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: a sequestered egg, phrenology’s adhesiveness, the rustle of blood, dancing chickens, and much more. Enjoy.
This morning the air brings the rustle of rain soon and the vague scent of vanilla biscuits.
Alt text says this week’s photo is a person holding a book in front of a bookshelf. Indeed it is, and that person is me and the book that I have temporarily removed from its space on the shelf in Waterstones is Welcome to the Museum of a Life published by Black Eyes Publishing UK. And the fact it is written by me, and it is there makes my heart dance a little happy dance.
In my ponderings this week I thought about blue moons, and I found out that maybe the blue moon at the end of May meant there have been forty-two blue moons since I was born. And whether there have or there haven’t this ‘fact’ along with the realisation that I hadn’t got a blue moon poem in amongst my moon poems inspired me to get writing. I donned my ‘Poetry in Business’ t-shirt and started to draft.
Sue Finch, FORTY-TWO BLUE MOONS
this heat, dear god. this room. a tranquillised diplomacy. refrain is bottlenecked inside the throat. i float, infused, transfigured; so pink and smooth: sequestered egg. i dream, such dreams! my cloudy raptures overrun. i must wake up. to wane of nations, whine of wealth, wax of sun; the clean and reachy flight of birds, white birds. those deadly vestal things are women in accomplished dresses, sweeping up and down. not i. an egg does not aspire to flight.
Fran Lock, LE SPECTRE DE LA ROSE
All week I’ve had a book with a broken spine cracked open in my study. (Which could be how it came apart in the first place). It’s a well-loved book, as so many of mine are, and becoming more beloved all the time. This is Another Beauty by Adam Zagajewski.
I’ve been doodling in the mornings, with and without words. What can I say, it’s the therapy I can afford and there are worse methods to get one’s s-h-i-t together. One of the phrases that comes up is one of my favourite lines from AZ:
“It’s not time we lack, but concentration.”
Shawna Lemay, …that summer was just about over
As a full-time writer, I sometimes work a 16-hour day, and still there are tasks not completed, and still there is no time to write poetry. I hardly ever have weekends off; I do most of my creative writing and editing on holiday, or late at night when I should be asleep. How do you let your words run wild if you’re earning less than the minimum wage, or if you have to get a first in your creative writing MA to justify the course fees and the time away from other priorities? How do you let go when you don’t understand the poem that everyone loves, or you have to write a poem-a-day, or what you most urgently want to say might lead to sweeping judgements in the poetry world, might even get you cancelled? When everyone is arguing, and you’ve been rejected again, and no-one will publish the book you’ve been working on for years, when you take your precious poem to a workshop and everyone finds something they want you to change, how then do you write freely and truly from your own heart?
And perhaps just as crucially, what can we do as a community, as readers, as friends and writers and peers, and teachers and mentors, competition judges, event organisers, publishers and editors, to support the wildness in each other? How can we shape the environment in which we create poetry, to encourage and sustain its wild heart?
Clare Shaw, Return to the Wild
Are you a poet with a chapbook or full-length collection that came out in 2025 or 2026, or is coming out in 2027? I created a spreadsheet to help poets with new books find each other for readings, events, collaborations, regional connections, and general book-launch camaraderie in this circus of book promo. Email me at kelli (at) agodon (dot) com and I’ll send you the link so you can add your book and info, to find other poets with books coming into the world around the same time. […]
Poetry Book Recommendation: The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvorocessi. I know, I won’t stop talking about this book. This is the first poem of the book—you can decide if you’d like more of this voice. I honestly can’t get enough of Gaby’s poems and rereading it again.
Kelli Russell Agodon, Terry Gross Wants to Interview Me! and Other Things AI Made Up
Two things. Firstly, the ‘Guide to Getting your Poetry Published’ is out in the world (literally: orders from Canada, Singapore, Sweden, France, India …) so that’s one big project finished. And thank you to Thomas Ovans for his review of the book on London Grip.
Secondly, I’m now setting myself a ‘poem a day’ challenge to get some work in the bag. OK, it hasn’t been every day exactly, but I’ve made a good start, and I’m back on it once I’ve written this post. Writing went out the window for a few days while our little choir the Lewes Singers were in Winchester singing the weekend services. Turned out the cathedral was the only cool place in town, in fact I got really cold a couple of times while it was over 30 degrees outside! I also met up with a friend for a visit to Jane Austen’s house in Chawton. Although I’ve been there before, it’s still a lovely place to revisit, very atmospheric and quite moving to be reminded of Jane’s short and somewhat unlucky life. […]
A couple of weeks ago Peter Kenny and I launched a new episode of Planet Poetry, this time featuring poet and children’s author Mara Bergman. It’s already proving to be a popular episode. Our next interviewee will be Will Harris, in the last new episode of this season. But there will be at least one, maybe two archive interviews released over the summer. Scaling back the number of new shows this season while keeping the poddy going has suited both Peter and myself, in that we’ve both had the time and energy to work on other projects.
Robin Houghton, Quick round-up of poetry & other happenings
Last month, I revived our monthly poetry thread for subscribers, and I could not be more glad that I did.
What I witnessed this month was a reminder of the care, decency, and thoughtfulness at the heart of poetic practice. I watched strangers comment generously on one another’s poems, sharing how and why they were moved. I saw vulnerability and candor that wasn’t performed, just human.
I also read some really, really good poems I would not have encountered otherwise.
One of the pleasures of putting together this selection was the range of subjects, registers, and approaches. I found poems in strict forms, poems inventing their own forms, and poems unfolding in lively streams of consciousness. There were poems about grief and loss, of course, but also many rooted in appreciation and pleasure.
I’ve tried to reflect some of that range in my curation—and, as usual, I’ve tried to link the poems up by echoes in their motifs. My selection is idiosyncratic rather than comprehensive, but please know how much I enjoyed reading your work even if I didn’t include your poem. And please know there’s always next month.
Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend
I wasn’t actually going to post this week, but
1. I have to say a huge thanks to Tim at Crooked Spire for a great evening last Sunday and the last event for the Fig Tree 2025 Anthology.
2. And I have to say a hugerer thank you to the wonderful Katie Griffiths for inviting me to read at the Riverhouse Barn (Michelle Penn and Tom Sastry coming up soon – go, go!!) on Thursday just gone. It was a wonderful evening of readings from Alwyn Marriage and the 4 open mic folks..And Katie’s own poem at the start (I think it was called Arrival) was glorious and very moving.
