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: speech bubbles, egoistic namby-pambyness, the staid denizens of heaven, a rainbow in a storm, and much more. Enjoy.
/ hope’s ache, pinkly.
Fran Lock, OPAQUE OR “DURATIONAL #11”
/ in the mind’s ill-mannered museum.
/ something is stirring.
/ claustrophobic and soft.
/ the bad idea. with its octopus of arms and gossip.
Some flowers hold their petals for only a few days and in those few days they are likely witnessed time and again by what is most important, the pollinators, be it winged, footed, or the wind. The more-than-human world is always announcing itself, a lot of it silently, invisibly. The swarm of insects indicate the announcement of flowers. The perching of birds announces the quiet leafing-out of trees, the whispering growth of berries, the stock-still readiness of seeds. You smell of lilac announces the high-up cones of flowers waving at the sky.
Sarah Lada, Quiet Announcement
On the nearby peat bog and in patches on the croft, bog myrtle flowers opened. They turned from bright orange to peach and cinnamon. Each day the heavenly perfume rises and threads through everything, caught and transferred by wind. For me, the essence of spring, the herald to a year of light, colour and smell, of growth and possibilities, the fragrance of life itself, is found in this combination of myrtle-incense and peat. When cold easterlies blew, I sat in a sheltered nook near the cliff-top, facing west to the sea, and almost felt the scent of bog myrtle as a tangible thing, a stream of life, overpowering even the aroma of salt, seaweed and rock. This, this, marks the real beginning of a new year – when I am submerged in, cleansed and blessed by attar of myrtle.
On April 22nd I take a break from writing to catch up with the latest news. I see a picture of a small boy in a woollen jumper and long pants holding on to a chair and am completely undone. He is very young, with the stance toddlers adopt when they are first learning to walk independently – widely space legs, arms spread. His hesitant smile is that of all children at that age, wide-eyed, hopeful, ready to explore. He looks so like my youngest grandchild I need to study the image carefully to be certain it isn’t her. She is at the same stage, tottering around with her arms held out for balance, a smile of delight on her face as she investigates her world. Tears flow. I can’t stop them. Hot tears and a rage-sweat. I let it all burn out of me.
Annie O’Garra Worsley, April-May… the force be with you
This week saw my friend Catherine Broadwall launch her book Aftermath at the downtown gallery/bar Vermillion, the announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes, a new poem in the lit mag Assaracus, and the return of some favorite birds, like the Black-Headed Grosbeak and the Rufous Hummingbird.
Also, the Iran war continues and a hantavirus scare from a cruise ship. Plus, the Supreme Court continues to abuse the “shadow docket” in order to support an evil, racist regime. Is this all discouraging and apocalyptic? It is.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Book Launch at Vermillion, a Desert Rat Poem in Assaracus, Spring Bird Appearances, The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Are you getting much sleep? Are you awake with me at 4am? Can you see this beautiful May dawn light? I’m not supposed to be here, but here I am, watching and noticing the soft peach and pinks in the May skies, listening to the dawn chorus and sipping some mint tea. Are you ok? Are you looking after your bold hearts and big dreams? Not easy is it.
What a mess.
In every direction there is chaos, calamity, catastrophe. It feels like all the sections are wrong, like the forks are muddled up in the spoons section, like all the pieces of us are scattered. It feels like the script of this episode of you and me is being writen by a maniac sniffing glue. The news keeps reminding me of boys in the playground at school kicking the bins to make wasps fly out and getting angry when they get stung. Fuck about and find out over and over again. The consequences of all of this, the divisions, the bubbling hatred, the violence, this vibration, this unease, all the energy of humanity is cornered and angry and confused and frustrated and frightened and sick and tired as this ooze of misinformation and wildly unchecked macho egomania spreads like a stinky toxic treacle sticking to every leaf and idea, every wing and cloud of thought. It feels like our world needs to be drenched with sea salt and sage and rose petals and rosemary, take a deep breath, but maybe that’s just me.
I’m going away on a Writers Retreat and just packing.
Salena Godden, Death is another country
The other day I went out for walk. I went out for a walk in the same way I would go about making a poem – and I do believe you make a poem, you do not simply write it. I went out to seek connection. I went with an idea of where I was going but, as with a poem, without knowing exactly what I might find. I went with purpose. I went, as one goes to poetry, with the cautious endeavour of bringing elements together. […]
The walk began in Moorgate, London, beside the bronze cast of a life mask of the poet John Keats. The sculpture itself marks the poet’s birthplace, a London pub now called The Globe. It was originally called The Swan and Hoop. Ten years ago I took my poem, My Name is Swan, to every pub in London that, like The Swan and Hoop, had the word Swan in its name. I read my poem in around twenty Swan pubs. The performances were documented in film. The poem is now due to appear in a book. My publisher will be making an announcement about My Name is Swan and other fine titles on their list at 4:30pm UK time. […]
The walk took me north to Bunhill fields and to the grave of William Blake. Here I began to conceive of a series of walks, with each walk connecting two points of literary or poetic history within a roughly one mile radius of each other. The walks form single scenes, short acts, that move toward a much larger play slowly unfolding across the city. The course is plotted weekly and broadcast live, here on Substack on Sundays at 5pm.
Jan Noble, Nº63 Poetry is mobility contrary to the viral thesis
So here’s something I’ve wondering—do you ever wake up and feel you should be happy, but melancholy feels like a heavy blanket someone keeps putting on your shoulders? That’s how I’ve been feeling lately, besides all the beauty around me—I’m thinking springtime birds, cherry blossoms in bloom, sunshine, so much we decided to skip going into the Two Sylvias Press office this week and instead are working from home. But to look at one’s life and feel SO grateful and thankful for all you have, but then also kind of sad.
I’ve carried this feeling a lot throughout my life (it’s come and gone and returned) and I know with the state of our country, things are feeling a bit harder everywhere. So there’s that. . .unfortunately. (Also, promoting a book at that time feels beyond ridiculous.) I’ve found planting stargazer lilies feels hopeful. I’m learning how much of my hope is tied to plants, maybe because they are a quiet insistence that something is growing despite our human world. Maybe it’s the agreement a seed makes with the future—possibility, it whispers.
Last week I met with two good friends and one said she believes things will get better, but first they have to break open before they can be repaired. And I’m like, Great, love that for us—but is there an express lane to the healing part? I’m so impatient these days and just like with movies, I want to fast forward past the bad/scary parts. But time, right? We have to day-by-day it with our fingers crossed and hope in our back pocket.
