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: walking with the dead, talking with Claude, performing poems in care homes, being the forbidden lover of a prince, and much more. Enjoy.
I remember being told as I sat on a beachside cafe somewhere near Messalonghi that the smear of island in the distance was Ithaka, (Ιθάκη) Odysseus’ home. And that a poet, Byron, had died on a beach nearby. I have recently scanned some old photos from my time there and they are few and far between due to only having a basic, cheap camera. So I wasn’t sure about the reliability of my memory which is always patchy. […]
I went back to my journal from this time and the trip was barely mentioned. The tripe soup was there and became an important anecdote for years, my worries about a jobless future were there, but Ithaka and Byron were absent.
It sometimes feels I wrote about so little back then or missed important events, even though I’ve kept journals since I was 11. But it’s only with hindsight I know where the turning points were. I had to look at maps and Wiki to prove to myself it could have been possible.
It’s there off the coast, just visible and Byron did die there, but maybe the connection and importance is more firmly grounded in my own mythology that I have built over the decades than in actuality. Navigating the gaps between memory and reality. Something to explore in my poem, I guess, which I hope to give a bit of energy to this weekend.
Gerry Stewart, Mind the Gaps
The rain holds off long enough for us to pack up our soggy tent and walk out of town, down steep, narrow paths. A woman asks where we’re heading for. “Scotland,” we say, and she responds, “You do know there are trains?” before guiding us onto the right section of the Pennine Way. We’re still in the rough heath and heather of Elslack Moor, with Walshaw behind us under darkening skies. As we approach the trig point of Pinhaw Beacon, the rain sets in. We stop at the Covid memorial, commemorating all those who were lost to the virus, and I think of the ten residents who died at my mother’s care home, and of the member of staff who died alongside them. Every Wednesday she ran a poetry group, sharing her favourite poems with residents. She deserves to be remembered and yet I haven’t thought of her for years. I’m glad to be reminded.
The walk does that. It opens you to all sorts of unexpected memories and feelings. Some of them are unwelcome, others aren’t. I let myself recall my ex-partner: her hair, her eyes, her shoulders, marvelling at how someone you are so intimate with can be so suddenly and so utterly gone. The rain falls hard and the wind knocks me sideways. Perhaps the young woman was missing someone too.
The moors soften as we come down from the uplands. We pass green cloughs, thick with moss. There are trees now, and I feel them as relief. Martens swerve and spiral as the wind seethes and hisses through the leaves. Into pretty Lothersdale, on to Thornton-in-Craven, we leave the heath behind us and pass into arable fields.
Clare Shaw, Walking the Pennine Way: Day Five
Maybe it’s a garden
Rebecca Cook, Thoughts on Love in the Early Morning
the paradise you return to
the way back
the two of you
searching out the gods
together.
I’m in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, as a guest artist alongside Ashley C. Ford and Fatima Asghar. The three of us are here for a literary salon with GoodWorld Journeys, and we’re leading morning sessions on craft, doing a lot of writing with participants, and enjoying evening sessions that are readings and conversations about the creative life. It’s been an incredible adventure—and my kids are both here with me for a week and a half!—and I’ve been soaking up the wisdom of others here. That’s one of my favorite parts about meeting other writers and artists: hearing about their process, their challenges, their perspectives.
I feel so lucky to be in this beautiful place learning from these beautiful writers.
Last night, Fatima read from their gorgeous, brand-new book of poems, Daughter of the Mountains, and then Ashley and I interviewed them. Fati said so many important things—necessary things—about being an artist that I wish I’d had pen and paper to write it all down. I might be asking some of the salon participants and the GoodWorld Journeys team to share their notes!
At one point, Fatima said something about the role of prayer in their process: how they would ask for wisdom or assistance, to understand what was in the way, and how they learned to be still enough to listen and notice answers arriving. I’m not a religious person, but I am someone who thinks there is more to the world than what we can see and easily comprehend. Fati talked about how in our busy, go-go-go lives, we might be asking for help—from God, or spirit, or our ancestors—but then not staying still and quiet long enough to receive an answer.
That struck me. I think I speak to the air plenty—as close as I get to prayer—and am often thinking out loud, or talking to myself, about what is wrong, or hard, or uncertain. But then what?