A huge thanks to Katie’s partner, Cris, for the lift to and from the station…and to everyone that came. Part of the evening was an interview ons stage. I’ll not lie, I was more nervous about this than any other part of the night, but I was out at ease and it was lovely to hear Katie say she enjoyed these blogs and my work. She’s certainly given me lots to think about in terms of using some of the gubbins I post here in poems. I gave myself something to think about by saying I should stop writing these and use the time on poems instead…We’ll see.
I look forward to Katie’s new collection, Mindset Mindrise due out this year, and commend The Attitudes (her previous collection to you now).
Finally, more gigs where you’re gifted a mug afterwards please.
Mat Riches, It meant allotment to me
Well, I was supposed to spend the last week on the San Juan Island at a writing residency. The first day was glorious – beautiful warm sunshine, seal heads bobbing in the water, and my first ever real-life encounter with baby foxes! The second day was cold and rainy, but I got a lot of reading and some writing done. The third day, sadly, I woke up with my jaw swollen from a tooth infection (root canal next week!) with fever and it was determined that I should probably get home so I could rest, get antibiotics and move up my root canal. […]
Here is the rising of the Blue Micromoon of May, which is slightly smaller AND a rare second full moon of the month. Apparently, all weird moons are signs of health doom for me, so I should really pay more attention to them (see many blog posts where weird supermoons coincide with unexpected trips to the hospital.) Should have paid attention to that horoscope!
Anyway, one thing I did get to do during the residency besides writing a new fox poem was look over my manuscript, and you know what? I had the strong feeling that, at this point, I could make it different, but I could not make it better. I definitely had the feeling it was time to send that manuscript out and start on a new project at last.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Rough Week with Blue Minimoon, Baby Foxes, Tooth and Rib Drama, and Summer Approaches
It’s beginning to flood, my foot
Charlotte Hamrick, May Listopia 2026
on the brakes falling straight to the floorboard
as water rises, the car floating slowly
amidst a cache of litter, planks,
a garbage can, and a blue tricycle.
Out of control, I let the waffling
steering wheel go, lean back with a Hail Mary
on my lips and think about wading
to the nearest bar for a screw-it-all beverage.
Of course time has dimmed my memories, and no doubt shifted them as well. What I remember is a blogging community, people whom I met only online, who helped and encouraged me.
Some of you are still here. I wasn’t, for a few years. I see the vacancies in the resurrected blog, the months of silence. No doubt I was silent elsewhere, too; silent on the blogs of my WWW friends.
Now, I miss it. All of it. The community, the fresh excitement of meeting someone new, someone interesting, a new way of making language, new thinking, new art. New eyes.
We built something. Now I discover that I was not the only one to fade. I learn that blogrolls are obsolete, that writers no longer exchange links and comments and follows that lead, eventually, to more of the same.
I learn that nostalgia is a kind of grief.
the buddha in the window well
Sharon Brogan, W.W.W. Nostalgia
wet with spring rain
remembers snow, its white shawl
I was seventeen, and blinded by youth: by my grandiosity and timidity. I wavered, as boys do nowadays, between thinking myself extraordinary and thinking myself worthless; but I didn’t recognize that about myself. So why Homer’s story of a fatherless boy setting out to discover whether he actually has a heritage (and whether it is ever coming home to save him) would move me, was mysterious to me. But move me it did.
I did know some things. I was reading the classics for the first time, and they were legible! So there was a heritage, it was a real thing, and I was up to receiving it! That, at least, I understood at the time.
But another thing that happened to me, I did not realize. It happened sotto voce. I was reading poetry for the first time. It was my great good fortune that I was given the Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: I was reading a master of English iambic pentameter. My ear was wholly untrained then. I was only vaguely aware that it was poetry, at first. I knew that that ragged right margin was supposed to signal something special, some elevation or sonority or affectation, but I didn’t really know what it was. So I just read it as though it were prose, galloping along, puzzling out the meaning. It was exceptionally clear language, very easy to grasp at first sight, but I was very young and very uneducated, and reading it at all was an athletic achievement. I was proud of it, and rightly so. So many foreign names, alien customs, weird locutions, puzzling repetitions! I marched through it, like Sherman’s troops through Georgia.
And something was happening besides the story. I was absorbing the fundamental rhythm of English poetry. I was learning it in probably the best, if not the most efficient way: just by reading it, line after line. When I read Shakespeare for the first time, later that year, I had a leg up: I already understood implicitly how this thing worked, how it steered, how you breathed when you read it. Poetry will eventually teach you how to read itself, if you give it time, and grant it authority.
Dale Favier, On First Looking into Fitzgerald’s Homer
In the ninth month of his forty-first year, readying the third edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman sat down to compose what we, ahistorical in our lexicon, might consider his coming out. Titled “Calamus” after Acorus calamus — a tall wetland flowering plant native to his birthplace, Long Island, the sand-duned end of America, also known as sweet flag for its strong erect leaves and solid cylindrical spadix — this would always remain his most overtly erotic lyric sequence, the one in which he included his elegy for his New Orleans heartbreak. The sequence is often referred to as Whitman’s “homoerotic” epic — a definition narrowed not only to sexuality alone but to a sexuality that exists solely as an antipode of the heteronormative paradigm. Such a reading flattens the substance to the surface, for the “Calamus” poems are Whitman’s love poems—his only overt love poems. Among them is a short meta-poem vibrating with the vulnerability of writing these verses at all:
Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.But while Whitman boldly celebrated his intimate sympathies in verse, he remained restive about them and sought to fathom himself through what he, along with his generation, thought to be science. Again and again, Whitman returned to phrenology’s amativeness and adhesiveness, charging his poetry of contrasts with this battery of words, locating his own coordinates in relation to them, making sense of the world, making sense of himself in relation to the world and of the world’s totality in relation to its multitudes. Out of the language of a pseudoscience, he sculpted a new vocabulary of elemental personal truth. In the “Calamus” poems, he dares imagine in the public plane what felt so intolerable on the personal — not only the total acceptance of his nature, but its consecration of an entire species of love:
For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-root shall,
Interchange it youths, with each other! There shall from me be a new friendship —
It shall be called after my name.How much more poetic it would be to call ourselves Whitmanic or Waltean rather than homosexual or bisexual or queer or any other term etymologically rooted not in the lush wetlands of nature but in the strangeness, the otherness of the counternatural, describing us not by what we are but by what we are not.
