A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere, including Substack, with a commitment to following a somewhat haphazardly chosen selection of poets, poetry lovers, literary critics and publishers over time. 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: the clay-dusted air of the workshop, the rambling treasure hunt for a poem, writing nothing but sonnets for a year, the poets on the farthest end of the table, and much more. Enjoy.
It’s a bright morning in Yorkshire. The trees are in full blossom and there’s a fierce little breeze which scatters their petals like confetti. Today is Earth Day. It’s also the twenty second day of National Poetry Writing Month; a writing phenomenon which began in the States and now extends around the globe. According to the NaPoWriMo model, a prompt is issued and poets are invited to write (and share) a poem in response .
Yes, that’s right – a poem a day, every day, for 31 days. I can’t remember when Kim and I began following this crazy instruction – seven years ago? Nine? Ten? My blurriness is partially the result of late-night-writing-sessions and sleep deprivation by the end of the month; partly the sense of almost-total immersion in the world of the poem.
For all of those years I’ve been doing NaPoWriMo, April has functioned as a sort of creative reservoir – a time when I know I will produce a stack of drafts which will go some way to sustaining me through the rest of the year. It’s not just about quantity either: the daily discipline; the heady exposure of knowing that I’ll publish my early drafts on social media no matter how imperfect or incomplete; the delicious combination of mutual support, appreciation and competition I always feel when I’m writing with Kim – there’s no doubt that I produce some of my best writing in April.
Clare Shaw, Running with the Pack: NaPoWriMo
Early in my social media times I began adding a link to a piece of music to each of my poems. I’ve been doing this for maybe … eight years?? My playlist of these songs exceeds 30 hours now. Why am I doing this? The thing is …
A poem takes us into a waiting room.
We open a magazine on a random page and read. The person next to us changes their position on a plastic chair. The wall clock ticks on. The air is stale, infused with the deodorant of the man who has left before we entered. These lines. We reread them, not having quite got it. A fly that has landed on the table is shuffling its legs.
Then we look up.
Outside, mute, the branches of a tree. Traffic. A person hurries down the street and a piece of paper falls from their trouser pocket, but they walk on, not noticing.
We look back at what we’ve just read and it has changed.
Kati Mohr, Linking and shifting between poetry and music
Like many people, I am intrigued by bird calls. Where we live in the foothills of the Mount Lofty Ranges, just out of Adelaide, South Australia, we are graced by many types of native birds. However in the forty years we have lived here, the number of species found in the area had dropped dramatically. This decline has been well documented and is due to a combination of habitat destruction, mostly for human housing, and climate change. Nevertheless, most of the time, the air is filled with the calls of birds, some regular residents, others infrequent passers-by. But what are they saying to each other? what are they trying to tell us?
Here are a couple of videos I have made, in which I give voices to the birds in different ways. Both these videos have had many screenings in Australia and around the world.
Ian Gibbins, The voices of birds…
With Birds and Duduk
In this piece, I’m playing a duduk, an Armenian double reed instrument made out of apricot wood. I’m also using live digital processing and recordings of birds.
Gary Barwin, This instrument is made of trees and birds
And there is this beautiful thing Ted Berrigan said, as quoted by Ron Padgett:
The gods demand of the system that a certain number of people sing, like the birds do, and it somehow was given to me to be one of those people—and I mean I did have a choice—I could have decided not to, to be a truck driver or a filmmaker. But I like doing that, and I feel that probably the major reason I write is because the gods might destroy… the whole thing could fall apart. I lift my voice in song. I lift my voice in song.
Valium numbs every part of the song that seeks to keep things whole in me.
The administrative precision of the hospital emphasizes the humiliation of being embodied. I will always dread it. But I won’t spend this week consumed by the worry of waiting for results.
I lift my voice in song instead, to quote Ted.
Alina Stefanescu, What started with wax.
I say to the tree growing inside me
It is one thing to taste your bitter
leaves but now I hear your barbets
all day, their song is crawling out
of my ear, do you know they are
planning to escape?I think they saw a cloudless sky
Rajani Radhakrishnan, An April full of poems -4
dancing in my dreams.
During bouts of outdoor work, when I’m mindlessly weeding, pruning, or doing soil prep, I’ve been mulling over whether–and if so, how–I’ve changed as to writing poetry (see closing paragraph of last week’s post). There are vague recollections of getting really on a roll and drafting new work into late hours of the night when I was 20 or 21 years old. But how I went about it, what approach I took to writing back then? I barely recall. It’d require research into my old journals to figure that out; there, I dare not go! And what happened to all the poems I typed up on my heavy, electric typewriter (an early 1970s Adler, if I recall aright)? They’ve mostly vanished, though a few reside in my attic in several boxes of old literary magazines which chose to publish my efforts. […]
I’ve just finished reading poems by the 16th c. Korean poet Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, a brilliant person who started writing before age 8 and died at 27. A young person all her life, by our standards, and a prodigy. A frequent theme of hers is yearning for a husband or lover who is far away, a trope as common in Asian poetry as in European poetry. The lover has gone to war, or been exiled, or is in another region on work for the king/emperor/church, or is at sea. Nansŏrhŏn frequently wrote in the style of the Chinese poets who penned this sort of yearning poem; in fact, her husband was often distant, trying to work his way into a higher-status position, while she was left at his home with her in-laws. Her desire may not even have been so much sexual longing as just plain loneliness. Her work, even when it is not more romantic in subject, is suffused with an overall sorrowful yearning.
I recall having that feeling when I was in my teens and early twenties. Often, I wasn’t even sure what it was I yearned for or desired specifically. I just felt the sense that something was missing in my life, and I suspect that many of my earliest poems aimed to describe vague heartbreak about a kind of emptiness. (I assure you, my work was terrible–no comparison to Nansŏrhŏn can be made here.) However, when I read her poems, that’s what resonates with me. […]
[W]hile I recognize and appreciate the sentiment that accompanies yearning, my work has not been animated or inspired by that particular kind of longing for awhile now. It’s not that I lack desires, but the tenor of the feeling is different. Romantic love or an unrealized self? Not so much. The longing is for new places, further questions, better solutions, comfortable nearness, safe space, peace. I find much to learn every day, much to love, to admire. In spite of everything.
Ann E. Michael, Learning & yearning
Kelli Russell Agodon came out to be our featured reader at the J. Bookwalter Poetry Series (just rebooted!) on Thursday night and she did a great job, as did the open mic-ers, and a wonderful audience. It’s always a pleasure to hang out with poets here in Woodinville, and the weather obliged, not being too cold or too hot, and the evening ending in golden light as the last reader read.
