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 World Cup, and a world in which the new is not what wins prizes; a globe of seeds, juice and pulp, and a world of leaf-shade and sap-hunger. And much more, as always. Enjoy.
a song inside these ending days. the morgue of form.
Fran Lock, (TOAD) FUGUE
language. languish. anguish. said the poet. english.
has no commandments, only commands.
we swill it at evening.
the bloody gum connecting to the rusty faucet.
yr blue-grey hands to strangle us, tearing the paper, stretching the bread.
The French vendeur who hands me the tomato in its perfect flesh— he knows. Some worlds haven’t been destroyed. It is a globe of seeds, juice and pulp that asserts itself, a repository of what we were given in the love garden of origin. What a miracle that it has not been trampled on by industry and pragmatism! To touch its smooth skin with tender fingertips is to touch origins. To eat it, a burst of elation, then a river of melancholy: eternal values in such a fleeting package! Says France: humans can revere things and earth and nature, even the self.
While revering in reverie, I was close to elements. Fires in southwestern France were raging, but that’s not what shook me. It was the popup window when I clicked on a video of those fires. It was the human-sized robot prancing idiotically. A robot cut off from human roots but embodying the highest hubris of its maker. He promises to help me with everything, bopping around the virtual space. He would do my chores but amplify my melancholy. He has me raging at my helplessness, tossing me against the rocks in the little skiff I’m navigating.
Jill Pearlman, La Tomate
I was talking to a writer friend about both of our different levels of feelings of failure, worry about money (or lack thereof), lack of reviews/teaching jobs/grants/awards, and talking about what truly brings writers satisfaction. I know I’m happier when I’m writing, and I haven’t been writing enough. My friend was saying (after doing a bunch of readings) that she’d just like to spend some time by herself. The balance between promotion and spending time reading and writing is hard for all writers all the time, but it seems harder lately.
This brings me to my mini-book review of The Adjunct by Maria Adelmann. A sort-of-satire of the universe of Creative Writing and English major adjuncts, a young woman who’s gotten her PhD is trapped in a cycle of trying to earn a living as an adjunct, her reputation smeared by a professor who slept with her when she was his student, doing gig work on the side. This English PhD did not 1) come from money or 2) go to the fanciest school and is always in the process of writing the book that will help her hopefully break out of adjuncting hell, except the book is always on Post-It notes in a cramped and unheated borrowed office space. In the end (spoiler alert, but not really), she ends up unable to support herself, living out of her car when she gets carjacked and then she is homeless, turned down for multiple fast-food jobs, and becomes what basically is a prostitute. Overwrought? Melodramatic to the point of Dickens? Maybe, but now that universities are using adjuncts for 75 percent of teaching and not giving benefits or paying a living wage, and stories of adjuncts dying in their offices not even being uncommon, this is probably more realistic than I’d like to admit. Here’s a quote from the first page of the book:
I’m writing at two a.m. from the adjunct office in the literature wing…The ideal setting for an Agatha Christie novel in which the ensemble cast gets knocked off one by one. The disappointing big reveal is that, actually, capitalism did it, and suddenly you realize that you aren’t in a mystery novel at all but just another Jacobin article…there’s a twist beyond the twist: It’s just real life.”
The speaker of this novel is very much like me—except I never slept with a professor, and I never got my PhD (just an MA and an MFA) and I’ve never been car-jacked. But I do have MS, several genetic health issues that are expensive to treat, and I did adjunct for four years, with a boss who was male, younger and less accomplished than I was, making less money (if it can be believed) than I make on the regular as a freelance writing poet, far less than minimum wage. Now, I worked as a technical writer for ten years–that’s how I got to Seattle, recruited by Microsoft–but if I hadn’t chosen that path and gone into literature studies instead, I could be as helpless and penniless, no savings account, no home, no health insurance. I became too sick to work the hours that Microsoft did (and still does) require when I became an adjunct. If I hadn’t had a husband–what would have been my future? And I thought about the “Gifted Child” syndrome and the “Rory Gilmore Failure” syndrome–if girls who are praised as intelligent and gifted since they were young are told to get their PhDs and there will be jobs waiting for them–well, we’ve been sold a sack of goods. Becoming a writer for money is tough–especially without backup money and connections, which let’s face it, almost all the famous poets you know came with as a package. Journalism, poetry–heck, people (according to the Atlantic) don’t even read any more. Am I a failure because capitalism doesn’t reward the work I love? I have published eight books total, six of poetry. I’ve had good reviews and good publishers and made friends along the way that I treasure. Have I gotten an NEA grant or a Guggenheim or Whiting Award? Even made the long list for a Pulitzer. Nope. And I have to face that fact that at my age, that may never happen. And earning a living writing? Is that a pipe dream I should let go of? Maybe so.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Anniversaries, Anxieties (with Mini Book Review) about Writing and Adjuncting, Plus Pacific Northwest Summer
As I mentioned before, I’ve been working on typesetting Judith Shaw‘s new pamphlet The Land Called Me Back, Poems from the Cuckmere Pilgrim Path. I’m delighted to say it’s going to be launched on Sunday 26th July at Berwick Church. If you’d like to come along, we’re meeting first at 2pm for a short walk, then at 3pm at the church Judith will talk about the book and read some of the poems. There are seven churches in this part of the Cuckmere valley and It’s amazing how rich and evocative both the churches and their settings in the landscape have proven to be to poets: both Judith and those who have taken this residency before her, including Oenone Thomas and Antony Mair.
Robin Houghton, Two book launches coming up
A modern day anchoress, I commit
myself to my car. In my moving cell,
I sing constantly and pray without ceasing.I dedicate myself to our modern religion
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, All Our Cells: Cars, Monastic, and Other
of hectic pace. I rush from one location to another,
showing my devotion in twelve hour increments.