Maria Popova, How Phrenology Queered Language: Walt Whitman and the Evolving Lexicon of Love
Now published, my translation of the great German poet Jürgen Becker’s 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Shearsman Books have done a marvellous job with this book. The poems are introduced by a brilliant essay by Lutz Seiler (also in my translation) and an extract from Becker’s early statement of literary intent, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’ (1964). I love the choice of cover image: the receding blue remembered hills evoking the way Becker’s poems layer, and intermingle, the past and present of his life and his country’s history so seamlessly. Becker’s work is hugely admired in Europe but almost unknown over here (and in the USA). […]
In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Gesammelte Gedichte (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’ Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Becker often returned to his childhood landscape.
It is, in part, such biographical happenstance that has made Becker a poet of historical change which, as he says in the poem ‘Dressel’s Garden’, is ‘not yet / a completed process’. The poems achieve their ambitious goals through a layering of time periods, a multiplicity of voices, strands of association and networks of memory. He collages fragments and juxtaposes elements of everyday speech, popular music, neutral description, higher tones, and historical quotation. What holds the poems together are recurring leitmotifs, focal points of personal and historical memory, familiar places, to such a degree that it is ‘possible to read 17 volumes totalling 1000 pages as a single, enormous poem’ (Poschmann). […]
Selecting from the 1000-page poem that Poschmann envisages would be difficult indeed, so I have chosen to present the whole of Becker’s crucial 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification the following year, this is the collection in which Becker explores his relationship with his own childhood in Thuringia and the continuing impact of the Second World War and the division of Germany. I have also included a substantial extract from Becker’s important 1963 lecture, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’, because it suggests clearly the poet’s dissatisfaction with the literary forms of that time and his belief that a form of ‘journalling’ was to be his own way forward. Becker’s baggy, comprehensive, allusive, meditative, brilliantly detailed poems (surely at their best at length) can also be viewed as a response to Czeslaw Milosz’s lines in the 1968 poem ‘Ars Poetica?’: ‘I have always aspired to a more spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose’ (tr. Milosz and Lillian Vallee). These then are poems of great historical importance, but my interest in them has also been sustained by the belief that they are extraordinary technical achievements and present an extension of the concept of what makes a poem, an extension too long absent from the English language poetry world.
Martyn Crucefix, Now Published: ‘Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium’ by Jürgen Becker
Longing in Dream Logic is not confined to romantic or interpersonal scenarios; it also takes the form of grief, where desire is directed toward the impossible recovery of the dead. In several poems centred on the speaker’s grandparents, memory becomes both a consoling and destabilising force. Echo Wood is especially effective in this regard. The poem revisits shared habits and private rituals—guessing the wood of a banister, smoking roll-ups—not as anecdotal detail alone but as traces through which intimacy is preserved after loss. Since her grandfather’s death, the speaker explains that ‘she likes to haunt’ the places associated with him because ‘it feels as if a part of you is still there, a bit of your soul left behind.’ The language of haunting is crucial here. It registers grief as a condition in which the boundaries between presence and absence become porous, and in which the mourner herself assumes a spectral relation to the world. Bosman intensifies this instability through the refrain ‘Perhaps- perhaps’, a phrase that suspends the poem between disbelief and yearning. Logic gives way to wish, but the wish is structured by grief’s need to imagine continuation. In this sense, the collection’s dream logic is nowhere more affecting than in its treatment of bereavement, where emotional truth depends not on factual certainty but on the persistence of attachment.
These recurring concerns—unrealised possibility, anxiety, failed agency, and grief—give Dream Logic a notable conceptual coherence. Bosman’s references to Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, and Sylvia Plath help to situate that coherence within a wider poetic lineage, though the collection does not merely imitate its forebears. One might locate Bosman between Dickinson’s inward metaphysical attentiveness, Plath’s psychological intensity, and Brontë’s emotional extremity, yet her work remains distinct in tone and method. Where those predecessors often move toward crisis, revelation, or visionary confrontation, Bosman is more interested in quieter forms of disturbance: hesitation rather than rupture, lingering attachment rather than rebellion, emotional afterlife rather than dramatic catharsis. Her landscapes, accordingly, are less sites of sublime struggle than repositories of memory and projection. What emerges from the collection is an understated but persuasive poetics of frustration, in which the mind returns compulsively to what it has lost, feared, or failed to realise. As a debut, Dream Logic demonstrates not only technical control but a sustained interest in the forms through which interior life becomes thinkable and speakable.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Dream Logic’ by Satya Bosman
As with other Italian imports, such as olives and spaghetti, I sometimes feel have an endless appetite for sonnets. So another anthology is always welcome, and this week I’ve been reading Paul Muldoon’s Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets (Faber, 2025). It’s an enjoyable buffet of small plates; one discovery I was glad to make was “The Shepherd Boy” by John Clare, which, like many sonnets, seems to tell a story about its own playful ability to imagine riches in a confined space (the book’s title comes from Wordsworth: “‘twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground”) […]
As with most poetic miscellanies, closer inspection reveals some scantiness in the table of contents. For a writer whose own inventively pararhymed sonnets have been so influential on contemporary poetry, Muldoon is surprisingly uninterested in the range of modern experiment with the possibilities of the fourteen-liner out there, and surprisingly keen on nineteenth-century poets with only a minor claim to significance in sonnet history. Robert Browning, for example, was not a notable sonnet writer — unlike his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning — yet not only does he get in with a sort-of-sonnet comprising two seven-line stanzas, but also features in two other tributes: Swinburne’s “A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning” and Landor’s “To Robert Browning”. For this week’s post, then, I thought I’d pick seven sonnets passed over by Muldoon, which would be in my own imaginary anthology.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #43: A Swirling Chain
If literary history is defined by the great writers who seem to mark its eras, what do we say of those whom time has largely forgotten: the quieter, more idiosyncratic voices who never quite rise to the surface, let alone manage to stay there? We call them minor, lacking a more precise term for the writer who falls short, somehow, of a Shakespeare, a Donne, or a Wordsworth. And perhaps it’s true of that writer’s vision, that it is smaller and less striving, that it doesn’t aspire to the level of the epic. Still, even a small vision may, in its way, contain its share of multitudes.
Consider the example of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907). “Who?” you might say, and well you might — though some of you might recall the poet and critic Daniel Galef’s piece on Lee-Hamilton’s chilling “Queen Eleanor to Rosamund Clifford,” which ran here a year ago last March. But largely, except to scholars of the Victorian era and those who remember him as the endower of a still-ongoing literary prize at Oxford and Cambridge, Lee-Hamilton has lapsed into an undeserved obscurity.