We also got to introduce Catherine Broadwall’s upcoming book, Afterlife, which will debut on May 5, and she’ll be our featured reader on June 18. I feel very lucky to have so many talented friends and writers around for inspiration.
Kelli read from her upcoming book with Copper Canyon, Accidental Devotions, which if you haven’t thought about preordering, think about it! It’s got Alexa solving existential crises, mermaid dreams, Emily Dickinson’s phone messages, and a whimsical take on a world in chaos. Kelli and I have been friends since before our first books were taken, so we were reminiscing a bit, how we’ve changed as people and writers, how we haven’t changed. I think both of us have become better writers, and part of that is a function of having supportive writer friends, and part of it is not giving up, and another part is becoming more comfortable with who we are as people, which somehow translates into poetry.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Kelli’s Reading in Woodinville, Goldfinches Returns with Cherry and Crabapple, Birthdays Approaching and the State of Publishing (And Fear of Failure)
“In Geologic Time, It Happened Just Seconds Ago” is a poem that came together over many years. In 2005 I first jotted down notes about the canyon, the view from Airport Mesa, and the Milky Way while on my honeymoon in Sedona, Arizona. Over the next twenty years or so, I returned to that material now and then, but never had the poem in my grasp, just images. After my divorce, I went back to those old, failed drafts to see what I could find. That excavation led me to a poem that is, in its own way, about excavation, and about seeing things later through a different lens.
What helped me find and shape the poem was seeing an opportunity to play with repetition and variation. Like jazz musicians, we writers can improvise and riff! I’ve noted some of that riffing in the handwritten annotation below.
As I note here, I saw the opening—“Our honeymoon was a strand of scenic overlooks”—as an opportunity to play with variations on that sentence. Mid poem it becomes “Our honeymoon was a stranded scene I overlooked,” and in the end it becomes “Our honeymoon was a strand, a strangeness, a look ahead.” Riffing on the words in those sentences inspired me to play with other words and to find possible variations. Ultimately I built the form of the poem around those variations and revisions/distortions, with the end words in lines 1-3 (stand, wrote, scenic) corresponding to the end words in lines 4-6 (strange, penned, scene), and so on.
Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “In Geologic Time, It Happened Just Seconds Ago”
In the summer of 2023, the poet and translator Aaron Poochigian posted on social media a link to an article about an unusual archaeological find: On a fragment of an amphora from Spain at some time in the first four centuries CE, some words were scratched into the wet clay that are quite different from the usual commercial information. The article’s authors identified the words as coming from Vergil’s Georgics. Theorizing about the sort of person who might have inscribed poetry on a pot, they note that children and youths were commonly employed in pottery manufacture of the time, and that the Georgics might well have been used in pedagogy in the agricultural area where the fragment was found. Whether or not their scenario is likely, it struck a chord with me, recalling my teenage encounters with Vergil’s hexameters, a rhythm I’ve tried to echo with the stresses of modern English, and used in several poems. The poem I based on this article has finally, finally, appeared in the little magazine Vergilius, so I can show it to you.
On some words of the Georgics,
inscribed on a fragment of Roman amphora unearthed in SpainJournal of Roman Archaeology, June 5, 2023
Picture him, down on one knee in the clay-dusted air of the workshop,
bent to the wet terra cotta. He’s mouthing the sounds of a poem,
working the spelling out roughly; misplacing the start of the sentence—
wrong, but we see what he’s after. Underside up, the amphora,
waiting, still soft, is a near-irresistible draw to his stylus.Everyone writes on amphorae—the contents, the names of the sellers—
Maryann Corbett, Vergil, dac-hex, and me
what’s to deter him? His memory’s zephyred away to the schoolroom
now, and he’s singing it—quietly, quietly—wheat fields and grapevines,
oxen and beehives; he’s singing the gyre of the year in the heavens,
Bacchus and Ceres. He’s etching his love of it into the softness […]
Much is written about how to be a good listener. Far less is written about how to be a poetic one, or rather, how to listen for the poetic.
When I write poems for strangers as I do on my podcast, There’s a Poem in That, I I don’t write affirming poems that reflect the client back to themselves, merely. Instead, I take a more assertive stance. It’s not about listening and repeating, it’s a poetic processing I’m still learning how to think about.
Nomenclature for this practice can still only be borrowed. The stranger asking me to write a poem for them—do I call them a client (medicine)? A subject (visual arts)? A querent (Tarot)? Do I talk about this work as clinical? Service-oriented? Socially engaged? A healing art? Isn’t it all those things?
Listening, too isn’t enough of a word for what constitutes the rambling treasure hunt for a poem in someone else’s story. The process is more journalistic than therapy-based, but art’s the goal. I get in there, and I tangle. It’s almost physical. I tangle with what people try to tell me.
My standard three hours of interview provide ample opportunity to learn whether, and how, to challenge my querents’ narratives, test assumptions, and clarify loose language. I begin to make demands. If someone is bold enough to require a poem from me; I’m emboldened to require they take the project seriously. I do them the favor of holding them to task.
Active listening is one thing; proactive listening is a more recently advocated set of advanced techniques in which the listener pushes back a little harder in a more deliberate effort to understand not just the words a person is saying but what, in fact, they mean by them. It’s a kind of parsing in which a subject’s words need not be taken at face value if their meaning is obscure. It’s worthwhile work for poets, who are trained to interrogate the language.
I listen for images, metaphors, motifs, patterns, and archetypal hero’s journey stuff. But I also listen for those narrative gaps in querents’ stories into which a poetic conversation can fit where nothing else seems likely to. I hasten to those clearings in a client’s imagination where only a poem might spark new fire.
Todd Boss, Call it “Anthrophrasis”
My Jesus in the World poems can demand a willing suspension of disbelief, since Jesus is doing activities that he didn’t do in the Gospels: bowling, going to a holiday cookie swap, helping with hurricane clean up, and so on. But I worried that mention of a midlife crisis would disrupt that suspension of disbelief.
This morning, the solution came to me, and it’s so obvious I hesitate to admit that it didn’t come to me sooner. I can take out the reference to a mid-life crisis. Let the reader decide why Jesus is buying a run-down house to renovate.
There are so many wonderful ways this poem could go–it’s so wonderful to have a glimmer of an idea that’s closer to fully recognized than just a whisp and to have poem creation to look forward to in the week to come.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Jesus Remodels a Fixer Upper
I’ve noticed that more of us are questioning the platform. Like me, these other users — most of whom, in my case, are artists or writers — don’t want to leave a place where they’ve staked out a long-time presence and do have a sense of community, but they are also putting more energy into their own websites, blogs, and other online forms that are not corporate, not part of the big system, and remain under one’s own control. They are also hungry for other forms of activity and community that require — and acknowledge — genuine connection and greater attention. I’m not going to leave the site, but I’m now much more aware of what it is, how it affects me, and how I want to use it.
