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 bowl of heat, the musicality of machines, an Emily Dickinson pilgrimage, the slow rebuilding of the world, and much more. Enjoy.
Last month I was in Grantown-on-Spey with a group of friends for our annual hillwalking week. The house we’d hired gave splendid views down over Abernethy forest to the Cairngorm hills. On the Monday, we climbed Bynack More, via the route that passed the green lochan, Lochan Uaine and Ryvoan bothy. On the Wednesday we went cycling. I stopped in a farm track to look across the river toward the hill we’d climbed. A plume of smoke was rising from the forest in the foreground. At that moment, the farmer arrived in his truck. He glanced at the scene through binoculars, and said “I presume someone has called that in?” Someone had. Very soon we heard sirens and fire-trucks.
Some of my friends are musical; they always bring guitars and a fiddle on our holiday. That evening, they were playing the corny old favourite, Will ye go, lassie, go? But over the musicians’ heads I could see the ever-growing plumes of smoke and, as night fell, lines of flames rampaging across the hillside, the very place we’d walked.
How do we make a poetry of witness? Is that the best we can do? Is lyric, and linguistic cohesion appropriate, as we move into disintegrated times? Can poetry offer any resistance or redress? A piece written quickly has flaws: does that matter? All the questions. I felt duty bound to do something.
I wrote this quickly, and was struggling with the ending. Lines came in and lines went out. There was the idea of what we inherit and bequeath. Or squander and fail to pass on. It seemed that what was burning was our culture, as well as the forest. The securities my generation had known are all destabilised.
The song itself came to my rescue, giving me the last few lines. The Observer was good enough to publish it immediately. But already Dunwich Heath was on fire too, and god knows how much of Europe.
Kathleen Jamie, We’ll all go together
The pain in my joints
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Stubborn living
telegraphs in morse. I read Ghalib
instead. The monsoon sings in
staccato. There is not enough rain
this year to quench hearts.
In Somerset (and everywhere), August grass is the colour of the paper we used to stain with tea at school to make fake parchment. I would repeat the tea trick at home in my room, made my handwriting cursive. I always wanted to be older than I was.
The rest of the country is on fire. Europe is on fire. Perhaps the moors around Sheffield will be burning when we get back to them. We sit in the bowl of heat at the cricket ground and watch Rocky Flintoff score his first century. My son accepts suncream and a hat. My dad says he’s never worn a hat in his life and he isn’t about to start now. […]
The stands erupt in a cheer. Lancashire are winning. The world is sizzling. We are having a lovely time!
Strangers talk to you here, under the sun, share fans and sunglasses. Two men from East London are impressed by Alfie’s seven year old understanding of ratios. When the cricketers take their helmets off, I’m amazed by how young they look, how expectant, even watched from a distance. They hope the field has been perfected for them. That it’s all to play for.
My dad’s friend takes his arm without him having to ask. Together, they start to walk, slowly and with great care. A street in Taunton. The earth. The universe. Amen.
Helen Mort, Postcards of fire
Isn’t this what you prayed for? To burn
Renee Emerson, To Julian of Norwich
with visions, to suffer like God.
Specter, voice from the living grave,
are you more pure there
than the maid on the footpath, begging
penance, shut within
the anchorage
of an earthly body?
Your large shadow turns the seabed into a twilight zone,
you have stolen the sun’s light, wearing it like a halo. […]I am writing poems in response to a close reading of Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa of the Ramayana. I allow each sarga to become the seed for a meditative poem, entering its unwritten interior—the spaces between what is narrated and what the text leaves open to the imagination.
Uma Gowrishhankar, Displacing Earth and Sky
I’m planning a new project, hopefully one with money attached. I’m starting a Patreon for this new project, which is tentatively titled “Eating Popeye’s In Romania,” and the early plan is to write and maybe make videos about our experiences in Romania for the coming year. I’m using Popeye’s as one of the lenses for this project because it’s been a running joke for me ever since I left Louisiana in 1999 that the first thing I look for in a new place is to see if there’s a Popeye’s. Sometimes I think the hardest part of the 4 years I did at Arkansas for my MFA wasn’t the workshops, it was the lack of spicy fried chicken and dirty rice that I didn’t make myself.
Brian Spears, A New Project in the Works
This holiday was meant to be nine days of uninterrupted, unscheduled time – plenty to write several poems that would form part of the central sequence, and to think about structure and order and a title and all those other important things.
Did I write any of those poems? Reader, I did not. It’s hard to know what I did do with all that time. I read a lot (four novels and some poetry). I went to check on the chickens (there was a hen coop at the bottom of the garden, also featuring two peacocks and some guinea fowl). I tried and sometimes succeeded to empty my mind of the myriad daily anxieties that keep it entertained. I looked minutely at plants and insects and took arty photos and conducted slow, aimless perambulations. I had some very lazy breakfasts (is there anything finer?).
I did write, almost every day. It did not come easily, despite the absolute abundance of easy inspiration all around. Slowly, and with much pulling of teeth, I wrote strange little poems about things like the wind, and pomegranates. All are in couplets, and follow the same format in terms of title, rough line length and style. The same deal with writing them as with everything these days: I had to be not thinking about them, to think about them properly. They would come in snippets, sometimes a line or just a couple of words at a time and I would have to periodically haul myself out of the pool to write them down. I described them to someone in a message as a form of poetic displacement activity. Sounds cute, not sure what it means. I’ve got eight poems (at the current count) out of it.
I’m also not sure what I’ll do with them. Maybe nothing. Maybe you’ll see them in a journal in a few months’ time. There are a couple I quite like. I’ve got out of the habit of writing for the sake of writing, i.e. without any particular goal already in mind, and maybe that was the point of it afterall.