Educated in France and Germany, he served in various diplomatic positions before abruptly and inexplicably, at the age of twenty-eight, losing the use of his legs. He spent much of his adult life in Italy, a semi-invalid under his mother’s care, producing his body of poetic work between bouts of illness and what the doctors termed “nervous prostration.” His interest as a poet inclined to the historical dramatic monologue, as in the imagined address of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the mistress of her husband, Henry II, whom Eleanor loves, as Daniel Galef has written, “the way the viper loves the dove.” In these dramatic monologues, Lee-Hamilton manages to channel not only the Victorian monologue-master, Robert Browning, but also the sonnet mastery of that poet’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
A master of the sonnet in his own right, Lee-Hamilton deserves our renewed notice. Today’s Petrarchan sonnet, small as it is, strikes a resonant note of large existential disillusionment. The beautiful, evocative sound that the seashell returns to the ear is not the sound of the sea, but the rustle of our own blood, which we tell ourselves is the sea. If this sonnet’s vision is one of debunked hope, posing the false promise of the shell’s sea-sound as a figure for the emptiness of the idea of heaven, still the poem is as beautiful and beguiling, even in its despair, as the illusory sound of the sea in a shell.
Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Sea-Shell Murmurs
The latest full-length poetry collection since her remarkable Griffin Prize-winning poetry title, Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] is Victoria poet Eve Joseph’s, Dismantling (Anvil Press, 2026), a book-length suite of deft, single-stanza prose poems. Her fourth published poetry collection, Dismantling is set in two untitled sections, the second of which is a suite of twenty-six numbered poems, each titled “cento.” “The shades above the city have already been drawn,” begins the first numbered “cento,” “the pockets of wind emptied. The room is quiet now, everything falling at the same rate of speed.” There’s a part of me still frustrated at how her work so quietly floats just under the radar, having only been introduced to her work at all through her third collection, and missing completely her first two—The Startled Heart (Oolichan Books, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (London ON: Brick Books, 2010)—although one might say what keeps her just under the radar is exactly the strength of her quietly powerful lyric. “All history is revisionist.” begins the poem “revisions,” “Dig down and there’s so and so with his version of events. A little further and you can hear the song of the last speckled cormorant and before that the ancestors of Przewalski’s horses no bigger than foxes. What’s the point of one more poem?” As part of her contribution to “short takes on the prose poem” over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics in 2022, she wrote: “I love prose poetry. There is something about the shape of the form that encourages ranging thought at the same time it demands concise imagery. It is a loping wolf that places each paw precisely.”
Composed across firm and precise lines, set with such a delicate touch, Joseph’s poems are masterfully written, perfectly held together, even through an ongoing conversation around how easily things fall apart. This is a collection of form and attention, carefully layered and precise. As the poem “the hour before dawn” begins: “How many silences penetrate other silences? The monk with his vows. A violin at rest in its black case. Two of Adelaide Crapsey’s three: the falling snow, the mouth of one just dead. Not the dying or the death itself but the wide-open O of the moment. The breath gone from the lungs yet still in the room.”
rob mclennan, Eve Joseph, Dismantling
Entire years of your life will blur together, or be forgotten. Eventually, some effort to rescue what is left becomes necessary, and some reckoning with its meaning becomes possible. The poems in The Discarded Life [by Adam Kirsch] are such an effort.
One of the poems’ pleasures is how well they evoke a time and place. We are in Southern California, in the early 1980’s. (I grew up there in the same decade.) The Muppets, Atari games, and Sesame Street all make appearances, against the almost-imperceptible gradations of climate that that place calls “seasons”:
The most of winter that we ever knew
Was a gray, cloudy tincture of the air[.]For those who did not live through it, the technology of the time will seem insanely primitive, as far from us as the turn of the 20th century was to them. The absence of the internet is only the tip of the iceberg. Kirsch remembers the limited graphics of one video game, which were
All that the bulky monochrome display
Could generate from five-inch floppy disks
You had to keep inserting and withdrawing,
Like turning hand cranks on an early Ford.While Americans worried about nuclear war, Southern Californians prepared for other disasters. I myself remember the regular drills, but not whether they were for earthquakes, wildfires, or a meltdown at the local nuclear power plant. Kirsch describes a fire coming to his summer camp:
…red smoke drifted close enough to make
Our eyes burn like the chaparral around us,and I don’t think I’ve heard the word “chaparral” since I moved away.
Brad Skow, Book Review: The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
First, the positive – I loved the second half of this book, where Clark tied in Plath’s life to what she was writing at the time. It gave some insight into her writing process and what inspired specific poems, and analyzed the artistry of her work. I also was impressed with Plath’s ambition and work ethic – I feel like a champion when I wake up at 4:45 to get a bit of writing done in my morning routine, but Plath wrote from 4 – 8am, as a single mother with very young children. She puts me to shame!
The negative…I did the audiobook for this – it was 45 hours long. I like Sylvia Plath as much as the next person – perhaps more – but I did not care about what she ate at girl scout camp or what grades she made in elementary school. I would have preferred a 300 page condensed version of this, focusing more on her career, development as a poet, and her poetics. I thought too Clark could have gone a bit more into the mental health aspect – I think she is kind of trying to make the reader think that Plath’s depression was hereditary and inevitable – but more could have been explored there.
But my main complaint is Clark’s kid-glove handling of the monstrous Ted Hughes. I think Hughes, whether indirectly or not, murdered Plath. Actual quotes from Ted Hughes:
“I murdered her.”
”It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius”
(at her funeral) “It was either her or me.”
(also at her funeral) “You all hated her too, right?”
Not to mention that he wrote Plath to tell her it would be better for him if she committed suicide. And don’t get me started on how he mishandled her work after her death – destroying her novel-in-progress and current journals, rearranging and editing her manuscript to take out the parts that made him look bad, letting his sister who hated Sylvia write her biography, letting his mistress handle her work…
Yet, Clark tries to subtly manipulate the reader of this biography to think of him as a Byronic hero – comparing him to Heathcliff and Rochester, commenting on his stormy good looks and country ways, his powerful poetic “talent” and how much he suffered after Plath’s death. Oh please! I like a biography that sticks a bit more closely to the facts of what this guy actually did, rather than trying to paint it in a gothic romance light.