Kelli Russell Agodon, Do You Ever Wake Up and Feel You Should Be Happy?
I think that’s why I’ve been writing more—writing has always helped me, even writing these little letters to you. I found myself writing a lot of prose poems too, I think because they feel as if I can get all the stuffs in there. I’ve been waking up, putting on “Goodbye Stranger” by Supertramp (wait, maybe this is why I’m sad, that song has lots of minor notes!). Also, please don’t think these poems are good—there are many many many really bad ones, but it feels good to be writing.
The cartoonist’s shape of speech,
Lori Witzel, Bubbles
its pinch-pot gnomon pointing out
whose breath it is, and isn’t. As if
the boundary was real, as if every
exhalation wasn’t both a way to
wipe clean the mirrored self and
a fog of unknowing. Those soap
bubbles in a vanitas still life. Your
warm breath in the shell of my ear.
I’m writing a bit but not with vim. Whatever vim is. A wonderful word. I’m painting. I’m plunking on my piano. I love that this is my life. But I’m wasting an awful lot of time wasting time. I’ve been pretty creative in my life, but I feel the potential in me to be more so, bigger in thought, farther in reach, giddier in play, bolder, broader, braver, more wonder-full, more experimental. But I don’t seem to know how to get from this chair to whatever that is, that place where I’m being bold and giddy. What is the environment that will best draw this effort out of me? It does not seem to be this chair. It’s not the chair’s fault. (Is it?) Are there people who can help shift me to this mythical place? Is it inspiration? As I’ve said previously, I don’t believe in “muses,” alas, or I could blame THEM, their mulish absence. No, it’s the brain. My brain. That wrinkly thing that’s currently a bit soggy with allergy snot. It’s a nay-sayer often, a builder of obstacles, a doubting thomas. How do I call it to order? How do I poke it into action? I feel a little lost, in fact. Do you ever feel this way?
Marilyn McCabe, text of earth, ocean, and breath. Let me, too, inhabit
I am easing back into my Substack reading, so if you haven’t seen me around, trust me, I will return. When life is this uncertain, it’s hard to concentrate—I keep running into these walls where I just, very calmly, stop doing. I just sit down on my suitcase and refuse to move. It’s called burnout. I’m working on taking care of myself, on having fun, on doing the things I need to do. Substack is one of them.
This morning I grabbed a few moments and ended up working on this poem. It’s been a while in the making. I dug it out and started to play with it. I have three versions here. Mostly, its the pronoun usage that I’m interested in. I would love your feedback.
VERSION #1
Rebecca Cook, 3 Versions. Which Do You Prefer?
How can we not love this world,
the elegance of it,
the way it lifts itself
up from sleeping,
the way it spreads
a blanket on the ground
and carefully sets out
the potato salad
the chicken
the cold slices of pie.
How can we not love this world,
the mothering of it,
how she catches the newborns
and lifts them to the sun,
how she lays the backs of her cool hands
across forehands to gauge fevers
how she rubs salve on the congested chests,
ladles up cool water
whispers sleep sleep
sleep. […]
Wow. There’s nothing like typing a poem out to realize it really is pitch perfect. Between 15 – 21 syllables in every line. Nothing misplaced. I think again of Elizabeth Bishop’s line that what she wants most in poetry is to see the mind in action. The leaps here from Dr. Martins to wild flowers to black widows to smoking to eating shrimp and making honey—to the speaker’s need to be seen as good. It all makes sense in the context of the piece. Beautiful, stunning sense. I adore this poem. I adore Jen.
The one time I was lucky enough to read with Jen was in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It must have been shortly after COVID. Jen offered to host me at her home which meant we had a good long time together. That night 5 minutes before our reading, I asked Jen if she would be willing to try a braided reading where one poet reads two poems and then the next poet reads work that somehow echoes what’s been read before. For example if Jen read her “Dr. Martins 1460 Wild Botanica” poem, I might read my poem with the line, “The season’s don’t fuck with me boots.”
In true Jen Martelli style she said “let’s do it,” and with no time to prepare we improvised back and forth choosing poems from our own book that chimed with the other. It was the most fun I’ve ever had doing a reading.
Susan Rich, Jennifer Martelli, Way Too Early
why not?
Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: May ’26
she stands in the sunshine
blowing bubbles
I don’t know who reads this. I don’t know who reads anything I write anymore, or whether that matters. I’m not sure it should… but writing, to me, has always involved this effort to transcend loneliness, however brief.
A poem and a painting then, since poems and paintings are less canny than human beings. Poems and paintings cannot — and therefore do not— condescend to you. Nor are they careerists. However much the poet or painter who created the poem or painting may be a late capitalist careerist, the poem and the painting are free to repudiate their creators. In this sense, the poem and the painting are better than us.
Alina Stefanescu, Frank Stewart’s “Marriage Among Friends”
I can only read in tiny snatches at the moment. Gérard de Nerval’s sonnets have been a great recourse in such a situation: brief, crystalline and endlessly evocative, they’re things I can dip into in spare moments, particularly the ones I know by heart and can think about as I walk to the shops or do the dishes. I have no academic grounding in them and my French is limited so my responses are personal and subjective, but I think in the case of these poems that’s as it should be. […]
Loss and recovery are fundamental, recurrent notes in the Nerval poems I’ve read. We see them here in “l’ardeur d’autrefois brilla dans ses yeux verts”, in “J’ai revêtu pour lui la robe de Cybèle” and in “la mer nous renvoyait son image adore” – the first two full of energy and forward-looking purpose, the third ethereally reflective. In fact the more I think about it the more the whole poem seems a magical orchestration of the tenses in three movements – a first, eight line movement revolving round the bitter stasis of a present that seems inescapable, a second, forward-looking three line movement which draws life from an eagerly anticipated future, and a third three-line movement of rapt retrospection.
Edmund Prestwich, Gerard de Nerval – Horus, a personal reading
Beautiful, filthy Pittsburgh, I think, is all ye need to know. Like the key of a map, the phrase collects the poem’s principal features in one clarifying legend. Perhaps microcosm makes a better metaphor in the context of “The Dancing,” which is more interested in connectedness, in complexity and wildness, than a map’s simplified order can represent. At any rate, I think of it as a kind of signifier, distilling both the poem’s linguistic strategy and worldview.