None of what I’ve based my life upon is disposable. When we take the time to create a work of art, to play or listen to music, grow a garden, learn a language, write a set of poems, or build a relationship, we do so because our effort feels worthwhile and we hope the result will last. Our lives themselves are short; time is precious. I want to make intentional choices and to spend most of my time in the real world, as positively as possible. So I think the right thing for me is to limit my intake of news to what’s necessary for knowing what is going on, and not get drawn into the maelstrom of debates and opinions; to limit my time on social media; to write as thoughtfully as possible, to keep learning, to devote myself to music and art and the people I care about — many of whom are online friends, some of whom I met through Instagram itself — but in a thoughtful way that honors the best aspects of who we are and what we respect in each other.
Beth Adams, Instagram, Revisited
So where are we now with the gift economy as artists/writers/creatives? I remember when I started blogging 2000 years ago and it was very much an exchange of ideas, freely given. I remember when I saw blogs like Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian) monetize. It was the first blog I can remember doing that and it blew my mind. Like, jealous! A bit. But also, it seemed odd? And now I think, how my life would have been so much better if I’d figured all that out way back when. These days I still struggle with the whole Ko-fi thing :) And I’ve whined about how maybe I should move to Substack all the time and then never do.
And now the question, the problem of AI, stealing our gifts but also messing up the gift economy. And then the feeling that it’s foolish to be putting almost anything on the internet at all. I honestly don’t know what to do with all these thoughts currently. Because just the pure giving online has brought me a lot of goodness in this world. So anyway, I’m sitting with the Wittgenstein quotation, the gift as a problem to solve.
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Thinking about The Gift
This week, on a tiny writing retreat, I’ve been thinking about the idea of running without fuel in the tank. And sometimes, not just fuel: no oil, no coolant, and the car needs some work as well. I’ve been thinking about what makes it possible to move forward when your resources are depleted. To be your best self, whatever that self is.
I used to find that whenever I traveled, I ran on empty. I was eating badly, not exercising, I lost connection with my game, and when I got back, I grasped at reconnecting with my life. But I like to think that being able to be my best—my most creative self, my most wild and fun self, my most dedicated self to Red Hen self, my most focused self—all requires some care, attention.
Some people need a lot of time with other people to feel good. I need a certain amount of alone time, and I need to spend that alone time reading, writing, or exercising, not doomscrolling. The apps raise my anxiety, and they convince me that everyone else’s life is much better than my life. They give me a fidgety unhappy edgy mash of dark to mess.
Alternatively, reading centers me, exercise brings my brain into focus, and writing reminds me of who I am. During my alone time, I rein in my urge to deep-dive, and I return to my focus. […]
On this, my birthday week, I think of Molly Fisk’s poem “Cedar Waxwings.” It is a good example of finding yourself through silence. It’s a poem that makes me think about healing and finding grace and getting back to equilibrium, and all of those things that I hope are possible while I am breathing, writing, finding my pulse.
So much depends on my finding my breath again. On refilling my tank. On resisting mournful isolation and embracing good solitude. I look to Molly, now, who is such a centered, soulful person. When I talk with her, when I hear her, her voice is large and surrounds me, and I feel like she is someone who climbed a mountain and saw the surrounding fields and all the trees, who saw devastation, too, and managed to stay sane and lived to tell the tale. She’s at the center of her own stillness, writing and seeing. Let us all aspire to such grace.
Kate Gale, Solitude, Stillness & Sanity: On Remembering Yourself Through the Empty
I’m back from the New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I taught a surrealist poetry class with poet and librettist Melissa Studdard. We were the last class, which made me a little worried because I thought everyone might be tired and thinking about midday snacks & drinks—however, I was so wrong! What a joy to be overfilled with people—two rooms, all chairs taken, and people on the floor—all writing surreal poems. It made me realize that even with everything in the world, people still want to create something, to write poems, to be in community. I needed that reminder.
Melissa and I also did a little photoshoot for our poetry series, Poems You Need, and I, of course, wore the wrong shoes and sliced my foot (this should be no surprise to anyone who knows me—I always wear the wrong shoes).
The problem was—we had no tissues to stop the blood; it was just me, bleeding onto my discount Italian flip-flops and the sidewalk like a very low-budget horror film. Our photographer, who turned out to be a quick-thinking hero, pulled out a tiny white baby sock (clean! her son’s!) she’d been using as a lens cover and saved the day. (And yes, I was fine, no stitches, just alcohol, Neosporin, and a very tight bandaid!)
Kelli Russell Agodon, The World Is Too Much and Also Beautiful
Being at a yarn show with hundreds of people is a complete contrast to my one-to-one coaching or the times when it’s just me writing poetry, but there is also a lovely cross over with my values of being helpful, listening to people and taking time for reflection. And this week while simply being in a show ground I have felt the lovely tingle of tears of happiness in my eyes when recounting moments that have brought me pure joy in my life and listening to other people tell me theirs. I have laughed a lot and remembered to stay in the moment because after all it is the moment that counts. Oh, and I remembered to still myself and say thank you when complimented by a stranger so that I actually got to feel the complete glow of how that feels.
Here’s to finding the ways we laugh with others, supporting those we love and being ourselves in the moment.
Graphene, from my first collection Magnifying Glass, is shining in my mind as a great poem with which to end this blog…for the wonder of celebrating the shine and the marvel of being human.
Graphene
Perhaps, before their pencil, in that building
it was in me – that flat form carbon atom;
hexagonally honeycombed
undiscovered and waiting.And before that, did it come from a star?
Maybe it was once inside you.
You are a study in graphene:
cleaved graphite, harder than diamond,stronger than steel.
Exceptional.
Sue Finch, THREE TIMES A YARN SHOW
over the last couple of years, by far my richest and most rewarding poetry experiences have been the launches of work by long-time friends. these gatherings mean an immense amount to me, and i wouldn’t trade my participation for anything in the world. but – there is always a but – the very things that make these these celebrations so joyful, so moving, and so special – their warmth and intimacy – are also the things that make them tricky. and by “tricky” i mean… what, precisely? i suppose i must mean the sensation of emptiness that assails me in the midst of the social. […]
people are very mysterious to me: how they think, feel, fit together, move through the world. i can – and do – enjoy and admire many of them – but i do not understand them even slightly. it’s like… it’s like life is a fundamentally different force for most humans than it is for me. they have all of these experiences, achievements, ideas, relationships, and these things fill them up, or they enlarge them, give them a shape and a substance, a weight in the world; they anchor them to reality and to each other. for myself, life isn’t like that, it’s momentum without mass, just restless moving energy; it forces me forward, and it thrusts itself through me, but there’s nothing to hold on to, nothing to build on or around. i feel flimsy, i guess. i feel.