Victoria Spires, Poigravanje pjesmama
Dust pan. Water
RM Haines, Summer of Salvage (no. 3)jogjug. Shoes. Scraps of paper everywhere. Into the mouth of Rahu. Into the garden of arrested type. Here, the people claim little interest in “the spectacle of language in a mode of exhaustion.” They claim little patience for “I’m coming to slit your throat.” It turns our all of our plans are masks. We found it out by telling it to a bug and watching it as it learned to see through us. After all, this is what is meant by “the city of common interests” and “the city of hand in hand.” Everyone is eating their way through a dream, and in the end, there is no choice. You pay the price, and you tell them you belong.
slow afternoon
Vaishnavi Ramaswami
the curve
of green bananas
Chennai, IndiaOne thing the heat seems to do is make me very lethargic. I was reading the June issue of The Heron’s Nest last night, and as I always do, copying out some of my favourite haiku (I choose my absolute favourites from all four issues of 2026 and, in January 2027, send them in for the reader’s choice awards).
The above haiku seemed to sum up the slow pace of recent hot days and I love the specifity of ‘green bananas’. Strangely though, the poem also chimed with viewing the solar eclipse, which we did yesterday evening, through some welding glass borrowed from my Dad! Equally entertaining was the variety of camera obscuras made from shoe boxes and cereal packets that people brought onto the field behind our house. I’ve included a photo below, which was taken on my phone with the help of a very kind stranger, juggling the phone and the glass to get a focus. Nothing like as good as what our friends filmed in Madrid yesterday and sent via WhatsApp, but I was entranced by the odd green tinge – like the underipe bananas!
Julie Mellor, heatwave summer
My dad was a strange and wonderful person. He could be very giving, sometimes he could be quite controlling, he was quite shy and he was also the life and soul of the party. He liked exploring and travel and doing things his own way, no matter what. He is missed.
The poem I’m about to share with you is about the strange limbo land that is an Intensive Care Unit, and how the strangeness of the ward enhanced the strangeness of death.
I want to talk to you about writing poetry about death, or grief. This is the sort of poetry I am probably best known for. […]
My dad died in the intensive care unit in Castle Hill, four years ago today. I had never been in an intensive care unit before my dad went into one, and it was not at all like I expected it to be. I have strange, detached memories of the time; they are very sensory memories – the musicality of the machines around us; much more than on a normal ward, the machines were constantly, quietly beeping, slightly different notes in different rhythms so that occasionally they would fall together and beep all at the same time and then move apart, like some sort of celestial star pattern, something unnoticeable until it aligned.
I remember the structure of the ward – a central desk and all the bays like the rays of a child’s drawing of a sun.
Wendy Pratt, Doubts I had while writing poems about my dad’s death
The last thing he ate was a plate
Luisa A. Igloria, What the Body Wore Before it Left this World
of scrambled eggs. When we took him
to the hospital, the traffic lights kept
changing to yellow—the color of caution,
the color of waiting between stop and go.
I think about him at the store, my hands
hovering over bouquets with sunflowers.
I’m back to squeezing my writing into the weekends; scribbling, shaping, editing between the dibs and drabs of laundry, cleaning and doing coursework while the kids are away. I have very few breaks in my new role, so I doubt I’ll get much journaling done at school, so this time feels precious and reserved as much as possible for writing and chilling.
I do it more as journaling rather than necessarily working towards writing a poem. The notes I write are more an extension to my journals than focussed on working towards a poem for publication or a collection: what I’ve been thinking about over the past few days, what I’ve experienced. This weekend’s writing has had chunks of lines about the eclipse and they are now maybe sliding into a rough poem.
Strangely enough, the poem is pretty disconnected from what actually happened. My poems are usually autobiographical these days, but this one, while based in reality, wasn’t what I was thinking about when I was out in the street, waiting for the clouds to clear. It was exaggerated or enhanced like the retelling of a good anecdote: a nugget of reality wrapped in silver foil.
That’s one of the writing exercises I used to give my students: take a true event, but write it like a tall tale or myth. They could use it for fiction, poetry or even autobiography. We all have those stories we tell at dinner with friends, when everyone needs to one-up on the craziness of their lives to keep the fun going. We take an event that really happened and make it more dramatic, more miserable or joyous, more crazy, just MORE.
Exaggerate, make it impossible, but compelling, lie, shape it to explain something about you, your life or the world. That basis in truth makes the fiction so much more believable and enjoyable. So I didn’t have these big thoughts, the person I’m speaking to wasn’t there, wasn’t on my mind, is possibly not even real. But the eclipse happened, the details and setting hold it together and sell it.
Gerry Stewart, A Nugget of Reality Wrapped in Silver Foil.
We unpacked the knitwear and then headed straight over to The Bridge Inn, where the poem began, to ask about visiting their toilets. We had a wonderfully warm and friendly greeting when we entered, and this made it super easy to strike up a conversation about poems and toilets! I was invited to explore the corridors and see if things were as I remembered. And, despite me thinking I had originally gone upstairs, there on the ground floor was the exact toilet door sign that was etched on my memory. But when I went inside, the sign on the vending machine was rather less poetically inspirational than it had been back then. It no longer read: “Have the best sex you’ve ever had”, instead there was just a simple brand label in its place.
Perhaps someone reading this will have been at that poetry reading and remember the vending machine and the sign it used to wear. Perhaps during the sign’s time there it made other people momentarily pause. Perhaps I am the only person to have written a poem about it. And maybe the moral of the story is actually that there is a joy in setting down a moment in time, and that it is the moments that matter. Who’d have thought a visit to one toilet in 2024 could have sparked all these thoughts so many months later. Oh, and I loved the poetry readings I heard that evening too so if you were one of the readers there, I tip my hat to you and your setting down of words.
