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, days bear their teeth, fantasy and reality rhyme, attention is a form of loss, and the poem has stopped showing and started naming. Enjoy.
The sudden early morning wind whipped up my loose hand-written pages of new poems and took them away, high over the gardens, scattered them who knows where. I apologise now for the litter they became. I sat at the patio table and watched them go. There are no copies. And so I began again the old process: wait, watch, hear, remember, get it down. It’s all memory, whether a second or two or a thousand years ago. I look again at notes from life in a lighthouse, on cliffs, among ruins, among ghosts, both up there and in a village where I’ll always be an outsider. Life on the outside, a life of faith – in what, is my business – emptiness.
Bob Mee, ON A DAY WHEN THE WIND WHIPPED UP MY LOOSE PAGES OF POEMS AND TOOK THEM AWAY, HIGH OVER THE GARDENS
Yesterday, towers stood like gleaming
Luisa A. Igloria, It was
sheaths beneath the broiling sun as though
they would withstand every form of violence.
Yesterday, a sinkhole yawned open at the exit
from the freeway. Days bare their teeth and
gums. The wind smears pastes of insect
bodies on glass. I am trying not to think
of these as plagues pouring out of the sky.
I have here A Chorus of Ears by Denise Riley, newly published. Four essays ‘On the Voice of the Poem’. A few pages in I know I’ll have to slow down and listen – as one might with a poem – as her elegant, rather wry hugely intelligent sentences unfold. I also suspect that ere long I’ll be standing on the table cheering. On page one already Riley is asking how writers may ‘preserve their freedom not to acquiesce in the zeitgeist’s tendency to aggrandise the poetic persona, with its platformed competitiveness’. Soon, she’s talking about how thought – and poems – surprise us in their making, or ought to. Many writers will know it’s not oneself, the poet, who makes the true utterance, it’s not our ‘voice’ or that of our people but ‘it’s the voice of language itself which is trying to speak’. For it to do so, ‘all the accidents of your authorship need to fall away’.
Kathleen Jamie, What We’re Reading This Summer
Here in Canonbury Square George Orwell completed Animal Farm and began work on 1984 and it is here where we encounter one of literature’s often forgotten poets. Enter Ampleforth. Ampleforth is the poet in 1984 who, like the main protagonist, falls foul of the system. Ampleforth is devoted to poetry and despite having to translate old works into Party approved texts he does so dutifully and carefully until he makes one fatal mistake. He fails to replace a banned word. He fails because he cannot find a suitable substitute for the word ‘God’. Ampleforth is arrested and punished not because he believes in God but because he believes in rhyme, in music, in the integrity of poetry.
I am sitting in Canonbury Square in the June heat, having completed a short walk from Louis MacNiece’s house just up the road and suddenly I feel utterly lost. Here I am in the summer sun and I can’t find another word for God. I feel suddenly abandoned by something that I cannot describe. Close by a small boy kicks a ball off the green. It rolls into the road. He doesn’t know whether to follow it or not. He looks for his mother. Across the way an angry man is shouting with a can of lager, barking insults at the neatly tended Canonbury borders and I am both of them, I am both a boy without his ball and a man angry with a can.
In the morning I’d visited my mother at the same care-home where I’d watched my father lose his capacity for speech, where his vitality for language abandoned him. My mother is smart and articulate but many of the other residents have been robbed of conversation, have forgotten how to ask for anything, can’t remember what it is they’re asking for and I am all of them too. And the boy who doesn’t know what to say to his mam and the man rattling with a can. And I am thinking of George, working diligently, articulately on his stories, preserving words in careful order, knowing the war will soon be over when I remember that it’s Father’s Day. It’s Father’s Day and I feel utterly lost but now I understand why.
Jan Noble, N°70 Bunting and rubbish
It’s been a quiet week here. Remember that tooth that kicked me out of the writing residency at the beginning of the month? Finally got it fixed, but it took almost a week to recover. On Tuesday, it was ninety degrees. Today it was gray and in the sixties. The Strawberry moon tonight looks more like spooky October than end of June. Meanwhile, I’ve been watching birds and listening to audiobooks and watching Film Noir on TCM. […]
Saturday is the 4th of July and the 250th anniversary of this fair country. This week the Supreme Court ruled, in line with Donald Trump’s well-known contempt for not just women and people of color but also disabled people (sound like any Hitlers you know?), that people with disabilities don’t have a right to live in their own homes. A lot of us are worried this means a return in being placed in institutions for being “inconvenient.” You can read more about it here. A load of laughs, right? It also took away some of the rights of people to claim asylum here. Whenever I get a bit of patriotism back, like while watching the World Cup, the USA reveals just how evil it can be. It’s hard to stay upbeat.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Recovery Week with Goldfinch, Almost Fourth of July and the 250th, and the Question of Patriotism
Last week the mayor of a city
most of us don’t live in
used the word “monsters” to describe
a political action committee.Also last week a woman in Texas
was sentenced to fifty years
because she read “political zines”
about feminism. A gay manwho works as a public servant
Rachel Barenblat, Ragebait
was kept from his children.
At least one ceasefire
ceased its ceasing.
