Now You Say Nothing,” “Letter,” “Here I Am, a Dull Transplant,” “Zhor” and “The Unthinkable Orifice”—Tapiero’s precise, prose abstracts on and around war and memory, family story and upheavals read as echoes of works by the late Etel Adnan (1925-2021) [see my review of her most recent here] or even Canadian expat Nathanaël, asking, precisely, what one inherits through such a history, and one so deeply present.
rob mclennan, Olivia Tapiero, Nothing at All (trans. Kit Schluter
Peter Dent’s Previous consists of five titled short prose poem sequences, each of five numbered sections of three lines of text. The poems are made up primarily of oblique observations of the world in a language that is simultaneously hermetic and transparent, or flickering between those two states. Here’s an example, the fourth part of the opening piece, ‘States of Undress’:
No fraternizing with those at the top who keep mouth-to-
mouth records in high duty alloy files marked LATER.
Think freely. Sleep it off in the comfort of your own bed.No one sentence necessarily leads to the next, and yet, taken as a whole, they cohere as a series of near-impossible imperatives; ‘think freely’ is as reasonable an instruction as ‘don’t think of an elephant’, for instance. But the overall effect is not unlike, say, a condensed version of 1984.
Billy Mills, Two Peter Dent Pamphlets
My debut collection (Black Bough Poetry, 2025) explores an era of change through the speaker’s relationships with people and the world. The symbolic juxtaposition of light and dark runs through these poems to highlight the contradictory nature of our experiences and subsequent transformations at different stages of life. It suggests that darkness is a necessary, if not temporary, state as we face grief, doubt and despair – one that will eventually give way to hope, freedom and a light that shines through personal growth.
The title poem, I Am Not Light, serves as a thematic hinge as the final piece in the first section of this three-part collection. This poem began as an observation of a pair of curtains that had faded through exposure to sunlight. This image and the first line of the poem sat with me as I ruminated upon the ideas of physical and emotional transformation through loss. The “sun-bleached” curtains became a metaphor to explore aging, memory, and the gradual alterations of identity, ultimately suggesting that fading does not erase value but creates a more complex sense of self.
Drop-in by Louise Machen (Nigel Kent)
Let us turn first to that evergreen truth: the only time poetry ever makes the news is when poets fight. It’s never because someone’s written a great poem, or an unusually terrible poem, or a poem which has upset the authorities enough for them to bite back. (We could try writing something they couldn’t get out of their heads; that would annoy them. Aye, sorry; crazy idea.) No: it’s always ‘poets at war’. You may have noticed a couple of recent news stories involving two journals, Gutter and Aftershock, both of which cancelled work when they later discovered its author or subject held opinions that were offensive to them.
It’s all a great shame. There have been positive signs over the last couple of years that our fractious little community is slowly coming back together after a period of unprecedented and often horrible division. Many of its architects, however, remain in positions of some administrative influence. As peace slowly breaks out, we can expect to see them directing some rearguard action.
It’s almost comical, for those of us old enough to remember how it all started: a good faith attempt to correct for biases in poetry publishing that had obtained for as long as anyone could remember. For countless decades in the UK, these had operated primarily and most egregiously against women; poetry had also shut out the provinces, the working class and ethnic minorities. By the 90s, things had markedly improved. But from the start of the millennium, this project was subsumed by wave after wave of sociocultural, demographic, technological and economic change. These great changes brought with them new political priorities, but also a raft of peer-group rules and incentive schemes which older artists often found impossible to parse. We watched as our well-intentioned project changed from one of redress to progressivism, from remedial balance to ideological correction.
In the case of poetry, this involved the revision of what was meant by literary merit. Some folk began to tell themselves a different story about the value they found in certain poems. Their critical attention shifted from the skillfulness of the poem to the authenticity of its performance; this was a sign that their cultural attention was shifting from the poem to the poet. It led, in the end, to the creation of two different camps, with each reading poetry – and, eventually, defining ‘the poem’ – in very different ways. You could attempt to belong to both, but not without a lot of mental contortion. […]
It takes very little time to alter the meaning of words. They go to wherever their value concentrates. A ‘good poem’ once meant a poem which demonstrated something like ‘the skilful manipulation of symbols within a word-game whose rules were broadly agreed’. Now I’ll often hear folk use it to mean ‘the work of a good poet’; and in ‘good poet’ I know they mean ‘the kind of person I find admirable, or feel I should’.