Sue Finch, LOOKING FOR A SIGN
At sixteen, when I found a poem I couldn’t get out of my head, I would quite often copy it out, usually by hand. But that was the year a neighbour lent me a word processor, pre-Windows, massive, all green-on-black screen, fat pre-floppy floppy disks and dot matrix printer. I typed this poem out, every space and break and blue of it, printed it dot by dot. I needed to sort of climb inside it and figure out how it worked. I had to feel the shape of it in my fingers before I could see it properly. I thought I’d read a lot of poetry, but I hadn’t read anything like this. Honestly, at that point I didn’t know you don’t have to capitalise the start of every line. I didn’t know you’re allowed to start lines anywhere on the page, and leave massive gaps in the middle of them if you feel like it. Honestly, I did not.
Before I read this collection, I didn’t know that there was poetry as visceral as this: violent, traumatic, political, and also proud and sexual and joyful and loving. I didn’t know about Chrystos, about the ‘Native Women’ the book is dedicated to (we did one topic in primary school, which mainly involved dressing up, and was light on political oppression), or about the injustices still perpetrated by the US government (the reason this book was published by a Canadian press). I didn’t know fury could be understood as clearly as this when it was so far outside my own lived experience, or how a collection could hold such anger and such love together. I’ve seen those things since, but this was the first time. This was an important book for me. It opened poetry up.
Nia Broomhall, Week 22: Not Vanishing
I’m delighted to announce that my poet mate and fellow podcaster Peter Kenny has got his first full collection coming out with Poetry Salzburg – hurrah to that! I had the privilege of reading the manuscript and I can tell you it’s brilliant. Publication is next year I think and no doubt I’ll be mentioning it again. Peter has been getting his poetry published in magazines, on buses, in anthologies (and latterly a pamphlet or two) for decades, so a full collection is well overdue and well deserved. Meanwhile, Alex Josephy’s new book A Little Bridge is out with Pindrop, and I was lucky enough to take part in her Hastings launch recently, alongside Judith Shaw whose pamphlet The Land Called Me Back is also now out in the world (there we all are in the photo at the top of this post). Alex and Judith are both big supporters of other poets’ work, being co-organisers of the Hastings Stanza. Fellow Telltaler Sarah Barnsley is one of three poets in the latest Mariscat Sampler (number 3) with ‘Find your own fascinator’. Sarah’s writing is always energising (I think that’s the word? ‘Vibrant’ seems to fall short and ‘unique’ a bit overused) and she delights in both challenging and entertaining the reader. A tasty sample! And finally, my old poet mate Charlotte Gann has a new collection coming out in the Autumn. More about that in due course.
Robin Houghton, Small steps, success stories and reasons to be cheerful
Those new to Collin Kelley’s work will find his chapbook Slow to Burn an excellent introduction. It is a small gem of a collection, which stands out for the authentic voice with which the poet speaks, the selection and combination of marvelous contemporary detail and cultural references that create a strong sense of time and place, and the universality of themes — childhood experimentation, alienation, exclusion, death and loss, growing up, self-identity. The writing is clear, the cadence well-controlled, the subject-matter real life, the opening lines lures that hook you and keep you reading to a rewarding end, to wit:
The day I told my parents I wanted to trade in
~ from “Wonder Woman” (p. 3)
G.I. Jose for Wonder Woman must have set off alarms. [. . .]Before you made me a witch,
~ from “Ian” (p. 4)
got forced into the basement to pray,
your mother stripping you, whipping you [. . . ]Mary pops up in the strangest places,
~ from “The Virgin Mary Appears in a Highway Underpass” (p. 13)
usually as a window stain or sandwich,
but yesterday she dripped down the wall [. . . .]Kelley’s is a chapbook of vivid and tightly written stories in poetic form. The narratives not only are about the “I” who addresses us; they also introduce us to a cast of believable people, at least some of whom we might have heard about or known when we were growing up. We meet, for example, “Ian,” who “kissed me once in the backseat, / crouched low, out of my dad’s line of sight” (“Ian,” p. 3); “Aimee,” who “built a shrine to John Lennon” and “could reel off the rapes and molestation / like a documentarian” (“Double Fantasy,” p. 6); “Laura Brown”, who “packed one morning, / caught the Toronto bus, / [and] disappeared like a chalk mark / in a rain storm” (“Laura Brown,” p. 11); and “Tina”, who makes the poet-narrator “her project, / to be reshaped and reformatted” (“Bell Curve,” p. 22).
Maureen Doallas, ‘Slow to Burn’ by Collin Kelley
Bridget Huh is a queer Korean-Canadian poet from Toronto. She holds an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, and her poems have appeared in The Walrus, Gulf Coast, The Margins and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2023 Vallum Poetry Award and has been recognized for awards in North American Review, Fugue Journal, and Palette Poetry. Her debut collection of poetry, Fugue Body, was published by Véhicule Press in 2025. […]
12 – What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of parking garages.
13 – David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Music, always. I was obsessed with the Sibelius Violin Concerto and that formed a significant part of Fugue Body. I was also thinking about the fugue, the baroque musical form, as a model for the form of the title poem, where three different themes (music, race, desire) were threaded into each other at the site of the speaker’s body.
Recently, I’ve been working on an ekphrastic series looking at Caroline Monnet’s Pizandawatc. It’s such an exciting way to think about sound and speech and materiality.
14 – What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The writers I will always return to for my work are Kim Hyesoon, Anne Carson, Marina Tsvetaeva, Christina Sharpe, and Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha.
