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 heady mix of scents, the spaces between pains, shapes that suggest buildings and bodies, a giant plastic tub’s worth of journals, and much more. Enjoy.
The grass has sprung back into shape after plenty of rain and it seems strange to be needing to be cutting it after weeks of watching it turn yellow (and rather crispy) and not need much attention. Pleasingly its flourishing green renewal has renewed my energy for gardening, and I have thoroughly enjoyed being out in the fresh air. I have also enjoyed the scents I have carried with me on my skin as a result of doing some cutting back and weeding. On the first day I smelt of rosemary, on the second lavender, and finally blackcurrants. A heady mix of scents.
I have often been found at my desk this past week squeezing in some extra writing time for the Tea Towel Poems. Those that have been out in the world have received feedback from their recipients, and for those yet to reach a couple celebrating their anniversary I have invited my lovely wife into poetry corner to listen to my drafts. She is good at giving me a succinct and honest reaction and can easily alert me when something I have written only really makes sense in my head. At one point I realised that I could make the necessary tweaks by changing the title of a particular poem. And Kath’s response to the fact it might mean the poem had a long title? “It can’t be any longer than that one about drawers!” Reader, there are drawers in the title of that poem but it’s not just about drawers!
Sue Finch, MARGARINE TUBS OF MARBLES AND ERASERS
秋晴や行きたきところとてもなく 片山由美子
akibare ya yukitaki tokoro totemo naku
autumn clear sky−
no particular place
I would like to goYumiko Katayama
from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), October 2025 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 13, 2026)
Temperatures are cooling, but most of our days still have the blue clarity that brings people outdoors, the ideal weather for yard and garage sales. There are lots of them in this mixed neighborhood of homeowners and student renters. I’ve always had conflicting feelings about these sales; to me they signify endings or passages. To others, though, they connote neighborly conviviality. […]
What germ of evil in our past
infected this computer’s sheath,
once beige, now with a yellowish cast
like rotten teeth?The screw loose and the weak-linked chain:
Nothing in literature or art
so bluntly explicates the line
Things fall apart….They lie there derelict, unhaggled,
wasted, remaindered, on the skids,
redemptionless. But now a gaggle
of college kidshas blown in on a gale of laughter,
Maryann Corbett, Yard Sale Weather
talking trash. May youth forgive
the faults age will no longer suffer!
May these bones live.
I found my most beloved prose writer, Marguerite Duras. Just saying that feels as though I am a child and my favorite color is blue, or yellow. She is every color. If you know Duras, you know her work and life are things of pain, truly. And also immense passion, contradiction, expression. A constant looking back at childhood, at what is no longer, at the mother wound, the father wound. She told me early on that The Wound is the thing to be obsessed over, stoked, and alchemized. Abandonment, family dysfunction, alcoholism, douleur; these things pervaded her inner world, and she chased them on the page.
I did not expect this, but standing at her tomb, I felt a tenderness toward this woman I have never met and could never truly know. I suppose I wanted to see her grave to ask if she is alright, and to also be tended to by her as a woman and as a writer.
As I moved through the glittering carousel energy of Paris, I imagine her in these streets with her contemporaries, at cafes and bars, creating beauty while she moved through her own shadow. I asked her to bless me.
And then I went to César Vallejo, whose grave is tucked into a row. It is easy to miss, even with directions. Vallejo is the reason I ‘became’ a poet—not just dabbled in it. A friend of mine in college, Lisa, gave me a translated copy of his book Spain Take This Chalice From Me (note: there are other translatons of this title). It became my heart because he taught me the heart of poetry could be difficult, could be violent, could be wild and surreal.
His avant-garde tendencies (he even used automatic writing) and darkness showed me new doorways, new permissions. I was young and didn’t understand the politics of his world then, but I knew the language had a ferocity that could contain and express human suffering. He is the reason I love bold language, strangeness, fucked up syntax, the visceral, the embracing of the ugly and warped and broken. Seeing him moved me deeply. I thanked him profusely. I asked him to bless me.