I watched the (in)famous quarter-final between England and Argentina in south London. Of course, it’s remembered for Maradona’s two goals, one of which was the most ludicrous bit of cheating in World Cup history and one of which was genius; but not so well-remembered is how the introduction of John Barnes almost rescued the game for England. Neither before nor since have I been so cross at the end of a football match. I wasn’t, though, one of the Little Englanders who saw, and probably still see, Argentina as the enemy. As a poem of mine, ‘Geography’, recently published by Tim Fellows in The Fig Tree, here, shows, my views on the Falklands War were contrary to most people’s. (We had a debate about in an English lesson and nobody in my class would second me, so our teacher, a lefty like me, had to.)
Matthew Paul, Maradona, Belfast and me
Anyhow, all of that somehow combined in ‘The Hand of God’, a poem I wrote a good few years ago and which was published by editor Crispin Thomas at Football Poets, here. Poor Terry Fenwick, Alan McDonald’s QPR teammate, moved to Spurs 18 months later in a bid to further his England career, was only capped once or twice again, and was later imprisoned for drink-driving.
When we began, we thought we would be solely focused on the artistic elements: editing books, publishing new and unique voices, and building literary culture. I started out thinking about stories, focused on the narratives that might change the world. Red Hen started with the idea of poetry as a feral animal skittering across Los Angeles. A coyote, maybe.
I always wanted to create a literary home for outsiders. As an outsider myself, I felt the pull of that outsider world. But the sooner you think about money and running your organization like a business, the better, because money is what allows the mission to thrive.
It took us a long time to ask for money at our own benefit event.
It took us a long time to start preparing P-and-L statements for books before we accepted them.
It took us a long time before we began to consider the cost of different endeavors before we decided to embark on programming that seemed worthwhile.
In the spring, we are releasing a poetry book from Vincent Antonio Rendoni, Dead Chicano Mixtape. One of my favorite poems is about money, and how being good or bad about money is a state of mind. If you are bad with money, when you get your hands on any, you think, what do I do with it, and make it disappear. If you are good with it, you save it. But what good is saved money unless you invest it to help others?
When poet Wanda Coleman needed help at the end of her life, I called a poet friend of mine and asked him to pitch in. “I must say,” I said apologetically, “She might not have been good with money.”
“Of course not,” he said. “She was a great poet.”
Being a great poet was enough.
Kate Gale, Keeping the Fire, Building the Boat: On Our Artistic Future
I want to read. I want to read everything. Ok, maybe not everything… But I want to read sooo many poets, and I want to read sooo many science fiction novels! And I know – particularly for the reading poets part – that reading is crucial for my creative development and appreciation/understanding of the wider poetry scene (and it’s fun!). So I want to read basically everything I can get my greedy hands on.
And yet, I consistently find spending time reading the most difficult thing to do. Not because reading itself is difficult, quite the opposite: reading is joyful. But I do so little of it. Why? And how do I prioritise it?
I think there are two things at play here.
I’m busy. My ‘day job’ is largely evening and weekend work with some day shifts here and there, and the time around it gets eaten up by gym (I have to maintain a level of fitness to do parts of my job), climbing (honestly one of the biggest ways I keep mentally well and regulated), and then writing (poetry, MfA, Substack, & all the admin for events, workshops etc). Add in a partnership I’m conscious of earmarking quality time for, a birdwatching hobby, and seeing a couple friends here and there, and there’s not a huge bunch of space left for the kind of downtime where I’m just floating around and could spontaneously think: oh, I’ll pick up a book for the next couple hours.
So as the space and time doesn’t necessarily naturally arise on its own I need to be more intentional with reading. And I do intend to read, it’s there in my mind that I want to make time for it, I want to do it.
And then I’ll manage it. I’ll pick up, say, a pamphlet someone’s recommended, and really enjoy it (or maybe enjoy it not so much because it’s also fine not to like everything we read). I’ll finish it, put it down, go on with my life, and suddenly it’s three weeks later and I haven’t read anything else except a few poems doing the rounds on Instagram (facepalm).
This is frustrating. And the first thing going on is that reading is labelled in my mind as a ‘leisure activity’ rather than something I do as part of ‘work’. So there’s a little internal reframing to work on because I also don’t prioritise leisure activities so what tends to happen is I hit a point where I have to stop doing things and then either escape out into nature and birding or disappear into a comforting sci-fi series (either way reading doesn’t get much of a look in).
The second thing going on is the lovely myth of productivity we’re all de facto enrolled in as punishment for existing in western culture at this time. I want so much to untangle myself from this myth, particularly since discovering my neurodivergence and becoming more aware of how tying myself to productivity essentially hurts my wellness. But it’s pernicious, and over the course of my life I’ve sewn it into my bones, into every cell of my being.
Reading, while there’s clear outcomes from it that I definitely want i.e. more time reading poems, discovering more poets I love, benefitting my practice etc etc, isn’t productive. At the end of a reading session I don’t have a draft of a new poem, a Substack post to publish, an event ready to advertise; I haven’t produced anything tangible.
Rachael Hill, Why is reading so much harder to make time for than writing?
At the Dr. Johnson House, James Marriott and I discussed the future of civilization. He worries that the decline of reading means the end of democracy. I think we are facing a disruption to which we will need to adapt. Just because we have not yet had democracy without mass literacy, doesn’t mean we can’t. More concerning to me than whether adults read novels is the fact that children are not being brought up to read enough. The schools are what most need reforming. James has written a polemical book (coming in September, I enjoyed it, and anyone who enjoyed his Substack post about it will enjoy the book) but he is a genial, affable, quietly insistent person, and he makes his case without any bluster or alarm. The best part of the evening was when we were shown an original copy of the Dictionary and a lock of the great man’s hair.