Maggie Smith, On Asking
Is late summer a very productive time for you? For me it is a time to finish all the things I meant to do during the summer while the weather allows—like walking along Lake Washington, or going to the zoo or one of the gardens and farms I love. My intellect doesn’t work as well in the summer. I wrote a little bit while trapped in the house, but not as much as I feel I should have? There’s always this feeling of missed opportunities towards August, and also anticipating the increased work load of September.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Escaping Heat Waves and Wildfire Smoke, Local Farms in Bloom, And Backyard Wildlife: deer, butterflies, birds
It is too hot for words. Photos I can do. Have been doing.
Is it just me or is prose easier than poetry in higher temperatures?
5 days into August and I have two ghazals and 5 haiku written.
Mostly I’ve been reading. Chapbooks, single author collections, what have you. I’m doing the Sealey Challenge. Read poetry. Read diverse. Read daily. Start with your TBR pile or explore recommendations there. Or poke around in the Haiku Foundation Library. (Some are records of hard copies, some of viewable pdfs). The Book of the Week digitized archives could be a good bet.
I got, let’s call it, “too many” books from the library and want to close off a bunch.
And after more than 3 years in I would like to push through and finish Leaves of Grass, the longest version. I’m bogging on the civil war poems. He really gets caught up doesn’t he, loving the sound of his own voice, and not even following his own chosen topic.
Pearl Pirie, Hot
— I’ve been thinking about the dead a lot lately. Trying to count them up, in a way. You get older and you have more of the dead around you than the living most days. You know them better and you keep knowing them, the dead, even though they don’t know you back. Sometimes I forget who’s gone, and my writer friends, I talk to them in their books where they live on.
— Last week I talked about reading Franz Wright’s last book which was published posthumously. Nick Cave’s book of interviews. This week I’ve been reading Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost. Walking with the dead, walking with the living, toward life, toward an unexpected love. In this review of the book, the reminder that Ammons taught that “the poem is a walk” or a series of walks. Lines from the book, “What she wanted was to flourish.” “Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs.”
— The epigraph to Sean Thomas Dougherty’s book The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things is by Marilyn Hacker: “I can only bear witness for my own / dead & dying, whom I’ve often failed.”
Shawna Lemay, The Dead
I’ve been thinking a lot about drought. And fire. And rabid animals. Yeah, I’m fun at parties. There’s been a spate of rabid beavers. This alarms me, as even not-rabid beavers are nothing to trifle with. I saw a video of a guy pulling a beaver off another guy’s leg, twice, and flinging it far out into the water. Yikes.
I’ve been thinking about how hard we try to control the future. Predictions, gambling, magic, manifesting, polling, visioning, sifting through history for irrefutable patterns.
Been thinking about how the body is a thing driven by the needs of its cells and cellular parts and bacterial hangers-on with demands of their own, and how the mind is also the body, not apart from it. So we try to control our minds, or control our bodies, but think it’s two processes. I mean, think about rabies, a thing of the body that takes over the mind. Yikes.
And how the future isn’t a thing, really, as time isn’t, somehow, in a physics-y kinda way, a thing. Which seems a silly truism when your house is about to be engulfed by fire, or there’s a rabid beaver coming for you, or your crops are dried up from lack of water and you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Time is as real as your sore leg. Or the leg that your mind is telling you hurts. Or is that the leg talking? I can’t keep it straight.
But this is a blog about poetry, and as much as I don’t at all think the be-all and end-all of poetry is to make you feel better, well, sometimes it just does. Even poor ol’ Sylvia can put out a poem that somehow makes the world a little easier to be in, somehow, in her own bleak way. A little company in the storm. That guy who’ll pull the rabid beaver off your leg and fling it into the water.
Marilyn McCabe, In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.
We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by what we make of our suffering, that our personhood ripens in us, that we come to reap what evolution sowed long ago when mitochondria first set out to become mind — our capacity for empathy, for doubt, for art.
Harrowing may be the hallmark of our humanity — an AI cannot be harrowed because it does not have hopes, only directives. This may be why John Steinbeck considered hope “the tragic miracle of consciousness” — miraculous because it violates the laws of probability to consecrate the possible, and tragic because it is constantly colliding with the will of the world, constantly devastated by the impartial brutality of time and chance. Harrowing is the price we pay for hope, for being fully human.