My friends are so important for my work not only in their attention and insight but also in the hilarious things they say. I have at least three poems in my new manuscript that are built on things they said that I wanted to remember and noted down. (Shoutout Mai Mageed and Aishvarya Arora.) And my poetry cohort-mates, Gerardo Azpiri Iglesias, Ella Shively, and Sam Samakande, are so singularly talented and have helped my writing grow so much.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Bridget Huh
Of all the poems I have written Matryoshka is my favourite. Written comparatively early in my poetry writing journey, it went through innumerable revisions, aided by being workshopped by a group led by Carrie Etter. This led to all the images in the poem having some connection to Russia, whereas in earlier versions there was a mixture of Russian and more general imagery.
Although usually I have some idea of what sparked a poem, this is not the case here. I simply have no idea where the initial impetuts for this poem came from. I do remember that, early in the process, a phrase used by Churchill in a radio broadcast on 1st October 1939 came into my mind. He said that Russia ‘is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. Mulling over this phrase fed into the notion that the secret selves of women, and more particularly mothers, can be symbolised by Russian nesting dolls, with each doll representing a different secret self.
This poem was one of the prizewinners of the Gloucestershire Writers Competition in 2017. Judge Roy McFarlane said ‘Matryoshka drew me into a dreamlike world where I might not have comprehended everything but it was dangerous…an arresting feast of words’. I like the fact that he picked up on the mystery in the poem and the choice of words. I appreciate ambiguity in poetry and leaving space for readers to bring their own response to poems.
Drop-in by Iris Anne Lewis [Nigel Kent]
Because its down-and-up-again persistence
is like a congregation’s kneeling and rising
(Levate, in the Latin of old rubrics),Because, at some point in the fifty years
since I learned to file its fungal names
among the tangled roots of the Plantae,
they bloomed, those names, as a kingdom of their own,And because this makes me smile, recalling
that leaven’s Your own little joke about the Kingdom,Be praised, O Lord, for this bit of mystery,
Maryann Corbett, Leavening
which lifts, which lightens.
Beginning to publish poems in the early 1950s, Charles Tomlinson will have been conscious of his outsider status on several fronts. Antipathetic to the still-echoing boom and verbal excess of Dylan Thomas, and sceptical of the narrowed range and palette of the fashionable Movement poets, the young Tomlinson was also developing an interest in European writing, which only became in vogue with Ted Hughes’ founding of Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965. Even further beyond the pale, his Cambridge friendship with Donald Davie stirred a lifelong enthusiasm for American poetry. His interest in things transatlantic yielded several extended visits to the US, and the 1966 collection American Scenes and Other Poems (OUP) which also boasted a section of ‘Mexican Poems’.
Tomlinson died in 2015 and The Change of Light from Dare-Gale Press is a timely reminder of his excellence. In these 22 late, unpublished poems, there are glimpses of his wide-ranging interests with allusions to French poetry, the Greek Islands, the Adriatic Coast, and even to Japan. But we are in a predominantly English landscape here, consisting of woodlands, rivers, trout streams and gardens. The poems are without exception beautiful in their precision, tonal elegance and civility of expression, pursuing, as Tomlinson always did, both the unfolding of abstract ideas as well as a close engagement with landscape and the natural world.
It is the poet’s acuity of observation that is immediately pleasurable for the reader. In ‘Between Seasons’, Tomlinson looks for Spring to arrive while a hawk moves through the garden, ‘on such sharp and silent wings, / It skims more like a knife’. This sort of equivocation between promise and threat is characteristic of the poet. The poem ‘On the Frontier: in March’ also explores the uncertain ‘swaying frontier’ between the seasons, the precarious balance of which is brilliantly conveyed in the sinuosity of Tomlinson’s syntax which runs as one single sentence through 23 lines, before a breath-taking expansion of vision to Planet Earth itself (‘this wandering sphere, / the unpiloted craft’). As this makes clear, Tomlinson’s often alluded to sense of Eden always did encompass what we now call eco-poetry and in ‘Snow’ the paradisal garden is once again deployed for the beauty of the earth, seen ‘with the eyes now / of its first inhabitants’.
Martyn Crucefix, Review of Charles Tomlinson’s ‘The Change of Light’ (2025)
Over the past twenty five years, [Jorie] Graham’s work has developed into a rich and prolific late phase, which is not to say either her formal approaches or subject-matter have become any more orthodox or simplistic. In fact, the syntax and rhythms are more fragmentary than ever, and the line-breaks are as fraught with drama and resonance, swooping between lines of different lengths to follow the dynamics of Graham’s thoughts that are also speech acts implicating the reader in what she bears witness to.
Increasingly this has centred on her ecocritical concerns about the environment and climate change. One might say that, as the books have gone on (from 2008’s Sea Change to 2023’s To 2040), the overriding feeling conveyed is one of urgency and acceleration, of a concerted effort to communicate the severity of our situation before time runs out and even to address a future generation (as in To 2040) in the hope that we can still reach such a year. Graham’s latest collection Killing Spree, which came out early this summer, continues this tone of emergency in shorter, sparer lines which assert a terser, more direct form of poetic redress.
In her Paris Review interview of 2003, discussing how she wrote the poems in Never (2002), Graham speaks of how she moved towards trying to write “in real time” and “en plein air before nature, porting it rather than reporting it, if you will”. These strategies have an ecopoetic intention at their heart, an “attempt to enact the time in which it takes to see the thing, the time in which that seen thing is living and constantly changing” in terms of “the rate of (species) extinction [that] is estimated at one every nine minutes” (Graham, 2003). This sense of heightened immediacy and simultaneity (“multiple things happening at once”) comes across in many of the late period poems, often reinforced by their irregular lineation and spatial dynamics across the page.
