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: odes to mushrooms, the greenness of grief, a city of mirrors, the wayward compass, and much more. Enjoy.
Almost March-end. It’s a bright, squally day. High clouds are topping out into pure white domes. I love these big expanses of sky, feel great joy watching wild weather rush in from the Atlantic. One cumulonimbus becomes a nuclear mushroom. White turns to grey. My stomach twists. Hard hail is hurled at my attic window.
All month snow has come and gone to greater or lesser degrees. One or two calm, frosty days have been sandwiched in between many hours of iced gales and raw cold but light persists and grows stronger. I feel spring in my bones, hear it in the lark-song.
Annie O’Garra Worsley, March, and memories
I’m carrying a heavy sense that something is going to happen, something not ephemeral. Lots of news-checking and kid-checking: each of my adult children is going through a hard time. The cat was squinting through a pink left eye this morning, vomited his breakfast all over the place, and I had to hurry him to the vet. He seems okay now, but twice-a-day eye drops will be an epic battle. Clouds hang over House Mountain and the neighbors’ dogs are barking.
I read another book I loved. Anne Haven McDonnell’s new poetry collection Singing Under Snow is the perfect partner to Forest Euphoria [by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian]. I don’t think the authors know each other, but their work connects: both books concern awe and walking in the woods; funga and queerness; solitude and interrelation. A kind of hush seems to hang over most of Singing Under Snow, which contains a gorgeous series of odes to mushrooms—a disposition to awe. Smell and taste and touch are vibrant, as opposed to the visual detail that dominates much poetry. A sautéed Agaricus agustus has “browned base notes in butter, high hint / of marzipan.” Inky caps “stink of squid.” Truffles emit an “intimate funk, maybe old cheese, oak, sweat, rot, maybe sulfur or leather or brine…it’s a low cello starting in the feet.” All this mushroom sniffing is entangled with memories of beloved people, who sometimes accompany the foraging. “Every love I’ve known,” Haven McDonnell writes, “I remember by her smell—maple syrup, soap, salt, moss, fur, cinnamon, yeast, sap, snow.”
Lesley Wheeler, Spring ephemerals
How does it feel in the body to be seduced by the unknown?
What darkness are you avoiding in your creative work?
In the Venn diagram of fear and desire, where do you fall?
What are your monster aspects? How might you share language with the beast?
Lisa Marie Basile, Bibliomancy of the week: Bram Stoker
I spent part of yesterday afternoon sitting a table as part of a “career day” at Rose’s school. One adult per table, most of whom are other parents from the larger school body, there to answer questions on what it is each of them do. Roughly twenty tables spread out through the gymnasium, others included a family doctor from Richmond, a journalist, a stand-up comedian, a lawyer, a woman with a big fluffy dog who works with training rescue animals, a chemist and a table full of people from the Embassy of Barbados. I was the poet, apparently, a table I littered with books and chapbooks, so students could get a sense of what it is I might do. With handouts, naturally. Beside me, a man who works with national security, his table empty. Everything on a need-to-know basis, I suppose. As he said, but what would he even bring? He answered questions, and showed them a picture from his phone of the building where he works.
rob mclennan, the green notebook,
I’ve been really struggling to come back here and know what to say. Blame it on the cognitive dissonance of our current moment. Within my little cocoon of a world, things are well. The birds are starting to wake me up again. The plum and cherry trees have big buds growing. The crocuses have already shown their light, and Maya the cat can’t get enough warm afternoon sunbeams. But all that winter healing feels self-contained. Everything else is on fire. We’re angry, sad, worried, scared, and nervous. And, I’m just out of energy. It’s even harder to say, Here, care about my little poetry book.
So, instead, I’m going to give you some of my kind of comfort. Read on below for a handful of haikus for the season and a Gen X-style taco recipe (but meatless). As well, I hope to see many of you in person at the events below in the weeks and months ahead—not for me and my book but for poetry and community and what we can give to each other.
Carrie Olivia Adams, The Spring of Our Cognitive Dissonance
I thought anger burned too bright for me to be able to write ever again. I have felt guilt good pure catholic guilt for not showing up here. For not doing the thing I have always loved.