Henry Oliver, Et in Arcadia Ego
Last month, in a post called The Source of War, I shared with you the second question asked by the Iranian poet who was interviewing me last year. This month, I want to share with you the first question she asked, which I will confess threw me for quite a loop when I read it: What would literature be missing without you, and what would you be missing without literature?
This was my answer:
The second part of your question is much easier to answer than the first because it is not an exaggeration to say that literature saved my life, though whether I mean that literally or metaphorically is not always clear to me. I was both victim of and witness to an awful lot of violence during my childhood. I don’t remember ever being truly suicidal, but I know that my experience, especially the sexual violence that I survived, left me feeling empty and ashamed, filled with self-loathing and not sure that there was a worthwhile purpose to my living. Religion filled that void for a while. When I was a teenager, I even thought I might one day study for the rabbinate, but it was ultimately reading—and I read everything I could get my hands on: poetry, science fiction, horror, literary novels, fantasy, Victorian pornography, you name it—that helped me imagine what a meaningful life might be like and gave me hope that I could exist in the world with purpose and have a life that mattered.
Writing, and at first I wrote only poetry, was how I claimed the voice in which I could begin to articulate that purpose—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that writing was how I reclaimed for myself the voice that those who did violence to me tried to silence. At first, the poems I wrote served as proof to myself that my voice was real, and that was enough. Over time, though, I came to understand that what I had to say in that voice was not just about myself and for myself, and through that understanding I discovered the audacity to believe that what I had to say was something to which other people ought to pay attention.
This is what makes the first part of your question more difficult for me to answer. On the one hand, if I had never written, if not a single word of mine had ever been published, literature would not be missing a thing. It would be whatever its collective of voices had made it. On the other hand, though, if I didn’t believe that my voice, solitary as it is, mattered in some small way to literature, there would be no reason to go through the frustrating and all-too-often discouraging process of publishing, of daring to add my voice and my work to the literary tradition of which it is inescapably a part.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, What Would Literature Be Missing Without You?
All the poems in “Pain Songs” have an expansive, meandering across the page feel as if they have been written contemplatively and possibly in fits and starts as the poet returned to check that what is expressed uses the right words. The white space in and around the poems gives the reader space to pause and absorb the lines. Yet the poems are a coherent whole and do not feel fragmentary. Sluman writes from a place of compassion and acute observation without sentimentality or pity. His poems demonstrate the human need for connection and understanding.
Emma Lee, “Pain Songs” Daniel Sluman (Nine Arches Press) – book review
In stanza three, we are invited back into the poem, given the directive to take up an awl and produce the dazzling fractures ourselves, split them into smaller and smaller pieces. But we’ve been here before, in the glittering disintegration of the opening stanza, and the speaker pushes a little harder, next issuing a kind of challenge: “try to make a metaphor, like Kafka’s frozen sea within.” Literature, wrote Kafka, is the axe that breaks this ice, what hacks us free of overly complacent stillness, mindless stasis. What Williams here instructs us to take into our arms, its “ponderous inertness” and “wetting chill” that “[frightens] you and [makes] you let it drop” is no longer some diminutive cosmos nor tautly attentive man-eater but something stranger and more frightening: the hidden self.
I just adore the movement into stanza four when, breathless from the cold weight that pressed against the chest, we see what has at last been figured as something truly precious, the closest thing we cannot know, slip from our arms and shatter on the floor. Think of dropping a glass, how you stand paralyzed by the memory of the movement that sent it plummeting and the vision of your shard-filled future as you plot a clear path towards a broom. If I hadn’t, if I had just. There’s no putting a glass back together. Ice may be a different story, to a point, but Williams doesn’t leave us scurrying for a bucket, but lingering over what’s left: the familiar taste on the tongue. It’s a poem about what falls apart (everything) and what we can do about it (nothing) and how, in the end, there is only beauty, only sweetness, in that.
Vanessa Stauffer, “Ice” by C.K. Williams
[Christopher] Wase’s poem for [William] Oughtred is a strange and charming poem, and also a great example of why good literary history requires, as it were, both data and taste — an informed sense of the big picture, but also close reading. Strong data about fashions in verse style, metre and form makes it possible, time and time again, to hazard an informed guess about the likely date and milieu of undated or anonymous material, and also to recognise innovation — who is writing at the vanguard of fashion at any given time (and similarly, who tries to launch a trend that doesn’t catch on). But “big data” can’t provide all the answers, because there will always be people, like Wase, doing something unexpected for reasons of their own.
Without the data about metrical trends in Latin in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, I wouldn’t be able to recognise that Wase’s poem is an outlier, and that it surely sounded like one in 1656. The strangeness of the form must have been part of the effect, and part of the tribute. With that knowledge in place, we can at least try to make sense of even the most eccentric choices. Even at the distance of nearly four hundred years, and knowing nothing of seventeenth century mathematics, Wase’s touching poem convinces me that William Oughtred was a remarkable man.