Jennifer Martelli’s “Dear_________,” begins with a paradox: “Today, to ease my anxiety, I thought of the scariest scene in The Shining—” The speaker then takes us into the opening sequence, in which a small Volkswagen travels through a mountain landscape while the camera follows from high above. What frightens the speaker is the scale of the view: “the vastness / of America,” the mountains, the road crossing into a place so immense that “only a helicopter or bald bird of prey” could follow it and comprehend “what kind of country this was.”
That gaze reappears at the end of The Shining, in the old photograph hanging in the haunted hotel. Jack Nicholson’s character stands in the foreground at a July Fourth celebration in 1921, though the film has taken place decades later. “He’d always been there,” Martelli writes, “celebrating America’s birthday.”
This move underscores the horror of realizing that the film’s violent man is part of the hotel’s past and, additionally troubling, how he may never have been separate from that past. Patriarchal violence is not an interruption of the national story. It is already inside the photograph, the celebration, and the country’s account of itself.
From there, the poem turns toward its unnamed recipient: “I see you in many men.” The blank in the title permits the addressee to remain particular while also becoming representative. One man proliferates into “angry men, bloated, omnipresent, powerful,” men frightened by “their own impossible hungers.”
That word, hungers, carries the poem into its final intimate turn, when the speaker remembers the Fatted Calf restaurant down the street. After six weeks of being unable to eat, she orders a rare burger and thick fries. “Finally,” the poem ends, “I could keep something down.”
The difference between the men’s hunger and the speaker’s hunger is crucial. Their “impossible hungers” appear boundless: appetites for power, control, possession, and permanence. The speaker’s hunger is physical and finite. Her body needs food. The ability to receive it, to eat and keep it down, is ordinary, but the poem makes that ordinariness profound.
José Angel Araguz, What Kind of Country This Was: On Jennifer Martelli’s “Dear_________,”
As part of the campaign to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal, [Emma] Lazarus wrote a poem to be read at a fundraising auction in December 1883. A poet well-versed in New York literary circles, Lazarus was herself the descendant of earlier Jewish immigrants to New York. Passionate about helping recent immigrants overcome the hardships they faced, she devoted her time to the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, after the Russian pogroms of the 1880s resulted in another influx of Jewish immigrants to the city. She also worked to establish the Hebrew Technical Institute, which further helped Jewish immigrants acclimate to life in New York.
Her poem, ‘The New Colossus,’ was styled after an Italian sonnet, during an era when large numbers of European immigrants were arriving in the U.S. in waves. In contrast with the Greek ‘Colossus of Rhodes,’ a male figure that presided over the harbor in Rhodes in the 3rd century B.C.E., Lazarus saw this new American colossus as a welcoming maternal figure, unarmed, and bearing a torch to light the way.
Read aloud at the fundraising gala in 1883, Lazarus’s poem included these now-famous lines:Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”It may have been the only poem read at the auction that night. While it did garner interest in raising funds for the pedestal of the statue, Lazarus’s poem was not widely remembered in her lifetime. Pulitzer’s fledgling newspaper, The World, did print it following the auction, but The New York Times chose not to publish it, a decision it rectified decades later.
As it turned out, Lazarus was away in Europe in 1886 when the statue was finally unveiled in New York Harbor, three years after the fundraising campaign began. Her poem was not mentioned at the dedication ceremony, and she died the following year.
Jenevieve Carlyn, Blood from Stone
It was only after her death that her poem was reunited with the Statue of Liberty, the Mother of Exiles, through the efforts of one of her friends. In 1903, the words Lazarus penned twenty years earlier were officially inscribed on a plaque placed inside the base of the statue.
I’ve always found the summer to be the only season in which I struggle to write poetry. Of course, an extraordinary heatwave like the current all-but-unbearable one inhibits doing very much except lounging about in whatever shade there is. Jackie Wills’s brilliant new collection aside, I’m also struggling to concentrate on reading; or doing anything else of consequence for that matter, though I enjoyed watching Ecuador win last night. If only all the World Cup games were on in the afternoon and evening . . .
Matthew Paul, Summer daze
That said, I finished a rare political-ish poem last week and sent it off to the Morning Star, who have since said they’ll publish it in August. As a lifelong leftie, it does my heart good to help to support a publication with values broadly similar to my own. I never quite understand why poets might, instead, want to place poems in right-wing rags, like The Spectator, which gives platforms to some truly odious far-right ‘thinkers’, such as very far-right Douglas Murray (its associate editor) and Max Klinger, and is edited by Michael Gove for pity’s sake. It also happens to be owned by Paul Marshall, the hedge-funder who set up GB News. I like its poetry editor Hugo Williams and most of his corpus of poetry as much as anybody does, but, to me, The Spectator’s values aren’t in the slightest bit compatible with the inclusivity of poetry.
I don’t buy the argument that getting poems published in journals and papers which don’t specialise in poetry must be a good thing per se; or that putting poetry in front of the sort of people who like to read very right-wing tripe might broaden, perhaps even change, their minds. I suspect that is very unlikely. In the same way that publications are necessarily picky about the poems they publish, poets surely have a moral responsibility to be picky about where they attempt to place their poems.