Fran Lock, MORNING PAGES
When I look up and away from the screen, there is a community I adore. Throughout multiple visits to a local wetland, I watched a discarded iced donut in the grass slowly get eaten away. Simply because I went for a walk to escape nonsense, I once observed ants protect aphids on a plant called Fireweed because the ants love the honeydew that the aphids produce. Community is everywhere. Symbiosis is necessary. Communication is necessary. Ten years now I have bent down to a plant or pointed to a bird and said their name to my husband. And now he says them back to me, his finger pointing up at the sky.
Sarah Lada, Rich Rich
I’ve drafted three poems now, one each morning. I’m also accumulating a windowsill full of spruce and alder cones, bits of moss and quartz, and other stray items: a rose hip, a mollusk shell, dried stalks of some kind of aster.
I hear owls at night: the deep hoots of a great horned owl, the faster, higher calls of a northern saw-whet owl. I missed some aurora activity last night, though. I gave up and went to bed at a quarter after midnight, thinking it was too cloudy, and others saw the flickering just fifteen minutes later.
Heading toward summer, Alaska, or this part of it anyway, is gaining five minutes of light a day. The sun currently sets at 9:30 but the glow lingers longer, hovering at the horizon until 10:30 or later.
Today, Saturday, is brilliantly bright, at least for now. The snow-blanketed volcanoes across Cook Inlet are perfectly clear. Directly across from my desk rises the cone of Augustine (Chu Nula, translation in progress). Visible at the edge of my view is Iliamna (Ch’nagat’in, One that stands above). I have to walk outside to see Redoubt (Bentuggezh K’enulgheli, One that has a notched forehead).
Lesley Wheeler, Ephemera pt. 3 (the wild life)
Today, my birthday started the day off with French toast made for me by J and sitting down to write some poems to catch up on NaPoWriMo hi-jinks I have fallen behind on. We don’t really have plans for the day since J has three gigs today stretching from early afternoon til 2 or 3 am. So I am on my own, and will probably work on editing things, tidy up the bedroom, and watch something trashy later. […]
In the end 51 was a wild year. Depressing on a global scene, and dysfunctional even on a level that my previous half-century had not seen. Yet, on a personal level, things feel good, though ever precarious financially (but then again, while things are more expensive, I have never quite been flush there even when they were cheaper.) I probably wrote over a hundred poems, edited dozens of chapbooks, made many collages and cover designs. I published three physical books (one a regular full-length collection, one a text/visual hybrid, and another special-edition hardcover w/ fauxtographs for Patreon. ) There were also a handful of e-zine editions. A smattering of video poems. Meanwhile there have been countless movies, many plays and musicals, occasional weekends away, and of course, the wedding last summer, which was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.
Kristy Bowen, 52
Once upon a time, around the time I first moved to London, I wrote nothing but sonnets for a year. They weren’t strictly sonnets, because they mostly didn’t rhyme and when they did rhyme they didn’t follow the right patterns; the metre, to the extent there was one, was rough and ready even by my standards. Never mind. I’d been reading a lot of Robert Lowell (possibly too much). The not-quite-sonnet tradition goes further back still.
More interesting, looking back, was how addicted to the form I was. I couldn’t stop writing and whatever I wrote came out in fourteen lines. Here is Ken Gordon, writing about his own sonnetification in Sonnet by Other Means: “It was like a fever. I began writing sonnets continuously. Daily. Sometimes two or three (or even four) in a day. I was like a chain-smoker: One sonnet lit another.” I don’t think I ever wrote four in a day, but yes—it was like that.
Are people drawn to certain forms? It’s a good question. I am still a sonnet reader, but I haven’t started a new one in years. Maybe it is also a question of timing: to everything its season and perhaps particularly to sonnets, that form which is so contained, so combustible, and apparently inexhaustible.
You can read one of those London sonnets in the The Sonneteer. I am grateful to Ken not only for taking it, but for providing the title—the only title possible, but I didn’t know that. The poem riffs on Jackson Browne’s song of the same name (written when he was a teenager, made famous by Nico).
Jem Wikeley, Poetry Notebook, 24/04/26
Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapulting him into renown. The voting process is a black box — no one outside the Academy ever finds out who else is in the running and by how much the winner wins.
Leafing through the ballots, one other name appeared over and over, so much so that I was impelled to count.
Marianne Moore had lost by one vote, never knowing how close she had come. It would be many more years until, at 77, she was finally awarded the fellowship.
Long before that, before she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (sharing a table with Rachel Carson at the ceremony), Moore had set down her views on writing in a series of essays later collected in the out-of-print gem Predilections (public library). Pulsating through them is a reckoning with the impossible task of the writer — to weave tapestries of truth and meaning from the tenuous thread of words on the ramshackle loom of language.
In an essay titled “Feeling and Precision,” Moore writes:
Feeling at its deepest — as we all have reason to know — tends to be inarticulable. If it does manage to be articulate, it is likely to seem overcondensed, so that the author is resisted as being enigmatic or disobliging or arrogant.
How we name what we feel is not so much a matter of our writing style as of our style of being, because in order to articulate something we must first apprehend it and we apprehend every smallest thing with the whole person — with the frame of reference that is our entire life, the sum of our experience and memory. When “one of New York’s more painstaking magazines” asked Moore to distill her poetic style into a formula, she fought back the “dictatorial” reflex to quip:
You don’t devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of the personality.
And yet a personality can write with more or less persuasion — that is, write more or less well — depending on what the person brings to the writing.
Maria Popova, Marianne Moore on the Three Elements of Persuasive Writing
This week, I attended a phenomenal reading at the Poetry Foundation featuring Ashley M. Jones, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Donika Kelly, and Patricia Smith. The poems asked a great deal of us—our attention, our emotional depth, our fullest humanity. They were not always easy—that is, they did not always say the easy or obvious thing. They did not lead with something “everyone can relate to” to win us over. They often centered on confronting and difficult subjects.
And that’s one of the things I love about poetry, the way it can immediately deliver identity and experience grounded in the complex and ongoing web of history. In other words, these poems were ambitious. They seemed to hope to outlast their moment in the grit, music, and scope of what they offered and asked of the listener. I felt challenged. I felt moved.