[Gerald] Stern’s music is built of accretion, a stacking up of sounds into a sonic lushness that foregoes the simultaneously anticipatory and analeptic distance of traditional forms in favour of something I want to call more organic, arising from a corporeal present instead of a telegraphed future or reverberated past: one sound gives rise to its twin with a wild spontaneity. The assonance of “rotten shops,” the liquid consonance of “beautiful, filthy,” the pairs of present participles: there is patternless patterning here, the sense of both randomness and design.
Beyond the musical pleasure, there’s a familiar delight in the yoking of praise and denigration: how we love to hate our hometowns, or secretly cherish certain exasperating persons, the places and people who teach us the protean nature of our attachments. How quickly we shift, out of a need—real or imagined—for self-preservation, fall in and out of devotion. How tenuous the divide between what is precious and what profane. “The Dancing” holds this egoistic namby-pambyness in check, tames our proclivity for simplifying our inherent ambivalence into for or against, love or fear, praise or denigration. Pittsburgh is beautiful. It is also filthy. You can love something broken, imperfect. Even—in 1945—the world.
Vanessa Stauffer, “The Dancing” by Gerald Stern
The British poet J. H. Prynne died a couple of weeks ago, prompting several touching responses from his relatively small but loyal group of readers. Coincidentally, this past week I’ve been reading some of David Melnick’s weird and extraordinary version of the Iliad, Men in Aïda. That poem is an example of an unusual (but not unique) approach to translation that prioritises the sound, the music of the original — I mean not just that the translator has attempted to use the same or a roughly equivalent metre, or even that they’ve taken the opportunity (as surely all good translators do) to echo the sound of the original where possible, but that this version of Homer chooses English words based primarily on their sonic similarity to the Greek. So ‘Men in Aïda’, the title and the first words of the poem, translates menin aeide, the first two words in Greek (‘Sing [of] the anger’).
Melnick is not the only poet to have tried something like this. Louis and Celia Zukofsky produced a similar ‘homophonic’ translation of the poems of Catullus, which is quite often quoted in passing by classicists. (And can be useful for teaching.) The reason I mention this mode of translation is because, reading Melnick, I was surprisingly often reminded of the particular pleasures (and frustrations) of reading Prynne. Quite often Prynne’s poetry sounds rather as if it might be this sort of sonic translation of something else, of a ravishing poem in a language I do not know; which is not to say that the English words he chooses have no meaning. (Melnick’s words, too, convey meaning and even a loose sort of plot, albeit more often impressionistically than by conventional syntax.) Here’s a representative sample, from Down Where Changed (1979):
The creamy recruit pines
for his stone, down under
the second-best hidingwhite at the foot of green
still white, ever green, love
offers the perfect match
ignites the perfect loan.I think this is a pretty fair example. It’s far from the best or most beautiful bit of Prynne but it’s far from the most obscure or difficult either. And it ends on loan, one of his signature words. Prynne’s poetry pushes you up hard against the sheer strangeness of language and languages. But it also delights in language in the simplest and most musical kind of way.
Rather surprisingly, Prynne has himself been translated a lot — most noticeably into French (many separate pamphlets), but also (according to Wikipedia) into Chinese and German, and he even composed some poetry in Chinese himself. This week, I was rather charmed to discover that his first published poem, as a schoolboy, was a translation of Thomas Hood into German verse. Not long after we moved here I picked up the bilingual French edition of the 1999 pamphlet Pearls That Were (Perles qui furent, French edition by Éric Pesty, 2013), with astonishing translations by Pierre Alferi. I found reading Prynne alongside a translation in this way extremely stimulating: I suppose this is partly because the translator is rarely able to reproduce identical ambiguities; he or she must, instead, adjudicate between meanings held in suspension in the original, while attempting to introduce alternative ambiguities. […]
When I asked on social media whether people thought [Geoffrey] Hill or Prynne would have the more enduring reputation, almost everyone who replied made it obvious — more or less politely — that they thought this was a no-brainer in Hill’s favour. But I find so much of Prynne’s poetry, for all its obscurity, exceptionally beautiful and unmistakably profound. The fact remains that I am more often moved to tears reading Prynne than almost any other recent poet in English. This just isn’t true in the same way of most of Hill, even though I am in variously ways unusually well equipped to enjoy him and do indeed sincerely admire and enjoy much of Hill’s later verse. How is it that two poets who have embraced difficulty and the limits of language in such apparently similar ways can produce such different results?
Victoria Moul, Bank on the grammar flowing: on Prynne’s music
Catching the Light (Fairfield Books, 2026), the anthology of cricket poetry edited by Nicholas Hogg and Tim Beard, contains, as it should, several poems by the doyen of cricket poets, Alan Ross, including ‘Watching Benaud Bowl’: ‘Leg-spinners pose problems much like love, / Requiring commitment, the taking of a chance.’ But among the great and the good (Agard, Arlott, Dabydeen, Hughes, Brian Jones, Kunial, McMillan, O’Brien, Rollinson, Selby, etc.), there are many individual poems which leap out, especially those by S.J. Litherland – one of only nine female contributors – and Matt Merritt; the latter’s poignant pair of portraits ‘Two Orthodox Left-armers’ celebrates two Yorkshire and England greats, Wilfred Rhodes (‘Every ball an interrogation, / every over a conspiracy of art and science’), and Hedley Verity, who died in an Italian hospital of wounds sustained from fighting the Germans in Sicily (‘Shell-bursts, a net of tracers closing fast, / but as upright among blazing Sicilian corn / as on any Scarborough dog day.)
Another of the fine contributors to Catching the Light, Rishi Distidar, has just had his fourth collection published: Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak (Nine Arches Press, 2026). In it, his trademark quirky wordplay and use of form gets full rein – just a scan of the titles gives you the idea. At times, his wish to entertain occasionally spills into silliness, but that’s no bad thing in my book, and there are precious few other UK poets around – Selima Hill and Mark Waldron come to mind – who seem to remember that poetry can be something to enjoy as well as be moved by. Those familiar with Rishi’s oeuvre will know that he also writes poems on the most important subjects, like ‘On board the ‘Tynesider’’, concerning Martin Luther King’s visit to Newcastle in 1967, which ends with these beautiful lines:
But actually he was at his best
when he was harried, harassed –
by time as well as the times –
at 1am on a slow train to somewhere
he would never go again, minting
coin as easily as he breathed, currency
we still spend in the realm of hope.It feels apposite that Rishi’s books should sit on my shelves between the Dickman brothers and Michael Donaghy.