How can any thinking person not be angry right now or anxious or frightened? National Poetry Month is coming and I have signed up but I can’t stop thinking about the children hidden in the Monster’s private diary or children torn from their parents’ arms because of the color of their skin. Men murdering citizens in the street. Families who have lost their SNAP benefits for no reason whatever. Survivors of rape standing in front of those monuments still not being believed. What the awful fuck. Even tapping into this much anger makes my hands shake god I’m such a coward. Here is my attempt at a poem off the cuff so to speak even though it’s noon and I’m still in my Christmas jammies though they have been laundered. […]
a wooden spoon
Rebecca Loudon, March 26 26 Where has she been?
makes a good weapon if you don’t
have flour
stir rocks with your hands
you’re going to need them
make a noise in your bowl
make it a drum
pound it until you bleed
make a noise in your throat
growl learn to bark
As a kid, I spent time every summer at a place called Knowlton’s Campground. Located on the coast near the easternmost part of Maine (and the U.S.), it was wild and stunning. We dug clams and “shopped” fresh fish out of the neighbor’s boat. My sister and I had the freedom to explore entire peninsulas and islands accessible only at low tide. Non-stop, kid nirvana. The land where the campground was located is now a nature preserve, and we visited this winter. Can confirm: It’s still wild and stunning (as you can see from the photos above). For today’s prompt, write a poem about a place from your childhood that doesn’t exist anymore. / Recommended reading: “My Kink Is Distance” by Amorak Huey and “when the world did not feel like a crushing weight” by Jill Kitchen.
Carolee Bennett, 30 Poetry Prompts for NaPoWriMo 2026
I have been writing quite a bit this month, spurred by some inspiration at AWP, lots of reading, and some ideas that have been sitting in a document titled Things to Explore at Some Point. (So original, I know.) I’d like to keep that momentum going, but much of what I’m writing has not been poetry. So instead of writing a poem a day in April, I’m going to ask myself to try and write something each day. No labels. No forms. No limits. It could be a sentence. A paragraph. A new line for an old poem. A piece of flash. To just write a THING.
Just putting that down in print feels right, like a weight off my shoulders. Like I can celebrate poems by reading them, and MAYBE, just maybe, writing one if I am inspired to do so. But it also feels correct that I should at least attempt writing everyday—this will be a success of its own.
If you complete a 30/30 with some good poems as a result, I am in awe of you. If you complete a 30/30 at all, I am in awe of you. If you, like me, are simply trying your best to connect with the page as often as possible, I am in awe of you. You created something where there was nothing.
Donna Vorreyer, Under Pressure…or Not
Here is the latest round of links to pieces dealing with the US-Israel war against Iran and related issues. I am also adding to these notes a second section. As you know, I have published several books of translations of classical Persian poetry, among them Selections from Saadi’s Bustan. Saadi, a 13th century poet from the city of Shiraz, is among the most important writers in the Persian literary canon, and his work has been translated into many languages worldwide. In light of the damage already done to some of Iran’s most important cultural and historical sites, and since my Bustan has been out of print for some time now (and is likely to stay that way), I thought a worthwhile thing to do would be to share with you some of Iran’s rich literary history. (I am writing more extensively on a specific connection between Saadi’s Bustan and United States culture in the series “On The Trail of a Tale: Benjamin Franklin’s Persian Parable.” Parts 1 and 2 have already been posted. Part 3 will post on April 3rd and Part 4 is coming in May.)
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Of Note: March 29, 2026
Yesterday I had a poem idea. We do Passion Sunday, which means we read the whole Holy Week text. This bit from Good Friday (Matthew 27: 50-53) leapt out at me: “Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.”
Is there a poem in those lines? I keep thinking about those holy people, long dead, rising up and wandering around Jerusalem. Do I want to update it to a modern capital city, D.C. perhaps?
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, One Last Look Back at Quilt Camp and Palm Sunday
The opening poem of Dan Albergotti’s collection Candy (LSU Press 2024) is what got me thinking of our current moment in these terms. The title is “Kick in the Jaw” and it opens with the line “Sometimes the zebra wins.” That’s kind of a jarring line if you don’t know much about zebras. It’s a common mistake to think they’re similar to horses in temperament because they’re part of the same family, but no zebra has ever been domesticated. They’re too aggressive. But even if you know that about zebras, it’s still an interesting contrast to Albergotti’s next lines. Here are the first four together.