Don Paterson, Poets are in the News Again
How
is it a flaw to be moved by the world,
to be undone by what was felledor disfigured, torn from its bed?
May we be tender through the frost
that comes to kill everything,the scrubbing after the stain that
Luisa A. Igloria, The Winter Garden
reddened the walls and toppled
the chairs to the floor.
When I first began my study of saijiki, I found it difficult to operate within two calendars at once. The classical haiku calendar, which uses the solstices and equinoxes as the midpoints of the seasons, made more sense in relation to my lived experience. However, the Gregorian calendar guides the country in which I live. Sometimes, it is deeply frustrating to see people celebrating “the first day of spring” when spring has been evident for weeks. I get irrationally annoyed that The Old Farmer’s Almanac – an inherently agricultural text! – eschews the preindustrial boundaries of the seasons and adopts the Gregorian seasonal boundaries. However, my exposure to different religious traditions helped me understand that all over the world, people adhere to different calendars. I’ve of course learned about the Jewish liturgical calendar; life in St. Louis has also exposed me to the Catholic liturgical year, as well as the Orthodox Christian year. In my own personal studies, I’ve learned about Hindu and Buddhist calendars as well. Most people with a specific religious or cultural identity navigate their specific calendar along with the Gregorian one. There’s no reason why a haiku poet can’t do that as well.
Likewise, my understanding of season words and what they mean cannot be limited to my experiences living in the Midwest and the American South my entire life. I have to recognize that my experience of summer will never be the same as the experience of someone living in Iceland. The world is too big to contain any individual’s limited knowledge of seasons. In fact, it’s too big to contain any one saijiki’s attempts to categorize the seasons. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t study saijiki. Rather, we have the saijiki as a foundation that guides our experience, but doesn’t dictate it. After all, even the strictest saijiki won’t refuse to let poets write about the moon in the spring.
As I wrap up this post, I’m reminded of this enduring haiku from Shiki:
for me going
for you staying—
two autumnsThis haiku points to the individual experiences of two friends who will spend autumn in different regions. Today, it has me thinking about how there are in fact innumerable autumns (and winters and springs and summers). That is not to say that we should take a purely individualistic approach to the seasons, but rather that we should recognize the incredible variety within collective experience.
Allyson Whipple, Innumerable Autumns
Here’s something I drafted two weeks ago. A seasonal poem with a hint of frustration and a little relief:
Late February
Ann E. Michael, Ides, ideas
And I’m awaiting
the buzzards’ return.
Each year
they migrate just
two or three months
then reappear
on their snag perches
and on updrafts,
wings outstretched
to embrace
the sky.
I can’t say I miss them
in winter
yet am glad
of their return
which signals
a tiny season
one wedge in winter’s grip
that says
it is just warm enough
for decay’s odors
to reach turkey vultures’
nasal cavities.
Soon there will be
skunk cabbage
and skunks will awaken.
Here, spring commences
with leaf-mold stink
and buzzards.
Reader,
try to be grateful.
The Oregon poet Hazel Hall (1886–1924), paralyzed at age 12 following an episode of scarlet fever, left school after the fifth grade to educate herself at home. Like other bright girls in literary history, left to manage themselves in a house full of books (Anne Bradstreet, for example, comes to mind), she read voraciously. It’s no surprise that as such Modernist poets as Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay began their ascendency, in the 1910s and 20s, Hall not only read them but responded to their influence with poems of her own.
In the course of her relatively short life and poetic career, which included three books of poetry — Curtains in 1921, Walkers in 1923, and the posthumous Cry of Time, which her sister compiled and published in 1928 — she gained a reputation as “Oregon’s Emily Dickinson.” Today Hall shares (with William Stafford) the name for the Oregon Book Award for poetry.
Today’s Poem, “Two Sewing,” takes the severity of spring weather as its overt subject, though its real concern is its own music. Its couplet pairs with their tight rhymes create one level of pattern, in tension with a metrical pattern of predominantly tetrameter and trimeter lines. The poem’s sounds become as mesmerizing as those of the wind and rain it describes.