Matthew Paul, Recent and future readings and recent reading
I reread Heaney’s worst book, Electric Light, in prep for an upcoming webinar on his style – something more clearly observed when he’s in cruise control. It’s fine; it lacks only a real sense of necessity, and is mostly superfluous to his oeuvre. Disconcertingly, though, it’s still better than almost everything else. So many poems of Heaney’s seem written at the golden hour, with the shadows stretching to infinity. The sense of history carried in his language – indeed in his use of almost every single word – never fails to humble me.
Don Paterson, Our Spring Reading: Part I
“And that sweet man, John Clare.” So, famously, ends the 20th-century poet Theodore Roethke’s brief poem, “Heard in a Violent Ward,” grouping Clare (1793–1864) with two other poetic visionaries, William Blake (1757–1827) and Christopher Smart (1722–1771). Roethke’s speaker prophesies to some unknown companion in an insane asylum that “in heaven you’d be institutionalized,” classing this mentally ill person, given to violence, with the three poets, and consigning them to the same ward in the afterlife. If this classification is jarring in its equation of violent madness with mysticism, it’s also a little odd, or else a little too conventional, in its view of heaven.
This speaker suggests that aside from the whiff of actual violence, to be a mystic in the vein of these three poets would imperil the presumed tidiness of the celestial order — as though the nine choirs of angels themselves would not know what to do with such a person, except to lock him up. Possibly Roethke’s speaker underestimates the nine choirs of angels and their capacity for dealing with people who think in visions. Also possibly, Roethke’s speaker underestimates heaven itself, casting it implicitly as a place where nobody colors outside strictly drawn lines and gets away with it.
Not that Smart and Clare, at any rate, really meant to color outside the lines. Like Smart, in conscious belief and practice Clare remained, all his life, a straightforwardly devout Anglican, orthodox in all his outlooks. Unlike Blake, he was not in any deliberate way a radical. But again unlike Blake, and again like Smart, he was given to what was delicately called “infirmity” of mind, and less delicately labeled “lunacy.” Sensitive and susceptible to disturbances as natural and predictable as the change of seasons, he was given to terrors as well as glimpses of sublime things beyond the defined and rational boundaries of ordinary piety. Or perhaps, as Wordsworth before him had suggested, the terror and the sublime were all one.
In Clare’s poems we might find the reminder that while the God in whom he believed might have established and endorsed those rational boundaries of ordinary piety, this God himself, with all the reality that flows from him, is not limited by them. It’s the visionary who glimpses something of that unlimited, and therefore unsettling, reality. Sometimes this looks like madness; perhaps sometimes it is madness. Suffice it to say that often enough, Clare’s poems arise from those moments when in one way or another, his own mental clarity dissolves and re-resolves on new terms.
His “I Am,” for example, written during a stay in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, gives voice to a mind striving to assert itself in darkness, while “Autumn” renders in verse the sensory warping that turns the vividness of a hot harvest-time day apocalyptically strange and terrifying. This turn of mind, in which mere sight becomes vision, transfiguring reality into something alien, simultaneously more threatening and more glorious than it ordinarily appears, may be what prompts Roethke’s speaker to assume that for the staid denizens of heaven, a poet such as Clare would be too hot to handle without a straitjacket.
Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: A Look at the Heavens
Winner of the Hudson Book Prize from Black Lawrence Press, Bettina Judd’s debut collection of poetry, patient. poems, takes as its subject the history of medical experimentation on Black women. Her poems evolved, Judd explains on her website, from a series of watercolors she had been painting while healing from surgery. The paintings themselves, she says, “were influenced by the work of artists in the service of science and medicine who painted portraits of indigenous and African peoples for the purpose of study.”* For Judd, an African American, that source material raised innumerable ethical questions about the use of Black women’s bodies (e.g., as exploited medical subjects, as slaves denied their humanity). Given her academic research interests and the fact her own surgery had been performed at a teaching hospital, and thus was subject to possible study, it was perhaps inevitable that Judd would undertake a more involved project. What ultimately came into being was a multi-voiced series of poems, each able to stand on its own, that provide a narrative about some aspect of Black women’s violation and suffering at the hands of doctors and scientific researchers.
The history that Judd resurrects in her poems is, all at once, eye-opening, traumatic, disturbing. It is also sourced in facts. […]
In “Pathology.”, Judd introduces us to “the researcher”, who is both unnamed and embodied in the character of the antagonist J. Marion Sims, a 19th Century physician, called by some the “Father of Modern Gynecology,” who developed groundbreaking surgical techniques but whose medical ethics and experiments on Black female slaves were highly controversial and damnable.
How to Measure Pain I
In the woman it is a checklist:
Can you imagine anything
worse than this?If the answer is no, ask again.
It is in this first section that we first hear from “the researcher” about the Black women Anarcha Wescott, Lucy Zimmerman, and Betsey Harris — dubbed “The Mothers of Modern Gynecology” — who “are taken into the care of a reluctant country surgeon in Montgomery, Alabama” and are experimented on: “In these three, Sims shapes his speculum, invents his silver sutures, perfects protocol for proper handling of the female pelvis” — without anesthesia or consent. (“The Researcher Discovers Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy”)
Lucy didn’t scream like most. Though sometimes she would moan—deep, long and overdue. I’d wake thinking death. It’s her, knees curled under, head face down, her body trying to move out of itself. [. . .]
~ from “The Inauguration of Experiments”As the collection unfolds, Judd tells by turn the stories of these three “patients,” as well as those of Joice Heth, Saartjie Baartman, and Henrietta Lacks, also African-Americans who suffered their own “ordeal[s] with medicine.”
Maureen Doallas, Bettina Judd’s ‘patient. poems’
Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and translator whose work explores Haiti and the Haitian diaspora’s culture, politics, language, and religion. The author of several poetry collections in English and Haitian, Sylvain’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear in leading journals including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Transition, Prairie Schooner, Agni, American Poetry Review, SpoKe, The Caribbean Writer, and African American Review. His short stories are also widely published. He holds degrees from UMass-Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow. Sylvain recently taught Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University and served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board. As of Fall 2026, Sylvain is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Director of the minor in Human Rights at UMass Boston. His publications include Education Across Borders (Beacon Press, 2022) and Underworlds (Central Square Press, 2018). Forthcoming works in 2026 include: Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan) and poetry collections from Arrowsmith Press (Fire on the Tongue), Finishing Line press (Habits of Light), and Central Square Press (Unfinished Dreams / Rèv San Bout).
1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
P.S.: My first full collection, Zansèt (Ancestors), written in Haitian Creole in 1994, marked a turning point in my life. At the time, I was a member of the Dark Room Collective, a public school teacher in Cambridge, and deeply engaged in activism around democracy and human rights. I set out to write a book that would embrace the full essence of poetry without retreating from the political. I wanted to experiment with language and offer an aesthetic that departed from what many Haitian readers expected.