Sometimes the zebra wins. And the sound
of the savanna goes on—birdsong, frog croak,
beetle chitter, snort and grunt of a warthog
hard panting of the cheetah after chase—Sometimes the zebra wins and nothing is different. It’s as much a part of the natural world as the predator winning. Even the cheetah in this scene isn’t feeding. It’s panting, gathering its energy for the next attempt. But if the zebra just managed to dodge the cheetah for now, that doesn’t seem like much of a win. The poem continues:
as the lion walks slowly away, bleeding from
the mouth, staring ahead, looking for a place
to rest and await a slow starvation. Sometimes
the savanna’s ambient song is interrupted
by a sharp crack that sounds like a gunshot,
the zebra’s kick finding the lion’s jaw.I’d be anthropomorphizing to say that the zebra is brave here. This is just nature, cruel and violent. The zebra kicks because it can and it connected with the lion and more often than not, the lion is probably going to win this encounter and it doesn’t mean anything larger than that. Albergotti says as much in the final lines:
Some stories get rewritten. Sometimes
the lion dies. Always the sound goes on.It’s the first two sentences there that really grabbed me, and it’s why this poem has stuck with me and why I decided to write about it. “Some stories get rewritten. Sometimes the lion dies.” Just because you’re not a predator that doesn’t mean you’re destined to lose no matter how much the predator wins in the stories. Sometimes the zebra breaks the lion’s jaw.
Notice that the world doesn’t end when the lion’s jaw is broken. It will end for that lion, but there are other lions. It will eventually end for that zebra, but there are other zebras.
I’d bet that Dan didn’t have any particular political or war-type situation in mind when he wrote this poem. I’m stretching this metaphor pretty tautly, mostly because I need to remind myself that no situation is hopeless, that there’s always a sound in the background continuing, and that I can find a way to be brave if I remember that.
Brian Spears, Being Brave
After I got a degree, I worked in a job laying
basketball courts. After this, I got a job
collecting debt. It was strange to me,
having to wear a tie. There were reports
that showed the team leader how many
minutes you were late. It’s a vibe that after
everything you are destined to live this way.This section from the title poem of Stuart McPherson’s The Aureate Trophies of Profit & Loss is almost a summary of the entire book, in a way. McPherson is primarily concerned with the dehumanisation that comes with late-stage Capitalism and the modern workplace where humans are a resource, and resources are to be exploited. In this sense, the poems gathered here are a set of responses to what we are asked to accept as ‘normal’ in our decaying civilization:
We should be asleep now but there are
choices to make between the drawsof long-shot fanaticism, or a life bereft
of hope. That clouting fist on a dooris a precursor to necessary dignified rest,
some basic standards of humanity.
(from ‘WISHLIST’)And those basic standards are precisely what’s absent from a world dominated by projects, PowerPoint decks, performance reviews and ‘competitive modern office chair/hierarchies’. What these poems do, amongst other things, is take this jargon and embed it in a flow of disjunction that serves to point up the machine’s perversion of language […]
Billy Mills, Two Broken Sleeps
The children had empty eyes, so they got dogs.
Kate Gale, For Jasper: Finding Courage in the Dark
The children poured love into their dogs like funnels.
The dogs followed them everywhere. They sent
each other pictures of the dogs climbing into their beds,
blankets and couches, riding in cars and trucks.
When one of their dogs is killed by a stranger,
the children cannot consume the darkness
of their deeply un-searched mud thick love.
The dog’s death is all the broken bones
of their childhood, every fist to the face,
every cigarette butt to the arm, every belt stroke,
every night without food; the children howl.
Bystanders watch their outpouring of grief.
They say, it was a dog!
My ten-year-old daughter protests and complains, she summons all her suasive efforts, but I remain an Elvis fan. Not limited to songs by Elvis, my appreciation extends to songs about Elvis, for example, “Calling Elvis,” by Dire Straits. It’s the lead track on their final album, On Every Street. About this album there are two schools of thought, both visible on its AllMusic page. “A disappointment,” asserts William Rohlmann, the site’s professional reviewer: “low-key to the point of being background music.” But the people think otherwise, and give it, on average, 4 out of 5 stars. Sophisticated subtlety, or bland lifelessness—it’s a fine line, and fine taste is needed to see it.
Timothy Steele’s poetry is on the good side of this bar. It is rewardingly subtle, in both form and content. The poems tend to start small, with close attention to tiny details in a mundane scene:
The lizard, an exemplar of the small,
Spreads fine, adhesive digits to perform
Vertical push-ups on a sunny wall.
(“Herb Garden”)By placing in its path an index card,
I catch an ant that scurries round the sink.
(“For Victoria, Traveling in Europe”)Sometimes, this attention is all: at the end of “Herb Garden” we’re still among the herbs, where, “quarrying between the pathway’s bricks, / Ants build minute volcanoes out of sand.” Other poems expand, and concrete details yield to something higher, or more abstract. The beach in “Starr Farm Beach” is named after a farm that’s named (I presume) after its owner, but that name inspires the fancy of “stars / … sown and grown and gathered for the sky,” and the poems ends thus:
We loved swifts that performed wild swoops and swings
Over the lake in unobstructed air;
We loved fish that, in sudden surfacings,
Nabbed supper with quick piscine savoir-faire.