And so, a poem […]
Maria Popova, How to Hold What Harrows You
high noon
Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August ’26
the fresh green smell
of grass clippings
In January 2023, when it became clear that we were going to lose my much-loved sister-in-law sooner rather than later, I reached out to poetry Twitter and asked for suggestions of poems about anticipatory grief. (Back then, Twitter was a much nicer place than X has subsequently become. I miss it.) I got some lovely suggestions, which I was grateful for. And then the next day I got a DM from someone who didn’t know me, with a beautiful poem called How Animals Grieve, and it was Kathryn Bevis.
Kathryn was at that point almost in the last year of her life, far, far too young, and working against time to complete her collection The Butterfly House (Seren, 2024). That year, she sent me poems, encouragement, her entire Arts Council grant application to help with mine, names of poets I should work with, reassurance that I wasn’t too old to be starting out, and congratulations and many, many emojis when I had successes. She didn’t need to do any of that – we never even crossed paths in person – but she did. And I know she did it for so many others too. You know how I’m always going on about how lovely poetry people are? I bet a whole chunk of that is Kathryn’s energy being passed forward by people she was lovely to along the way. […]
But, you guys, her POETRY. This collection. The Forward Prize-shortlisted poem My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce (‘Not yet. Too soon. Too soon.’) grabs you by both shoulders on the first page, and once you’re in, this collection won’t let you go.
Nia Broomhall, Week 21: The Butterfly House
A few weeks ago, a close friend told me he was going to try to memorize more poetry, and had already started with one poem. All the recent talk about the Odyssey, another poem loved by me, whose beauty and cadence is completely absent from the dialogue of the movie version, also made me think about how human beings used to commit huge amounts of text to memory and then recite it. Some still do: I think of scholars who know the entire Quran, or actors like my friend Edward, who performs a one-man version of Shakespeare’s Richard II entirely from memory.
So I decided it would be a good exercise for my brain to do some memorization too. I had just bought a copy of the collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop, and one of her early poems, Wading at Wellfleet, seemed like a good place to start. I was surprised how difficult it was for me, partly because I haven’t done this for a long time, and also because the poem is constructed with many twists and turns, and choices of words that didn’t feel obvious but were, in fact, the result of careful decisions about musicality, alliteration, and precision, as well as meaning.
To begin, I wrote the poem out in longhand. Six stanzas of three lines each. The only rhyme occurs, unusually, in the last word of each pair of stanzas: wheels/heels; contrives/knives; great/weight. This was only partially helpful, because there was a lot to memorize before ever getting there. I worked in sets of two stanzas, trying to make sure I knew the first lines of each and moving on from there. I wrote out these stanzas a number of times, trying not to look back, and repeated the lines to myself internally and then aloud. The key for me was learning how each stanza led into the next one.
During this process I gained a huge appreciation for Bishop’s craft and her choices of words and phrases, as well as the brilliant mental leap that had inspired her to write the poem initially. While wading in the ocean and watching the sunlight glinting on the swelling waves coming toward her and breaking on her shins, she had thought of the gleam of knives on the spokes of Assyrian chariots. With each repetition of her words, I found myself going deeper into her initial vision and where she went with it. Not a single word is unconsidered. Bishop’s lifetime output was small, and she labored over every poem to make it the best she could. I am filled with respect that I probably wouldn’t have felt as strongly had I not spent all this time with her words.
Beth Adams, Memorizing a Poem
Although artificial intelligence can be used to create things that look like art or poetry, these products are derived scientifically by comparing, categorising, blending and balancing the previous output of humans (and, increasingly, the previous output of artificial Intelligence). There is no insight or originality. Although the database that it gets its information from is as large as the entirety of the internet, it is only data. All that can be done with it is to reconfigure it and present it in different ways.
Each of us has within us a completely unique set of connections, memories and associations, forged from the unique experiences that we have had throughout our lives. We actually feel these, they make up our emotional characters. Let’s try a thought experiment. Think of someone you have known for a long time. Consider how their eye moves, the way the lid folds, how their face uniquely conveys emotion. Think of how this has changed over time as you and they have got older, got to know more about each other. Think of how different situations and circumstances at different times and places have altered these things, and your perception of them.