In particular, the repeated “In, in, in” of lines 5 and 22 strikes in much the same register as Tennyson’s “Break, break, break.” Its three monosyllabic stressed feet, set off by commas whose enforced pauses suggest the missing unstressed syllables in those feet, drive home the intensity of the actions of spring wind and rain. But what’s also fascinating in this lyric is the conceit of sewing, which presents the often destructive vagaries of weather in the springtime as actually constructive, engaged in putting the world back together, stitch by stitch, “for all the springs of futurity.”
Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Two Sewing
I didn’t know this, but when news of his death reached London, around this time, in March but of 1821, thirty-four newspapers published announcements of his death. Thirty-four. Most were only brief notices, just a few lines, but typically they described him as “John Keats, the poet” Not a poet but the poet. The poet.
When I first arrived at Keats-Shelley House, and I say this to you in confidence, I felt a presence. I’m not going to get all woo-woo with you and I’m quite sure I brought a certain energy there myself, conjured something in that space having become intimately acquainted with the poet over these last months, I most likely manifested my own projection of him.
Of course there was expectation, stepping inside that house, stepping inside his house, moving through the poet’s rooms, well, you’d want to feel something too wouldn’t you? And just as, if you’re receptive enough, you can feel moved reading a poem or hearing music or witnessing drama in theatre or film, so it was there, elevated from the page, a vibration, an atmosphere, the essence of poetry. Only without words.
That first evening, after they’d closed the museum, when they’d locked all the doors, after the crowds had drifted away from the Piazza, there was the kind of silence you might imagine being or not being heard two hundred years ago. And I felt it, a sense that I’d interrupted something, had intruded, arrived without invite. The coldness of London stirring in the ancient heart of Rome.
“This is my patch pal, my manor, my gaff” the spirit might have said and yet it wasn’t entirely unwelcoming, more it was trying to assert dominion over the territory, not chasing me out simply deciding whether I might be accepted there, to share the air, bunk in his crib, couch in his cell.
I know this feeling well. This, this is what it is like being a writer, what it is like doing the poetry, among snobs and toffs, in the presence of gatekeepers and taste testers, parvenus and pretenders. They will jostle and muscle and budge but they wont throw you out. Neither will they let you in. The best advice I ever received about getting on in this business was, “Just keep reminding them that you’re not going away.” And so, in order to make claim on the space, I undid my laces, removed my boots, walked bare foot across the night tiles, those same clay tiles that have carried centuries of feet and l felt, if not a connection then a stronger closeness to it, to him, to the poet.
Jan Noble, Nº55 Signals sent from the poet’s house
The Island in the Sound (Bloodaxe, 2024) is Niall Campbell’s third full collection, though the first of his that I’ve owned. Campbell is a fairly high profile young-ish/early middle-aged Scottish poet who’s done the sort of things you’d expect for an established poet of his age in the UK: his first collection won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and his second was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Back in 2011, he won an Eric Gregory award, the traditional post-university prize for the up-and-coming UK poet. (You have to be under thirty.) More recently, he took over as editor of Poetry London and his approach to the magazine persuaded me to re-subscribe. […]
I enjoyed the lightly-borne but unapologetic literariness of this collection, with poems referring or alluding to Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. S. Graham, Jules Laforgue, William Blake, Borges, Hart Crane, Robert Browning, Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare and the Persian poet Farid ud-din Attar. There’s a real sense of a range of experience and reference, reflected in a variety of form that emerges naturally from the “world” of the collection — without that sense that you sometimes get that a poet is making a careful attempt to show us they can do more than one thing.
Naturally I liked some of these poems less than others, and I could have done with a few fewer pieces self-consciously ‘about’ poetry itself. I disliked, for instance, the arch and internet-meme style title ‘Three Folk-tale Characters Who Are Definitely Not Metaphors for the Poem’, but I liked the three poems themselves. They reminded me a bit of similar short sequences of folk-tale-type poems in recent collections I’ve read by Rory Waterman (Come Here to This Gate) and Reagan Upshaw (In the Panhandle), in both cases presented ‘straight’. If a fine poet can’t tell a fairy story, who can? I don’t think there’s any need to add defensive scare-quotes.