But we best loved stars rising here and there,
Whether from hopes of something we might sow
Or from a lonely impulse to declare
The kinship of the lofty and the low.As delightful as the what of the poems is the how. There’s joy in seeing each thing fall perfectly into place. Not just, for example, the rhyme of “savoir-faire” with “air,” but the slotting of the complex and foreign phrase “quick piscine savoir-faire” into the iambic template with exactness and precision. Steele asserts, in All the fun’s in how you say a thing, that “the chief sources of variation in metrical composition reside within the norm”: good iambic pentameter, he holds, rarely contains anything but iambs, and this, he argues, is less of a restriction than one might think.
Brad Skow, Dionysus and Apollo
Just read a poem by Lee Harwood. Two lines jumped out at me and felt unbelievably poignant. Trains run through a town, he writes, ‘staring in at the bare rooms and kitchens / each lit with its own story that lasts for years and years.’* Wow. It just caught me off-guard. Funny how often, when you like the music of a poet’s work, you find that they also deal with the sorts of ideas and ways of seeing, too, that appeal to you.
*A Poem for Writers by Lee Harwood
Dominic Rivron, A Poem for Writers
Over at A Poetry Notebook, Jem has a nice discussion of Larkin’s ‘The Trees’, a poem he always thinks about at this time of year. It’s one I know by heart too, though it never occurs to me until later in April. Jem feels ambivalent about the poem. […]
I have always loved this poem and found Larkin’s dismissal of it startling when I read his letters. (He complains about writing something so mediocre on Thomas Hardy’s birthday, and perhaps one can understand that, when measured against Hardy’s best work, it feels disappointing.) The greenness of grief seems obvious to me, first, as an invocation of Eliot, something of a silent bête noire throughout Larkin, as the poem is presumably “set” as April turns to May; but it also invokes the sense of tears at renewals, such as the “happy funerals” in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. That poem contains a sister image to “something almost being said” in “someone running up to bowl”. Life is an attempt, which seems to come so easily, so naturally, to the tree, but not to us. The rings of grief have no parallel in ‘Whitsun’, which actually leaves out the wedding rings, but perhaps relates to the rain at the end.
what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can giveThis is part of the ongoing theme of “Earth’s immeasurable surprise” in Larkin, which sometimes takes the form of new lambs and sometimes of the memory of “the strength and pain of being young which cannot come again.” Somehow the trees do find a way of being young each year, though it hurts, like growing pains and the pains of seeing the past “smaller and clearer as the years go by”.
Henry Oliver, Larkin’s trees
Amid the enormous wealth of texts addressed to Elizabeth I, it is nevertheless rather unusual to come across one speaking to her “woman to woman”, as it were. In fact, [Olympia] Frontina’s poem, though addressed to Elizabeth, is mostly about her own struggles and suffering as a Protestant exile, and how the defeat of the Armada gives her some hope for the Protestant cause. It draws a clear parallel between Elizabeth’s courageous resistance in the face of Catholic Europe and Olympia’s own trials.
Funnily enough, the book in which this poem appears has been cited a couple of times by scholars as a particularly rich source for the depiction of Elizabeth I as a virgo mascula, ‘manly maiden’, a kind of virtuous Christian Amazon. It’s true that several of the poems in the collection (though not Olympia’s) do mine this seam at considerable length. But it’s striking that none of the scholars who have been interested in the book from this angle noticed that it also, and very unusually, contains a poem by a woman about her own experiences. […]
Are Eleutherius and Olympia Frontina two women, or one? It would need a much fuller study to make a proper assessment, but I think it is quite likely that they are the same person: the tone in which Eleutherius addresses the queen directly is rather similar to that in Olympia’s poem and there are a series of overlaps in the use of certain Latin words. There are also a handful of set pieces which are treated in a similar way. Such correspondences could of course be explained by close friendship, family relationship or belonging to a literary circle in which members were regularly sharing work. But at this point I would hazard a guess that Olympia (if that was in fact her name) adopted the pen-name ‘Eleutherius’ for the grander and more stereotypically masculine genres of Claudianic panegyric and major Horatian odes with which she opened her book, but dared to leave the more personal elegy under a female name. It is ironic indeed that having concealed her identity once, it was then unwittingly concealed again by the careless error of an early cataloguer.