A counter-argument is that placing left-leaning political poems in left-leaning publications like the Morning Star and the New Statesman will only preach to the converted, but how likely is it that a right-wing publication would publish a left-leaning poem or even one that, say, even tangentially alerted the reader to the horrendous adverse impacts of climate change?
To Phrase a Prayer for Peace, by Donna Spruijt-Metz:
from Day 63
I walk
through my unbombed neighborhood—
I sit in my white
studio to write to YOU—More than any poem in this very moving book, which at its core is a diary Spruijt-Metz kept during the first 120 or so days of Israel’s war on Gaza, these four lines capture the essence of the struggle—spiritual, ethical, moral—that I think any American Jew of good conscience faced in coming to terms with the brutal reality of Hamas’ attack on the one hand and, on the other, the far more brutal reality of Israel’s response. While the poems gesture at times towards the contested historical context(s) through which all sides to that conflict give it meaning, Spruijt-Metz is more concerned with trying to reconcile the “unbombed” comfort in which she lives with the inevitable concerns Hamas’ attack raised about Jewish safety and the concerns about Jewish identity and community raised by Israel’s response. Spruijt-Metz holds herself accountable for the privilege of her position by weaving the mundane details of her life through the book like a recurring motif in a piece of music, constantly reminding herself and her reader that part of the reason she has the luxury of wrestling with these questions in this form is that she is not in any immediate, mortal danger. In the end, To Phrase a Prayer for Peace is a book-length wrestling with the transcendent presence she addresses as YOU, an attempt to find a Jewish answer to a question that is not the obvious one of how this YOU could allow things like the Hamas attach and Israel’s response to happen, but rather of how it is possible through whatever it is that YOU represents to find a path into a different way of being in the world. Given how much more brutal and complex the war in the Middle East has become—and it is in so many ways just one war, isn’t it?—it may seem odd to return to a book written in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, but precisely because of that increased brutality and complexity, the questions Spruijt-Metz wrestles with are more relevant than ever.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #56
Vulnerability Index, Elizabeth Robinson, Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2025, ISBN: 9780810149205, $20.00 […]
In her Introduction to Vulnerability Index, Elizabeth Robinson talks about her work with the homeless, or better still, unhoused of Boulder, Colorado and her experience of ‘crushing depression’ and how the openness and generosity of the unhoused people she worked with helped her deal with it. She challenges the stereotypical views of the people she worked with that are often held by the comfortably housed, and, crucially for the poems that follow, speaks of the vital, difficult need to pay attention to others. The poems are acts of attention, while recognising the difficulties involved:
My attentions are crude, raw.
I begin to think that all attention is a form of loss.
because it cannot create perfect reciprocity
with its focus.And yet Robinson continues, through these poems, to attend to the world of her unhoused clients, to understand them not as a problem, but as individuals each with their own attributes and their own reasons for the lives they lead. Which is to say she attends to the world she moves through not only looking but seeing. And these are the kinds of things she sees:
On Why He Doesn’t Want Housing
“A body that is in motion stays in motion.
A body that comes to rest stays at rest.”He’s afraid he’ll die if he stays inside.
and
He is asking and he is he is asking and
he is asking and asking forsomething. Not for resolution
in which this story has zero
confidence, but for relief.Relief as a hinge between
death and survival.
An imbalancethat no story can right into equilibrium.
(from ‘Do Not Resuscitate’)Formally, Robinson deploys a range of strategies, from lists through pieces based on responses to official forms to snatches of overheard conversation. The list and form-based poems provide glimpses into the relationships between the unhoused protagonists and a system designed, it would seem, to humiliate them:
Says they discharged me at eleven and I walked around in the dark all night, snow blowing everywhere, wearing only this T-shirt, jeans, and my flip-flops, nowhere
warm to go.
(from ‘Inmate’)The understated tone of the writing, here and throughout the book, is carefully contrived and lends a dignity to the people Robinson writes about that society generally denies them.
Billy Mills, Elizabeth Robinson and Bruce Parkinson Spang: A Review
How this little poem swarms with wretched lives that seem to start up almost one to a line! Baudelaire’s genius for metaphor takes a striking turn here, seeming to pile presence on presence, pressure on pressure, in a way that reflects the crowded claustrophobia of nineteenth century metropolitan life. “Pluviôse” – name of the rainy fifth month in the French Republican Calendar, straddling January and February – becomes an irritable god pouring water in floods from an urn. Personified like this, he’s not only seen as causing the conditions the city struggles under, but himself seems oppressed by a discontent that makes him lash out at everything and everyone around him. The poem in fact develops as a series of brilliantly self-contained images like tiny video clips, each inviting the reader to dwell on it and expand it in his own collaborative imagination. Most brilliant, to my mind, is the final one with its ripples of teasing suggestion. There’s an animating friction between squalid and glamorous connotations – squalor in the “sales parfums”, a flicker of discordant glamour in “le beau valet de coeur”. There’s an arresting element of surprise at the way these court cards suddenly start into speaking, three-dimensional life. Readers will imagine different scenarios. For myself, though I don’t know if this is a result of letting the English meaning of “sinister” weigh too heavily, I picture the knave of hearts (the valet de coeur) and the queen of spades (the dame de pique) putting their heads together, whispering like a pair of conspirators from Goya’s black paintings. As they look back on their dead loves, “sinistrement” makes us feel they’re doing so sadly, gloomily and (to the unsympathetic spectator) boringly, but also that their doing so is disquietening, sinister in the English sense, and perhaps somehow ill-intentioned. All the tiny vignettes quiver with varying suggestions, though. In “Aux pâles habitants du voisin Cimetière”, for example, “habitants” seems to treat the cemetery as just another district of Paris, blurring the line between the living and the dead. And why are they pale? Because they’re ghosts, yes, but they also seem to be shivering with cold, hunger, disease, dread, like the living poor.