Plath was no Innocent – the first half of the book slogged along as she dated so and so and cheated with blah blah blah and got drunk here and etc etc etc – she was not much of a prim 1950s lady. But choosing Hughes as a husband set her on an unstoppable slide to self-destruction. I don’t think he remotely deserves the wrist-slap of being called a “Rochester.”I think there is room for another Plath biography to be written – one that is a little less soft on Hughes, a bit more focused on Sylvia’s career as a poet, and 1/3rd the length of this one.
Renee Emerson, A Mushroom of Doom, a Marriage of Doom, and a Face of Doom
“Impossible Paradise” is a selected poems taking from Chen Yuhong’s collections “Half-Light” (2022), “Trance” (2016), “In Between” (2011), “Bewitched” (2007), “A River Flows Deep in Your Veins” (2002), “In Truth the Ocean” (1999) in English translation. She has been influenced by poets such as Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood, Alice Oswald and Carol Ann Duffy whom she has translated in Chinese. However, this is the first time Chen’s own poems have been translated into English. The selections are gathered by collection in reverse order, with the most recent poems first. She relishes in the everyday and natural experiences. […]
In “Inkstone” written, ‘on seeing a Duan inkstone from the Qian Long period, Qing dynasty’, the stone is “ineloquent”,
“yet from it soundlessly
flow mountain waters, birds,
insects, flowers, fish, people”[…]
Chen’s poetry is quietly compelling and concerned with connections between people and between people and the natural world. It’s an empathetic, measured plea for compassion and understanding. The poem’s rhythms feel prayer-like, pointing to a space for mindfulness and focus. This collection and English translations are long overdue.
Emma Lee, “Impossible Paradise” Chen Yuhong translated by George O’Connell and Diana Shi (Carcanet) – book review
Normally at the top of these posts, you’ll see details of the publications under review: title, author/editor, etc. However, for If/Then, I list Chris Turnbull as ‘instigator’ and I do so for good reason. The genesis behind this most unusual publication was a visual poem by Turnbull which she sent to Linda Russo asking her to write something in response to it and then send her poem on to another writer to repeat the process. The result is a kind of chain art text, or 21st-century renga for longer poems. The final list of contributors is: Chris Turnbull, Linda Russo, Sandra Guerreiro, Anna Reckin, Camilla Nelson, Matti Spence, Sarah Cave, Luke Thompson, Suzanna V. Evans, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Andre Bagoo, and Richard Georges.
Of course, the chain art experience is not that unusual, but what makes this one stand out is the physical structure of the object, which Turnbull describes as an ox-plough or boustrephedon, sheets of print bound in a complex folder card binding, not unlike accordion pleats, but reversible in multiple directions. Printed pages are bound into the folds using a loop of strong thread, one or two folded sheets per fold, and the first ‘return fold has a bonus of two square postcards with short extracts from a couple of the poems inset into slots in their backing card cover. The images at the link above are a perfect instance of a picture being worth a thousand words.
The poems set up conversations between them in a variety of ways. Some are straightforward links, as in the closing lines of Linda Russo’s ‘With Our Many Small Faces Turned To The Sun’:
burying the words, finally
o how long it takes
under onto
reconfigured to provide the opening for Sandra Guerreiro’s untitled response:
“o how long it takes
under onto” entering the field
The next fold begins with Camilla Nelson’s ‘from Run’, a celebration of birds, her:
black bird black bird
ch- ch- ch-
meutgghhhhlooking back to Anna Reckin’s preceding ‘Now that’:
blackbirds shyer this year, but still there, darting
in and out of the ivy on the wallLater in Nelson’s poem we read:
ch- ch-
click of cows moving
up chalk downs
and me in the dip
gathering sunThen Matti Spence’s ‘Walk And’ opens:
Hear the chalk-
downs drone not white
but a proposal of something
near to that deflectionThis is followed by Sarah Cave’s ‘Walk & Pray, Pilgrim’:
hear the chalk rabbits
beneath the mountain
& thru the mountain & pray
& ray to the mountain(Rabbits also appear in Spence’s poem.) The fold ends with Luke Thompson’s ‘Chalk Rabbit’.
The fifth fold then opens with Suzanna V. Evans’ ‘and sings’:
Sea-sieved melodies, whale melodies, fall like particles of chalk, marine
snow, down to the black spines of sea urchins, to the ear-shaped shells of
abalones.There are other threads in these ecologically aware poems that I could have picked up on, but the chalk Downs of South East England have personal resonances for me, so I went with that one.
Billy Mills, Three Pamphlets and a Boustrephedon
Last week I was in London for a couple of days to do various things, but mostly to spend some time in the British Library. One of the items on my to-do list for the BL was to photograph in their entirety the two manuscript notebooks containing most of Payne Fisher’s earliest recorded poetry. I’ve known about these manuscripts for a decade or so, and I already had fairly detailed notes on them, but no full images and therefore no complete transcriptions.
Fisher, a fascinating figure about whom I hope to write a book in due course, went on to be Cromwell’s poet. I’ve written about him several times, both in scholarly articles and chapters and also here on substack:
Fisher came to the attention of Cromwell as a Latin poet, and it is as a Latin poet that he had great success in the 1650s (and diminishing success thereafter). His breakthrough hit was a remarkable Latin poem in the Claudianic style about the siege of York and the battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644. It is an excellent and unforgettable poem in large part because it is both genuinely a celebration of Cromwell’s unstoppable military might and a lament for the suffering of the defeated royalists and the besieged inhabitants of the city. (In this sense, though not really in many others, it is a bit like Lucan’s Civil War.)
Fisher had in fact fought at the battle of Marston Moor himself, on the losing royalist side, and the earliest versions of the poem — which exist in both Latin and English — are straightforwardly royalist. Here is a fragment of the early English version of the poem that would eventually become Marston Moor, describing the city of York:
That Matron-Citty prostituted now
To the leud embracement of hir Ravishers
Hung downe hir aged Head disfigur’d round
With Batteries both of Foes, and hir owne Feares.When we think of ‘war poetry’ today we tend not to think of poetry celebrating the victors, but rather the verse that laments the suffering of the participants — as in the trench warfare of the First World War — or, as here, of innocent civilians. Conversely, if we think of the poetry associated with the English civil war, we think probably of the ‘cavalier’ poets, celebrating honour and chivalry mostly in a rather abstract if beautiful kind of way, as in Lovelace’s poem, ‘To Lucasta, on going to the wars’:
Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
Lov’d I not Honour more.Fisher and Lovelace were almost exact contemporaries, and in fact Fisher met and became friends with Lovelace during the 1640s, when they were both serving in the army. But Fisher’s version of war poetry is entirely unlike Lovelace’s — and indeed it’s not much like anything else I can think of from this decade. The style is perhaps best described as ‘documentary’, and indeed several of the poems do seem to have their origins, at least, in material written during a campaign.