It made me reflect on how I’ve been teaching writing for 14 years, and my list of similes for what the process is like has grown stranger by the year.
Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend
In the opening poem in this collection, “Dear Life,” Popa writes, “I can’t undo all I have done to myself / what I have let an appetite for love to do me.” These lines set the tone for a book that again and again catches us on its barbed hook. Language hooks us. Ghost crabs are a “speculation on shape,” water, “an artifact of loneliness.” Can I capture the essence of this book after only one reading? Probably not.
Toward the end of the book, toward the end of a long poem, “Pestilence,” Popa writes: “Each day I remember / Each day I strategically forgot,” and “how human is the future / will it let us let / I am listening through my terror for yours…”
Olawaseum Olayiwola in The Guardian described Wound Is the Origin of Wonder as “purposefully heart-decelerating.” It balances contemplation with a sense of walking through the natural world, balances woundedness with a deep, profound healing. I’m wholly intrigued.
Bethany Reid, Maya C. Popa, WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER
I can’t let Poetry Month go by without sharing a few notes about books I’ve spent time with this month. So, here are a few brief recommendations:
by Mihret Kebede and translated from Amharic by Anna Moschovakis
When’s the last time you read an Ethiopian poet? Or poetry translated from Amharic? Well, it was a first for me, and I continue to be impressed by the incredible work that the good people at Circumference Books are doing. So many of their books are from regions and languages that are so rarely represented in English translation, and thus, feel so very new and surprising in all the right ways. And if you, like me, are looking for an activist poetics for our times, these are politically engaged poems that provide a very personal model for literary resistance.
Yes & Now
by Yvette Nepper
Yvette may be one of my earliest friends in poetry land—we met our freshman year, when we were both at Ohio University for a time. I greatly admire Yvette’s work within the poetry community in Cincinnati, and we share a Gen X love of DIY and zine culture that continues in many of Yvette’s chapbooks and projects. Yes & Now is one such limited edition chapbook (in this case produced by FTP), “printed on a mimeograph machine in Mike Cowgill’s mom’s basement.” I love Yvette’s ability to balance profound thought with humor and play that makes one feel like it’s totally okay and maybe even preferable sometimes to have a dance party within what feels like an apocalypse. Come hear Yvette read at my house this September, and while you can’t buy Yes & No online anymore, check out her other chapbooks.
Carrie Olivia Adams, April Sunbeams & Books
This, Ian Storr’s second, beautifully-titled collection of haiku (and haibun), has been a long time coming, 16 years in fact, since Seeds from a Larch Cone. Ian is my friend, and was my long-time colleague at Presence haiku journal – he was the managing editor from 2014, following the tragic death of Martin Lucas, until last year, a stint in which he undertook much more than the lion’s share of the work involved in cementing its reputation as one of English-language haiku’s best journals, if not the best.
I know I’m biased but I have no hesitation in saying that Late Light, published by Alba Publishing and available here (scroll down) is the most important collection of haiku by a British poet since (at least) Thomas Powell’s Clay Moon (Snapshot Press, 2020) and the two collections by our late Presence colleague Stuart Quine (Alba Publishing, 2018 and 2019).
Ian hails from Sheffield and still lives there. He spent his working life as a children’s social worker, an immensely important and difficult job. The compassion, objectivity, resilience and intelligence needed for that profession shines through in Ian’s haiku.
Matthew Paul, On Ian Storr’s Late Light
Marriage is one of the most marked gaps in classical literature. I can’t, off-hand, think of a single good classical poem about being married, and barely any even about a wife (as opposed to a lover or would-be lover). Marriage is of course depicted quite often in Greek tragedy, though generally not very positively. But that’s not to say there’s no good Latin poetry about marriage — around 1500 the Renaissance Latin poets Pontano and Sannazaro, in particular, pioneered the Latin poetry of marriage and this sub-genre remained fashionable for a good century or so. […]
I’ve been thinking about marriage in literature, and especially in poetry, partly because I have been rereading Women in Love for the first time in decades, and partly because this week I finally received the copy of Matthew Buckley Smith’s Midlife, which I’ve been waiting for — I ordered it a while ago but it took a good few weeks to make it across the Atlantic and through French customs. Smith is the host of the popular, if oddly named, Sleerickets poetry podcast, which I’ve been on a couple of times — once a year or so ago and then just last week. I’m not a big podcast-listener myself but I enjoyed talking to Matthew, who’s a gifted interviewer, both times. Sleerickets’ trademark is plain-speaking so in that spirit I hope Matthew won’t mind that this week I’m writing about his own poetry.
Midlife, published in 2024 by Measure Press, was Smith’s second collection and the winner of the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award in 2021. (This is an American poetry prize that recognises excellence in formal poetry, with a particular interest — in recognition of Wilbur’s legacy as a translator — in poets who also translate; previous winners have included A. M. Juster, A. E. Stallings, Rhina P. Espaillat and Maryann Corbett.) Last year he was also one of the Rattle Chapbook Prize winners, which means that his pamphlet The Soft Black Stars was circulated to all Rattle subscribers (including me) a few weeks ago (if you’re not a Rattle subscriber, you can order it here).
The first thing to say is that Smith is a very good poet in various ways: he is technically accomplished, he has some range in both form and style, and — a feature that readers of Horace & friends will I think particularly appreciate — he conveys an enjoyable impression of literary depth. Midlife contains one excellent (and one less good) version of Horace, one fairly good version of Catullus 51/Sappho 31, one version of/response to Rilke, as well as versions, responses and allusions to Homer, Tennyson and (especially) the dramatic monologues of Browning. The Soft Black Stars, though on the whole a bit less ‘literary’, contains poems responding to the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’ and to Ezra Pound. (The title of the pamphlet is taken from a short story by the American horror writer, Thomas Ligotti, but I haven’t read these stories so won’t comment on that.) Smith is writing in that American formalist tradition that sometimes sounds to my British ear just a bit too clickety-clack, and at times I find him a little boxed-in by his forms. But this is a pretty minor niggle: if you enjoy collections written entirely in “traditional” verse, he is obviously one of the very best US poets writing in this way today.
Victoria Moul, On marriage
Rhina P. Espaillat published this sonnet, titled “Here,” after the passing of her husband, Alfred. And it is as precise a description of what remains after losing a spouse as anything English literature has to offer. It is a poem, in my own lingering grief, I can hardly bear to read and yet cannot bear to set aside.