I appreciated also the sense of a real range of addressees in Campbell’s book — I think this is a kind of corollary of the range of literary reference. Sometimes a collection contains lots of essentially similar poems dedicated or addressed to a range of people and there doesn’t seem that much connection between the style and form of the poem and the addressee. Here, though, there’s a real sense of speaking in different ways to different people. A moving and understated series of verse epistles, ‘Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage’ run throughout the collection (tantalisingly, numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8, so not, presumably, quite all of the sequence). Written in rather loosely metrical lines, these are some of the most conversational poems in the book.
Victoria Moul, Two good poetry books
The Tattoo Collector – Tim Tim Cheng (Nine Arches Press)
“Your train passes a valley –
Mountains around you
are unnameable muscles.
Your insides
shift like sand
as animals go ashore.”I’d had this book on my ‘to read’ list for over a year and I’m so glad I finally got it for Christmas. Tim Tim is a poet of real skill and deftness. She plays a lot with erasure and other forms where the poem is found from within another text. This is a great way of dismantling and undercutting received narratives, and has now inspired me to try similar things in my own work. I enjoy the precision of Tim Tim’s work, even where she is working within and across multiple languages – the clarity of thought is always there.
Victoria Spires, Some things I’ve read recently – Part 2
I realized at some point during this convention that it’s 20 years since I attended my first AWP, in Texas. I didn’t know anyone in 2006 and approached AWP less artistically than critically: how are the readings and panels framed, and what literary values do those formats express? How do writers represent their affiliations through their performance styles and self-presentations, scare quotes and square coats? I’d been learning how to look and sound like a literature professor, and my attendance, after all, constituted research (I analyzed the conference, alongside other ways poetry manifests in public, in a 2008 scholarly book, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present).
The 2006 AWP panels, while closely resembling those at scholarly conferences in format, seemed scattershot in quality. The scholar in me was shocked by how little background work some presenters seemed to do preparing for them. AWP panels are better now, yet I attend fewer of them. I’m interested in many of the topics. I’m just running around in my writer hat: connecting with old and new friends over lunch or tea, doing signings and off-site readings, checking out the Book Fair.
In 2026, I can report on only one AWP panel that wasn’t my own. Early on, I lost my hand-written list of what I planned to attend, along with my favorite water bottle, thus ramping myself up quickly to Maximal AWP Disorientation, a condition that eventually takes down many conference-goers. I forgot the time of one panel I’d been determined to make; I got shut out of another, “Poetry and the Sacred” (room at capacity).
The panel I did squeeze into, though, was funny as well as thoughtful. (I couldn’t see if they were wearing thematically appropriate outfits, since the room was full and I sat way in the back.) “Alternative Nation, or Whatever: Gen X Perspectives on the Writing Life” reminded me about the wars, epidemics, economic crises, and toxic prejudices of the late twentieth century AND the mixtapes, miniseries, and problematic literary smashes (Flowers in the Attic, anyone?). Tara Betts talked about reading as a pleasure and a freedom–and how hard that reality can be to translate to her students now. Most presenters addressed the stereotypes of slacker, wiseass nihilist, and the “loser with pointless integrity” (that’s a quote from Matthew Zapruder’s poem “Generation X,” discussed by B. K. Fischer). Paisley Rekdal described the literary culture she entered as a Gen Xer: creative writing workshops, mostly taught and enrolled by white people, characterized literary subjectivity and political engagement as naive, anti-intellectual, and anti-aesthetic (a position espoused VERY strongly in the scholarly world, too, where only the avant-garde among contemporary writers seemed to be breaking into the canon). Rekdal cited Cathy Park Hong’s influential critique of this attitude in “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde”. (I flashed back to the modernism conferences where male Language poets in leather jackets held court in the hotel bar.) Gen X writers, according to Rekdal, went on to break down some of those attitudes and open a lot of doors–but remarked that our generation is also responsible for the current accommodationist ethos in universities. I’d like to hear a whole keynote by Paisley Rekdal one day. As I might have put it in the 80s, she’s wicked smart.
Lesley Wheeler, Square coats: AWP & Shenandoah
everyone has their own private capitalism
Robin Gow, limited edition flavor
like a daughter in their coffee cup.
a hand beneath a pillow. the self without
any lungs. the little hunger that eats the dark.
mine is a gone flavor. something marketed
with shiny teeth & iridescent packages.
mystery flavor the color of cave fish.