Victoria Moul, Realistic war poetry from the 1640s
[Margaret] Tait was Orcadian; though once she qualified as a doctor she travelled widely. In her mid-thirties, after serving through WWII in the Royal Army Medical Corps, she turned to filmmaking. “I think I gradually came over to feeling that it was necessary to do something more than just simply bringing people back to bodily health”. Between 1951 and 1998 she made over 30 films of various lengths, all of which have this sustained focus and attention to detail which I imagine she gave to her patients. Tait also published her own poems in three slight, beautiful hardbacks, the shape and size of a Ladybird book, in 1959 and 1960. Her logo is a cardiograph line, the double beat of the heart.
In her films and her poetry Tait was, says Ali Smith, instinctively Modernist (Smith links her to the Beats and Whitman, and to Hugh MacDiarmid, a friend and the subject of one of her films – check it out on YouTube). Interviewed on Channel 4, Tait quoted Lorca: “an apple is no less intense than the sea, a bee no less astonishing than a forest … [The artist] enters what may well be called the universe of each thing … [he/she] takes all materials in the same scale”. The camera was an impartial witness, she believed: it showed all things in great and equal detail, it could present context and perspective as well as great intimacy. Using collage and disjunction, following associations of ideas and sounds and her own train of thought to move from one shot to the next, without hierarchy. This allowed her to create what she felt was “a pure form of poetry”. “In poetry something else happens … Presence, let’s say, soul or spirit, an empathy with whatever it is that’s dwelt upon, feeling for it – to the point of identification”. In The Big Sheep, for example, this dwelling is in accumulated, over-familiar layers. Images ‘rhyme’, and are nested together through repetition and cross-linking; she revisits and revises places, shapes, textures and faces constantly, in subtly interconnected moments. But these are not private exercises. She is constantly aware of us, the audience, peering over her shoulder. Look at this, she says. And this. Now look here.
“Poems, like all human fabrications from straw huts to theology, are made to our measure and by our measure, and are not above or beyond us,” said Charles Simic in ‘Notes on Poetry and Philosophy’. “Language and paint are not metaphysical and forms are not spectral. Patterning is a universal human act”. It is in this that I understand her move from “simply bringing people back to bodily health” to looking more deeply at how we live, at how we knit our experience together. In her film poetry, she looks to present simply this, “in a way that only the motion picture camera has a language for”. Documentary filmmaking was, in her view, ultimately unsuccessful because of the way it isolates its subject from its surroundings in order to study it. “I think that film is essentially a poetic medium,” Tait said, “and although it can be put to all sorts of other – creditable and discreditable – uses, these are secondary”. Her film-poems have been described as anti-narrative. They end by simply ending.
Lesley Harrison, Sometimes it’s the Wordiness of Words That Gets in the Way
“Fardistantly past due, we throughganged the outpumpers, the alden gatherers saved from longforetimes.“
A couple of years ago, I made a video that used a very early version of MidJourney AI to create some background elements that I did not have my own material for. At the time, MidJourney seemed like an exciting new way to create original material. However, it is now clear that these AI engines illegally use original work and consume massive amounts of power. Therefore, I have completely remade the video using all my own footage. Even so, the images look somewhat unworldly, which is part of my intention. The text is in a kind of future-archaic dialect that I invented.
Ian Gibbins, The Bilgestruck reimagined
i find myself craving primordial. to chart
Robin Gow, 5/31
a path across species. wake up in the twilight dawn
of a thick-shelled egg. the sun, like a father’s eye
burning through the walls of any house.
we wake with hollow bones.
Whenever I watch sensei doing an arrangement, I am struck by her care, not only toward the flowers but her attention to the active empty space that is part of the floral field. When I took lessons in Dutch Still Life flower arrangement, I was surprised by the way the floral field is completely filled, in much the same way that an oil canvas is primed and fully painted. You never glimpse the canvas underneath an oil painting in the same way you see and appreciate the white spaces in a Chinese landscape painting.
Because, of course, the empty space is doing crucial work. In Japanese this is called 余白の美 the “beauty of the white space.” As an expression of “ma,” it is an emptiness that is active and generative. […]
I also often find myself now thinking about plants as sentient beings— each, as some Buddhist philosophers might say, on their own path toward salvation and enlightenment. Michael Pollan, in his new book on consciousness, begins his journey with a long meditation on exactly this possibility when he describes the poppies in his Berkeley garden appearing to return his gaze one afternoon, and rather than dismissing the experience, he followed his feeling into the emerging science of plant intelligence.
Researchers have shown that plants are able to read their environment and solve problems. They appear able to learn, form memories, send signals to other plants, change their behavior in response, and even cooperate with plants they recognize as kin. Pollan stops short of claiming they have reflective selfhood, but he takes their inner life seriously. And so do I.
Leanne Ogasawara, Mountain Tiger-Sky Mind 虚
you gave me your hand lens
by a mossy tree
and I looked up close
my eyelashes crushed by its metal rim
my nose touching tree bark
smelling its tiny life
made large.On bark cliff faces,
Anna Chilvers, Confessions of a Moss Widow
dripping dark where the sun can’t enter,
unfathomable life hides
itself from view
It delights me that Scientific American includes science-related poetry — and when my monthly issue arrives I turn first to the monthly poem. Here are the opening stanzas of ‘The Algorithm’ by California poet Barbara Quick from the May, 2022 issue.
Optimization under uncertainty
is a field of study in which my grown son
will earn his Ph.D. The math, in his case,
concerns the production of wind energy.He reads his papers aloud on the phone to me
as a way to optimize their clarity,
so that even a layperson, such as myself,
can understand what he’s saying,
in between each beautifully made
equation and graph.Quick’s complete poem is available at this link.
JoAnne Growney, Science in Meter and Verse (from Sci. Amer.)