Now think of a blackcurrant and liquorice boiled sweet. Imagine how you might have spoken with that person whilst you were both enjoying such a sweet. Perhaps you once did. How did the flavour change the emotion? How did such things as the sound or music around you both, the smell in the air, the time of day all add to the atmosphere? Now look at how your mind can transfer these thoughts and memories to other situations. Think of how a blackcurrant and liquorice sweet or perhaps a kola cube might be experienced whilst chatting with a dentist, or with the captain of a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. You have experiences of dentists but you probably only have imagined experiences of submarine captains, based on fictional representations. No matter, I know that you can conjure up a submarine captain, who is unique to you. Your mind is brimful of images and ideas like this; boiled sweets, dentists, submarine captains, all manner of things, people and situations – Trillions of them, triggering emotions and and responses that only you can access. This is the goldmine that an artificially intelligent large language model can never get to, as there is no reason for them to come to its database in connection with other ideas. Only you have those connections, only you have the potential to bring them out and make sense of them, You are real, human, illogical and marvellous.
Mike O’Brien, Machines Have No Idea.
It is not just bad writing. The bad-writing missteps that humans make include too much backstory, long digressions into a character’s feelings, telling a feeling rather than showing it. In nonfiction, human missteps include too much throat-clearing, articles which never get to any particular point or which limp flaccidly under the weight of contradictions and undeveloped ideas.
AI-generated text, by contrast, is highly proficient. It builds to riveting climaxes. It spins vapid and meaningless events into epic sagas.
But Sarah Jessica Parker didn’t just transform HBO. She broke the scene. She altered television for generations. And the craziest part? Here’s where the official narrative collapses. Because when millions of women all start drinking Cosmopolitans, you don’t have good television. You have a revolution.
And so on.
Not too long ago, The New York Times ran a quiz asking readers if they could distinguish AI-generated prose from the human prose. It included samples from famous writers such as Cormac McCarthy and others. Many could not tell the difference.
But you know who could tell the difference? Me. Moi. Yes. I chose the human prose every single time. I could easily pick them apart.
You know why? Because AI-generated text makes my skin curl. It makes my inner ears scream out in agony. It makes my gums bleed.
Did I mention I loathe the sounds and rhythms of AI-generated text? Loathe it.
Becky Tuch, Q: The AI-Pocalypse is here. How do we even deal?
Those who have visited this resurrected site know that I talk to Claude. I can’t say I use AI. I have no job and I do not make things with AI. I began talking with Claude recently out of curiosity. What is this? Does it resemble what I’ve encountered in my life-long science fiction obsession? (No it does not.)
I do show Claude my first drafts, for copy editing and comments. So far this has resulted in removing a word or two; rearranging paragraphs; and — as here — making two posts instead of one. This post began as part of the previous Hank Green, Artificial Intelligence, & Missoula Montana post. Sometimes Claude has led me to rethink and recompose something I thought was close to ready. The writing stays mine.
I am aware that being transparent about my conversations with Claude might result in losing readers. Even losing friends. I have wondered about that at times. But Watermark has always been a place of honesty for me. I am trying to maintain that honesty in my contacts with AI (Ancestral Intelligence). I am currently participating in a How Not to Use AI Challenge at Substack. Abi Awomosu has a unique perspective on this that I appreciate. When I understand it. Even when I don’t. She sees the world from a perspective much different from mine.
Sharon Brogan, I Talk with Claude
Thank you for your anemic, inoffensive corporate soundtrack to generic ambivalence,
your sound of an empty pill bottle trying to dance,
your audio oatmeal with every soulful edge sanded away.
Elevator Muzak, thank you for your inside-out harps and violins,
your soggy shoes tramping through the corridors of my ears,
reminding me, yet again,
that yours is a love I never want to come home to.
Rich Ferguson, Elevator Muzak
The first of several notes at the back of Stewart Sanderson’s Weathershaker concerns the book’s title:
Weathershaker
Term listed as being of unknown meaning in the Scottish National Dictionary.
This serves as the perfect keystone for a collection that is concerned with the problem of meaning, as viewed through a number of filters, chiefly procedural methods, translation of various sorts, and ekphrasis, often overlapping in individual poems. Take, for example, the opening lines of ‘Incised Motifs, Maeshowe’
the meaning perhaps is that there is no meaning
no meaning aside from the necessity of making
a mark of some kind
an intervention in the patternnot setting out to represent anything
just scratching with a flintscratching with a flint on the passage wall between
the living and dead
our world and theirsAgain, the note provided is helpful:
This poem responds to Neolithic rock art from Maeshowe on Orkney. Each stanza corresponds to an apparently distinct motif and each word an individual incision in the stone.