Lisa Marie Basile, Literary ghosts of Montparnasse cemetery
I am absolutely delighted to share “’To Bear Witness to One’s Own Life’: A Conversation Between Hyejung Kook and Mia Ayumi Malhotra,” published in Poetry Northwest online! I only knew Mia slightly when I agreed to interview her about her latest collection, MOTHERSALT (Alice James Books, 2025), but now, after going back and forth for many months, I feel lucky to have gotten to know her and her work much more deeply. […]
I’m still a year out from my book release, but this feels like a pre-debut of my debut. It’s difficult to concisely sum up a book, but here’s my current attempt: ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH is a collection haunted not only by loss—death and miscarriage most prominently—but also by the tender details of the world, peonies reemerging in spring, the taste of salt licked from your palm, the music of overlapping voices and languages.
Hyejung Kook [no title]
As I enter this new phase in the memoir project, I’m facing a fork in the road, and both roads give me agita. First, I’m spilling my tea to anyone who reads the book. But also, I have to figure out how to get people to read the book. It’s hide-and-seek. I’ve been hiding my whole life, and now I want to be sought after.
The count down to publication of I’ll Look for You at Moonrise, is now 9 months away: a full gestation. Due in Pride month.
Right now, I’m working with editors who want me to inject more feeling into some of the adverse events in the story. (Again, please. This time with feeling!)
But here’s the thing . . .
. . . there is some potentially upsetting material in this story, no lie. We even talked about content warnings, which I am not a fan of. Warnings weren’t a “thing” when my stories unfolded, mostly in the 60s and 70s. The truth is I didn’t know that the awful things that happened to me were awful. If you are a woman who lived through those decades, you know exactly what I mean.
Risa Denenberg, Changing Focus
Back in the mists of the 2000s, the GCSE poetry paper for our exam board had a section that asked students to compare a selection of poems from two set poets. You got to choose Duffy and Armitage, or Heaney and Clarke. This was the anthology that made headlines in 2008, when the government decided that the rising tide of knife crime in the UK must be due to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Education for Leisure, and removed it from the syllabus. Remember that? (Macbeth was absolutely fine though.) Anyway, that didn’t affect me because I was the only one in my department at the time who wanted to teach Heaney and Clarke. It was a perfect pairing. I had a lovely time teaching that syllabus. The students, who ended up spending great chunks of their exam time flipping back and forth through an unwieldy booklet of poems, not so much. But they didn’t hate Heaney, at least. And that’s how I got to know his famous, glorious, 1966 debut (debut!!! IMAGINE!!!) collection Death of a Naturalist. I could have taught those poems until the end of my days and never, ever got sick of them. […]
Throughout Death of a Naturalist, we are shown a childhood and a history that is ended, an innocence that can’t last, an anxious step into adulthood and the future. What steadies it in the end is memory, and love, and poetry. In the last poem of the collection, Personal Helicon, Heaney tells us ‘as child, they could not keep me from wells’ and ends by explaining that, because staring into wells is ‘beneath all adult dignity [.] I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.’ It’s the best definition of poetry I know.
Nia Broomhall, Week 26: Death of a Naturalist
a rat will rearrange things:
Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Labor Day
loaf of bread
now by the back door,
candlesticks tipped over,
cupcake in the sink.
you with a boy inside
sprawl in a soft chair
counting the spaces between pains
while it cowers behind the washer.
we’ll get him later you call
lovingly between contractions,
your husband on his knees
with a knife […]
I was delighted to find that fellow poet, Neil Leadbeater, had brought out another collection, shared this time with Lori Levy (interviewed by Neil here). The very title, Flavours, conjures up a lavish spread of glorious food for the reader’s enjoyment; who could fail to be drawn in by those zesty lemons that adorn the cover, painted in acrylics by Katie Bayer?
The first half is given over to Lori’s poems under the intriguing heading, ‘Lemons, Eggplants and Chocolate Chip Cookies’. Neil’s poems follow under the heading, ‘The Fruits of Our Labour’ (Psalm 128:2 comes to mind). The final section contains ‘Dialogue Poems’ which unfold in a poetic conversation between the two poets, with Lori’s words on each verso and Neil’s poems of response on the opposite recto.
The Contents page alone is enough to set one’s mouth watering, with its mention of ‘Peach’, ‘Pomelo’, ‘Pistachio’ and ‘Olives’. Perhaps somewhat unusually for poets today, Lori and Neil have not shied away from the inclusion of humour, an ingredient (sorry…) that enhances these beautifully crafted texts and brings a wry smile to my face. To humour we can add a compelling sense of playfulness, an aspect that is particularly appreciated in these difficult times.