I’ve been thinking about the wind, its partnership with seeds, with pollen, its agency with water, how it casts it beyond its own reach, and sand, rising as clouds from the desert to whirl and settle to crevices in odd places, and weather, wind its worldwide vehicle. And wind’s havoc, flattened forests, but from which new growth births, and us, our dust bowls, how wind carries even our own species with it, tangling itself in our hair, lining our faces with its force. But it occurs to me also that we are as wind ourselves, the same force of movement, destruction, new plantings. We also drive ourselves mad with our constant blowing. What can we learn from being like the wind? Could we be more humble? But the very trees themselves bow down. But though we can “harness the wind” for our energy generators, we have not yet learned to stop it. There’s that. This week the wind blew light rain pattering against the window. And here’s a charming poem by German poet Jan Wagner that translator David Kaplinger has rendered “portrait of the rain.” I guess I’ll have to start studying German, so taken have I become with some of the German poetry I’ve been dipping into.
Marilyn McCabe, particles, pollen, all the dirt of the world
I’ve been thinking about throwaway remarks in poetry recently. Those little bits of speech which don’t really seem necessary but nevertheless lodge themselves into the felt memory of reading the poem with great force.
One such moment is the detail that Jaan Kaplinski supplies the reader in these lines, from his poem ‘This morning was cold’:
I came from a meeting – a discussion of
the teaching of classical languages –
and I was sitting by the river with a friend
who wanted to tell me his troubles.The lines could make perfect sense without the reader learning about the ‘discussion of/ the teaching of classical languages’. There are many Jaan Kaplinski poems which include similar declarative statements without any self-interruption. ‘I came from a meeting/ and I was sitting by the river with a friend/ who wanted to tell me his troubles’ is fine. But it’s the bit in the middle I love, the bit you could argue that we don’t need. When I first encountered the poem some twenty years ago, I thought its inclusion was slightly knowing, a little on the nose, self-regarding, even. All this time later, I return to the poem to check that the poem’s speaker has remembered to include this unnecessary yet vital detail that so perfectly captures the urgent liminality of needing to switch between two very different worlds, from theoretical pedagogy to listening to the ‘troubles’ of a friend on a ‘freezing’ riverbank. The poem makes another, similar turn into the world of domesticity, towards its end: ‘I stopped at a shop for oatmeal and bread.’ This is also worth meditating on. But he had me at ‘meeting’.
Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: A discussion of the teaching of classical languages, by Jaan Kaplinski
I was editing some poems today and thought about one of the strategies that I use a lot when revising any writing. Cutting out the parts that are less interesting. Trimming filler. Pruning around important or more arresting images so that they stand out and aren’t cluttered up by other material. What would the musical equivalent of that be? I wondered.
I modifed the backing tracks from my piece Nothing Makes Poetry Happen (which I posted yesterday) and improvised an alto saxophone solo on top. I was trying to sound like Julius Hemphill on Dogon A.D. an album that I adore.
I took the poetry editing approach and cut out lots of filler. I noted that played too much, trying to capture the feeling of excitement and energy in the tracks. I didn’t leave much space. (Oh you ADHD!) So I edited out unnecessary parts. I found places where the “images” (musical ideas) would be better without the clutter around them. I didn’t reorder the solo, though sometimes I have done that. Except for adding on a single note at the end which came from the beginning in order to end with something more summative and cadential and a formal callback to the beginning.
With writing as with music, it’s easy to think that the flow of a draft is integral and inseparable to the essence of the work. But it isn’t. Or, in fact, one can craft a flow that better expresses or highlights the core material. And the modified flow often is a better manifestation or expression of the flow one was aiming for in the first place.
Gary Barwin, Editing music as if it were writing
Frances Brawne (later Frances Brawne Lindon) is cast as the girl next door in the Keats story. She literally became the girl next door when her family moved into rooms on one side of Wentworth Place (now Keats House) in Hampstead, London in April 1819. Fanny and Johnny had met the previous November in 1818 and Keats appears to have been initially quite critical and dismissive of her. She, however, showed him enormous kindness, gave him emotional support when his brother died of tuberculosis that December and it’s easy to reduce her simply to being the poet’s muse as the two became close during Keats’ most productive period in 1819. Fanny was “a voluminous reader” and “books were her favourite topic of conversation.” She was also, “an eager politician” and is described as being “fiery in discussion.” She was vey much Keats’ equal. On 18 October 1819, Keats proposed to Fanny Brawne and she accepted. Keats had given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry and a marriage would not be consented to by Fanny’s family. They kept their engagement a secret.
When Keats began coughing blood in February 1820 Fanny was still living next door. His infectious illness meant that meeting in person became problematic and instead they exchanged frequent notes and letters despite being only a few yards apart. Fanny would pass his window returning from her walks. All of this provided condition for an intense yet frustrating affair. We will never know if their relationship was consummated physically. The romance intensified when Keats left for Italy, on health grounds, in September. He never returned. He died in Rome in February 1821 with Fanny still believing he would be back by spring. She was thrown into a profound period of mourning that lasted six years when she learned of his death, cutting her hair short, wearing black and the ring Keats had given her before he left.
When she eventually married, twelve years after his death, she retained all of the poet’s letters and keepsakes and her archive provides much colour to the Keats story. It offers little further insight into her own. The letters she wrote to Keats are lost. The last ones she sent to Rome were never even opened and buried with the poet in accordance to his wishes. When the Keats letters were sold into a collection and published after Fanny’s death there was controversy. Fanny didn’t quite fit the Victorian narrative that had been established, she was too ordinary, even considered by critics as unworthy to be cast alongside such a distinguished figure as the poet. […]
Frances Brawne Lindon is number ninety two on the top one hundred list at Brompton Cemetery and I go in search of her. I find her in the brambles and the ivy behind a metal, workman’s fence. She retains a degree of separation, cut off, removed as she was with her poet. Perhaps they have some works in mind here. Perhaps they’ll clear a path to Fanny, give her a little more status, restore her to a greater and more deserving glory. She doesn’t need her lines cut back anymore. They’ve been lost already. I stand respectfully, eagerly behind the metal barrier as if I’m waiting for a rockstar or a member of the royal family, which, of course, I am.
Jan Noble, Nº66 Finding Fanny
In Prayer (I), George Herbert creates a sonnet out of a series of metaphors for prayer. No explanation is given. The images emerge, disorientingly.
Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.I especially like the line The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, as I think it expresses a common feeling of reading poetry—a half-way feeling between experience and understanding. The soul can only be paraphrased. There are no words that fully express the human soul. The heart in prayer is on a journey to God, it cannot be said to have arrived. Poetry is the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage. It is a common cliché that life is a journey—but it is a cliché because it is true, it has been said for as long as there has been commentary on human life.
As Thoreau said, being a traveller is the history of every one of us.
A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us.