Victoria Moul, Hiding in plain sight: two (?) new women poets from 1589
I’m very grateful to Vivek Narayanan, editor of Poetry Daily, for the invitation to write about a poem and its “spark”. I’ve always found “Cook Ting” works like a charm when introducing students to contemporary poetry that doesn’t immediately make sense in the way they expect. Its emphatic rhyming and collaged imagery encourages them to curiosity about what it’s doing, which then leads into a discussion of the connections we make as readers, encouraged by the leaps of rhyme — and then finally we look more closely at one or more of the sources that Langley used when writing the poem. […]
In the Poetry Daily piece I concentrate on the poem’s use of phrases from Cage’s essay on Rauschenberg (as you can see, “Cook Ting” was originally called “Rauschenberg”). But Langley also copied out other observations from Cage which inform the poem’s thinking about what art does to the world in a more general way. Here are three:
Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.
*
[Rauschenberg] is not saying; he is painting […] The message is conveyed by dirt which, mixed with adhesive, sticks to itself and to the canvas upon which he places it. Crumbling and responding to changes in the weather, the dirt unceasingly does my thinking.
*
Each thing that is there is a subject. It is a situation involving multiplicity. (It is no reflection on the weather that such and such a government sent a note to another.)
I’m struck in particular by the mention of “weather” here twice as an aspect of reality which is not human, not social or political, and yet as changeable and contingent as thought itself. The inclusion of the natural world in the poem — through Mark Cocker’s nature diary for the Guardian newspaper about seabirds feeding near the Sizewell nuclear reactor — is also “a situation involving multiplicity”. The only direct evocation of Cocker’s diary in “Cook Ting” is the sentence “The gulls are a / white flap over sprats in the foam”. But the whole piece describes a more complex ecosystem of gulls, long-necked divers and marine skuas — the latter being “highly opportunistic” birds who feed through kleptoparasitism, or piracy; that is, they wait for other birds to catch a fish, and then harass it until the fish is disgorged.
What strikes me about reading Cocker’s seabirds back into the lines of “Cook Ting” is how the “sources” of a poem are much more than the choice words that a poet (like a piratic seabird) plucks from the mouth of another writer. The two pieces of writing fall into conversation with each other, suggesting further analogies between the behaviour of birds and the imagination.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Zip! Zoop!
In this short poem, the reader is pulled from a secure place and made to “fall in love with the void” – the unreachable, the unsayable. The poem ends with the sweep of the “merciless arc of the lace-edged skirt,” taking the reader into a void of a different kind. “Lace-edged skirt” implies society, time, restrictions, human physicality, desire. “Merciless” is a strong word choice here. O’Hara could intend the reader to take this as time’s relentless force – even Leonardo, great embracer of life, came to dust. He also could be making a statement about sexuality – and here read society’s restrictions and expectations about who and how we love, a different sort of window – the lace boundaries of conformity and roles. Either way, the poem ends with an upward sweep into a puzzling but fecund unknown.
Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Frank O’Hara, “Windows”
In rhymed tetrameter quatrains, Blake excoriates the evil of the place: how the cries of the poor blacken the churches, how the existence of girls forced into prostitution stains the institution of marriage. Interestingly, “London” appears in Blake’s Songs of Experience but has no counterpart in his parallel volume, Songs of Innocence. That might suggest that Blake cannot imagine an innocent human city — at least not till the New Jerusalem prophesied in the Book of Revelation, which forces us to remember that in the Bible’s account, the humanity that began in a garden ends in a city.
And yet, to read “London” carefully, to think about its diction and narrative, is to come away unsettled. Oh, there’s an easy reading, the kind of high-school English-class account, that takes the poem as straightforward revolutionary rage against power: The human condition in 1794 London is nasty and brutish, filthy and immoral, with the Palace and the Church forging mental restraints that bind us in our misery. The poem is Blake’s indictment of the urban social order, the Industrial Revolution, the economic and political arrangements that have created this damnable state.
All that is certainly in the poem, but a sense of unease ought to touch us when we find ourselves in self-congratulatory agreement with the angry narrator. Blake is involved in something deeper, I think, for the narrator is not entirely a trustworthy one. Under the poem’s indictment of the social order is a hidden indictment of the poem’s speaker as someone who does not have the answer to what he sees and hears. If the city corrupts us all, it corrupts as well the man who observes the city’s evil.
He is, in other words, one of those who “feel they know not what but care; / And wish to lead others when they should be led.” That’s from the very curious poem “The Voice of the Ancient Bard,” which Blake initially put in Songs of Innocence, then moved to Songs of Experience — a poem that is, admittedly, so strange and ambiguous as to grant no certain use. Still, as one critic pointed out back in 1986, there’s something there suspicious of the observers who wish to lead others toward some imagined future.