Edmund Prestwich, Imagery in two of Baudelaire’s Spleen poems
Larkin’s extraordinary formal command becomes in the mature poet so absolutely assured that it is almost invisible. But in these poems you can still catch him experimenting, as in these sapphics from 1949, which are not systematically quantitative but certainly partially so. If you have any Latin lyric in your head, I think it’s impossible to read this poem and not feel sure that Larkin, too, had at some point read some lyric verse in Latin:
Sinking like sediment through the day
To leave it clearer, onto the floor of the flask
(Vast summer vessel) settles a bitter carpet —
Horror of life.Huge awareness, elbowing vacancy,
Empty inside and out, replaces day.
(Like a fuse an impulse busily disintegrates
Right back to its root.)Out of the afternoon leans the indescribable woman:
’Embrace me, and I shall be beautiful’ –
’Be beautiful, and I will embrace you’ –
We argue for hours.This is not a successful poem, and Larkin would probably have been horrified to see it published at all. It’s obviously an experiment: an experiment in metre, but also in metaphor, simile and the unexpected transition. That muddled simile of an impulse like a fuse disintegrating to its root must be remembering, and reversing, Dylan Thomas’ ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. (Thomas’s particular kind of romanticism was hugely fashionable in the 40s.) The poem is trying to do too much, and its dense abstraction doesn’t convince. Still: ‘out of the afternoon leans the indescribable woman’ is a very good line, even if it would be better without that unnecessary ‘indescribable’. Her role and position in the poem should itself tell us that, like Lycidas or Chloe in Horace, she cannot and need not be described.
You can hear in these lines the recurrent choriamb (— uu —) which is the ‘signature tune’ of sapphics and various related metres in Latin and Greek. Larkin no doubt read some Horace at school or university, as well as some of the English attempts at sapphics that crop up quite regularly in English poetry between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was perhaps influenced also by the choriambic music that recurs occasionally in both Hardy and Pound (as well as, for example, Bunting and Sisson, though both too late to be in play here). But the poem is obliquely Horatian in other ways too: many of Horace’s odes begin with a philosophical or political theme only to introduce an erotic object (whether boy or girl) at the very end. Sex in Horace is always both a distraction from, and a reminder of, the brevity of life. And Larkin here imitates too, actually quite unusually in English lyric, the signature shape of an Horatian ode, which typically ends somewhere quite different from where it began.
Victoria Moul, Larkin’s odes
The poetry of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was once so well known, filling page after page of school anthologies, that editors would often seek out his lesser-known poems, just to present something a little different — the B-sides of his greatest hits, on the assumption that everyone already knew the A-sides.
That assumption is just not true anymore. “The Rape of the Lock” is assigned, when assigned at all, with a trigger warning. “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” — Pope’s surprisingly un-Pope-like poem — has mostly disappeared. And then there’s An Essay on Man, the four-part work published from 1733 to 1734, that was once considered Pope’s major work and a necessary adjunct to any general education. We’re left, these days, to remember the A-sides before we get to the B-sides — beginning with today’s extract, the most glittering passage from his most glittering work, in the full power of his rhymed pentameter couplets.
But it’s also worth pointing out that this passage, the opening lines of Epistle II, appears at war with its form. The easy flow of heroic couplets — the deft arrangement of parallel constructions, for that matter — demonstrates an intellectual confidence that the actual content ostensibly declares does not exist. To be a human being is to be “In doubt his mind and body to prefer; / Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err” — and yet, notice the mastery of the chiasmus: mind/body, inverted to mortal body/erroneous mind. The poet is in charge, holding firm to his explanation of our infirmity.
Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: An Essay on Man
The speaker phonetically translates “moon” into “mun” which creates the right sort of sound but is the wrong word. As her thoughts digress, the word for moon surfaces. She’s not really forgotten, the word is there in her hindbrain, it just took a distraction for it to surface.
“The Symmetry of Fish” is an exploration of language, not just as words or letters on a page, but how words are spoken, the effort it takes to speak and the anxiety of getting it wrong. Cho’s poems feature the act of speaking, facial expressions and the way a mouth is manipulated to get the right sound in order to be understood. Her poems are a lyrical probing, teasing out what it means to be understood and to understand how someone caught between two countries, two cultures, two histories can honour both.
Emma Lee, “The Symmetry of Fish” Su Cho (Penguin Poets) – book review
Jacobea Vulgaris or Senecio Jacobea, a two-faced weed:
Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Ragwort
poisoner of horses and cattle when it’s dry
but a flourishing source of nectar for so many
species of invertebrates I cannot begin to name,
except for the day-time flying scarlet and black
Cinnabar moths that flutter around me as I tug
the yellow flower-topped stems from the ground,
or plant a fork into the clawlike purple roots and lift.