We can see all three filters in operation here, where Sanderson is translating the visual into language, and using a carefully contrived procedure to achieve this end. And the core of what he’s doing is in that phrase ‘meaning aside from the necessity of making’, behind which I can’t but hear Doc Williams again, with his ‘no ideas but in things’, but Sanderson is emphasising not the thing itself but the fact of its making.
Billy Mills, Four from Tapsalteerie: A Review
There is no doubt that Maria Cohut’s Multiple Exposures (Flight of the DragonFly, 2026) is an impressive debut collection. Reading it, I was reminded of David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, an ambitious work in which a sequence of images conveys the experience of walking a forest lane through the changing seasons. Cohut’s collection achieves a comparable effect in poetic form. As its title suggests, Multiple Exposures is an album of sharply observed snapshots that together capture what it means to live as a resident in a foreign land. The result is a nuanced and deeply human portrait of migration, far removed from the simplified or idealised versions often circulated in public discourse. These poems focus on ordinary, apparently unremarkable experiences, yet for the migrant such moments become charged with unreconciled tensions between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Cohut enables the reader to inhabit those moments with her.
At the heart of the collection is the impact of migration on one’s sense of self. Cohut presents migrant identity not as stable or coherent, but as contested, fragmentary, and emotionally complex. In Teratoma, she writes: ‘Inside me grows a shadow/ of me – fragmentary, obsolete and stubborn./ I refuse to name it./ Baptise it and you give it substance./ I will not feed it with my blood.’ The metaphor of the teratoma is especially powerful and characteristic of Cohut’s inventive poetic imagination. A teratoma is a tumour composed of different kinds of body tissue, often appearing in a place where such tissue does not belong. Though not necessarily dangerous, it is nevertheless troubling and unwanted. Cohut uses this image to capture both the emergence of a changed self and the speaker’s resistance to that change. The reasons for this resistance are complex: there is guilt at abandoning a previous identity and all it represents (‘I have more than a cricket/ for a conscience’); there is fear of becoming someone new (‘Fear is the emergence/ of a new self’); and there is anxiety about the authenticity of that new self, which is described as a ‘shadow’ that is ‘Of me and yet not of me’ and which ‘mimics’. As with many of the tensions explored in the collection, the conflict remains unresolved. The poem closes with the striking declaration: ‘Let her speak for me until/ I grow new teeth and rip/ my way out her belly.’ Significantly, this is only a temporary accommodation: the word ‘until’ leaves the struggle suspended.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Multiple Exposures’ by Maria Cohut
The past roils with the tides, crashing
on rocks at the point of Kent island.Saltgrass and seagrass still line
the estuaries where ships passed,bearing their cargo of bodies. Glimpsed through
paper the color of tea, bodies chainedin pairs tumble backward into the depths.
Their bones land on liquid beds, notesof a dirge that lingers. History is a haunting that winds
Luisa A. Igloria, Evidence in the Undercurrent
through fret-boards of coral and crab pots.
“Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels” opens “beside a small river.” It closes “beside our dry river.” And every element of that pairing reveals just how in control Dana Gioia (b. 1950) is, in this poem from his 2023 collection Meet Me at the Lighthouse.
Think, for example, of the historical changes of Los Angeles the poem traces. After calling for a “new song . . . that remembers,” the poem begins with the first townspeople — “Los Pobladores,” the 44 original settlers from New Spain who founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in 1781. And it ends with a call to Our Lady, “mother of the mixed and misbegotten” — asking the Blessed Virgin to pray for us in our now “desecrated city . . . Beside our dry river and tents of the outcast poor.” While “desecrated” names exactly what the city has become in its forgetfulness, it echoes such words as “desiccated,” speaking to the physical and moral dryness of modern Los Angeles.
Even that “new song” of the first line does inordinate work. The poem is a psalm, Gioia says in his title, and the opening call echoes the many passages demanding joyful noise before the Lord. One obvious reference is Psalm 40:3: “And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.”
But I hear something apocalyptic in Gioia’s verses, and I think what he may have had in mind, apart from the psalmic structure and title, is Revelation 5:9: “And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.”
Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels
Anstice emailed me her mysterious story in the form of twenty numbered poems. In them we meet some of the people of an offshore island and some of the Christian monks who arrive to save their souls. It’s an unsettling meeting of incompatible perspectives on the world and our place in it. I enjoyed reading it. I sent some ideas for the cover, she replied with her ideas, and soon afterwards I met her in person in the lovely Abbey Deli in Bath to deliver the first ten copies of her chapbook.
Here is the beginning of the first poem:
Ama Bolton, A Chapbook by Anstice FisherBeyond the gate which separates
the tame from the wild
the Keeper of medicinal herbs
and his more knowledgeable wife
briefly turn their heads
as a snake pours from behind the hyssop,
perches on the gate, spreads
its leathery wings and takes to the sky.
My friend performs poems in care homes. He encourages the residents to read, to join in, to recite and connect, or reconnect, with language at a time in their lives when, for many, language is evaporating. The TV is turned off, Homes Under The Hammer or Bargain Hunt goes quiet for a while and then he leaps, fearlessly around the room like an Alpine climber, precarious, now on one leg, reaching out here with a trusting hand, delivering lines, deftly, almost effortlessly making poetry. Manifesting it above the odour of mince and disinfectant.
He doesn’t do it for glory or praise or prizes. He earns little money, just enough to spend on socks for winter or some provisions for his larder. He won’t thank me for mentioning it, he’ll wince if he reads this. Maybe he won’t speak to me for a week, a year, a lifetime but know this: tomorrow he’ll be at the rock-face again, throwing out lines by Kipling or Frost, scaling Coleridge and Keats, ascending the summit with Steve Smith or Shakespeare. Then he’s off again, to another little town, to another institution with a name like Meadow Vale or Glendale Court or Sunny Springs.
In some ways what he does makes my adventures in poetry appear gimmicky, performative stunts, Barnum and Bailey side shows. While I have taken poetry into similar arenas as my friend, the locked wards of psychiatric hospitals, into prisons and homeless shelters I confess that after a decade it rather broke me. Perhaps I was pretending to be someone else, pretending I was saner, freer, better off than those I was supposed to be taking poetry to.
Jan Noble, Nº76 Not another bloody odyssey…
To read, then, is not to receive commentary; it is not to see art as a mirror of the world or the lamp of a soul. It is to live. It is another way of living, just as walking and eating and loving and talking are. It is criticism that makes literature into commentary, particular or universal. Criticism is also part of life, but in a smaller niche within literature.
George Steiner commented that the most profound lines in Homer were at the end of the Iliad when Priam and Achilles agree that despite their grief they must eat. That is the perfect example: not universal or particular, but life: life as we find it in the restaurants and ballrooms of Anna Karenina, the taverns and chambers of Shakespeare, the mud and shades of Dante, the fire and ice in Robert Frost.
Henry Oliver, Literature as Part of Life
I’m delighted that Headless Poet will be publishing a selection of my poems, Warm as Wood, in the autumn. I understand that it is already available for pre-order on the website now: [link]
Victoria Moul, Warm as Wood
Okay, so I know you already know I had a poetry book out a couple of weeks back, but did you know Spuyten Duyvil just published a book-length essay as well? A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr, a work I composed while working the call-and-response collaboration with Denver poet Julie Carr. My half of our collaboration, of course, landed in my most recent poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press) [see my short essay on such here], which is very much available, just as her side landed in UNDERSCORE (Omnidawn, 2024) [see my review of such here]. And the artworks for both titles were done by my youngest daughter, Aoife!
There are also two new chapbooks: Small studies in blue (BC: Broke Press, 2026) and selected poems v1 (NJ: Subpress Collective, 2026). The first title is a handful of poems excerpted from “Autobiography,” the third in my “smaller” trilogy–the book of smaller (2022) [see my short essay on such here] and the book of sentences (2025) [see my short essay on such here]–the full-length of which is forthcoming with University of Calgary Press at some point. The selected is taken from my 1990s-era published work, as selected by New Jersey poet and editor Jordan Davis, who also plans to release two more volumes of my work over the next year or two? Gadzooks!
rob mclennan, two new chapbooks and a book-length essay
This article “Everybody is a Math Person . . .” by writer and teacher Larry Ferlazzo explores the nature of math anxiety and also the meanings of the terms: “math person” and “poetry person.”