More suspicion comes to us from Blake’s word choices, emphasized by the technique of repetition that pervades “London.” The repeated “charter’d” in the first stanza of the four-quatrain tetrameter poem was merely “dirty” in an earlier notebook, as “mind-forg’d manacles” was originally “german-forged.” Both of these changes push the sense of constraint into something systematic, written into the minds of city-dwellers — which includes the speaker of the poem.
But it’s the last line of “London” — “And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse,” an astonishing oxymoron — that most suggests the speaker is equally bound in the charter, the mind’s manacles. He has risen a half step above the ordinary, suffering bounded people, as he observes the vile city: a nasty cauldron of woe. “How the youthful Harlots curse / Blasts the new-born Infants tear.”
We might dwell on how much of this is aurally driven: He hears the infant’s cry, the soldier’s sigh, the whore’s curse. But what he gains from all that is only an observation of life (from birth to marriage to death) as collapsed down into a single monstrosity. He needs to make the step beyond that, to a vision of the city as a light unto the nations — a vision of the New Jerusalem that Blake knows is beyond the appalling cry.
Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: London
London is hungry, it isn’t greedy, it simply demands repayment for your tenancy. Some respond by making money, some by making a tonne of money, some make poetry. Others give up their souls, have their life blood siphoned from their wan bodies. The machine needs feeding. London is a great hole that must be filled.
It is no wonder that John Keats retreated to Hampstead, that heaven on a hill, not the exclusive suburb it is today, one that has followed the same trajectory that many poorer or affordable boroughs on the fringes have done, an outlying state attractive only to misfits and migrants, artists and writers, desirable once it’s been described as a ‘colourful neighbourhood’ and Samantha and Lucy and Tom decide to rough it there for a while. Then they tell their friends about it. And then one of them opens a chic, vegan restaurant. And then… I digress…
The London Keats was born into was recovering from the ‘gin craze’, a Hogarthian epidemic of anarchic alcoholism. With industrialisation and empire expansion London had become the wealthiest city in the world. With this wealth, at its untended edges, came horrific poverty, an almost unparalleled depravity. With reforms to the licensing laws there wasn’t even the ubiquity of gin to drown the misery out. We’ve not entirely emerged from this staggering hangover and Samantha and Lucy and Tom will talk of urban regeneration.
There are two kinds of poverty, a poverty of opportunity that keeps people stuck in one place and the poverty that slowly kills them there.
On the night before I came home, I walked across Rome and at each turn, on each corner, there was treasure cut in stone, water and marble and a drama of columns and domes, arcades and arches, churches and piazzas. You can walk across any city for free or for the small expense of warn shoe leather but in some cities having no money matters less.
London is a different beast. Increasingly it has become a city of mirrors, of glass facades, of endless reflections, of vacuity and self obsession. Stare at it for too long and it will show you who you are or what you are not, it will reveal what you have, and show you what have not got.
Jan Noble, Nº57 The secrets of Swan
And then those pastures, tourmaline green
Lori Witzel, Auguries
dotted with hundreds of lambs. The eagles
scavenging afterbirth during lambing season,
filling the whole round world with auguries.
I’m writing this Substack post looking for a favour – or more particularly, for suggestions. In a couple of weeks, our little family will be walking a portion of the old pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago. Our portion of the route will be around 120km over six days, which should translate to around five or six hours walking per day. There’s something appealing in the simplicity of this schedule: waking around 6am, leaving the hotel at 7:30, walking the countryside roads until after lunch, and then being free in the later afternoon and evening to take in whatever village we stop in overnight.
A big part of the reason for undertaking it is that my son has recently turned twelve, will start high school in the summer, and is a typical kid of this generation – in love with screens, his life filled with impulse and impetus. The idea was to try something to shake up his life, and to slow things down for him. Will we still be talking after this holiday? Comments are open to discuss this – but also for something else. With five or six hours’ walking time, I thought I might set myself a target of trying to memorise a poem every day. Doesn’t it feel like a natural fit – to walk and to commit something to memory? The rhythm of the steps, the rhythm of the poem. So I am looking for suggestions for what poems to commit to memory.
In my earlier life I worked as a debt advisor for a charity; I would write out poems to memorise between speaking to clients. The job could be quite bleak, and I found the process of internalising a poem to be a few minutes of escape or reprieve. Later I would read this feeling described in the introduction to Harold Bloom’s Possessed By Memory, one of his more sentimental and vulnerable works:
When you have a poem by heart you possess it more truly and more strangely than you do your dwelling place. Because the poem possesses you.