Victoria Moul, Metre, maths and difficulties of dating
In 2011 I teamed up with Orkney artist Laura Drever, I to write poems of the islands’ bird species, Laura to draw them. Our purpose was to see how closely we could capture their presence as part of the living fabric of the place, not so much a layer of occupation as a layer of consciousness. Laura’s freehand line drawings recorded them as they moved around in ones or threes, or whole flocks. For me, sitting on a windy hill, words came individually or in small, airy groups. In my notebook lines are thick or thin depending on sound, or sudden change. Movement and space are everything. […]
This all came back to me when I chanced upon the work of Cecil Touchon, an American painter, typographic artist and creator of long series of print collage. His output ranges widely in scale and setting; one subset of his work, what he calls ‘asemic poetry’, is produced and distributed in book form. These pieces began with pieces of found text that were arranged in some kind of regular form – such as receipts, magazine ads, letters and sometimes poems. He printed these out on white sheets and then, using their structure, internal spaces, hesitations, line breaks and maybe even original font, he allowed his hand to ‘write’ over them in a free-flowing script. Some are written in a cursive, flowing hand with sharp, tall verticals and generous hooking tails. Others show a series of clustered, individual strokes in thick, urgent dabs that tail off like comets. Some are written left to right, some right to left. There are something like punctuation-like marks and accents. The result is something that looks like a poem: we sense a voice speaking to us, with message that we already half understand, and which we can almost, nearly, read.
I love these pieces, not only because – like Laura’s drawings – they are beautiful in themselves. There is this sense of a voice behind the text, of someone, somewhere, having something urgent and important to say; so important that they embedded it in a poem, the most intimate written form. There is a wide range of expressiveness across the collection – some are flamboyant, some are tight and urgent, in form as well as script. Some stutter, are thrifty and self-conscious with their ‘words’. In many, Touchon notes, there are artefacts of the original document. ”I would sit down with the material and begin working and keep working until it seemed I had expressed ‘the moment’, so to speak. At a certain point one comes to the end. At that point I stop.”
Lesley Harrison, ‘weirden’ : the magic and mystery of erasure poetry
Lo and behold. Rather than a “salvaged” poem, I’m actually going to drop a brand new piece here—and there are several pages of stuff just like this yet to be brought into the light. The larger project is tentatively titled Random Walk, and it’s the result of an ongoing immersion in books about AI, neural networks, computer science, cybernetics, and related subjects. As of now, this is the opening piece. And for you prosody-heads, I consider it prose despite its being broken into stanza-like chunks. The line length is arbitrary and determined by margins.
Also, the quoted line is from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. Great book.
RM Haines, Summer of Salvage (no. 2)
The daylilies are blooming, and they remind me of a poem I wrote back when the rumblings of the present evil were just beginning.
Unexplained Bagpipes
After reading that white-supremacist marches are often led by pipers
A skewer through the ear,
it spits you to the spot
until you suss it out.
It’s unexpected here:back garden, mid-Midwest
midsummer, -week, and -day.
Ripping the aural chintz
of airborne oldies airplay,it groans a jaunty grind.
The kids turn cartwheels, smitten.
The sound itself has forgotten
the quarrel it trawls around.Garish, clownish, bizarre,
still blocks away, it hauls
over your ivied walls
the rack-nerve rumor of war.Work now. Gather the spent,
blood-spattered peonies.
Daylilies crowd the fence,
desperate. Like refugees.(First published in Tampa Review; in the book Street View)
Maryann Corbett, Daylilies
In his collected poems, Beyond Remembering (2000), which was published the year he died, [Al] Purdy offers us vivid imagery from the Canadian wilderness around his home. “The Last Picture in the World” describes the haunting sight of a heron, fully at ease in the world it inhabits:
A hunched grey shape
framed by leaves
with lake water behind
standing on our
little point of land
like a small monk
in a green monastery
meditating…Stillness and presence, the essence of a heron. The image guides Purdy towards the metaphysical:
and it occurs to me
that if I were to die at this moment
that picture would accompany me
wherever I am going
for part of the wayLeaning into the act of remembering, the poet’s words do more than reminisce here; they question the premise that “you can’t take it with you when you go…” And who’s to say that we can’t? I, for one, would like to believe that the people, places, plants, and animals we love most in this life will accompany us at least “part of the way,” when we hop that final train and ride the rails to wherever we’re headed next.
Jenevieve Carlyn, Hidden Histories and National Treasures
Something which seems fairly consistent across cultures, across history is the idea of heron as provocation, whether benign or fearful. In Japan, the crane symbolises peace and longevity but its cousin the heron’s appearance is more mysterious, more ambivalent, tied to spirits, gods, death, a link to another world. White herons are said to appear as someone is about to pass into the next realm.
In Ancient Greece, the word for bird (‘ornis’ / ‘oionos’) also meant ‘omen’. Thus birds like herons were an expression of the Gods’ intent, whether benign or otherwise. In Homer’s Iliad Athena sends a heron as an auspicious omen to Odysseus:
“Pallas Athena sent a night heron; they did not see it with their eyes through the murk of night, but heard its ringing cry. And Odysseus rejoiced in the bird sign.” (translated by Caroline Alexander)
In the novel ‘The Rain Heron’ by Robbie Arnott, a chilling, gorgeous eco-fable about our fragile and dysfunctional relationships with the planet and each other, the heron is a contested symbol of wildness which destructive forces seek to capture and tame. Arnott’s book contains some of the most devastatingly beautiful descriptions of this hybrid being made of weather and flight. Tellingly, the heron is always see-through, shape shifting:
“Its blue-grey feathers were so pale, they claimed later, that they could see straight through the bird.” (Armott)
In Mary Oliver’s ‘Heron Rises from the Dark, Summer Pond’, the bird seems to accomplish what is impossible. The narrator watches the heron take off from ‘thick water’ and feels a sense of infinite scale, knows that there are more things in heaven and earth (and pond) that we might dream of:
Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is
that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed
back into itself–This image is ostensibly hopeful, but the untethering the heron symbolises might feel a little vertiginous too. An un-anchoring.