Caroline Gill, Poetry Book Review: ‘Flavours’ by Lori Levy and Neil Leadbeater
Hedgerow of Voices, Paul Brookes, Jane’s Studio Press, 2026, ISBN: 978-1068432378, €6.94 (There’s an email contact on the publisher’s About & Contact page)
In Your Mouth, Paul Brookes, Culture Matters, 2026, ISBN: 978-1-918132-02-1, £10
The Drey Skin, Paul Brookes, The Red Ceilings Press, 2026, £10
Paul Brookes is something of a polymath: poet, shop worker, interviewer and editor of, amongst other things, The Starbeck Orion. But it is his work as a poet that is of interest to us here, with these three new publications all out this year, but with a span of half a decade or more behind them, each one different but with overlapping formal and thematic threads woven through them. I’m reading through them in the order they came through the letterbox, but you could start and end with any of them, really.
Hedgerow of Voices consists of four sets of individually titled sonnets (with one outlier): ‘On River Dove’, ‘Old Moor’, ‘Hedgerow of Voices’ and ‘On North Star’. The first and third are linked sonnets by virtue of the last line of one being the first line of the next.
‘Woolley’, the second poem in ‘On River Dove’, opens with these lines:
Daced and Barbeled, swirls and ripples, rivered.
Cuts through an ancient sandstone riverbed
Ripples fossilised. Earth remembered
lost river. Water’s higher speeds threadvelocities sand grains roll, ripples
form, move with the flow, have short, steep downstream
sides.The twisting, turning syntax enacts the fish-swim through space and geological time while the linking last/first lines pull us along. And the twists and turns move us from the deep geological past to the Anthropocene present with the closing couplet of the sequence:
A hungry AI data centre feeds,
sups my future till there is no more me.‘Old Moor’ moves us to another part of the landscape, and also to another part of Brookes’ range, as the final poem in the sequence, also called ‘Old Moor’, moves away from the constraints of the sonnet form and finds its own verbal music:
In hush of sorting sidings,
A dance begins – Lapwing shadows shunters
each wagon, each bird, searches place,
pushed gently over the Hump,
A rise no steeper than a banked field
where Redshank pick through pools.In ‘Hedgerow of Voices’, the linking again leads us through the weave of the hedge, a site teeming with life, feeding, breeding and renewing itself.
Billy Mills, Three by Paul Brookes: A Review
Béatrice Douvre was a French poet who died, aged only 27, in 1994. Although she published a few poems in magazines during her lifetime, the great bulk of the Collected Poems are drawn from unpublished material found in her papers after her premature death. The earliest of these poems date from 1986, when she was 19; the last of them were written just a few days before she died. In French, her Oeuvre poétique has been available since 2000; this is the first complete translation into English.
This substantial paperback edition, running to over 500 pages in a large format, prints the French verse and English translations (by John Taylor) on facing pages. The book also includes the translation of a brief preface by Philippe Jaccottet, written originally for the French edition. Jaccottet, who died in 2021, was a Swiss poet, translator and critic whose poetry and essays are still ubiquitous in the poetry section of even the smallest French bookshop; several of Douvre’s poems are dedicated to him. This gives you a sense of the extent to which her poetry was embraced and endorsed by the French poetry ‘establishment’. In his excellent introduction on ‘Translating Béatrice Douvre’, Taylor says her work has a ‘mesmerizing lyric élan’, while the publisher of the collected poems in French called her ‘a meteor avid for the absolute’.
Both these descriptions point to the signature intensity of Douvre’s lyric voice. The typical Douvre poem is short – less than a page long, and sometimes only a few lines; light on punctuation; musical without following any specific formal scheme; precise in its evocation of emotion (emotion more than particular recognizable experiences); surprising in its diction; and systematically slightly surreal – surreal, I mean, in its unexpected use of words, but also in its unusual angle of perception and a kind of hyper-focus on the minutiae of observation and response. This intensity of focus creates ultimately a sort of distance from experience as well as an intensifying of it.