In the office cubicle, beside my pad and pens, my scraps of budgets and cost-cuttings, I had tried to memorise Yeats’ ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’. I still have most of the opening half quite clearly in my mind: I went out to the hazel wood/because a fire was in my head. What is perhaps strange is that in remembering the poem I can also recall the view from my old desk, my colleagues, their small talk, each part all the clearer when I recite it – as though I wasn’t just committing the poem to memory, but also the place where I’d memorised it too.
Niall Campbell, What Poems Should I Memorise?
In “Of Power and Time,” Mary Oliver calls the internal force that pulls us away from our own work “the intimate interruptor.” She doesn’t dwell on why this inner voice distracts us, but she’s unequivocal about the need to ignore it, even at the cost of unstocked pantries and unreturned phone calls.
In Oliver’s description of this internal antagonist, I recognize my own intimate interrupter. How she “helpfully” shows up to remind me of tasks when I’m mid-thought, almost as if—could it really be this—I can’t stand the intensity and reverberations of my own mind.
Creative work requires solitude. “It needs concentration, without interruptions,” as Oliver advises. “It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once.”
And that can feel uncomfortable.
I sometimes feel I need a break from the pressure of my own creative energy, that very thing I covet but sometimes fear once it’s in my grasp. Now it really is up to me.
Now that the game is on, I might let us both down.
Maya C. Popa, Advanced Techniques for Avoiding Writing
Last night I gave this workshop at University of Toronto’s Hart House. I was in a wood-pannelled room overseen by a former Warden of Hart House, replete with vest and pipe. Walking through U of T campus, it really struck me how much I love the literally “old school” architecture: ivy-covered buildings and stone buildings in some kin of Gothic style. And yes, colonialism and patriarchy, but there is something about the gravitas of such architecture, a notion (even if it is just an illusion) of “learning” having its own space outside the marketplace. I can’t examine this idea too deeply or it all falls apart (shouldn’t learning be in the agora, how can we separate it from class, do we want to protect and ritualize learning and put it in the pipe-holding hand of a special group of hierophants…) Despite this, walking in the dark and pouring rain, I was charmed.
Gary Barwin, TRUTH’S SUPERB SURPRISE: NOTES FROM A CREATIVE NON-FICTION WORKSHOP
And after all
who can fault
the wayward compass
when the magnetic north pole
is in constant motion
drifting by fifty kilometers a year
and reversing itself altogether
every few centuries
while each twenty-six thousand years
a different north star
comes to shine its guiding light
above all the confusion.We are here
Maria Popova, Corrective for a Broken Heart
to lose our way.
This morning the air brings me the notes of new carpet off gassing in a Premier Inn and mixes in essence of chilled seaside town air. A soundtrack of traffic plays like urban waves in the background.
Alt text says this week’s photo is a person holding a book in front of a bookcase. I say it is me visiting the National Poetry Library in London and not being able to resist a photo with my second full collection of poetry Welcome to the Museum of a Life published by Black Eyes Publishing UK. I also say this feels particularly apt given that I am a guest on Helen O’Neill’s Coach Write podcast this week. We had a wonderful chat about coaching, poetry and the journey to having books in the world, and it felt good to be a guest. I like listening to people talk on podcasts and I like being asked to talk too. It also makes me chuckle that the episode will air on the first of April!
The main focus of the visit to London was seeing the Manic Street Preachers headlining at The Royal Albert Hall for Teenage Cancer Trust. It was a fantastic concert opening with Motorcycle Emptiness and ending under a raining down of confetti during If You Tolerate This. That opening song was a moment of absolute tingle for me as I realised I was standing in the now, watching the band perform live, while also watching the original music video from all those years ago projected onto the screen behind them. A wonderful mingling of right now and back then.
Sue Finch, A TRIP TO LONDON TOWN
I cannot tell you how taken I am by Theresa Kishkan’s The Art of Looking Back. I have read an advanced galley, but you can pre-order online or at your favourite indie. Honest, vulnerable, insightful, poetic, authentic, meditative, are all words popping into my head as I prepare to win you over to this book. It’s also uncomfortable in parts as it asks questions in a consideration of a life well-lived but not without inner turmoil. How do we look back on who we were as young women? What kind of generosity and grace might we offer our younger selves?