The book became, in many ways, a hybrid form—merging American poetics, which tend toward the imagistic, exploratory, and personal, with Franco-Haitian traditions that are philosophical, surrealist-leaning, and socially engaged. Its reception, including the generous preface by Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassègue, the former Haitian Minister of Information and Culture, affirmed for me that I could dwell seriously in the craft. It gave me permission to see myself as a poet.
Fire on the Tongue, by contrast, reflects a more elastic and mature poetic consciousness. If my early work emerged from instinct and urgency, this later work arises from a deeper sense of intentionality and self-possession. But that evolution has not been linear. What I once understood as personal growth has revealed itself to be inseparable from history, displacement, and the political conditions that shaped my earliest awareness. This collection engages themes of identity, memory, exile, and cultural buoyancy. It navigates immigration, adaptation, loss, and self-understanding—what it means to live with two feet on different soils. While grounded in a Haitian-American experience, the work seeks resonance with the broader condition of migration and belonging.
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, non-fiction or fiction?
P.S.: I came to poetry at fifteen, through love and through history. I fell deeply for a girl who had just moved into my neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. Like many adolescents, I discovered language through longing—the way words could carry desire, absence, and imagination.
At the same time, I was coming of age under the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. I began writing with what I think of now as a split tongue: privately composing poems of resistance against the regime, and love poems for the girl who stirred me profoundly. From the beginning, poetry became a space where intimacy and politics converged.
Over time, poetry ceased to be merely an artistic practice and became a mode of consciousness—a way of testing truth against lived experience. […]
9 – What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
P.S.: “Trust the poem, but do not trust your first impulse.” That advice has stayed with me because it honors intuition while insisting on discipline—it reminds me that the initial spark matters, but it must be tested and refined through craft and revision.
Yusef Komunyakaa often echoed a similar balance when he said, “write with your heart, and edit with your mind.” I remember him once, sitting outside the Carpenter Center on Quincy Street at Harvard, saying, “allow yourself to be surprised by what the poem is revealing, and don’t force it to reveal something that the voice in the poem did not ask of it.” That idea—of discovery rather than control—continues to shape how I approach writing.
When I sit down to write, I often feel the presence of both Robert Pinsky and Komunyakaa not too far off in my cognitive and poetic distance, as reminders to balance instinct with intention, and openness with precision.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Patrick Sylvain
Last night (7th May) I had my Manchester book launch at Manchester Poetry Library. It was a really lovely event, hosted by my friend and colleague Malika Booker. This event was a little different to Sunday – I did a fifteen minute reading, followed by a fifteen minute Q & A with Malika and the audience, and then a poem to finish. This time Blackwells was the bookseller – they bought thirty copies and sold out!
Actually, the real story is that the bookseller bought 30 copies but only sold 29 – someone either loved my poetry so much they stole a copy, or someone absent mindedly wandered off without paying…I prefer the desperate-for-my-poetry-so-they-stole-a-copy version of the story.
This week I also ordered a box of one hundred books, ready to take round to smaller events that don’t have their own bookseller. This also means I’ve got some to sell through my own website as signed copies – another way of getting the book into the world.
When I first published my pamphlet back in 2011, I bought some postcards and some tissue paper and wrapped it up before posting it to my first buyer. I found this process both time-consuming and strangely satisfying, and have done it ever since. My friend John Foggin (sadly missed) on receiving a tissue-wrapped pamphlet said that I always do everything with my whole heart, and I think he was right – what other way is there of doing anything?
Kim Moore, Adventures of the House
Kim wasn’t exaggerating – the launch of The House of Broken Things was magic. Up at Wainsgate Chapel, off the road where the ponies gallop to the fence to see me when I walk over the moors by night, up the stoney lane which leads past the chapel to my home. […]
And in the second half, after a break filled with cake and booksales, Jodie (Kim’s identical twin sister) played her french horn with Dave Nelson’s expert piano, and the chapel filled with a perfect sound, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry before Kim took to the stage again and settled the matter.
I would love to leave it there. I’d love to say that I had a wonderful time, and that I left smiling and feeling lucky and fulfilled but – that’s not how it goes for me. Time with people is costly, and there was so much chat; there were crowds and emotions and sitting still; too much sugar. I’d forgotten to wear my “I’m faceblind: please introduce yourself” badge so there was the strain of half-known faces, unfamiliar shifting etiquette, noise. I’d a migraine by the time I left, and come evening, I walked a long time in the darkness considering the strange animal I am, how I have no name for myself, how I don’t seem to fit in anywhere.
Then out of the blue, Kim texted to tell me how’d she felt calm when I arrived at the Wainsgate, and I realised that this place here, however rocky, however changeable the weather, is where I fit. And I carried on walking into the night taking photographs of lichen and bluebells with the UV torch Amy brought to my house because she thought I might like it, because I am a strange animal, and my strange little flock is right here. Here’s to The House of Broken Things. Here’s to poetry and friendship. Here’s to finding your kin.
Clare Shaw, Different Forms of Magic
Then one of the women who organized the gathering wondered aloud how it would change things if every reading series in New York included somewhere in its web presence, or at its venue if that were possible, a written commitment to what we now call diversity, equity, and inclusion, incorporating specifically a zero tolerance statement about sexual victimization of any kind. I thought this was a brilliant idea. Such a statement would allow me at the very least to establish publicly both a set of expectations and a standard of accountability for my series’ content, management, and audience. It would serve as a resource I or anyone else involved with First Tuesdays could refer people to when telling them about the series, as well as a publicly accessible code of conduct should it ever become necessary to call someone to account for their behavior, including me.
I wrote a statement, circulated it on the series mailing list to get buy-in from as many regulars as possible, and posted it to the First Tuesdays website, where it has lived now for more than ten years. I did not feel the need to incorporate it into our regular meetings, though, until we began once again to meet in person after the pandemic shutdown and I actually had to ban a fellow poet from our open mic. He’d read an egregiously sexist and implicitly racist poem for which he refused to take any responsibility despite the ample room I gave him to do so, first during the break between the open mic and our featured reader and then in an email exchange over the course of the next week or so. In that exchange, he criticized me for calling him out publicly, immediately after he read the poem. He felt blind-sided, he said, which struck me as a point worth considering, not because I thought I shouldn’t have called him out like that, but because if he’d never read what I’d begun to call the First Tuesdays vision statement, there was no reason for him not to assume our open mic was, like so many open mics are, more of a public square where anything goes than a curated literary space.