After the death of Dylan Thomas, Caitlin Thomas published a 1957 memoir of her time married to the poet, with the unbearable title Leftover Life to Kill. Espaillat catalogues instead the actual leftover objects.
Born on January 20, 1932, Rhina P. Espaillat had her 90th birthday in 2022 celebrated by several of the better poetry publications. Back in its heyday, Prairie Home Companion featured her work. The godmother of the New Formalism — the counter-current that emerged in the late 1980s to offer alternatives to the endless free verse of modern college writing-program poetry — she occupies a section in every contemporary anthology of rhymed and metered verse.
The authorized translator of Robert Frost into Spanish, and the translator of such works as the poetry of St. John of the Cross into English, Espaillat is a major poet working in our lifetimes. Which is why we’ve featured her work several times here in Poems Ancient and Modern: the comic “Undelivered Mail,” the dimeter of “Things That Go,” her translation of “Songs of the Soul in Intimate Amorous Communion with God.”
And in “Here,” the reader will find several of the features that recur in her verse. The sonnet form she often uses. The simple rhymes, for example, that do not strain for effect. The list-making. The precise observation of “his red Swiss Army knife / hiding its tiny arsenal of blades” and the near personification of those knife blades: “like legs tucked under.” A refusal of hyperbole: “I almost hear him say . . . ” And a powerful emotion never named but completely expressed, with the unbearable ending […]
Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Here
The latest from Colorado poet and critic Camille T. Dungy is America, A Love Story (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), a powerful collection of poems that provides a table of contents listing single poems and poem-clusters, arranged in untitled sections counterpointing with occasional stand-alone pieces. The book-length suite of America, A Love Story is exactly that: a heartfelt declaration and examination of a complicated country and culture, and a history of aggression, devastation and racism that still ripples across the landscape of generations. “America,” she writes, as part of the brilliantly-devastating opening poem, “This’ll hurt me more,” “there is not a place I can wander inside you / and not feel a little afraid.” Writing of childhood, her father and grandmother, the use of the switch and of her father being pulled over by the police, the second page of the same poem offers: “Of course my father fit the description. The imagination / can accommodate whoever might happen along. / America, if you’ve seen a hillside quickly catch fire, / you have also seen a river freeze over, the surface / looking placid though you know the water deep down, / dark as my father, is pushing and pulling, still trying / to go ahead. We were driving home, my father said. / My wife and my daughters, we were just on our way / home.” This is a book of consequence and heart, and the cruel nature of love itself, articulating a detail of people and movement, history and storytelling with an attention to intimate detail. Amid the story of the neighbourhood women amid a shared stray cat in the poem “True Story,” a piece that tells far more than I’ll offer here, she writes: “One woman believed, as Issa believed, / that in all things, even the small and patient / snail, there are perceptible strings that tie / each life to all others.”
There is such a delicate way that Dungy articulates her narrative collage around the idea of love, of America, including an America that will impact her children, and all that might lie ahead; of the ties, and even the traumas, that bind people together, offering poems from a variety of sides and perspectives, coming together to form a coherent shape around how she understands and approaches her love, her America, from the best elements to the worst, and what all that requires and declares, demands and articulates.
rob mclennnan, Camille T. Dungy, America, A Love Story
If [Liam] Guilar’s approach to translation is to reimagine, then the way Kit Fryatt and Harry Gilonis work in Book of Inversions is to take things apart and then put them back together in carefully random disorder. As the author/translators note in their introduction, it’s ‘a book of inversions, turning the world upside down’.
The introduction also mentions some antecedents to their approach, including Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, Celia and Louis Zukofsky’s homophonic Catullus, Anne Carson’s versions of the same Latin poet, Richard Caddell’s transmogrification of I Gododdin in his elegiac For the Fallen, and Geoffrey Squires’s My News for You: Irish Poetry 600-1200, not so much an antecedent as it was published while Fryatt and Gilonis were hard at it, but certainly a kind of gold standard for anyone tackling the field. There are also notes that indicate textual sources, other translations (full disclosure, three of them are mine), and further interesting titbits about each poem inverted. The notes also indicate if the version is by one or other of the authors or a joint effort.
Their title plays on the Lebor Gabála Érenn, englished as The Book of the Takings of Ireland, or The Book of Invasions. As such, it is fitting that, after a couple of dedicatory snippets, they open with a version of Amergin’s Song from that text. Not the famous, or infamous, ‘I am the wind on the sea’ one, but Amergin’s third song. Amergin Glúngheal is Ireland’s mythical first poet, and the songs represent a moment of claiming Ireland, which, maybe, makes this a doubly appropriate opener. Here it is in the Irish Text Society version by Macalister, the official version, if you like:
A fishful sea!
A fruitful land!
An outburst of fish
Fish under wave,
In streams (as) of
A rough sea!
birds,
A white hail
With hundreds of salmon,
Of broad whales!
A harbour-song—
An outburst of fish,
A fishful sea!And here’s the Gilonis take:
Fishfilled sea!
Fertile land!
Fish erupt!
Fish in waves
bird-flock-like!
Ocean’s wild!White sea hail,
salmon hordes,
widespread wales!
Harbour song:
‘Fish erupt,
fishfilled sea!’And the Irish text as best as I can manage to reconstruct it from what’s to hand:
iascach muir
mothach tîr
tomaidm n-eisc
iasca fothuind
rethaib ên
fairge chruaid
cassar finn
crethaib én
lethan mîl
portach lág
mniportach lugh
tomaidm n-eisc
iascach muirWhat’s immediately apparent, even to readers with no Irish, is that the new version adheres much more closely to the chant-like terseness of the original, short lines and an emphatic rhythm and an echo of the Irish tendency to composite word formation.
Billy Mills, Celtic Matters
The poet J.H. Prynne died this week, at the age of 89. I’ve been reading his work since I was a student. My first experience of it was very like the one described in this tribute by Ian Patterson for the London Review of Books blog:
[the] poems were like essays in their apparent substance, but they had a manner, a rhythm and a music, as well as a density of thought that shifted my idea of what poetry was and what it could be and do
So this week I thought I would try to give some account of that experience: the reading of words that sound explanatory but resist explanation, and which resonate with a musical air of meaning that repeats itself as a kind of thought.