If you’ve always wondered about women depicted in paintings (and you know I have, beginning with my first book All the God-Sized Fruit), and the effect of the male gaze on women, this book gives you another view. As a young woman, Kishkan posed as an artist’s model. “I see him taking me in,” she says, then asks, “Was I taken in? I was.” Years later she looks back with wisdom and clarity and examines her relationship with the artist, with the paintings of her, and with her own self, now and then. She says, “I am trying to find out who I was in the light of that gaze, and before it, what foundation held me in place in the whirling years…”
We have been on similar paths of interest at times, perhaps, though we’ve never met. Interested in art, probably reading the same books back in the day — Ways of Seeing by John Berger was such a big one. So it’s interesting to see where we converge and where we diverge. We’ve both written in various genres, are of similar age. I felt reading this book that looks back so keenly, so delicately, to be cathartic. It helps to dwell for a while, before asking, what next?
Shawna Lemay, Three Books
I’m seventy-three now;
you, forever past fifty-nine,your body resting with
my poem and the photoI tucked into the pocket of
the suit they dressed you in,too hot for that late Florida day.
Maureen Doallas, Missing You
The reaping to which I refer in the title of this post is metaphorical, as spring isn’t a big time for bringing in the sheaves, though in a few weeks the winter wheat will be ripe. I feel I have reaped some joy from a recent poetry reading I gave at the library of my former employer, DeSales University, and how often do we feel that way? It’s a gift! Dr. Steve Myers invited me to read with three of the alums of the MFA program DSU now offers, and last night I found myself back in the library where my office used to be (once I finally escaped from the basement where I’d been located for 17 years). The audience was a mix of undergraduate and graduate students and friends who were kind enough to show up on a Wednesday night. It’s wonderful to feel appreciated now and then.
I haven’t been giving many readings lately or even attending open mics. Evenings and nights are not my best time, but the college is very nearby and I really was pleased to be able to participate…Best Beloved drove me there and back, so everything was manageable. I read some quite old poems and some quite new ones, and a few in-between from my books. And I sold a few books! Always a thrill. I am dwelling in gratitude today.
One of the best things at the event was seeing a former student who was one of my writing tutors and who now works at DeSales. She’s also lately enrolled in the MFA program. What a joy to catch up with a person I met as a bright 18-year-old with a natural talent for writing, who’s pursuing creative writing now–as a mother of two, and nearing 40–not so different from my own circuitous path in poetry. Such are the rewards of teaching…occasionally, I do miss it.
Ann E. Michael, Sowing and reaping
Thank you to Quibble Lit for publishing my poem “Physics of a Marriage” in Vol. VII. I love journals that still produce print copies (in addition to online publication) and it was so exciting to get a copy delivered to my mailbox.
I also love “themed” submissions and find it helps me focus on what the poem needs to say. In the case of this poem, the prompt was right outside my office window, on his hands and knees digging in the dirt.
Most of my poems come from the lived reality of my life and writing poetry helps me understand what this life means to me. As many of you know, my husband is a physicist and I am the one who loves to garden. Somehow over the long arc of a 37-year marriage, we’ve each become a little of both.
Carey Taylor, Physics of a Marriage
Drones fly over gardens,
tankers barrel through straits on fire. So muchhas changed. Or so much has merely changed
hands. Yet power stays put. Spoils of manyconquests, we’ve been trying to survive in
the margins, in the aftermath of the lastaftermath and the last. Imagine freeing river and
Luisa A. Igloria, Old World, New World
forest and plain from maps into their old names.
I couldn’t stop thinking about many things: the elegant movement of the hands of servers behind espresso bars, like hands of Michaelangelo, Galileo’s telescopes that proved heliocentric view of the universe, the pistachio gelato at Giolitti’s covered with lightly sweetened mascarpone cream and at Perché No in Florence, the sound of the choir echoing against the richly decorated walls of the Saint Peter’s Basilica, the electric candles that one had to light, the paintings of Caravaggio, their visceral violence, the gushing blood, its rotting fruits, the invitation of Bacchus, the perfect teeth of a screaming Medusa, the Montepulciano and the Chianti, posters of a Hokusai exhibit, the mineral white wine I drank inside the ruins of an ancient Roman theatre whose name I do not remember, the Aperol spritzes, the two negronis inside a bar, the view of the Imperial Fora, the gravity that can make anything fall.
Saudamini Deo, Beware the Ides of March
I stretch my hand out
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Because she said I must stop doomscrolling and write a feel-good poem
and the quiet sits on my palm
like a question:
Are you enough?
Can you be enough?
Are you predator? Or prey?
Can you feel the inky wetness of your severed wings?