That’s when I decided to start reading the statement out loud at the beginning of every meeting:
First Tuesdays is an open mic/featured reader literary gathering where writers who wrestle with the issues of our day—from racism and sexual violence to climate change and economic inequality—can find an audience willing to embrace the risk and discomfort that come with sharing politically engaged, satirical, or otherwise edgy material; where those writers can coexist, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and camaraderie, with writers whose work is more traditional and conservative; where anyone who comes only to listen, even if they just happen to walk in off the street, can sit down with a cup of tea or glass of wine and feel not just welcomed, but challenged, engaged, comforted, seen, maybe even inspired.
At the heart of First Tuesdays, in other words, is an ongoing, proactive commitment to diversity and inclusivity, in both the kinds of literary work we welcome into our community and the people who come to share it. Nothing will erode that sense of community more surely, however, than the mistrust and hatred borne of sexism, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, or any of the other far-too-many ways that human beings have learned to target each other for who they or what they believe. So I will state this plainly. Neither work nor behavior that bespeaks any of those “isms” or “phobias” is welcome at First Tuesdays, and I will, as host, confront and hold accountable anyone who brings either into our midst.
When I first started this practice, I explained it by talking about my exchange with that banned poet. Over the last four years, though, and especially since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, it has become something more important: an affirmation that gathering as we do every month, as we have been doing for the thirteen years that I’ve been running the series—and by “we” I mean everyone: the regulars, the newcomers, the featured readers, the people who just happen to be in the café when the reading starts—that gathering as we do to share the literature we make is in and of itself a form of resistance that we should not take for granted.
When I think about the impact that reading this statement aloud has had on the First Tuesdays community, I think about the people who nod along as I read, even those who’ve heard it month after month since I started, and about the applause the statement sometimes gets, and the softly spoken—and sometimes not so softly spoken—expressions of support I hear when I’m done reading. Listening as I read the statement out loud, in other words, matters to them, just as reading it matters to me. Because even if it feels like all we’ve done on the first Tuesday of the month is walk a block or two to the café to hang out with friends and listen to and talk about literature, we should not forget that there are an awful lot of powerful people in this country who would very much like to undo not just the community that we have formed, but also the capacity inherent in literature to build that kind of community in the first place.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Sometimes Resisting Means Recommitting Yourself to What You’re Already Doing
Is it fair to say, as Micah Mattix does, that “The Nigerian poet and critic Ernest Jesuyemi was selected as a National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow…until they discovered he was a Christian”?
Or is this too simplistic a description for what happened?
Was the NBCC board right to withdraw the full fellowship? Or is this religious discrimination? Does it matter that this is a fellowship, which requires working among community? Is this another artist cancellation, or is this categorically different?
Becky Tuch, I Can Buy Myself Lit Mags!
On a long oak table in a formal room
in Rare Books, on the library’s seventh floor,
is the fifteenth-century manuscript—Middle English—
from which I mean to wring a dissertation.
The work is verse, a church-year’s worth of sermons
probably copied by an earnest monk.
The librarian, anxious for this precious object
left to my handling, offers me a bookweight.
I settle into the captain’s chair and the task.These first steps are detective work, forensics.
Maryann Corbett, Academic dreams . . .
Hand: Anglicana; Secretary features.
Materials: paper. Visible watermarks.
A lot of Northern spellings. I warm to this,
matter and form, but I’m especially held
by matter, tangibles: the ink, the paper.
Though faded, the pen strokes have the ebb and flow
of a bending quill tip in a moving hand.
The heavy paper still shows peaks and troughs
that speak to the moving pen. My own right hand,
knows pens and writing, and it feels these moves,
knows in its bones another hand was here.
I was surprised and a little unsettled by Kariega, the last poem in the book, in which the narrator and a companion paddle upstream through the game reserve of this name in the Eastern Cape. The journey is to escape the ‘concrete, tar or plastic’ of so-called civilisation, to explore the river – ‘And there’s an island far ahead where we’ll rest and eat/ with the waterbuck, the crabs and blacksmith plovers/ where the world is as it has always been, quiet and slow’. He ponders the passing of time and the inevitable end to life that I suppose most of us who have long kissed goodbye to seventy will think on here and there and considers if the end were to come it would not seem tragic if it happened in such a place. It’s a fine poem. My surprise was because, having only a very limited knowledge of South Africa, I looked up Kariega before reading the poem. It is home to a vast Volkswagen factory, supposedly the largest car factory in Africa. I expected this to come into the poem somewhere in contrast to the reserve and wonderful natural wilderness that stretches away from the town. I thought about why [Harry] Owen avoided this rather obvious contrast – and concluded that sometimes, perhaps, the power is in what is left unsaid. That view, however, relies on a knowledge of place that perhaps only a few outside South Africa would connect with.
Following on, I think when a poet is from another country – Owen was born in Liverpool but has lived in South Africa a long time now – the reader needs to attempt to understand at least the sense of the place in which a book is written. Mindforest is not exclusively bound to South Africa but it supplies much of the backdrop. My glimpses of the world in which he immerses himself, and hopefully via the poems us, were long ago. I had a couple of work trips to South Africa in 1994 and 2001 and they were confined largely to the surreal creation that is Sun City and to Johannesburg, where I found, at that time, the city centre was more dangerous, darker and considerably less welcoming than Soweto, where I needed to go to visit a boxing gym and so obviously took time to look around. Necessity and time confined me. The wider landscape of the country I experienced only in passing, in travelling through. Still, it’s something I could work with in reading the book.
I think it’s fair to say that Owen has developed as a poet later in life and perhaps this is to his advantage. Those who find a ‘voice’ or success early on sometimes burn out and the opportunity to use the supposed wisdom that comes with age is lost. Not so here, as the poet acknowledges in the poem Epiphany, which perhaps describes what it feels like for so many of us not born into financial privilege and academic expectation.
Bob Mee, REFLECTIONS ON MINDFOREST by HARRY OWEN
Back in January, I attended a conference in Cambridge on “Creative Medievalisms”. Among recurring threads of conversations throughout the event was a ripple of ideas about voice — the human voice, the creative voice, our personal voice. Margery Kempe cropped up repeatedly in these discussions, as did the ventriloquized voice of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. In “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”, Chaucer lets the garrulous, “gat-toothed”, bawdy Wife speak at length, giving her free rein in the longest prologue of any pilgrim-teller in The Canterbury Tales. Veering between learned argument in which she takes on Church teaching on marriage and virginity and earthy vignettes of her life with her five husbands (“in his owene grece I made hym frye” she says acerbically of husband number four), the Wife is a lively, funny, engaging interlocutor. As she courts controversy she is interrupted within the Prologue by (male clerical) pilgrims who don’t like what she is saying or object to her going on for so long.