Helen Mort, Heron as agitator, heron as GBH
I have traveled a bit and have, wonderfully, a little mental cabinet of moments; they lie like orbs in the dark until I take them out into my mind’s light. One such is evoked by this poem by Lola Ridge. I had arrived after a journey to a hotel on the edge of things in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland. Spread out in front of my balcony were mountains that seemed so close I could reach out and stroke them like a beast. But a deep valley flew between me and the mountains, and up from its depth breezes came, and from around the mountains mists, and I spent a long time watching the show, and felt I could watch forever, or that forever itself was in front of me, and I was the brief show.
Marilyn McCabe, And I lay quietly on the drawn knees of the mountain
I am writing this from the Lake District, a few days of borrowed time among the fells — the bracken high and greening over, the becks still loud after June’s rain, the light not properly gone until well past ten and the valley going that deep slate-blue that isn’t quite dark. Walk out late enough, away from the village, and the sky here does the thing it can no longer do over most of England: it fills, edge to edge, with stars. Which is roughly how this fortnight’s three arranged themselves — a poet, a painter and a composer, each caught in the act of looking up, and each finding that to be alone under that much sky is not at all the same as being lonely.
1. A poem to enjoy — William Wordsworth, “A Night-Piece” (1798) — You cannot walk these fells with a book in your pocket and not have it be Wordsworth’s; he is the presiding spirit of the whole district. This poem is the one I always remember on a dark-sky night. A “pensive traveller” is treading a “lonesome path” with his “unobserving eye / Bent earthwards” — head down, going nowhere in particular — when the cloud splits and “above his head he sees / The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens,” the “multitudes of stars” wheeling in their vault. Nothing is added to the man; something is simply uncovered above him, and it changes the walk. It is the plainest account I know of what solitude is actually for: not withdrawal, but the clearing of the eye until more of the world can get in.
Adam Cairns, Three by One
This collection of poems is a response to Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa of the Ramayana—sixty-eight sargas comprising over 2,500 ślokas. I have allowed the sargas to become the seed for meditative poems, an inward reflection arising from close reading of the original Sanskrit.
You are the layers of minerals in the rock,
Uma Gowrishankar, After the Leap (Translating Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa)
the emerald sea of grass,
the quaking mountain unearthing silver & gold,
all living forms in fright—
ignorant
you are the air in their lungs,
the venom in their throats,
sulphur fumes,
the flowers that carpet the hills,
the sea swelling on a full moon night.
This prose-poem captures what the full collection required me to solve: how to reveal the complicated, aching truth of loving a soul-scorching, malicious mother who caused so much misery when destiny tapped me as her fulltime caregiver.
To create distance between the mother and daughter dynamic, the narrative arc defies expectations by presenting a caregiver’s journey as a story of adultery. In Cancer Courts My Mother, disease becomes a Casanova, therefore, the collection is created through the lens of speculative poetry versus memoir.
Mistrustful of the poetics of dying and bereavement, and determined to avoid cliché, I alighted on a form which eschewed the elegiac in favor of a two-way narrative arc structured like a funicular.
The downward movement, a terminally ill patient’s inevitable decline, is presented as marital peril: a dangerous dalliance. Disease is disguised as an illicit lover — “the dark prince whose wanton seduction has already begun, the sly suitor who will reach the terminus.”
In contrast, the ascending movement is hopeful, told through the sub-plot of fulfilling a last request: “Work miracles,” commanded half-shut eyes. By carefully reversing little green deaths, the poems transform a wish into reality: a full recovery of the dying woman’s cherished houseplants. Caregiving for a harsh, sharp-tongued mother does not come with a script. Neither does outlasting her. What poetry offered was a frame — speculative, oblique, formally controlled — through which the unbearable could be examined without sentimentality. Cancer Courts My Mother is not an elegy. It is a reckoning.
Drop-in by LindaAnn Loschiavo (Nigel Kent)
The avant-garde artist and writer Mina Loy (1882–1966) published only two books of poetry in her long lifetime: the 1923 Lunar Baedeker and, in 1958, Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables. Flitting among early-twentieth-century art forms and movements as among domestic ménages and personal tragedies, to us she may seem to slip like a shadow through a Modernist poetic world peopled by more solidly and enduringly visible figures: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound.
In the early 1920s, the poet and critic Yvor Winters, already formulating his own vision for a strictly hierarchical poetic canon, set Loy alongside both Stevens and Moore: “I think Mina Loy a genius.” Yet today we hardly know her. Perhaps we should know her better than we do.
It was Pound who coined a word applicable to Loy’s experimental poetics. Logopoeia, one of three “kinds” of poetry as defined by Pound in his Literary Essays, involves, as Pound puts it “the dance of intellect among words.” Lest anybody remind him that he has earlier instructed poets to eschew such abstractions as “dim lands of peace,” Pound hastens to explain what this “dance of intellect” means. It “employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage. . . . It holds the aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation, and cannot possibly be contained in plastic or in music.”To get some handle on what Pound might mean by logopoeia and other related “aspects” of poetry, we can turn to Loy’s 1922 poem, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” which first appeared in the Dial. An ekphrastic poem, engaging a work of visual art — in this case an abstract sculpture, completed in 1920, by the Romanian-born French artist Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) — “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” seeks less to describe the sculpture than to accomplish in the medium of language what the sculpture aspires to accomplish “in plastic.”