Oliver Dixon, The Surface Breaks
I thought I would share a short piece from a few years ago on Alice Oswald and the Iliad. I’ve done a light edit, which feels odd for something so provisional, but there we go. For my money, Oswald is Homer’s most interesting and exciting contemporary interpreter. Her own poetry, from Dart through to Memorial (an “excavation” of the Iliad) has been in constant conversation with him. She also writes and speaks searchingly and provocatively about poetry as an oral tradition, with “his” poems at the centre of that vision. […]
Oswald is a releaser. In the first lecture, she tells the audience that she isn’t going to show them the texts she quotes from. Instead, she recites each passage twice. These passages are often from Homer, because Oswald is always thinking about Homer and the wandering bards who released his poems over and over again over the years. And one of the striking things about her own poetry is the way she combines that commitment to an impersonal, oral tradition with her own very distinctive voice.
In Memorial, for instance, her “excavation” of the Iliad, Oswald severs the poem’s similes from their subjects. Those similes seem to shift, even as you read them, between the collective voice, the much-remembered phrase, and Oswald’s individual phrasing. As in the lectures, each one repeats:
Like when a mother is rushing And a little girl clings to her clothes Wants help wants arms Won’t let her walk Like staring up at that tower of adulthood Wanting to be light again Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted And carried on a hip Like when a mother is rushing And a little girl clings to her clothes Wants help wants arms Won’t let her walk Like staring up at that tower of adulthood Wanting to be light again Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted And carried on a hip
I find these pairs completely mesmerising. The effect of the repetition is like making an impression in a wall before bringing in the drill, or (because the Oswald-Homer world is a blue, watery, wanting world) the first rush of water which carves the way for the river. The first version makes space for the second to flow through. Even on the page, they make you listen. I also find it hard to imagine anyone but Oswald getting away with it.
Jeremy Wikeley, Oswald’s Homer
July was a tough month and August is busy, so I won’t be reading 31 poetry books for the Sealey Challenge this year. I have managed to read two lovely collections from Jacar Press, however, that will stay with me for awhile. And Kudos to Richard Krawiec for establishing Jacar and its fine catalogue of books.
When my Best Beloved saw the title of Tina Kelley‘s latest collection [Field Guide to North American Words], he thought it was a sort of dictionary-field guide and was slightly disappointed that it is poetry. There’s nothing to disappoint in this collection, though, and it really is something of a field guide–it’s full of interesting words that describe what we didn’t know there were words for, and full of speculations about meaning and inquiries into etymology, and a few puns and other sorts of wordplay. Kelley has written more prose and journalism than poetry, but her poetry never overplays the cleverness of her thinking; the balance of thought-provoking and incisively intelligent observations in her work impressed me. It’s the kind of collection that makes you want to review some of the poems again after you’ve finished the book, to go back and see what you might have missed on the first read.
Kathryn Kirkpatrick‘s book Creature feels entirely different but also masterfully achieved. I enjoyed reading each poem twice, which slowed me down a bit but helped me to savor the subtle way she employs rhyme and alliteration, or verse forms, and varieties of said, into her work. What stands out most, however, is an abiding sense of compassion for the world and its beings. I felt very…embraced by these poems. True, too, that the middle of the collection contains beautiful pieces about her mother’s death, which right now hits close to home for me.
Ann E. Michael, Comfort in words
my thirst becomes a summons; my spitting is my song. magic resides in a cracked egg, a token of ice pushed under the tongue, the transferred vigour of a cut fern. i climb the fence, i keep yr silence, moving backwards stooping, in the service of this sorcery.
Fran Lock, ON MAGIC & FUTILITY
I have a couple of writing projects I’ve started, and I’m just avoiding them thoroughly. Inching around the file. I can’t get near the page. Much of my avoidance is, I think, due to my overall discouragement with the publishing part, the effort it takes to take a finished product to the reader. It’s a bit cart-before-horse-y, I know, to think about publishing something I haven’t even completed. But there it is, the dark cloud of grim possibility, lurking down the road. YES I recently got into one of my aspirational lit mags (DIAGRAM!!) Yes, I have books. But oy, the effort, and the low rate of return for my efforts. Oy, the rejections rejections rejection. I just can’t even.
I thought successes would build on themselves, that momentum would be created. But that is not how it’s worked for me. Every project is a new beginning exactly like the old ones; every publishing effort is a grind, like that last hill home at the end of every bike ride. It’s always there, and I have to downshift and pedal. If I had enough breath to sigh, I’d sigh.
I wish I didn’t care. I wish I were one of those people who say “oh, I just do it for the sheer pleasure of doing.” Apparently, I do not. I’m in it, apparently, for the glory. That’s a joke. I wish I were one of those dissheveled and earnest near-hermits who disappear into their imaginations and hours go by until they arrive back to the present, hair sticking up, clothes awry, having missed a meal or two. I’m not. I don’t really have dissheveled hair. I don’t really even have to brush it, and it generally looks okay. My shirts are generally relatively clean. I always know what time it is. I would never miss a meal.
Oh, to be a wild thing instead of this tame creature looking around at faces for encouragement, at eyes for approval, like my friend’s anxious German shepherd.
Marilyn McCabe, stalking like a shadow among the garbage cans
My local writers group began as a “Circle” in 1948. It removed “Circle” from its name decades ago because of the connotations that “Circle” had then. Those connotations are less scary now, and recent changes in the literary world make me wonder if it’s time for a circle revival. […]
Decades ago I was asked by a group to give them a talk. The organiser was worried that the group was getting too cosy and felt unable himself to change the tone, wanting an outsider to shake things up. Much more recently, people from another group visited ours, saying that their own group has become too settled, too keen on tea and biscuits. Talking to writers at a residential conference this summer I concluded that local groups for ambitious writers are doomed, replaced by small, invitation-only Zoom groups who often ask prospective members for samples of work/critiques first.