In fact, the Wife is such a distinctive character that, as Marion Turner observes, she is referred to by other speakers in The Canterbury Tales and emerges after Chaucer’s lifetime as a literary figure in her own right. She is even described by Thomas Hoccleve (1368-1426), a poet who knew Chaucer and promoted his reputation after his death, as a specifically female authority (auctrice) on the subject of women’s displeasure at men’s depiction of the female sex: “The wyf of Bathe, take I for auctrice” (“Dialogue”, 694). The Wife is the Chaucerian voice that escapes the bounds of the text and the control of its author to take on a life of her own.
Yet despite her unique voice, Chaucer’s Wife is also in some ways utterly unoriginal, a creation based on the anti-feminist discourse of the time, sometimes viewed as nothing more than a collection of misogynist ideas brought to life. Chaucer was entering into a contemporary debate that was crowded with authorial opinions. Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) a catalogue of illustrious women is designed to respond to the anti-feminists. Although the style and form is very different, there is a common purpose with Chaucer’s Wife. Where Chaucer offers us the voice of an ordinary middle-aged woman with a wealth of experience of marriage, in The Book of the City of Ladies we encounter a dreamscape in which the Lady Reason, the Lady Rectitude and the Lady Justice explain to Christine that they will debunk all the misconceptions about women. Abounding in examples from history and myth, with a core of philosophy and a sharp critical eye for inconsistency, we can detect in Christine’s detailed rebuttal to the misogynists, something akin to the Wife’s vivacious and rather one-sided argument with the clerks. The subject matter overlaps, but the individual voices of the authors take the material in different directions.
The creative voice then is the thin thread, the wisp of experience and meaning that the individual brings to the discourse, orchestrating the interplay between the living and the dead. In the words of John Keating, the teacher played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, it is the verse that we contribute to the play. Now, whenever we talk about voice, there is the unavoidable subtext of what it means to write in the age of AI when a pattern-recognition machine can spew out sense-making words. As someone who loves the struggle of writing and wrestling with words on the page, I cannot imagine why I would want my creative hand guided by a robot and I find it difficult to care about text that is not written by a human. It’s ersatz writing to me, no more than a poor substitute for the real thing. It removes the thin thread that makes the writing worthwhile for the author and meaningful for the reader.
Ruth Lexton, The Creative Voice
The voice that is great outside us. Between us. That is all of us.
So often we’re taught to find our “voice”—both as people and as writers. But I’ve always thought that this notion of “voice” is reductive and essentialist. I’d rather imagine our “voice” to be more about the range of ways that we interact with the world and the range of relationships we have. As a writer, also. What are the ways we relate to language, culture, writing, to process. To our processing of the world and how we (and our words and our notion of words) are processed by the world.
Imagine a sculptor bringing a set of objects with which to build a sculpture. I feel that their “voice” is not so much about the objects as it is their way of considering and engaging with these objects. Perhaps the process of accumulating the objects, the way they put those objects together. The way they are open to what the object are saying.
We are always already part of the work, the world. We don’t have a singular “voice,” any more than we exist as independent organisms apart from the world. Our bodies/selves require the infrastructure of the world: air, warmth, food, bacteria, shelter, other humans. Each individual is the result of their engagement with this infrastructure. So, all writing relies on the infrastructure, the betweenness, the interrelationships, of language and humanity, readers and the society and culture that by definition surrounds the writer, their work, and the process of their work.
A writer doesn’t need to find their “voice,” but instead to develop awareness and tools for considering and realizing process, for considering their entanglement, inter- and intrarelations, their I’m-soaking-in-it-Madgedness.
Is there a self without interaction? Is there a writer?
Gary Barwin, The voice that is great outside us: writer as part of the necessary polycule
I was a latecomer to poetry, curling my nose at it in that confounding and rather embarrassing way we have of discounting what we don’t understand, dismissing as useless what we don’t know how to use. And then I met Emily Levine. Across the aisle on a transatlantic flight, across our half century of age difference, we became instant and abiding friends.
Intellectually dazzling, creatively mischievous, and ecstatically funny, Emily took it upon herself to open my world to poetry, reading me a poem a day, peppering with poems our rapturously roaming conversations about semiotics and the singularity, the physics of flight and the evolution of flowers, Hannah Arendt and The Beatles, until I came to love poetry and, eventually, to write it. Emily is the reason The Universe in Verse exists.
When she was dying — which she did with such vivifying reverence for reality — we began taking long weekends by the ocean, reading poetry and talking about the meaning of life. The poems she brought were always a revelation, down to the very last one, which became a lifelong favorite I revisit whenever I lose perspective.
Maria Popova, Poetry: I Too, Dislike It
— I recently read the short book, brief notes on the art and manner of arranging one’s books by George Perec. I’m immersed in reading about the history of classification as it regards books right now for the novel I’m writing. Perec also says interesting things about the daily, the habitual. “The daily papers talk of everything except the daily,” he says. And, “How should we take account of, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infraordinary, the back-ground noise, the habitual?” He goes on: “To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as it if weren’t the bearer of any information.” […]
— I recently picked up Imagining What We Don’t Know by Lisa Samuels, admittedly because the title refers to something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: Imagining, the imagination, our power of imagination, the importance of our imaginations.
— From the Lisa Samuels book: “Beauty is a problem for poetry because we no longer imagine beauty as a serious way of knowing. But it is. Beauty wedges into the artistic space a structure for continuously imagining what we do not know.” She notes that taking beauty seriously and working on theories of beauty “is out of fashion.” But she says, “Forms of beauty are resistant structures, imaginative structures that present an impenetrable model of the unknown. Beauty is therefore endlessly talk-inspiring, predictive rather than descriptive, dynamic rather than settled, infinitely serious and useful.”
— To reiterate: beauty is a serious way of knowing! Yes.