As Brancusi’s sculpture strips a Romanian folk tale about a golden bird, the Maiastra, to a single fluid, suggestive shape, Loy’s poem, too, consciously rejects layers of poetic tradition, especially the traditional presentation of rhyme and meter as a fixed pattern. These lines are not without metrical sense, but they shift from trimeter to dimeter to single-stressed lines, creating a controlled but undulant surface. Additionally, Loy rejects the closure of punctuation. Emdashes signal breaks and departures of thought, and the poem ends on ellipses, but otherwise the lines hang in seeming suspension on the page, open-ended, as if to suggest the sculpture’s fluid “Alpha and Omega / of Form.”Brancusi’s sculpture renders a traditional, linear narrative into this three-dimensional form with no beginning and no end, no edges or “extremities / of crest or claw.” Likewise, Loy resists the narrative impulse, beginning her poem with a non-sentence which extends into a metaphor, anchored by that “As if” of the third line. At the same time, the poem does things in language that the Golden Bird can’t fully achieve in its medium. In language, Loy can invoke associations that come to us primarily, if not exclusively, in language: the idea of the Christian God, for example, and the story of the Immaculate Conception and Incarnation — but also Osiris, the Egyptian god of death and rebirth.
The poem doesn’t tell these stories. Its business is not to have, in the traditional sense, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like the sculpture, it’s not meant to represent the arc of flight, but to be its “nucleus.” It simply folds these allusions, and everything we might connect with them, into its seamless, undifferentiating shape, and holds them there.
Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Brancusi’s Golden Bird
I’m delighted to feature today a poem by Stephen Claughton, taken from his pamphlet titled The 3-D Clock (Dempsey & Windle, 2020). The collection in question is thematic in nature, taking a mother’s dementia as its point of departure, tackling some of life’s big issues.
Matthew Stewart, A poem by Stephen Claughton
As a reader, I was especially drawn to this poem by the way Claughton’s use of emotional restraint and understatement serves to heighten its resonance. Much of its power can be found in what remains unsaid by the two protagonists, left to be inferred by the reader. In fact, the supposed closure of the poem’s seemingly circular ending opens out far beyond the limits of its lines.
Chloe [Yelena Miller] is a good friend and poet. Her second book PERFORATED marks an advance over her first VIABLE. The strengths of the first are still present in the second: an intimate but unassuming voice, an observant tenderness towards self and others, the willingness to broach difficult subjects. In the second book, the personal references widen out into the world. The Italian touchstones are handled with greater range and depth. My favorites in this regard are the opening poem “Pantheon,” which ends distinctively yet inclusively in the way an Italian dialect “relies on the plural/ second person, voi,” and the poem “Etruscan Bronzes,” concludes soberly about the transience of youth:
Jee Leong Koh, Chloe Yelena Miller’s PERFORATEDThese bronze figures,
from their height of youth,
artist’s hand concealed
by the smoothing of time,
gaze upon a far-off horizon
long buried.
In the Nineties, when I first started to read poetry, the contemporary prose poem was mainly something British readers might glimpse in translations of the kind of riddling Eastern European poetry that the Cold War had made popular in the West. In 1996, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize, and Faber published her poems in the UK. This new selection, The Acrobat (Faber), translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, includes her Nobel acceptance speech, which argues that “Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating ‘I don’t know’” […]
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #45: Angels and Bandages
1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don’t know if my life changed, but a certain anxiety eased—at least for a little while. It gave me a little more confidence to think I could make a life writing poems. In some sense, it didn’t have to do with getting published, but a sense that being at work in the work itself is what is most worthy. I found an ethic that I’ve tried to hold to for nearly 30 years. The early work is so long ago, I feel like I have no idea—though I think, I suspect, that certain concerns trace through, even though the poems have grown wider in their approach and cares—a poem as ethical form, a leaning toward the philosophical, a need to honor other poems and poets.
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I had an extraordinary high school teacher who could actually teach poetry. I remember distinctly understanding a poem for the first time—John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” I simply didn’t know a human could do that in words, and I was desperate to learn how to do so myself. […]
6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Yes, almost always. My work is most often agitated into being by something I’ve read. I think I’m mostly trying to learn how to think, and the poems are laboratories of a kind, an epistemological laboratory, to find out if I can learn to think for myself the thoughts another person thinks. I’m not trying to answer questions; I’m trying ask them. I suspect—and this comes from 15 years of translating from Ancient Greek—that the current questions are the questions that have always been questions. Not “current questions,” but a currency of questions.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I’m not so sure it’s different now than it’s ever been. I sort of think of a poet writ large as a sleepy watchman at the periphery of…of the knowable, I guess. I don’t think of it as a role, per se. I’m with Emerson when he says, “Do your work, and I will know you.” Poets get itchy in a uniform, and the art itself wants to dismantle any authority a given poet might feel as their mantle. The role of the poet might be to refuse the role of the poet. […]
11 – What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
For 15 years I’ve been nearly religious about waking up around 5:30 in the morning and translating for an hour. It humbles me into the day. For my own poems, I avoid routine. I labor with translation and reading in hopes of being worthy of a poem coming to me—and when one does, I set to work, and stay at work, until it feels done.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dan Beachy-Quick
I was nervous about ushering this book into the world. It felt a little like handing someone my heart and hoping they’d handle it with care. But the response has been so generous that I keep finding myself quietly stunned and deeply grateful. Thank you to everyone who has read it and/or reached out or let me know a poem found you. I’m just so appreciative.
Today I did an interview with Lois P. Jones for her wonderful podcast The Title Drop and she said how open these poems feel. I think that’s because with this book, I trusted the reader with more: more uncertainty and spirituality, more joy, grief, humor, desire, more of the questions I’ve carried quietly. And I think that’s the best advice I can give any poet or writer—write openly with the belief your reader will “get you.”
We can’t control how a book will be received. But we can make the thing with care, release it into the world and trust it finds the people who need it. And mostly, we’ll have no idea if that’s happening…and yet, we write. I think that’s a hopeful act.
Kelli Russell Agodon, Fireworks Are Over, Hope Is Not. . .