Do you ever wake up wondering how to live? I don’t mean in the face of terror and imminent death, as so many around the world are facing in this war torn world, I mean just the daily ordinariness of getting up and getting on with things, whatever those things are. I look around and wonder if there’s something I’m supposed to be doing, something that I don’t know about or have forgotten. And why. I wonder: Is despair a reasonable response to some days’ unfoldings, or is hope the only way to go? Is gratitude just a way of distracting from doing the vacuuming? When is trying to make something happen worth doing and when is it folly? And do you only know when you’ve either succeeded or failed? When is desire just a failure of gratitude and when is it a useful engine for change? And when is effecting change a useful effort and when should you just sit still and breathe for a while? And when have you been breathing and sitting still for too long like a scared rabbit and you should just go make a run for it? These are things I wonder some days. Dysphoria, c’est moi, as a natural state of being, some days. More days than I care to admit to. So, sometimes, poems can provide some momentary stay against all that. I said “momentary.” There’s only so much poetry can do. Here’s a little prayer from Pádraig Ó Tuama, from his book Kitchen Hymns, from Copper Canyon Press.
Marilyn McCabe, When the wren wakes I’ll ask
Li-Young Lee is a strong poet of family – creating throughout his works an atmosphere of home that is vivid and inviting – even when he conjures up the small terrors familial relationships can display. The image of father looms in several of his best poems. In “Eating Together,” Lee focuses on the absence of father, or, more precisely, on the family space the father once occupied.
The poem, which melds the tenderness of family with the ache of loss, begins with the rich smells of a shared meal. I like the attention to detail here: “slivers of ginger, / two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.” The “we” of line four gives the family a hallowed moment – this is the clearest descriptive I can write for how I react to these lines – a moment made warm by their gathering around the table for the meal that is surely a good-bye to the dead father.
The physical motions of the mother, probably addressing her own grief, recall the recent past, tasting
“the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago.”Human action in most of Lee’s works, certainly in this poem, takes on an almost sacred presence. This meal is such a beautiful setting, made even more sharp and direct by the use of few words – and it’s perhaps the brevity, with nothing wasted, that shapes the poem’s impact on the reader – definitely this reader.
In the closing lines, however, the warm scene surrenders to the cold inevitability of loss. Lee finishes the poem with a powerful simile for death: “a snow-covered road / winding through pines.” The loss is real and is felt in the depths of the silent, snowy road – a strong poetic visual that recalls the isolated but compelling winter images by the artist Hiroshige Ando. It’s the final line I can’t escape – a road with no travelers but “lonely for no one.”
Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Li-Young Lee, “Eating Together”
Swaddle them in manuscript.
Mold them with the soft indent
of pen, of ink, jet-black as their hair.Your characters will be their playmates,
your stories their dreams, woven
for them like any toy a mother weaves
from scrap yarn, remnant cloth.When they taste simile and metaphor
Renee Emerson, Literary Mama
they will be glad to have a literary mother,
glad for the sweet drip of language
over lips and tongue.
There is an idea that more people write poetry than read it. Often, this argument is made by people who edit poetry magazines. Most recently, Sam Leith has made this argument, in response to this Note worrying that the Venn diagram of people who read and who write poetry is a circle.
To a certain extent, this is just the sort of exaggeration one expects on the internet. But it is important to note that the idea is false. According to NEA data, something like 9-12% of American adults read poetry. That is some thirty or forty million people. In the UK last year, over a million books of poetry were sold.
Now, maybe these numbers have changed from earlier times, but do we think they are very much higher than in the past? There is simply no way that these millions of people are sending poems to magazines. That is not what the editors’ anecdotes suggest. They are seeing the multiple submissions, the prolific minority, the enthusiastic “Sunday poets”, but they are not seeing the silent readers, who don’t talk much about their reading, let alone write about it, who don’t go to readings or workshops.
Theirs is an understandable point of view. Beleaguered editors are inundated with submissions from people who do not subscribe to the magazine, but all the people reading Poetry Foundation or Poetry Archive, pulling down an old favourite from the shelf, discovering a new poem as they scroll—they don’t need or want poetry magazines. (Maybe they should, though: Victoria Moul reviews some options if you are interested…)
A lot of poetry magazines, we must be honest, are full of poems that not all poetry readers want to read, either because they will read them in books and anthologies (or online) later on, or because there is never going to be much of an audience for the work. These magazines are part of a winnowing process, in which many readers will not, understandably, wish to take part.