I think Covid was the tipping point. During lockdown, more people started using online options to meet fellow writers. They discovered like-minded people online who they’d never have met at their local group, and questioned the benefits a local IRL group has over international ones. It looks to me that experienced writers (often the lifeblood of their groups) are abandoning local groups and are not being replaced. Local groups might consequently need to reposition themselves in the market – an opportunity? I hope so.
Tim Love, Writers circles
I’m what I’m calling upper-middle aged. I’m 62. And I began thinking about it tonight because I saw an advertisement for an out-of-town professor job in creative writing, which I normally would have applied for. However, I guess I have realized that I’m at a stage in my life where I don’t want to go through the usually depressing rigmarole of applying for it, let alone if I were successful and got the position. At this point, I’m not sure I want to up-end my life so radically. To teach full time. Commute a long way several days a week. Committees. All of it. I love teaching and I love writing, but I don’t want to have to work so hard to jump into a new full-time career. I figure I’ve arrived at a balance in my life. With writing, teaching, editing, family and indolent napping. And so, I think I don’t need to work so hard at a new job. But the more important realization is that I feel that I’m able to write the best work of my life, and I have decades ahead of me to do that, assuming…well, good luck, good health and other such contingent things. I’m fortified to realize that I feel that I have never felt more interested in writing, more enthused about it, and open to the possibility of creating new things and new kinds of things. So that feels very satisfying. I certainly don’t feel too old or too weary or too worn out for that. I feel more energy than ever for creativity and indeed, I’m creating more than ever. I don’t have as much need to prove myself in the academy and also, in any case, perhaps that ship has sailed. The trireme has left without me. Good thing. I don’t want that kind of Odyssey. I’d like to not have things get in the way of my creative work—other than the teaching, mentoring and editing that I already do. Neither my wife nor I have a pension, but we’re ok. So this is an interesting realization for me in terms of the difference, perhaps, between career and vocation, I feeling excited just to get on with what is the most important to me, and maybe not worry so much about the career that I had imagined previously, that I would have had, that I wanted to have, and that I kind of assumed that I would have. But instead, I’m free to write. To choose who I mentor and teach and what editing projects to take on. For example, this summer, I held back on editing and mentoring so that I could have more time to work on a new novel. Now, I’m at 35,000 words, likely about halfway through the draft.
Gary Barwin, Being Upper-Middle Age
There are diamonds here, a few spirited individuals who genuinely want to help and do so without judgement, who will apologise when the scripted inquisition sounds a little sharp or impersonal, who understand that a variety of events may have transpired, that circumstances must have become untenable for you to resort to this degrading bi-weekly interrogation simply in order to qualify for some meagre assistance to help you pay rent or put food on the table.
And then there are others who genuinely relish extinguishing any sense of aspiration you might have, who enjoy making you feel like a scrounger, a dodger, a parasite, who will take pleasure in breaking your spirit. Do not, whatever you do, tell the person in Booth 83 on the fourth floor of the Hackney Job Centre that you are a poet. Alarms will sound, buzzers will go off, men without necks will appear whispering into their cufflinks, “We have a poet in sector C, repeat, we have a poet in sector C. Execute Code 9. With prejudice.”
I made this mistake some weeks ago, told them honestly how I intended to become self supporting through my own contributions. “May I be honest with you,” said Shirley, “We get a lot of people like you in here, arty types, and I tell them just what I’m going tell you. We are required, by the government I may add, to ensure that you adhere to the ABC scheme.” “The ABC scheme?” I ask. “The ABC scheme,” says Shirley. “A = A job. B = Better job. C = Career. You don’t start at C in the ABC scheme. You start at A. You start with A job. Forget C for now Mr Noble, today you need to begin with the letter A. And today you are here to get A job.”
This is the kind of situation that Swan is familiar with, the kind of treatment he is accustomed to and conditioned by. Swan is a character in the title poem of my forthcoming book, My Name Is Swan (blimey, that was an uncomfortable segue.) Swan is trapped, is bound by and bound to a single channel life but in his dreams he glides, elegantly he spreads his wings, is free from restrictive economics and a poverty that weighs on him heavily, that threatens to suck him under, that will drag him down river. In a poem he is no longer a number, he becomes a narrator of an alternative storyline. But he is haunted by his reality. There are shadows on the water. And he cannot escape them because the shadows are his own.
I am sitting in Booth 83 on the fourth floor of the Hackney Job Centre and I am aware of my own shadows, I am aware of my own wings that I have stowed carefully away beneath my seat. I am waiting for my Work Coach. I am hoping, praying that it won’t be Shirley, I am wishing, wanting it be somebody nice, someone understanding, that I might get a pass, for a couple of weeks at least, that I might be permitted to begin the ABC scheme at C.
And I think I’m in luck when Imran appears. He is young and he has kind eyes and he smiles without a sense of duty or pity. “And how is your job search going Mr Noble? Do you have any changes of circumstance to report?” I notice on his side of the desk in Booth 83 he has a small and exquisitely bound Koran next to his bottle of water. I decide to risk it. I reach into my bag. “Well, I’m publishing this in October.” I slide a copy of my book across the desk. Imran gathers it up in his hands, admires it as if it were a sacred text. “Wow!” he exclaims, “You wrote this?” “Yes,” I say, “It’s beautiful,” he says, carefully turning its pages, “truly, this is a thing of beauty,” And slowly the shadows begin to fade and slowly I feel my wings unfurling beneath my seat.