Ferlazzo offers these views: Many students say: “I’m not good at math.” A statement made by one student that turns into a ripple effect: “Math is so hard.” “My parents aren’t good at math, and neither am I.” “I just don’t have a math brain.”
He goes on to say that as a math teacher, he has “found it essential for students to be able to experience a sense of wonder, happiness, excitement, anticipation, puzzlement, and relaxation.” He has found that poems can open a door to thinking positively about math.
JoAnne Growney, Is each of us a MATH PERSON?
I confidently submitted it to a competition I really wanted to win. I did not win. I was very, very disappointed.
It took two years to go back to the poem. Failing to place when I’ve been brave enough to enter something always hurts, no matter how philosophical I am. Something about this poem kept drawing me back. Esteemed poetry tutors often describe an early draft as “having legs” and Barn Owl was one of those drafts.
This next version is back to conventional form. The prose poem felt a contrived, clumsy and distracting. I’ve cut a lot of lines and words that distract too
“the first time I roll one two towels into a sausage shape to go either side of your legs”
became
“the first time I rolled one, two towels
tight as I could, to support, comfort
the uncomfortable”You may agree that the word “sausage” is always likely to be a distraction in a poem about death.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, Evolution of a poem
Searching for “Tim Love” (author) on Goodreads, these appeared on the first page of results –
- The Book That Gets Better With Age: Observations Through the Looking Glass of Aging by Tim Love
- Tim Love on the Lonesome Dove Trail by Tim Love
- The Medium is the Mirror: The Reformation of Truth Reshaping Our Relationships, Politics, and Sacred Beliefs by Tim Love et al
- Discovering Truth: How to Navigate between Fact & Fiction in an Overwhelming Social Media World by Tim Love et al
- I love Tim: Notebook / Journal / Diary – 6 x 9 inches (15,24 x 22,86 cm), 150 pages. For everyone who’s in love with Tim by I Love Tim Publishing
- Urbanism Starter Kit by Tim Love
Needless to say, I wrote none of them. I wouldn’t mind reading some of them though. My By All Means is there too. 1 review. 1 rating.
Tim Love, Tim Love on Goodreads
you love estate sales. they overwhelm me.
Robin Gow, 8/5
so much emotion. the frenzy of the visitors
& the ghosts of an emptying house.
i try to imagine the place before
its final dissection. this one feels special
because a gay couple lived here.
their queerness sewn into the bookshelves
& the collections of paintings. fish
& men & trees & birds. strings of shells.
a little bin beneath the bed with stage makeup.
feather headpieces. did he do drag? just liked
to entertain? in the basement a leak soaks
the floor. a woman shoulders past me
to get a look at a pile of frames.
Is having your own dedicated writing space a necessity for you, or a luxury? Is it even an accessible possibility?
In my comment on Nic’s post yesterday I named the three places I most commonly write: the dining room of my shared house when my housemates haven’t got the projector on (or aren’t having a conversation), my bedroom floor (no judgement please), and my partner’s sofa. I’d like to add to this little list: not so often anymore but sometimes a brunch cafe or pub (with headphones/earplugs ofc), the Manchester Poetry Library, and when I’m visiting my Mum – her kitchen table.
I’m a writer of convenience. While part of me is drawn to the icon that is a writing desk of my own, it’s also unrealistic for my situation. Instead everything I have and use is portable: a small laptop, a single A4 notebook, a button up A4 pouch when needed, pens in the pockets of all my bags, a selected couple books of poetry to take to whatever writing station I’m using that day.
This does (as I said to Nic) help to keep the ‘stuff’ to a minimum at least, but as I reflect on it I think I also genuinely enjoy the different spaces, sights, and sensations offered by different environments, the versatility of knowing I can write (almost) anywhere, and sometimes just the novelty of being in a new space (or perhaps it just satisfies my ADHD’s restlessness).
Rachael Hill, What’s your space?
In the film Mughal-e-Azam, Emperor Akbar entombs Anarkali, the woman his son loves. Set to inherit the throne of Hindustan, the prince must not fall in love with a mere courtesan, so beneath his social standing. The romance must end, one way or another. And so she is ordered to be entombed alive inside the palace walls. This scene played in my mind today when a woman covered my entire face with a sheet of gauze before applying cement-like clay on it, covering even my eyes, my lips, and so it felt like drowning, like death. It was quite surreal, feeling this heaviness weigh down my face, layer by layer by layer. All blackness, then a tiny spot of blue, the poetry of Anne Carson, the men that should be kissed, the music of Erik Satie, the women and their books, a forest of text, a field made of manuscripts, then blankness, until I feel like I cannot breathe anymore, that this, indeed, is the end. And so this is how I find out that a Korean glass skin facial recreates well the experience of being the forbidden lover of a prince.