I’m admittedly a bit behind on the work of Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, the author of Barcode Poetry (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2021), Supergiants (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) and TzAR: Pixel Art Anthology (The Blasted Tree, 2025) (as well as a mound of chapbooks), with the latest full-length title being The Wiki of Babel (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2026). […]
I’ve always considered the best kind of writing one that allows a collision between unexpected words, sounds, ideas or structures; one that allows, through that collision, the pure elements of the poem to form in the reader’s own comprehension of those collisions, and Flemmer’s The Wiki of Babel is an ambitious assemblage of the multiple languages of the Biblical Tower of Babel (in which a scrabbling group were struck by G-d to speak in multiple different languages, thus no longer being understood by each other, therefore seeming to all speak in a “babble”) and the wealth of information shaped and collected and hyperlinked across Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (and this title reminds me that Vancouver poet Rob Manery had been working on a hyperlinked poem/poem project back in the mid-1990s, which makes me wonder whatever happened to that, if it ever saw completion). Organized into cluster-sections, Flemmer’s engaging, delightful and playful collection of collage-lyrics is structured via sections “Suggested languages,” “Alternate histories,” “Current events,” “Community portal” and “Canadian hypertext,” the final of which includes some fun explorations through language via Canadian classic novels, including Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966), Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Marian Engel’s Bear (1976) and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974).
rob mclennan, Kyle Flemmer, The Wiki of Babel
I’ve spent the month of June reading The Intentions of Thunder by Patricia Smith – an amazing poet who I was lucky enough to meet and hang out with at the Cork International Poetry Festival recently. This new and selected from Bloodaxe does a brilliant job of giving a sense of the range and development of Patricia’s work over the course of ten collections of poetry – enough to give you a real sense of the development of her poetics over the years, whilst leaving me wanting to buy each individual collection (not good for my bank balance!). The Intentions of Thunder also won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2025, which as far as I know is a rarity for a New and Selected. She has more accolades to her name than I can write here – you can read more about her and her work here…
I do think you need to read Patricia’s collections to get a real sense of the kind of poet she is, and preferably one after the other. I wish I’d found her work whilst I was researching for my PhD. There I was, trying to work out how to write about female desire and sexism and masculinity and whether poetry can create social change – and Patricia has been doing all that work (and more!) for decades, getting (as Danez Smith says on the back cover of The Intentions of Thunder) better and better with every book.
The Intentions of Thunder draws from many of her collections, starting with Life According to Motown, published in 1991 and finishing with Unshuttered, published in 2023. One of my favourite poems in the collection is the first poem “What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t). It begins
first of all, it’s being 9 years old
and feeling like you’re not finished, like
your edges are wild, like there’s something –
everything – wrong.Each book feels more like an album than a poetry collection – each one has its own identity, its own stage of development. Patricia has prefaced each book here with a short prose introduction which kind of tracks her development as a poet, her sense of her own poetics.
Kim Moore, June Reading Diary
In the hard moments of hard days, my three-year-old curls herself away and sings to herself, to the walls, to me, to the shadows listening: “It’s so hard…to [be a] big girl…” It’s a song in the lineage of the Kangaroo song, one I made up for moments like these, a recent iteration of “Why is the baby so very mad?” and “She’s so fierce, with her two teeth.” I have been giving her these nonsense spells since her birth. I have chanted them to her, changing the lyrics at whim, and to suit her moods and requests. She doesn’t mind my voice, doesn’t question or pull from it: It’s so hard to big girl—sing it Mommy. And by all that’s holy, I do. How has this little child so easily broken open the heart of my poetic wound?
As a young poet, I composed countless lines of sonorous words in delightful and tragic patterns with little semantic sense. As antiquated language faded from the codex of my writing, new voices made their way in, and with them an understanding of what happens when phonemes become morphemes, when morphemes become words—signifier and signified, and now we have meaning. Where before there was sound as somatic truth, now it was a doorway from my body to the larger world. Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” and its proto-Siri voice reciting poetry to the house’s absent inhabitants, formed the first tether between my psyche and living writers. A few years later, as if in echo of Bradbury, out from the mystic, I heard Robert Hayden ask, “What did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?”—and suddenly, poetry gave voice (and blessedly, contrast) to the “chronic angers” that surrounded me.
O questionable confessional poetry in halting lines and the call of an open mic —I was fearless on the slam stage—the one poetic venue that wants to hear you. But this was not my place either. My scratchings were steeped in outdated verse, a locked doxology (for ever and ever, amen), and the primal vocal patterns fueling my writing were in direct conflict with my desire to be understood. Up to this point, I hadn’t considered what it meant to be a poet in a world where only the likes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen might write like this—“too street” for the page and “too heady” for spoken word—and I didn’t have a guitar to tender that connection.