Jan Noble, Nº77 The best review I ever received…
I am away from home—away from vacuum cleaners and dirty dishes and laundry and cats-needing-fed and all things routine. Let’s not call it a “trip” (even if it is trippy), but a pilgrimage: to Amherst, Massachusetts, to hang out with Emily Dickinson. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years and years, and never quite managed, until now.
On the first leg of my journey, my dissertation advisor and Dickinson scholar, Dr. Vivian Pollak, met me in Amherst. Vivian and I spent three days exploring together—visiting not only the Emily Dickinson Museum, but also Smith College (where Vivian attended about a year behind Sylvia Plath) and Chester (where a friend of the Dickinson family and correspondent of Dickinson, Joseph Lyman, was born). I also enjoyed sampling local restaurants with Vivian and her husband.
On day four, when the Pollaks decamped for Boston, I headed west, to Pittsfield and Lenox. My aim was to tour the Berkshire home of Edith Wharton, The Mount (heady stuff). Although Herman Melville’s Arrowhead was closed, I also visited that property, walking around the house and grounds and trails, catching a view of Mt. Greylock, which is said to have played a role in the creation of Moby Dick (written at Arrowhead in “the bitter winter of 1850-1851.”)
Now I am back in Amherst, staying at a historic bed and breakfast and immersed in what I am defining as the writing-retreat phase of my pilgrimage. Thanks to Vivian, I had an hour alone in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, scribbling (with a pencil—no ink allowed!) madly. On the 11th, I have a two-hour group session in the same locale.
Today I am at Mt. Holyoke College, visiting their special collections. On Monday, I have an appointment to visit Amherst College’s Dickinson holdings.
I carted along a number of books, and thought I would catch up with blog-reviews on this trip, but some sort of magic seems to be underway and I find myself hard at work (or at play) with my own manuscript, making discoveries, figuring out what my new book of poems is about.
Thank you, spirit of Emily Dickinson.
Bethany Reid, My Pilgrimage
After two months of heatwaves and no rain – dying trees, crops too desiccated to harvest, moorland fires – I woke early this morning to the softest, gentlest rain imaginable. I went outside. It was bliss – like being kissed lightly all over. And cool air at last and the scent of the softening soil …
I was reminded of these lines from Turn of the Moon, a poem by Robert Graves.
Soft, steady, even, copious rain
That harms no leaf nor flower, but gently falls
Hour after hour, sinking to the taproots,
And the sodden earth exhales at dawn
A long sigh scented with pure gratitudeGraves had a big influence on me as a teenaged poet. Nowadays he is deeply unfashionable.
Ama Bolton, Drought and rain
I had the privilege of spending time this week with a couple of younger poets, and one of the subjects was the feelings of despair and anxiety these times have brought on, for ourselves as women and individuals, for America, specifically for the arts in America and the environment. I was born in a pessimistic decade, when the economy, the music, the fashion, the President – basically everything sucked. (The brown and orange polyester alone gives me PSTD.) When I was born, people were standing in line at gas stations. Stagflation had arrived, as had high unemployment. We were just getting out of an unpopular war. The year I was born, Roe v. Wade passed, and with it, a sigh of relief for women’s rights. Flash forward to now – gas is crazy expensive, interest rates are up, Roe v. Wade was repealed leaving women having miscarriages to be imprisoned (depending on your state’s level of crazy), jobs are getting harder to find (especially ones NOT training AI to replace humans), our President sucks, and the music and fashion are okay but remind me vaguely of the more optimistic decade, the nineties. As someone who has experienced more than five decades, I will say that this will not last forever, and though it feels like the end times now, things can get better.
Not without everyone’s help, of course. People need to take the lead in voicing courage, support of women, the arts, and the environment, creating new jobs and demanding better support for science and medicine. We can vote and use our dollars not to support billionaires (ahem, Bezos and Musk) or corrupt politicians. We can also use hope as a weapon – to envision a better future is an act of rebellion against what currently is. It’s what science fiction writers like Octavia Butler dared to do decades ago – the Parable of the Sower, for instance, imagined a world that empowered empathy, love of nature, and cooperation. We can memorize poems, buy books and art, patronize museums and libraries, refuse to give in to the people that say National Parks, Poetry, and Art are worthless (the current administration, for instance.) Did you know America spends the least on the arts per capita compared to the rest of the world? Here’s the breakdown: “Federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. combine to spend roughly $7 per capita annually on the arts, compared to $47 in Japan, over $50 in China and Australia, and upwards of $218 to $246+ per person across the United Kingdom and Western/Northern Europe.” When governments spend more on the arts, not only do artists benefit, but the community, and it actually creates jobs! (Check out Ireland’s experiment giving money to artists in the last few years.) We need to not just ask for, but demand better of our local, state and federal governments on protecting air and water, the rights of women and children and immigrants, the support for scientific study and the arts. We need to get louder about this, not give up. Because things can change rapidly. Hope can start out of small local attention and grow. I’m not giving up, and I’m still working in perhaps the most American-despised art form, the poem. I still plant flowers and trees, and donate to causes that protect animals, trees, women, and yes, poetry. I’m not making much money but even a small amount counts. Not becoming paralyzed by fear and anxiety – which is what oppressive governments and billionaires would like for us, in order to continue doing evil on the planet – is imperative.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Zoo Visit, Flower Farms, And How to Have Optimism in Hard Times (for Us, and for the Arts)
Is it summer, or are we learning to be with the crooked floors in our creaky house (White House, America)? Somehow, I heard very little political talk during my travels this season. In the States, in Europe, people weren’t avoiding conversation, it just seemed too obvious, too much said, even irrelevant. Instead of doomsday desperation, I heard people bursting with the passion of their endeavors — poets whom they were rediscovering, spiritual space they were inhabiting, art residencies they were establishing.