Shawna Lemay, Notes on Beauty, Books, Imagining, the Soul’s Skeleton, and a Smoking Angel
Since nothing is ever complete, the poetry book I wrote about my mother, Diaspora of Things, seems like a light-sensitive print of where I was a few years ago. The relationship keeps evolving. The deeper I get into motherhood – all these years now! – the more I slide alongside her, intuiting her unsaid about joy, loss, “annoying aspects of inevitable change,” freedoms gained and realities of our limits. In strange morning dreams, so kitchen-sink and unsentimental, I’m waking up to the twists that adult children exert on mothers, and how much I got away with! Doris had a taste for the radical, and more patience than I give her credit for. To the complexity and mystery of motherhood, and the sister-soul that walks along with us on our journey!
Jill Pearlman, Diaspora of Affections
It has been a time of moments recently. Stillness. Patience. A buzzard on a fence post. Applauding a flyover from a heron. A rainbow in a storm. A 5p found on the ground at a motorway service station. That tyre pressure light. Seizing the moment to drink tea on the settees of family and friends. Asking for a drink in a coffee shop by using its advertising tagline to see if the person taking the order laughs.
And a new writing desk. Sometimes I spend too long flicking through my phone, but recently it led to a serendipitous moment when I saw that a friend had a writing desk for sale. Mine was old and faithful, and it always surprised me just how much I could get done in such a small space – so many poems and videos and meetings and essays and coaching sessions. It was originally gifted to me many, many moons ago by a neighbour of my grandparents and has easily fitted into every place I have ever lived. It has been well and truly loved and as it retires I tip my hat to just how well it has served me. And now into service comes a new beauty, with space aplenty. This then reminds me of that time we were asked to bring something to show which was important to us when I first started my coaching training. Being a little nervous at starting something new I had everything ready, but felt the urge to double check before the meeting started. I felt a little bit clumsy and fumbly (and everything was crowded into a small space) and as I reached for the glass paperweight to check that it wasn’t dusty before I shared it with a group of new people, I knocked my hand on my laptop screen and promptly dropped my show and tell object into my glass of water. I do like to be ready for things before they happen, so my heart beat a little bit faster as I dipped my hand in to retrieve it and hurriedly wiped it on my jeans to dry it off. At least that solved the dust problem, I told myself as I took a deep breath and clicked to join the meeting.
I am pretty confident that my readiness will be easier where I now sit so here’s to finding the space we need for the things that bring us joy, and for appreciating the old and the new!
This past week I was keen to find out what kind of poem would be the first to be written at my new desk (and when it would take shape). Pleasingly it was a love poem that flowed. They are quite rare for me and come with a little fanfare and sparkles when they arrive.
Sue Finch, THAT’S NOT MINE, MINE’S CRISPY…
Now is the time of spring’s coolness. The breeze and shade detain the heat. The trees look fresh and new. But the flowers are falling. The blossom is over and the rhododendrons and azaleas are nearly over. Far away in north D.C., the tulips at Hillwood House are peaking and about to wilt. Here the tiny blue flowers by the path will soon go to seed. As we walk back to the car, we hear an oven bird, whose loud clear song fills the forest from some hidden spot. So much of what we have seen are tropes from American films, and tropes of real American life. The oven bird is familiar from Robert Frost. “He says that leaves are old and that for flowers/Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.”
The sun has begun its decline. One of the fishing boats is gone now. The young man in headphones is sloping back. Bikers are strapping their bikes onto car racks. As we leave the forest, we come back to aggressive American driving, the need to get things done before bed. The late sun sinks behind the trees and lights the undersides of the high-raised roads. Dogwood flowers gleam in the evening glow. We pass the filling stations and see the price of gas is rising, rising. A fire truck goes past. The 24-hour diner sign still shines. There were two dozen cars at the shore when we left—owners and boats were still launched on the Occoquan.
In Washington, there are secrets, heard and unheard, in Congress, the White House, and the Court—at Langley, Rosslyn, the Pentagon— and in all the agencies and institutions and non-profits that fill the grid. Somewhere back in the woods, the oven bird is still singing. “The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.”
Henry Oliver, He says the early petal-fall is past
I’ve read that the turn in a poem is a key to the closing, and ending lines will be stronger depending on how near they are to (or distant from, and evocative of) the turn. This seemed helpful revision advice. Yet does every poem require a turn? The idea of the volta is ancient indeed, but it need not be a prescription for all the poems in the world. Poetry from other than Western cultures often proceeds quite beautifully without a turn, and does that mean that such a poem is static? That’s often seen as a negative in art: when nothing moves, or moves the viewer. I’d like to refer my readers to L.A. Johnson on Jericho Brown’s duplex form, “Radical Stasis” in Poetry. What could be more static than repetition? And yet in Brown’s work, the lack of a turn implies circularity, not necessarily ambivalence and certainly not a lack of movement. Johnson calls it a transformation.
I want to experiment with how altering a poem’s closing might lead to changing the poem’s form or structure for a stronger impact. Another option I’ve used is moving the last lines to the start or near the start of the poem. Maybe those lines weren’t really the image or idea that particular poem was aiming for. And then there is docking the tail of a poem. It may be a cruel practice for dogs and horses, but a poem can benefit from a careful removal of the unnecessary closing line(s). Closing lines that summarize a point can wreck my delight in a poem, and alas, I tend that way sometimes…I spent my childhood Sundays in church, listening to my dad declaim from the pulpit. The oral and rhetorical structure of sermons is routed into my brain, and that can be a real problem when I draft. Poetry can be many things, but I don’t care for poetry that sermonizes.
At any rate, I have a LOT of unfinished drafts that might benefit from change-ups. Instead of writing a blog post, I ought to be working on those!
Ann E. Michael, Closure
And what about that final quote? It’s italicised and in speech marks. Did the horn blow the tune to which that ballad was originally set? Is that Childe Roland speaking about himself in third person, suddenly seeing himself from a distance (the distance of death)? Is that the storyteller Browning’s voice suddenly breaking into the dramatic monologue?
‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ is the title of the poem too, so to end with the same words almost suggests something circular. We have returned to the start, in a kind of Groundhog Day. Childe Roland will never get to the tower but be stuck in this perpetual circle of hell forevermore… And it’s worth mentioning that time is supposed to work differently in Elfland or Faerie Land. Perhaps it loops.
It’s a sinister, unsettling ending, deliberately ambiguous. But perhaps that is why it continues to fascinate and inspire. It creates a desire that it refuses to satisfy. Browning’s neverending story continue to haunt our literary culture.
Clare Pollard, Reading ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ by Robert Browning
I could translate all this into words like hunger
Luisa A. Igloria, Life Study
or gift, witness or mercy. But I choose not to.
I consider the breath that unraveled so quickly, how
the future briefly arrived, without fanfare or song.