Poetry is about that traveling. Whether in literal journeys in which we learn to see strangely, as in Bishop, or about spiritual journeys, as in Herbert, travels in our heads and souls, poetry captures the sense of being unsure about the world, but knowing that something is understood. Before we can begin to talk about the specific understanding, we have to be able to enter the dream, and to begin to see the poem as it wishes to be seen. We must read like travelers, coming into a new place, looking for what they can see.
Henry Oliver, Something understood. How to read poetry.
This time, wedding travel took us to the high mountain country near Boone, NC–spectacular scenery, very rainy weather, fog rolling in, winding dirt/mud roads.
I am sitting in a tiny cabin in near dark, and I’m always surprised at how hard it is for me to work on the computer lit only by the light of the computer. I’m fine reading online stuff with no other light, but writing a blog post feels hard. Or maybe it’s the tiredness that makes it hard, the existing outside of my normal routines.
Let me record a line that came to me this morning, which may find its way into a poem at some point: “I am the bartender without a corkscrew.”
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Second Spring Wedding
When I began writing this, I saw the bats flitting about in the air but now it’s so dark that I can’t see them. When I look up from my word document (white words on dark “paper”), I see pale, parallel symbols across the sky.
It looks like a trace fossil.
Sarah Lada, Trace
This past weekend I was most fortunate to have been interviewed, via Zoom, by four Chilean university students of English and creative writing. They are taking Hernán Pereira’s course at Arturo Prat University, Iquique, Chile. In 2014, Hernán collaborated with Dr. Karen Jogan of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania on a poetry and place project that resulted in the book So Far..So Close/Portada y Contraportada: Contemporary Writers of Tarapacá & Pennsylvania. Pamela Daza took the photos for the book; I posted a bit about it here. Thanks to social media, which I don’t often thank, I’ve kept in touch with Hernán, who is full of interesting ideas for teaching young people to enjoy poetry and to learn English.
Now, I’m retired, and I was pleased to hear from Hernán that he’s assigned his students books by English-speaking poets to read and research, and then interview, said writers (with whom he is acquainted). Would I be willing to be interviewed? Why, of course!
The result of most interviews is that I learn a great deal about my work by having other people ask me questions about it. I usually learn a bit about the interviewer(s) in the process. In this case, I was happy that the students had come up with some good and unexpected questions that really made me pause and ponder. I was also impressed with what excellent English skills they have, and how polite and earnest they are. One of the questions was what makes me motivated to write a poem. Not inspired (the usual question), but motivated–a slightly different verb and a telling one.
I answered along the lines of how seeing an image, experiencing an event, learning new information (ie observation), or reading a text with which I might disagree or wonder about leads me to a line of questioning/reflection, and that whole process motivates me to write. I have to say my answer was, in real time, rather vague, and that I was speaking with people for whom English is a second language. But a student named Maximillio said, “So, would you say then your motivation is responsive?” Wow, yes! Which clarifies a lot for me. I’m not a forward-momentum sort of writer who bulls into powerful expression, much as I admire such writers and sometimes wish I were more like them. I’m the ponderer, the one who imagines being an other and tries to figure out that perspective, the somewhat distant observer who nevertheless wants to bring the feelings and experiences home to whoever my reader may be.
That was a splendid experience for me. So nice to speak with people under 25 years old again. I miss that. Meanwhile, reading a 1998 edition of Lorca’s Poet in New York (in translation of course, though I am getting slightly better at reading the Spanish). And drafting new work in my head while watering the garden.
Ann E. Michael, Interviews
How to explain to someone else
Luisa A. Igloria, It was
when your basic condition is knowing you barely
have words for things in this universe? I try to strip
the shelves of my excesses. Why did I need more
than one pen, one bottle of ink?
People who believe in community lean into community. We are doing everything we can to lean in. I have been working seven days a week since becoming Publisher and CEO in January 2024. I haven’t been paid for three months. I’m going to keep working, but if it were up to me, I admit, I can’t carry this press into the future alone.
Sugar is poured unevenly in the publishing business. Presses without endowments and large operating reserves often go overlooked. I wonder where the sugar was poured for the Literary Arts Fund. I wonder if there was ever actually a chance for Red Hen Press, or if we only imagined there was.
Meanwhile, Tobi has powers and is hatching a plan, one that includes rebuilding our board. Our staff continues to march ahead. Our work goes on, but we need more support to be sustainable, to survive into the next year. Tobi is our community whisperer, the one who speaks in the clearing in the woods, and they help us believe that if the community wants Red Hen, it will happen.
The night we found out about the Literary Arts Fund, we had tickets to a play called Exotica, where performers dressed up like animals and performed aerial stunts. There were two dancing chickens (you really can’t make this up) who got all of us on our feet to conga through the adjoining restaurant. Maybe it was our new board member and Tobi, getting everyone up and dancing, to remind us that we are all in it together.
At some point, they had a “slut contest” to see who would dance on the bar and strip. The twenty-somethings lined up, but nobody took off more than a jacket. I just couldn’t let this pass. I got up and danced the slut walk, off came the jacket and the top. My bracelets and rings flew in all directions. Sometimes, you have to do it yourself.
Tobi is creating our future, and the future is a conga line with a chicken in the lead. I like that future. I believe in it.
We Kates don’t give up easily. I won the slut contest and walked off with the champagne. Red Hen Press will not go quietly into this good night. Tomorrow is another day.
Kate Gale, Not With a Bang: Finding Our Future in Community
My anguish can be washed in warm water, with a mild soap, when it’s soaked then rolled in an old towel lay it out in the dappled sun, beside lilies of the valley where it can hear the tinkling of its bells and exchange its sour breath for their small beads of sweet aroma smelling of fields and fields of the smallest hope.
Jill Pearlman, Anguish is like Laundry
Now here they come again, the immaculate men.
Bob Mee, THE JOY OF STREAM-WRITING IS NOT KNOWING WHAT’S HAPPENING, WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN
Here they come, smelling of incense and failure.
They walk past the pot-holes, weeds, broken glass,
into my dreams, while I sit in moonlight with my
book. What’s this pressed between the pages?
It’s summer, for sure this time. Gave my author site a cleanup for broken links and to be better organized. Read a bit. Sent a couple more submissions. Took a walk. Transcribed some.
Birdsong of various chirps, and another, somewhere among cat’s meow, falsetto donkey and door hinge. Took a horsefly, a wasp, a few deerfly out to see the sky. Snacked, drank, read some more. Received a few more submissions for my one-line chapbook call. Wrote some more.
Pearl Pirie, Getting Resettled