Summer exuberance, maybe, or a collective decision to retire the word “resistance” for why we engage in the arts. It is always uncomfortable, in political crisis, to be defending against a firing squad (presumed, internal, external) about why we do what we do. Artistic conviction is becoming more ingrained and internal; it is enmeshed with complex realities, instead of part of a binary. The idea that “we” don’t need to give “them” more power is part of our daily bread. An internal compass has pointed us and draws us in the right direction.
We may not save civilization, or avert other disasters. We could be laying traces for future generations to nurture humanity. We might be like Hansel and Gretel dropping bread in the forest – like the Irish monks in the darker times, copying out texts for those who come after. Or we are simply making art, day in, day out.
Jill Pearlman, Doomsday meets the Passion of our Endeavors
As artists we live in a bizarre timeline. I do believe that we have a duty to get our work out there. We owe it to the things we’ve made to share them. In the Cave / O’Hagan conversation Nick Cave talks about how people say the best art is never seen and he disagrees. “It has to do with connectivity and, well, with duty or service.” A song especially he says, “does not exist in its true form unless it moves through the hearts of others as a balm. Otherwise, it is just words and notes and little more.” If you have the power to share an art that is healing, then that is your duty. Annie Dillard has cautioned the artist against hoarding, and says we must spend it all. I tend to agree. That said, when we put our work out there now, we’re likely to have it stolen in some way, scraped, with no compensation. And by compensation, I don’t necessarily mean money, either. When humans share work there is something magical and giving going on. I think we need to be extra mindful of what and where and how we share things.
Shawna Lemay, On Refusal, Contingency, and Your Duty as an Artist
The World
(El Mundo, de El ángel es vampiro, 1991)
by Vicente Quirarte
Translated by Ernesto PriegoWe want to name the centre of things,
the sounding heart of things,
the silent fervour of things.We believe: revealing the mystery
will save us from the passing
hours that erode our memory.It’s better to leave things
behind the spider’s patient web,
behind the wing of the fallen angel,
or the nightgown that grows into your beauty.The soul of things
is the purest mist that lets us
glimpse their true name.Do not search for wonders. Wait for them:
Ernesto Priego, The World / El Mundo – Vicente Quirarte (1954 – 2026)
your cry of love
rising from the mirror that reflects you:
that slow rebuilding of the world
that affirms its most enduring matter.
We did it. 268 miles, 36,000 feet of ascent. We walked them all, sun and fire and driving rain, sickness and blisters, the weight of our tent and our sleeping bags and mats and everything we needed on our shoulders. We did it.
Even as we left Byrness, I considered calling it off, catching the bus to Newcastle. If I could barely hobble across the campsite, then why on earth did I think I could walk 27 miles of open moor and mountain?
But it turned out, I could. Niamh carried more weight. I bandaged my feet good and thick and tight. We picked plantain and sheep’s wool. I thought of Jackie Hagan: “remember how it feels when you stub your toe?” Pause. “Well, fuck off.” I wondered how she stayed so loving and funny despite her pain, I remembered laughing with her and Steve and Miles days before her death, how we passed the laughter between us like it was a brightly shining ball until that little room was full of light and laughter. […]
And here’s the top of the hill, and the light is golden. There are houses ahead of us. The hedgerows are rich and thick. Tall crowds of rosebay willowherb and ragwort, hawthorn hung with berries. I stop to rub my hands in hogweed for its orange-and-lemon smell. Knapweed, thrumming and static with bees, blackberries. We stop to draw the last moments of sweetness from the path. Foxglove, herb robert and bracken, nettle dancing with butterfly, meadowsweet. Broom. Buttercup, thistle, honeysuckle, rose. A van passes us, two other people on the lane. Long grass in the fields, goats with long horns, ponies with short legs. A dog barking in the distance. Rosehips and willow, a breeze blowing through the leaves, bindweed and moss. Gorse hung with shining cobwebs, sycamore rustling. Houses and solar panels, a bench, children’s voices, cottages, blackberries. A quiet village green and a sign: “Pennine Way/St Cuthbert’s Way” – pointing back the way we have been. “St Cuthbert’s Way” – pointing ahead. Very quietly in the absence of words, our path has ended.
Since I was a child, I’ve delighted in the finding of words. But poetry is more than the right words. It’s their movement, the organic, independent life which exists between them. Words can be the solid metallic core and the molten iron surrounding it, the liquid rock. Words can be the crust we live on, the water, the soil. Words can be the leaves and the flowers. Words can flow and float and explode; they can stand for millennia, they can flourish and wither in months. They can be heartbeat and breath and moan, they can be dancing things, they can howl.
Words are living things, like our breath and blood, and poetry can be alchemy. Whether it is in sound or rhythm, in the poem’s ghosts and associations, in its secret language or “the poem under the poem” described by Lucille Clifton, Ted Hughes’ “beasties”, his “lovely living thing” pulled up from under the still surface – there has to be space within the poem for the act of transformation. Though we might guide it, it must be ultimately allowed to decide what it wants to be.
In responding to my blog on Day 15, a lovely man offered me blessings though he assumed I was not a person of faith. But I am. I am filled with faith, if not with belief. Though I feel its pain very keenly, I have great trust and confidence in this world. Some of that comes from the deep, solid core of Catholicism I was raised with, especially now it has been purged of its institutionalised religion. Even more of it comes from soil, and rain. In Catholicism, transubstantiation refers to the changing of the bread into the body of Christ. But I see transubstantiation everywhere. Pain becoming wisdom. Death becoming new life, drought becoming rainfall, grief becoming hope.
Poetry is an act of faith, and of transformation, a place where we can surrender to the life in us and beyond us. The walk is over. There is so much more to see.
Clare Shaw, Walking the Pennine Way: Day 16