So I did what any cloistered poet would do: I looked to contemporary masters for a new vernacular (Adrianne Rich, Philip Levine, Lee Young-Li among them), begged them to discipline my writing out from song and into narrative. I prostrated myself at the feet of Anne Lamott, Stephen King and Richard Hugo. For every fast, I would swear off Kalevala and Sir Gawain. Let me be narrative, O lord. Renew a right spirit within me. But I found instead Matthew Francis, Brenda Hillman and Michael Ondaatje. The fractured storytelling in House of Leaves and Cloud Atlas, and all the sundry works of Catherynne Valente. I played Counting Crows on repeat.
From This Body—Music, guest post by Sherre Vernon (Trish Hopkinson)
I’m wrestling these days with having my silence stolen. Silence in the sense that Umberto Eco talks about in his essay on censorship which I mentioned in this post. Remember his call to: Redi in interiorem hominem? The digital noise as a drug is something I know I need to address for myself, for my mental health. As a first step I had this idea to cull my instagram — to unfollow those accounts that have been inactive for over a year. I’m shocked/notshocked by how many accounts that I followed that were inactive for two years plus. It appears the smart kids did a mass exodus (went dormant) about January of 2024. My other step has been to adopt the idea of a half-sab or half sabbatical from social media. Instead of having just one day off per week, I am going to try to take several days away. I mean, duh. Lastly, I’m trying to make my home email a sacred space. So I’ve unsubscribed to almost everything, bookmarking sites instead, old school. Who knows, maybe that’s not the answer either, but I’m wondering if emailing friends isn’t the way to go? […]
So I was re-reading (and need to go deeper) The Wasteland by T.S.E. And this is a good guide for it. I have been attending to the idea of the fragment, and so: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” is worth thinking about. And then the ending is the Aum Shanti chant which I once found useful and might again, particularly the Aum in all the things.
Shawna Lemay, Whose Silence Are You?
Two notes I’m taking from this autopsy, both about openings.
First: where an opening reaches for abstraction, the thing it should have entered through is often waiting one or two lines below. In Prayers it is line three: the cancer. I’ve gone back through a handful of my own drafts since seeing this, and the same shape keeps recurring — the first lines perform the mood, then a later line, often unforced, names what the mood was about. The repair is almost always the same. Cut the performance. Begin where the seeing begins.
Second: a single feeling-noun — tears, fear, grief, longing, loss — can carry an opening if the surrounding image earns it. Three in the first stanza is the diagnostic threshold. The poem has stopped showing and started naming. In Prayers, tears recurs three times across the first seven lines, and prayers arrives twice more after that. The recurrence isn’t motif. It is the same reach repeating, in lieu of the thing the poem is trying not to look at.
Adam Cairns, Two lines reached for tears. The cancer was one line below.
Has this ever happened to you? You’re writing, you’re into the flow, hearing all these words/voices/words/phrases/words/words/words, and then it just won’t stop?
I wrote this poem a few years ago after a terrifying episode that happened one afternoon. I had been writing poems and I couldn’t turn off the flow. The flood of voices, words, and phrases overwhelmed me. I was afraid I was psychotic.
I don’t know if it lasted 5 mins or an hour. I don’t know if anything has ever terrified me more. It only happened this one time, but I have been vigilant ever since. I didn’t write poems or lyric prose for a few years. Then I took a chance and started a Substack. It has helped bring me back. Thank you for reading here. […]
“Sam is standing over Jessie they
threw buckets of spinners absurdly
small a staircase in his mouth in all that
never a one their umbrellas rain
falling rain falling everywhere upwards of twenty
back forty the pink birds
shifted the church doors are locked
now nebulous”I cannot make it stop.
“star candies five and ten
ways to cross the waste listen
Johnny the boss is soft ice too the back room they will
Judy, did you hear a sound?
the tree branches caught every child under
five is in an excellent
we were all at riverbanks and”I cannot make it stop.
Surely I am damned.
Rebecca Cook, What Happens When You Can’t Turn Off The Flow?
I tell you,
this is hell.
Do not leave me in it.
In May I taught a week-long class: Taking Flight: Travel Poetry of Humans and Birds in a French castle complete with swimming pool and winery. The estate overlooking a working vineyard also held a small chapel, some fountains, and wooded paths. For one luscious week, we lived like royals with our own award-winning chef and a concierge who attended to our every need. Within days, this was our new normal.
There were so many things I loved about the castle—writing from new prompts every morning, a different room for each time of day and even a turret.
But most of all I loved the kindness present everywhere. The 9 women who came with me showed a willingness to leap into whatever crazy idea I came up with (“here’s a castle treasure map—go!”) and to look after each other with love and gentle attention. There’s so few experiences in my life that live up to the fantasy in my mind—but this week with no other tasks but to write poetry, swim, and eat freshly prepared French food—was a fantasy come true. At the end of the week, each poet wrote to me that they felt thankful for the experience which far exceeded their expectations. That’s all I needed!
Susan Rich, Sometimes Fantasy and Reality Actually Rhyme
The last time that I wrote, I was anticipating my talk at Bawtry Library as part of the Bawtry Festival. I promised to tell you how I got on. What I hadn’t anticipated was doing the writing from a chair at the side of my hospital bed. Ohh cruel fate. One minute you are a successful poet, dropping pearls of wisdom, regaling audiences with tales of your brilliance and experiences in the literary world, the next you are staring death in the face. Well, not exactly. I don’t think that kidney stones come with a high mortality rate, and with a bit of luck I shall be discharged in a day or two. But they bloody well hurt when they are doing their thing in the dark domain of your kidneys. And when the agony is upon you, thoughts of the sweet release offered by the grim reaper are of some comfort. Then again, the release offered by hospital strength pain relief is even sweeter.