[…]
wresting the screen before the eyelet lost / to speech tune you blame the victim: I’ve quoted these unpunctuated lines together because I don’t know how to split them apart. Following the clear but abstract statement of the distinction between knowing and doing, we are suddenly plunged into a confusion of violent action. To “wrest” is usually to “wrest control” of something: here, “the screen before the eyelet lost”. This is — to use a synonym for darkness — “obscure” (Latin obscurus, dark, hidden, secret). But obscurity is also what is being (obscurely) described: to put a “screen” before an “eyelet” is to block a small hole for light. So clarity of knowledge has been followed by a cover-up. “Lost”, at the line-break, is the hinge word here, the moment of maximum confusion before an immoral argument emerges which inverts the dynamics of power: “you blame the victim”. How / why do “you” do this? Because you are “lost / to speech tune”, like a good poet. But here it sounds as though your eloquence is a bad habit.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, In Darkness by Day
We’ve been thinking a lot about the poetry of Douglas Dunn recently, especially Douglas’s superb and undervalued pre-Elegies poems. This seemed a good excuse to give this little essay a second airing; it appeared in a recent-ish issue of The Dark Horse devoted to Dunn and his work. It’s about my own debt to Douglas, and to one poem of his in particular. Since that poem is unavailable online, I’ll risk reprinting it at the end of the piece until I’m told off. You can, however, still read it in Dunn’s essential New Selected Poems. […]
I remember reading ‘Remembering Lunch’ in an appropriately wine-stained paperback copy of St Kilda’s Parliament, bought in the Charing Cross Road in the late eighties. I’ll have picked it up it from one of the second-hand bookstores where, twelve or fifteen years earlier, Douglas would have flogged his review copies to pay for his long Soho lunch and its longer bar tab. I had just read and fallen in love with Elegies, as we all had; but with the young male poet’s atrocious impatience to have everyone sprawling on a pin, I decided I had Dunn’s measure. I opened at ’Remembering Lunch’. So much for that theory. For one thing, even the measure was new to me. What’s with the long line? Isn’t it prose when you keep bopping your head on the right margin? Clearly not; but are poets permitted such long sentences? At the time, one knew just enough to reach for the word ‘Jamesian’ whenever one encountered such fluent hypotaxis, but little else. I was, at least, used to poems ending with the sea. The sea is literally a great place to stop. But it was clearly going to take me years to catch up with the rest of it, and I had best make a start.
Don Paterson, Learning from Dunn
At age 76, [Robert] Cording has been writing a long time; he started before he was out of college, and he published his first book of poems in 1987, almost 40 years ago. To look back over that lengthy career is to begin to understand something about the meaning of his new book’s title: what he’s been able to achieve through decades of devotion to his craft, which produces both an accounting and an appraisal of all that he has written and published, and what is possible to ascertain from what the poems tell us about the life Cording has experienced and lived and shared, not only with those he loves but also with his readers.
About the latter, Cording’s poems make quietly clear his life’s through-lines:
[. . .] family and friends, [. . .]
~ from “Talking Through a Storm” (p. 114 )
our blessings—the disarming joy of being
loved, the bounty of the natural world
that still takes our sight beyond ourselves. [. . .]As that excerpt implies, Cording is an observer of the interior life, one from which he draws energy and consolation, as much as he is a poet who looks out into the world of both the ordinary — “all that is / too humdrum for our notice,” the “nothing much” that characterizes daily goings-on (“Ode to Ordinariness, pp. 130-131) — and the inexplicable and divine, whether it is “the perfection of birdness” (“Lord God Bird,” pp. 132-133) or “some accidental loveliness / we put our hopes in” (“Massachusetts Audubon Chart No. 1, 1898,” p. 185).
As attentive as Cording is to these constants, as much as he can praise the recurrence of “the sun returning like a second chance / after this evening’s shower” or “the moon rising like a clockface” (“Ode to Ordinariness,” p. 131), the world, he writes, “keeps moving to its tasks, random with pain, / rich with surprise” (“All Souls’ Morning,” p. 54), landing him in an “in-between” space where grief and lament reside alongside praise and “a source of awe”: “the colors // of dawn on the earth’s other side. Everything— / the tamaracks and maples, the spruces and their / smoke- winged / sparrows, the painterly sky darkening toward infinity” (“For Rex Brasher, Painter of Birds,” pp. 75-76). The lesson to be drawn, then, is that both suffering and cause to celebrate can and do coexist, that a day can be “perfectly made for delight” while “grief is endless” (“Four Prayers,” p. 151).
Maureen Doallas, Robert Cording’s ‘What’s Possible: New & Selected Poems’
May 2026, next month, marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of my first book of poems, The Silence of Men, which I think is worth celebrating because it is—and this is a testament to CavanKerry Press’ commitment to its authors—still in print and, somewhat remarkably (to me at least), still selling. I just received my 2025 royalty check for $4.83. It’s easy to laugh at that amount, and we’ve all heard the jokes about how poets are only in it for the money (right?), but I have always believed that poetry does its work in the world very slowly. I don’t know how many copies of the book that check represents, or how many people will ultimately read those copies, but it makes me happy and not a little bit humbled to think that poems I wrote more than two decades ago are still doing their work somewhere.
[…]
How To Write A Political Poem During These Unprecedented Times, by Adrian S. Potter:
Perhaps we sink too much energy into pretending to be unoffended when we really should feel insulted. As part of his unapologetic reign of bluster, one of our so-called leaders keeps teaching a master class on how to parlay hot takes and brash rhetoric into votes and profit. Meanwhile, I’m busy trying to write a poem that will finally put an end to bigotry, and yes, even within the false mythology of a post-racial society, bigotry still exists.
The tension in this piece is between the self-important navel-gazing that characterizes the way some writers live “the literary life” and the implicit call to action with which Potter ends the piece: “But when I try to write about [these unprecedented times]…my hand instinctively tightens into a fist hoisted high above my head.” The essay was published in 2004, and I imagine that, in light of what’s been happening in the United States and the Middle East, it lands with even more urgency than it did back then. I found myself thinking of Louise Glück’s essay “The Idea of Courage,” in which she critiqued the use of the term courage to described what it took for a poet to write poems that revealed aspects of their life they might not otherwise have revealed. Specifically, I found myself remembering Glück’s point that this usage of courage “concentrates attention on the poet’s relation to his materials and to his audience, rather than on the political result of speech.” We all know the stories of the poets in totalitarian nations throughout history who risked that political result and paid with their lives. Iran, of course, is one of them. How far are we, I asked myself when I finished reading Potter’s essay, from a time when the difference between writing a political poem and raising one’s tightened fist into the air will not be as different as he suggests.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #54
in the front yard, the ferns
Robin Gow, poem in which i am an activist
are unfurling their fists. i wonder what it is
that they reach for. i should probably open
my hands too. catch something. not a star,
maybe just a petal from the peach tree who might,
if the world is real enough this year, bear fruit.