It’s easy for a poet to move on once a book is out – after all, most of us write new stuff all the time and a book can quickly become ‘old’ in a poet’s mind – especially if, as is often the case, given that poetry so often creates its own rules, even the most thorough editing misses something.
In the case of Poems In The Key Of Aardvark, I’m cross I mistook a comma for a full stop in the final proof-reading, which meant there is an irritating capital letter at the start of a line that shouldn’t be there; and in the last line of another poem I messed up a tense. Why I did that, I’ve no idea – I’ve read and re-read the poem dozens of times, yet this morning there it was, staring back at me from the page, yelling at me: “You fouled up here, didn’t you, idiot. Your book’s not perfect now, is it?”
As annoying as that is, I can’t allow it to deflect from the business of promotion. I want Poems In The Key Of Aardvark to be read. And there are more than 160 poems in it that haven’t annoyed me yet! Make that, am pleased with and would like others to read.
Bob Mee, PUTTING A BOOK OUT THERE IS ONLY HALF THE BATTLE
I’ve just published a new ludokinetic poem, ‘Scenes from a Flit’, on itch.io, the site for independent game creators which is increasingly inhabited by poets experimenting with interactive forms. It’s a poem in which I cast you, the reader, as a thief. You steal, you flee, you hide, via three brief vignettes. It’s part of a broader project, but I won’t go into that now.
What I will say is that I’ve been actively interested in and messing around with games of thievery, trespass, intrusion and so on for a little while. Starting exactly when? I’m not sure. I’ve always liked thiefy characters: you can find a poem about Ishikawa Goemon in School of Forgery, a smuggler in Sandsnarl, and so on. I went to Mexico two years ago to deliver a conference paper entitled “‘Hey! You’re not supposed to be here!’: Simulated Trespass and Intrusion in Virtual Playgrounds”. The basic premise of this paper was that the appeal of trespass is to pull on a thread — to stress-test a system by experiencing first-hand the meaning of its boundaries, what it seeks to hide or apportion. Doing so gives us insights into whether those boundaries might stand to be drawn in some other, better way.
Of course, the consequences of such stress-testing in real life can be dire. I tried to illustrate this in the slides with the ending lines from Rebecca:
The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.
So we channel our impulses into the unreal spaces of simulational and fantasy media, where forbidden zones almost always contain something which has been unjustly kept from us.
Jon Stone, DIARY / Games of Intrusion
I have long enjoyed the #PoemsAbout prompt that Broken Spine editor Alan Parry runs on Bluesky. He puts a weekly prompt up and suggests that people respond on a Friday. It starts the weekend well. Contributors are also encouraged to comment and support each other, which helps to build a community. If you get into the habit of it, you find that you are often delighted by the quality of the posts. In fact you will soon get to find your favourites amongst the regulars. I did, and have even featured some of them in Sixty Odd Poets.
This month I decided to do something similar myself. I put an #OddChallenge challenge up on Bluesky, Facebook and Substack. It wasn’t a prompt as such. The challenge was to write a poem in the future tense. I got plenty of participants, and will be contacting some of the ones that I particularly like about the possibility of featuring their responses in a Sixty Odd Poets page. This to me seems like a decent use of social media to promote poetry. It also allows poetry to be discovered without the need for a formal submission system. In fact I am considering giving up the formal submission system altogether or at least taking the majority of what I publish from people who I have been able to ask personally, either in real life or online.
I would be very interested to know what other poets and editors think of this approach. I can see that it wouldn’t suit everyone. I can’t imagine The New Yorker following my lead anytime soon. But I think for a hobbyist publisher such as myself it might be a good strategy.
Mike O’Brien, Share Your Poetry on Social Media
She never sold her paintings. As far as I am aware, she never even tried to. She won Second Place in a competition once, and that painting was displayed proudly in her living room with the blue ribbon attached, for as long as I can remember. (When my father passed away two years ago, my brother and I gave that painting to one of his aides, who’d fallen in love with it and later had it specially framed.)
Apart from the occasional competition, though, my grandmother had no professional or commercial aspirations for her work. She painted for other reasons.
Margot Kaplan was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, in the early 20th century. As Fascism began to rise in Germany, my grandmother’s parents sent all the male children away. She herself was finally able to escape the country by marrying my grandfather, Heinrich Tuchverderber, at age 19. Together, they left Germany and went to Shanghai, China. The Hongkou district of Shanghai, a “Restricted Sector for Stateless Persons,” was the only place willing to let my grandparents in.
Eventually, Margot and Heinrich found their way to the U.S., shortened their last name to Tuch, and bought a small clapboard house on a quintessential American street, in a quiet suburb of Connecticut. But, as you would expect, both my grandparents remained tormented by physical and psychic pain throughout their lives. Though safely in America—alive and with jobs, food, running water and a growing family—the demons of history could not, would never, be shaken.
And this was why my grandmother painted.
“The only time I’m not thinking about Hitler,” she told me many times when I was a child, “is when I’m painting.” […]
I believe there is real despair within our literary community at this moment. There is fear. And there is a lot of anger. All of this, in my opinion, is warranted. We are at a critical moment of change. And the odds do not look good for us, we diligent laborers who have spent the better parts of our lives committed to studying, teaching, and learning the very difficult craft of writing.
AI brings all sorts of terrible things with it. Data centers that re-shape and damage communities; environmental harm; pollution; increased mass surveillance; the loss of critical thinking; the end of jobs…
But for us, as creators, it also has the power to bring feelings of profound alienation with our work, our passions. Why bother? We think.
Why bother taking a writing workshop with others, when I can just have AI improve this paragraph for me?
Why bother reading closely to understand craft choices and taking notes in dozens of craft books, when AI can fix my story’s problems in under three minutes?