It is reasonable to think that we must have flourishing poetry magazines of the old-fashioned sort, but lots of poets publish online—some of them here on Substack!—and they do just fine.
There are still plenty more readers than writers of poetry, they just may not be reading what the editors wish them to read.
Henry Oliver, Do more people write poetry than read it?
favourite corner
Jim Young [no title]
the cat takes ownership
of the sun
I woke in the middle of the night with the germ of this poem circling inside my head. I got up and sketched the bare bones in the light of a street lamp.
HOW TO CORRUPT YOUR COUNTRY
- start with the teachers. Make them mouth your new lies. Fashion the curriculum until it mirrors your twisted logic and hate is triumphant
- control the media. This goes without saying. Pass laws that make truth telling illegal.
- silence all who dare to disagree. Show trials can be effective, as can framing the innocent. If this fails fall back on the death squads.
- have neighbour inform on neighbour, brother on sister. Offer incentives to ensure that none will know who they can trust.
- once all this is achieved, begin to purge those closest to you. The corruption you have condoned will provide real evidence.
- try to sleep at night, if you can.
It is an angry poem. How many times have individuals sought to destroy democracy? Probably since we invented democracies. This is a work in progress. I worry it is too hectoring, far too much tell and not enough show. Plus it is essentially a list poem and it is difficult to pull off a list poem without it sounding simply a list!
Paul Tobin, HOW TO CORRUPT YOUR OWN COUNTRY
I got an MFA in Writing years before I went to rabbinical school. (Thanks, Bennington.) Writing is my other vocation, and a lot of my identity is wrapped up in that. I know that rabbis are exhausted — the last several years have been a Lot. I know not everyone has time or capacity to develop the literary skills I hold dear. And yet hearing that some (many?) of my colleagues turned to AI for sermon help filled me with uncomfortable feelings.
So I sat with that. Why does this bother me so much? Here are the seven answers I’ve landed on. […]
AI is good for large-scale data processing, and for things like searching medical scans or DNA code for markers of disease. AI translation tools can be useful in medical settings, especially rural ones (and especially in conjunction with live human translators who can offer nuance and context.) AI is good for automating repetitive tasks. And some of these things are probably worth AI’s current environmental cost, though I still think we need to figure out how to exact less of a price from the earth.
But writing, painting, poetry, composing…? Not a chance.
Using AI to create art (and in case this needs to be said, I see poetry, sermons, and divrei Torah as art forms) bothers me both because we risk the atrophying of our artistry and because creating art is something human beings can do. An AI can mimic the product of a human heart, but it is fundamentally not the human heart. I fear that something spiritual is lost in us when we outsource our creative capacity in that way.
I wouldn’t ask an AI to help me write my poetry. Or to write a love letter, because what makes a love letter matter is not the information therein but the stumbling, imperfect, human expression of its author’s heart. And that’s also why I wouldn’t ask an AI to write (or even to help me write) a d’var Torah or a sermon.
Rachel Barenblat, The words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart (or: why I refuse AI)
This past week, I managed two nights sleeping on the cold floor of the Pittsburgh Airport. I am a pro at airport sleeping. One flight was at 6 a.m., so it wasn’t worth getting to a hotel. As I settled in for the night, I remembered getting up in the night at the Farm, all the kids who used to wet their beds. I did not because I did not drink any water. The kids who got thirsty would wet the bed because they were lonely and cold. I found myself in that same cold in the airport, sleeping in my clothes with my golden coat draped over me.
Earlier, as I wandered through the airport, I got word that there was a thing about a cover. I needed to talk with an author about a cover change, and the production team was feeling exhausted because they had already tried out so many covers. What to do next! I listened. I registered. I called the authors. I solved the cover. To me, that’s a tiny problem. Yes, we must have a great cover, but of course, we will.
The big problems that keep me up at night, whether I’m on the floor or in a bed, are raising funds to keep publishing poetry, and fundraising in general. I want to keep our poetry program alive. Find new board members. Build the editorial circle. Pay the bills. I want the authors to love their covers as well, but keeping the machine going is the wheel on which I turn and turn.