Based on A Poet’s Glossary, a book I always enjoyed opening, I impulse-purchased this new critical work by Edward Hirsch. But it is not a book I will finish, though I will keep dipping. The attempt to link poetry to the state of America is far too blunt, the readings are often too anecdotal, and thus the page count is far beyond the actual interest, though the book is not without interest and if some compressed version of this was available in online essays, I would read it. In general, this might be a worthwhile book for someone new to the topic, but it feels old-fashioned to me. If the topic at hand is so important (as I agree with Hirsch that it is) some other way of discussing it must be found. No easy task, and perhaps an unfair criticism, but that is where we are.
*
Adam Kirsch’s 2008 book about modern poetry is much more lively, gets to the point, and has Kirsch’s own strongly-held views to sustain it. It is less about “who we are now” or whatever, but has a lot more to say about the poets and the nature of poetry. Kirsch is against “poetry’s neurotic obsession with the modern”. He thinks the “poetics of authenticity” which prevailed after the war, and which finished the job Romanticism started and led to the removal of formal qualities, “has thoroughly failed” and has prevented poets from writing major works. He wishes us to return to the pragmatic tradition of Johnson, Aristotle, Horace, and Arnold. A very worthwhile book.
Henry Oliver, Palms, poems, moderns
It was late May, and I had a day off, or was killing time between my day and evening jobs, and I missed campus, with its grassy quad and emerald oaks and bobbing tulips, its redbuds and dogwood, magnolia and cherry, and so I went to the park in search of something like it. There was nothing there that one would call manicured, and what I missed most of all, I’m sure, was the people who’d sit in the grass and read poems with me. I remember I wrote a letter to a friend—we had email, but nobody had a computer; word processors hulked on our desks like suitcase bombs—and then I read Sweet Machine for the first time, and “Door to the River” is the poem that left me breathless in the grass.
What’s to like? I’ve been asking another version of that question a lot lately: Why do I like what I like? It’s a simple poem, so far as the literal circumstances: it begins in ekphrasis, more specifically interpretive ekphrasis—the speaker doesn’t tell us what the painting looks like, but attempts to interpret de Kooning’s intention or meaning—then progresses to narrative description, recalling yesterday’s meadow, then proceeds through a series of questions that feel by turns existential and self-directed, arriving at something like certainty, then a turn to exhortation and another narrative that leads to a moment of lyric epiphany—of transcendence. Why do I like it? Because it is transcendent, and it brings us along on its path towards insight.
Maybe simple isn’t the word.
“Door to the River” is sort of the antonym, conceptually and formally, of another field poem, Mark Strand’s compact little “Keeping Things Whole.” I’m tempted to call it an antidote as well. There’s paradox at the heart of Strand’s poem: If his speaker is what is missing, he is also the missing piece; in that sense, he belongs wherever he is—and yet the division seems to be absolute. There is “the air,” and there is “my body,” and though the two meet, they remain separate. There is such a thing as lack: the air can lack the body; the body can lack the air. Together they “keep things whole,” but this wholeness is only accomplished by continuous motion, is comprised always of its individual components.
In “Door to the River,” we have another mind contemplating another field, but the insight that arrives is entirely opposite: in this field, there is both stillness and fullness: “some / balance . . . no lack, nothing / missing from the world.” It’s an experience of completion, wholeness, abundance. And so the final revelation at the end of the breathless penultimate sentence—this is a sentence that began thirty-one lines earlier, with “It was her voice”—arrives as an utter surprise: that this experience of wholeness must be the same as the experience of death. Having tumbled through to the end of this astounding claim, we end with the simple finality of a one-word sentence: Fine.
Vanessa Stauffer, “Door to the River” by Mark Doty
Spring of course is the season of possibilities. April has been a busy month but now the big weighty tasks are behind me — giving workshops, which is not a task I do with ease, memorializing a friend — and I feel lighter and the mornings have been so sweet with a perfect mix of chill and warmth from the heating sun. Trees are crazy with buds and blossoms and the azaleas across the street are laden. A squirrel ate my one lone tulip, as it does every goddamn year. And it’s been very dry and my least favorite season, summer, is on its way, and it could be a scorcher. So it goes. I try to give participants in my workshops a sense of possibilities, but memorials for friends signal an end to possibilities. One possible outcome of possibilities is nothing. I think of this often. And so. The old eat-drink-and-be-merry, the old eat-dessert first, the old be-here-now. I can only shrug or laugh or be wry. I like the word wry — it’s a tricky little devil: that sometimes-y vowel, that silent w. You can speak it without opening the jaw, the maw of possibility. I like this wry poem by Aidan Chafe for that very thing, its wry embrace of what is possible.
Marilyn Mccabe, with snot and ice cream
Listening to Kathy Acker, dead twenty-five years, read her translations of the poet Sextus Propertius from Blood and Guts in High School … let there be no double winter dead winds … I understand my missteps are all colossal flaps for the wind to carry me, whether I want to be carried or no. The landing isn’t up to me. The wind decides. All my successes or perfections don’t need the head of a pin to stand—that would be too vast—so I never keep one around. My journey needs no island. I’ve given up maps. Since having is believing, I don’t believe. Call me useless, call me criminal, call me undigested pizza with hallucinatory moments of despair—but nothing has always been greater than something.
Sam Rasnake, Monday Works… #14: “On Perfection and Flaws”
If one assumes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is correct … Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away … then perfection is the blank page before the poem gives words to lyric, the imagined story before its told, before the idea of Venus de Milo Apollo gives shape to stone, before strokes of paint find a fence or sky or face on canvas, before the note is played. The saying, the doing can only muck the truth.
How to have one and not the other is the real task at hand, the work behind the work—the bottom of the glass reached as the meal is finished—plates carried to the kitchen—the chair returned to its place.
The poets on the farthest end of the table are laughing
Luisa A. Igloria, Poem at 3 AM with Leftovers and Rilke
and the visiting scholar on the other end is trading
jokes with the futures trader, and no one quite notices
when the waiters come to fill and replenish cups of water
and tea. Your colleague is rhapsodizing over the thick
clouds of chicken and corn in the soup, and you give
your whole mind to all of this, for here as in the world
attention is a practice that asks nothing from you except
to be here. Though when all of you walk back into the night
and the air is cooler and all are hugging and waving goodbye
or someone is suggesting you find somewhere else to go and
have margaritas, you know the world is waiting to slip into
your mouth again— another kind of communion, the kind
you have every day, the kind that stains your fingers
and leaves a slight film of oil, even now in this kitchen
where, standing barefoot on cold tile, already you are
chewing on the future.