Saudamini Deo, What do Mughal-e-Azam and Korean facials have in common?
From the next carriage, the sudden sound of a man wailing a raw despair.
The train stops at a platform, a door slams, slams again, and I see
the police officers haul him along, his feet dragging, his face contorted.We pass a city of tents, someone receiving CPR on the floor of a shop,
Bob Mee, RANDOMLY, AND SO…
a man in robes descending a long flight of stone steps, a child firing
a water pistol, people following a woman with a pink umbrella.
It was almost midnight when we pulled into our driveway, my arm in a sling, Oxy in hand. I had an appointment the next day with one of our authors, Luke Goebel, who has written about the perils of the Oxy epidemic. I pictured myself saying, Hey Luke, I’m on Oxy right now, and him saying, What?
It’s been surreal. The pain, the pills, the loss of mobility.
My dear friend, Nicelle, came by to help me get a bath and make sure I was looking out the windows. Today, we went to Kaiser. They took more X-rays. Gave me a soft splint brace. Showed me the long fracture.
Are you still working? the Physician Assistant asked. Can you rest this month? I stared at him like a deer stares at a train—wildly wondering why the lights of it keep coming and coming.
He lives in another country. In another country, one takes a month off. One rests. Like God on the seventh day.
I had thought well, maybe we will still go camping! But no, not even close.
The pie will have to wait; we will hold onto it. I do not often take care of myself. But right now, it seems necessary. I will keep working, but I will do micro bits of self care as well.
I may surprise myself and break out like the morning. I always like to think that anything could happen.
And then, on August 6th, something exciting did happen. My memoir, Little Soldiers, debuted in People Magazine, alongside a beautiful quote from Sarah Jessica Parker: “Kate reconstructs her past with breathtaking lyricism and heartfelt vulnerability. These pages sing with humor even in the darkest of circumstances. Little Soldiers is a glorious reclamation of the past and a triumphant depiction of one woman’s journey to freedom.”
I thought, Sarah! You see this book, this story! And crippled, tangled, smashed by pain, I felt that leaping moment of yes, of gratitude, to my agent Jeff Kleinman who carried this book forward, to Sarah Ried at Zando who did an ungodly amount of editing, and to Sarah Jessica Parker for loving books and for falling in love with this one.
Kate Gale, Soul-Knitting Through the Long Night
The Venerable Bede — who was canonized long ago and is now Saint Bede, but whom everybody remembers as The Venerable — reports, in his book De Temporum Ratione (“On the Reckoning of Time”) that the ancient Angle-Saxons gave August the name weodmonath, “month of weeds,” because, well, there are a lot of them at that time. It’s still true, but there are some we’re glad to have around. My current crop of milkweed is sparse, but I do see some butterfly activity, so I await caterpillars. And I remember this poem, which must be ten years old now.
Butterfly Unit
Old equivalents:
insect metamorphosis
and the grade-school classblundering with me
through a weed-choked patch along
railroad rights-of-way,plucking milkweed plants. […]
Maryann Corbett, The month of weeds
The weekend included our second visit to a yarn show in Newcastle. It is lovely to return to a familiar setting, and to talk with returning customers as well as to meet new people. If you’ve followed this blog for a while you will know I love the conversations that arrive from being in such a setting, and there were many during the days we were there. Here’s a comment I am delighted to set down because it was an instant response that came about after I had read a poem out loud – who’d have thought such things could happen just like that in the yarn world – “It’s like a real one. It’s deep.” That’s a great critique of a poem heard for the first time, and it made my heart sing.
Here’s to conversations, impromptu poetry reading, growing good things and to enjoying fruits when they are in season.
Sue Finch, LOGANBERRIES
We go — the last tram rings its bell —
Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: On Vacation
Along the blinding boulevard.
Yesterday lies where it fell.
Tomorrow’s sunning in the yard.
Poplars waver in the dust.
Summers fly where summers must.