Kate Gale, The Story of the Summit: Finding My Footing in Risk
I wanted a break from schmoozing and talking to strangers at the writing conference. But that did not happen. He introduced himself as Thomas and I learned that he is a mythology professor at a university in Ohio, so of course he liked my response to the writing prompt from that morning in which I spontaneously took my legs off my body, planted them in the woods, rendering my torso a trunk writhing with cicadas and in wonder of watching my legs grow amongst the trees as the years go by.
The four feet of dark, gray space between my childhood home and the neighbor’s house. The abandoned glass factory near the Allegheny River and its grimy floor covered in ledgers, the handwriting within them almost impossible to decipher. The Allegheny River and its pits of gurgling mud and green riverside oases. The wooded edge of anyone’s backyard, away from the crowd of the party, where I have seen red fox, mice, and of course the birds. The forbidden, dangerous landscape of railroad tracks. The dark tapering world of my childhood home’s closet, well beyond the hanging coats, the sound of people looking for me as they go up the creaking steps above my head. All my life I have been drawn to the lonely, dark, once-was places. Away from the adults. Away from my peers. Knee-deep and stuck in mud. Entering abandoned mine shafts like a reverse birth. Decades-old exhaust grit lining the part in my hair and crunching between my teeth as I walked hunched-over in abandoned turnpike tunnel ventilation shafts. All my life, I’ve felt out-of-place and alien to nearly every person around me, even my closest friends. All my life, I’ve laughed at and belittled myself around them so that I wouldn’t have to explain myself.
Earlier that morning, in front of an audience of just under 100 people, a celebrated poet called writing for one’s self precious. I hadn’t heard that word in a negative connotation since my MFA program about 15 years ago. You don’t want for your writing to be precious. It is precious to say that you only write for yourself when you actually mean that you fear rejection from an audience. Listening to this poet, I allowed my mind to groan and roll its eyes. I am guilty of just writing for myself. It is something I have done nearly all my life. Right? I allowed what he said to steep in my mind as I sat through the morning’s next panel discussion. I thought of an interview I once listened to with the writer Ocean Vuong as the guest. He talked about his books being “sent down the river,” meaning that once the book is out of his hands and in the public, the book takes on a life of its own. A life he cannot control. I thought of my own writing and how when I release it into the river, it just spins in circles and bobs back and forth from shore to shore, always within reach of a long net that I carry in my hands.
Sarah Lada, I Can’t Put My Teeth Together And I’m Seeing Stars
when you say,
Give me silence,
purify my sour heart –I prepare yellow gills of liminal poison,
brush damp earth from caps
scented of hoar and musk,
slice then grind under mortar and pestle
emetic fungi, season with butter and salt.[…]
This poem was inspired by the 2017 film Phantom Thread, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis. If you’ve never seen Phantom Thread, it’s a dark and twisted story of a haute couture dressmaker played by Day-Lewis whose structured life is upended by a chance meeting with a waitress played by Vicky Krieps. Her ability to perfectly remember and serve his large and detailed breakfast order intrigues him and is the spark that begins her role as muse, model, and lover. Their relationship gradually turns to the dark side with scenes of fevered outbursts and mutually toxic behavior that flirts with death:
“I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open, with only me to help.”
If this is a love story, it’s one of masochistic obsession that will keep you mesmerized, if you’re in the right mood for it, as it does have long stretches of silence and drawn-out scenes. There are no nude or explicit scenes because none are needed. There’s also lots of gorgeous 1950s fashion and interiors. A good movie to watch on a chilly, stormy day or on a too hot, blindingly sunny summer day. Milder days are for outside living; nature’s breath on your skin and dark thoughts behind cobwebs in your mind.
Charlotte Hamrick, Roots and Rituals
Our apricot trees are blossoming,
always the first. Next the greengages.
Then the cherries. In the Alborz mountains
behind Tehran the cherry trees blossomaround Nowruz, the Persian new year –
a time of joy, gratitude, and fresh starts,
of visiting families and celebrating nature.Is this where we can begin to find hope,
Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Ordinary Miracles
in the things that tie us together, not
drive us apart? Branches of blossom,
the shared miracle of their fragile scent.
snowflake melts.
Grant Hackett [no title]
path’s completed.
somewhere darkness flowers.