Anyway, if I do perish through this current affiliation, at least I will have gone out on a high. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet too loudly, but my Bawtry appearance was a resounding success. Actually, I don’t think that the trumpet sounds outrageously loudly when the resounding success happens to be speaking to an audience of just over twenty in a small branch library in the outskirts of Doncaster. Particularly when a proportion of them were from my own family. But what the hell? I can be anything that I want to be and the majority of the audience were not family, and I had not even met many of them previously. Nobody walked out in disgust, nobody fell asleep, and the response was very favourable. I am a literary giant of the local library scene… In Bawtry. [..]
When I told Judy, my wife, that I had chosen twenty [poems], her first reaction was not encouraging. Twenty??? I stuck to my guns, figuring that I could always drop some if it wasn’t going well. In fact in the hours between selecting the twenty and the start of the gig, I flitted between panicking that twenty was far too many and panicking that I would run out of material inside the first half hour.
In the end, I delivered two 40 minute sets almost to the second. And all was well. I was a little bit technical, explaining the joys of writing in iambic pentameter, but that seemed well enough received. I even read a few stanzas of The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, so that my version The Budgie could be delivered in context. Again, well received. I ranted about Meadowhall, Ikea and Tescos in a section on shopping, I talked about what my dad has been up to since he died in a section on my dad, which I intersected with a section on death. People listened, laughed where appropriate, and applauded. I even managed to sell a few books at the end. There is honestly no other way to describe the evening than as a resounding success.
Mike O’Brien, Pride Comes Before a Fall
My best beloved is very, very fond of all things tech, and especially the equipment of live and recorded sound. We own lots of it, and for many years he, or we, schlepped it to various venues to run live sound boards for church services or poetry readings, or to record the concerts of musician friends. These days we don’t have the stamina for such jobs, and the tech is used for recording poems, as seen above. But here’s a poem in praise of the stuff and the marvelous sounds it preserves.
Microphone Litany
for John, sound guy
Wacky and various though they are, I praise them:
The sort shaped like metallic ice-cream cones
(sturdy, utilitarian, everywhere)
along with the wand-like, pricey as small cars.
The impossibly tiny, glued unseen against cheeks,
tucked into wigs or hair
(their wires always succumbing, always demanding repair).Dangled from ceilings on squint-invisible strings
or on booms, swaying in acrobatic danger,
hung at distressing heights from spindly stands,
swaddled in foam against windy buffetings
or strung up in weird cat’s cradles of rubber bands—I praise them all and their magic, which lets me loll in bed
Maryann Corbett, On being married to Sound Guy
and summon a peal of bells in Normandy
or an ache of countertenor, ages dead. […]
I didn’t plan to do a poetry reading on the same day as a concert, the two being 100 miles apart. But I’m so glad it all worked out, because both events were terrific. Ver Poets are a really welcoming group, and hats off to the twenty-five or so people who came out on a very hot day to sit in a very hot room and listen to me and Mark Fiddes. Speaking of Mark, he’s a poet I’ve admired for a long time, despite the fact that he’s just a bit too successful at competitions. I wish he’d take a break and give the rest of us a chance – ha ha. I interviewed him a while back on Planet Poetry – listen to it here. Anyway, we got a preview of his new book Hotel Petroleum (Broken Sleep) hot off the press – actually the launch reading this this coming Thursday. He gave a great reading, and there was a nice Q & A/ chat in which we both chewed the cud a bit with the audience about the podcast, competitions, getting published and the like. Followed by a short (and I have to say high quality) open mic. A really receptive group, and I was delighted with my book sales. Huzzah.
Robin Houghton, Various news & musings, from Mozart to Billy Ocean
Ah, summer. Historically, not the best season for writing as far as I am concerned. The garden, yard, and outdoor activities tend to take precedence over sitting with a notebook or in front of a screen. Sending out or revising work gets shunted to rainy days, or to days so blisteringly hot and humid that I’m forced to stay indoors with the dreaded air conditioner going. So it is a bit out of the ordinary that I have participated in not one but two online poetry workshops this June. And they were worthwhile.
First was a workshop sponsored by One Art online magazine (Mark Danowsky and Louisa Schnaithmann, editors) in which Erin Murphy read, defined, and gave examples of demi-sonnets, a form of her own invention. She discussed using the form and offered suggestions for revising poems using the demi-sonnet; she had us writing to a prompt and revising one of our longer drafts to “fit” into a 7-line stanza–an excellent practice for learning to be more concise. The practice is fun and was useful to me. I had already tried my hand at demi-sonnets and at 7-line poems, but using the process and form for revision was enlightening. Readers, you must check out her work! She has published lots of poetry collections.