Why bother writing at all, when writing can be so fucking hard, and so fucking lonely, and so fucking disappointing sometimes, and now these stupid fucking machines can do it all for us in literal seconds, and without any of the mental and emotional strain?
But then, like I said, I began thinking about my grandmother. And I began thinking quite seriously about why people make art.
The answer seemed so suddenly simple: We make art because we have to.
We do it because this is how we survive.
Becky Tuch, Q: How do we nevertheless persist?
p.s. Everywhere I look there are faces. Everywhere I look there are chinks in the tin foil inside my windows.
p.s. I shower inside a tiny box. I tie my robe so tight it’s hard to breathe.
p.s. I talk to myself and answer myself and brainstorm with myself about how to reuse empty cans.
p.s. When I find some twine I promise to phone home.
p.s. Of course I am thriving. I’m making a quilt out of plastic bags and leftover phone books. I keep the neighborhood cats fed. I still have my teeth. I still have a library card.
Rebecca Cook, What I Was Going To Tell You
I still believe that as Kay Ryan once wrote, it’s important to stay sweet and loving. I read a post recently here from 2017 and it’s interesting to measure yourself, too, against old blog posts. I guess that’s a gift I’ve given myself, too. In the same post I also quote Robert Bly who said: “I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness.” But tenderness is different now too, and my ability to stay sweet and loving has eroded, or at least, transformed — it is thinner and worn and perhaps more real. Thin in the way that certain metals are hammered to wafers, gold, for example. My understanding of it is different. As much the fallout from the relentless of the day job as anything. Unless you’ve worked in the inner city through the aftermath of a pandemic do you even know humanity? :) Well, it’s a thing alright. The proximity to constant affliction And the burnout is fine because it’s real. At first I couldn’t live with the burnout but now I am the burnout. So that changes you and I don’t think I’ll change back, but that’s perhaps a gift too. I mean, I can read Weil now in a different light. Stay curious! people say. And oh, I am, I really am. Just not in the ways the exhortation might imply or indicate.
Shawna Lemay, I’m Just a Soul
I’ve spent most of this year growing plants rather than poems. My garden is the only place I forget everything other than bringing life to the tiny seeds in my palm, and unravelling the mystery of why they won’t do what the seed packet says. I’ve grown Cosmos, Nigella, Calendula and Egrigeron from seed I saved last year. Vegetable wise I’m trying out a new type of tomato Grushovka, which is shocking pink. I’m looking forward to being able to make delicious (and bright) sauces. Padron peppers are starting to emerge and I’m yet to get tired of them, charred and anointed with salt and honey. I’m also growing brussels sprouts, which will please no one in my family but me.
Where I used to lose track of time, to the point of forgetting to eat (!) writing has felt like something I “do” rather something I love. In comparison time in the garden sprints past, with the constant “oh I’ll just do this” keeping me happily trimming, weeding, sowing and planning. This is terrible for my physical health, but a joy for my mind. I’ve not stopped writing, I’ve just stepped back from the submit/accept/reject treadmill that siphoned the pleasure and purpose from my work. Becoming trapped on this treadmill is entirely my fault; the desire for external validation is never far away and despite having a decent amount of work published, it’s never quite been sated. I’m guessing it never will. This is a good thing because it keeps me trying but if validation is the only reason to write, the writing itself becomes of little value, both inside and out.
Am I writing any poems at all?
Curiously I find my poems this year feel like some of the best I’ve made. The short courses I’ve taken with Poetry School have moved away from the nature focused work of the past few years to writing work that travels unpredictable pathways. It’s fun. Alongside this injection of inspiration, having the right diagnosis and subsequent medication had allowed me to access a part of my mind that was firmly shut. I’m exploring the unexplorable. Regardless of the hows and whys, I’m enjoying the ride and feel more creative than I have in a long time.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, If you want me you will find me in the garden
The work has its own desire to connect, and that is something not pushed by ego, social media, or even platforms such as this. Being in front of a number of festival audiences this year is showing me something I don’t have a name for yet between author, text and the inner world of the reader/listener. I’ll say more if I ever find a word for it.
The writing now is slow. It keeps coming, even working two jobs to live, it keeps coming and asks me to sit and wait, to travel, and not to share too soon. I don’t feel I’m sharing this recording too soon, it seems like just the right time. I generally turn down requests to be interviewed or be on podcasts these days, as I feel we’ve slipped into art only being used for extraction capital a lot of the time, and I am an artist and author, and we do not have to accept ‘the way it is’. And yet there’s an urging to find a way to be part of a world in which the new is not what wins prizes, or is hyped and aligned with the extractive narrative, but rather is part of building something true within the concrete reality, something more like a wild, beautiful garden.
John Siddique, Newborn
That’s the thing about yards and gardens. As much as you say it’s yours, as much as you cultivate and claim you control, it’s not and you don’t. And for some of us, this is a form of delight. Several times a week, I place my hand on the door knob and look at my dog Silas, asking him Ready to take a gander? And out we go on our stroll around the 1.2 acres of land we get to live on. Silas’ experience is very different from mine, his senses providing to him narratives to which I’m not privy. I have fingers, so I lift up leaves, bend things back, pry things open. I roll flower buds between my fingertips, seeing the rays of petals all puckered into a center. I open the nesting box and oh, hello there, two Eastern Bluebird hatchlings are nothing but feathers and eyes. I lift pokeweed leaves and oh, hello there, a planthopper nymph side-eyes me as I infiltrate their world of leaf-shade and sap-hunger. I briefly imagine them in my world, paging through a book that’s taking forever to read, answering phone calls about children who want to murder their parents for taking their phone away.
Hurry,
Sarah Lada, Oh, Hello There
the bird
has forgotten
about the egg.