Later in the month, Lesley Wheeler‘s “Poetry from the Underworld” was a 3-hour online workshop sponsored by Sara Ann Winn of Poet Camp. I’ve been a fan of Lesley’s work (and of Lesley herself) for some time now, and thus jumped at the opportunity to attend a workshop with her. Wheeler had us explore the variety of ways we can consider the Underworld and write about it, or use the concept as a starting or ending point (or metaphor) for our work. Think about it: Hell, Persephone, Inanna, spelunking, oceans, tunnels, subways, archaeology, burrows, mycorrhiza, drilling, depressive episodes, digging, death, Sigmund Freud, the unconscious. Yes, the possibilities are nearly endless for poets.
She then covered quite a few revision process options and let us hear how her poem “Sex Talk” developed; a moving, personal, and craft-based discussion that all of us learned from, I think. Kudos and gratitude.
Ann E. Michael, Workshops
People you meet yearly or every 2 or 3 years, as with a haiku group, feel connected. It’s a slow-motion relationship but founded on commonality. Of all the people that exist, these are you people, also interested in books, reading, writing, nature, and of those, in poetry. Of that subset, interested in short forms, within that, in haiku, within that, a particular subset of English Canadian haiku that is playful and flexible. And of those, not too shy to talk with people and share their poems.
What is community? It’s a choice to come together. It’s a group gathered for photos with people chanting my name to join them– that happened at the Haiku Canada Weekend in Kingston last week. It touched something in me. Unambiguous welcome as being a part of an us. Something one step more than people lighting up and running over with hugs. A reunion with the haiku family. It does the heart good.
her rare tight hug—
Pearl Pirie, Community of Choice
orb weaver’s egg sac
carried high
All afternoon I wandered the croft looking at wildflowers and wallowing in the joy summer brings. An orchid extravaganza has been playing out across the fields. There are so many this year – much greater numbers of familiar blooms, and some new species. I don’t understand why. It could be any combination of strange weather patterns, croft management, luck or other phenomena. My notebook is full of questions to ask people who know about these things.
In one patch I counted 23 Lesser Butterfly orchids (Platanthera bifolia). From two individuals recorded a few years ago, LBs have spread right out across the croft, down onto the flood meadows and over the river. They are delicately, beautifully pretty, with creamy white flowers, each one winged like an angel. At dusk a rich perfume is released attracting specific long-tongued pollinators such as Elephant Hawk Moths. The orchids also have a special relationship with another group of organisms. Fungi families, with interesting names such as Ceratobasidiaceae and Sebacinaceae, invade an orchid by creating microscopic coils in root cells. They help seed germination and then provide newly growing orchids with carbon, phosphorus, and nitrogen.
These symbiotic relationships between orchids, fungi and insects are vital, and evidence of the complex webs of life which underpin all aspects of the natural world. The abundance of orchids on Red River Croft tells me our soils, fungal networks and insect communities are in good health. Such remarkable inter-species partnerships are one of many in nature but there are other factors at work here. The croft is managed – lightly grazed then cut for hay in late summer, well after orchids and other flowers have been pollinated and their seeds dispersed. Nature’s bonds have developed alongside people, grazing animals, management and machinery. Here, they’re flourishing.
In the Highlands, scientists view orchids as ecological linchpins and important bio-indicators of long-established biodiverse habitats. In rare or fragmented ecosystems such as peatbogs, machair, heath and Caledonian pine forests, orchids promote as well as signify the complex webs which sustain much wider floral and insect diversity. If orchids are present, so too are fungi and insects. They in turn provide support for birds and other species. This is also the case in crofted landscapes but only when they are free from herbicides, fungicides, insecticides.
I knew little about orchids until they began to pop up on the croft. For a few intense weeks in June they feature in my dreams and thoughts. Orchid fever dreams, excited, hopeful, full of flamboyant colour. Perhaps they come because I saw none as a child. The industrialised old town of my youth was not conducive to plants which need clean air, water and uncontaminated soil with healthy micro-communities of fungi, insects and other organisms. So I go out every day, an excited child looking for treats, to see if any more orchids have emerged.
Annie O’Garra Worsley, Orchid dreams
This week […] marked the 24th anniversary of my first date with Kath. It was a blind date and one I am delighted I went on. I have a couple of poems about that very evening and it felt good to take one of them to the bandstand stage at Oswestry Pride at the weekend as part of my set. It was my third time reading at the event and it felt good at the end of a very hot week to be taking the cool breeze of poetry to the park. Because I wear reading glasses, I can’t always see the people in the audience clearly, and because it’s a park it wouldn’t be possible for me to see the people standing further away anyway, but what I can feel is which poems land particularly well and I’d say this one did. […]
Your hair
your skirt
your make-up
your eyes straight ahead
told me
you were out of my league.Then that fumble of fingers
Sue Finch, FINDING THE BREEZE
had the coin falling from your grip.
Your one flaw was all I needed to say my name.
I write the words down on a sheet
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Stalled
of paper and they terrify me. And I think
of how the lady next door has let her
jasmine grow on a bamboo arch that
I pass under before I reach her door
and the scent or the possibility of scent,
softens my footsteps and uncreases
my forehead and I get to her, somehow
open to earth and sky and welcome.
Thank you for curating these, Dave, as ever.
My pleasure.
Thank you, Dave!
You’re most welcome.