Douvre’s use of language is frequently exhilarating. Here is Douvre’s original and Taylor’s version of the first half of the poem ‘L’outrepassante’ (‘She Who Goes Beyond’), dedicated to the poet René Char. The title of the volume, Inhabit the Brief Halt, is taken from the first line:
Habiter la halte brève
La rive avant la traverse
La distance fascinée qui saigne
Et la pierre verte à l’anse des pontsDans la nuit sans fin du splendide amour
Porter sur l’ombre et la détruire
Nos voix de lave soudain belliqueuses
L’amont tremble de nos tenaillesInhabit the brief halt
The shore before the crossing
The fascinated distance that bleeds
And the green stone at the arch of bridgesIn the endless night of splendid love
Bring onto the shadow and destroy it
Our lava voices, suddenly warlike,
The upstream tremulous with our pincersHere we have several examples of Taylor’s great strengths as a translator and also the choices and compromises involved in any such translation. ‘Inhabit the brief halt’ is a wonderful translation for Habiter la halte brève, with just the right edge of peremptory strangeness. ‘Halt’ is also, of course, the most obvious translation of halte because it is etymologically the same word. Taylor quite often chooses the etymologically closest option, even when it is not the closest in everyday meaning. ‘Halt’ exists in French and English alike as both a verb (often a command: “Halt!’) and a noun, but in English the noun ‘halt’ is much rarer than the French equivalent. Halte remains a fairly common word for a pause or break in French; a halte-garderie, for example, is the standard term for a common kind of part-time crèche. We might notice something similar about ‘fascinated’ (fascinée) and ‘splendid’ (splendide): in both cases, the English word has a slightly different or narrower range of uses in everyday speech and a somewhat different tone or register than the French equivalent. In all three of these instances, the English translation arguably makes the line a little stranger even than it is in the original.
I think Taylor does this on purpose to create a sense of dislocation and disorientation. This reminds us that we are reading a translation and encourages us – if we can – to refer to the original, but it is also a translation strategy specific to, and appropriate for, this particular poet. Almost every one of Douvre’s extant poems suggest an experience of the world so intense and minute that it feels like a kind of dislocation.
Victoria Moul, The foam or the blaze: the poetry of Béatrice Douvre
Patricia Lockwood is a wonderful prose writer — and also the author of one of my favourite tweets — but she hasn’t published a new collection of poems since Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014). Agate Head / Stone Soup (Bloomsbury) is a double volume with a preface that describes how her imagination returned to poetry through a combination of avoiding the internet, learning metalsmithing, going on bike rides, and taking what she sees as Sylvia Plath’s attitude to poems: “Write them straight through, from beginning to end, don’t mess with them too much, and tell people you’re doing it”.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #47: Newfangleness
Edward Lear (1812–1888) must surely count as one of the most interesting and peculiar figures to live in the Victorian age — and that’s saying something, for the Victorians were as interestingly peculiar a people as the world has ever known.
A commercial artist, best known for his illustrations of scientific and popular books about birds, he was also a musician. And painter. And composer. And eccentric traveler. And inventor of the limerick (leaving aside Mother Goose’s ur-texts). Out of all his work, it is his nonsense verse that has survived: poetic extravagances that, though they are mostly taken as children’s poetry these days, he intended as works to be appreciated by adults. Nonsense is serious business, and Lear was the best at it. Think of “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” (which we offered in February), “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,” or “The Table and the Chair.”
Or take Today’s Poem, the 1877 “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.” In six eight-line stanzas, Lear shows us his rollicking meter of three and four feet, with just enough dactyls to make the lines tumble across the tongue. The comic poem shows a genius of a small kind: interesting and peculiar. And fun. What more could one want from nonsense?
But it’s also worth noticing how rhyme drives the internal logic of the nonsense.
Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The Pobble Who Has No Toes
The second full-length collection from Montreal-based poet and intermedia artist Leigh Kotsilidis, following Hypotheticals (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2011) [see my review of such here], is Some of Us May Live (Coach House Books, 2026), a collection some fifteen years, one might reason, in the making. I’m intrigued by the steady punch of Kotsilidis’ sharp and short-lined lyric sketchworks, offering accumulating phrases that thread together to form narrative shapes. Just listen to the opening of the three-page poem “FIRST PRINCIPLES,” that begins: “A theory exists / for each of us. // To stop motion, / something heavier must intervene. // There is nothing / that won’t crush you. // The more you suffer, / the more you remember. // A crisis churns / out opportunity. // Fame promises fun / until someone ODs. // We pay heed / only to what is useful.” Kotsilidis’ narrative shapes nearly form rings, from the phrase and the sentence to the poem, and into the collection itself, a book-length single moment of perpetual clarity. One might say that the sentences and phrases of Hypotheticals extend and interplay with an ongoingness, almost as a book-length line, broken up into line breaks and individual poems, run almost continuous from the first page to the last. Or, as the poem “WHAT WE CAN’T SEE” begins: “We wade at the edge / of what is beyond us // There is nothing more / than delusion // Men mistake porch bulbs / for moons // A body drifts indeterminately / unnoticed // Every body leaves / over time [.]”
At nearly one hundred and thirty pages (albeit with thirty pages of endnotes, perhaps the most I’ve seen for an individual poetry title), there’s a heft to this collection, and a shift in an ecopoetic from focusing the impact of climate crisis upon the landscape to that of the world’s inhabitants, offering a kind of bestiary, one comparable to Vancouver poet Meghan Kemp-Gee’s own full-length poetry debut from the same publisher, The Animal in the Room (2023) [see my review of such here]. “How / to communicate that / which has no name // or why a name said / again and again and again / dissipates.” she writes, to close the short poem “SUBLIMATION,” “Lying / among such incessancy / our bodies // concede; / a thousand bees / devour us irretrievably.” Kotsilidis’ clear-eyed interiorities ripple across the lyric, the landscape, attempting to articulate the question of how one is able to live amid such self-created crises. “We raise stone / and concrete edifices. / The only sounds between walls / the ones we create.” she writes, as part of “SCALE PROBLEM,” “We dismiss birds that signal / heavy weather. / Wait out high winds / threatening the next resonance disaster.” From stardust to oceans, suburbia to glaciers, selfies to snow fences, the scale of these accumulated poems, these questions, observations and life-lessons, is enormously rich, varied and complex, managing to encapsulate everything there is and might be, fully aware it can never be contained.
rob mclennan, Leigh Kotsilidis, Some of Us May Live
While waiting for the arrival of John Chmura’s new poetry collection, 539: A Year in the Pine Barrens, I listened to an audio version of John McPhee’s classic book, The Pine Barrens (1968), a seminal work of environmental and cultural reportage that began as a series of articles in The New Yorker in autumn 1967. McPhee’s descriptions of a vast landscape, ethereal and haunting, are echoed in Chmura’s poetry. Since this is a tale of two Johns, I’ll use their surnames throughout this blog post to avoid confusion.
Beyond the immense natural beauty, there are cultural and ecological tensions. Chmura’s collection opens on a winter highway with artillery practice heard in the distance, while “the only sign of life is roadkill.” There are road signs, though, and the green highway sign on the book’s cover is County Route 539 through the Pine Barrens, where he composed many of his poems. At times the signature trees are “phantom limbs draped in fog,” but the forest is always alive, and it is wiser than we are. From his poem, ‘Arborism’:
Never before has peaceable pine
or roving oak stumbled into a human grove
and thought how beautiful
are these creatures, snapping selfies,
to share with tendrilled friends.After reading the collection, I commented to John: “I am tempted to blog this… not a review, but a reflection on your book in conversation with McPhee’s, as a reader encountering the region for the first time through these texts.” In response, he noted that the Pine Barrens are changing, not only from new development and natural disasters, but ethnic and religious tensions on the rise. In light of this, he wondered if some of his more speculative poems might come across as escapist.
Jenevieve Carlyn, “Histories in snakeskin and gossamer”: Reading John Chmura’s 539: A Year in the Pine Barrens
There is an early – now lost – paper by Boris Pasternak called ‘Symbolism and Immortality’ which argues that our impressions are subjective. However, he also argues that these subjective impressions are capable of being ‘the common property of man’. Pasternak is recalling this lost essay in his ‘Essay in Autobiography’ written in 1956 and he goes on, ‘I assumed that every human being leaves behind him when he dies his own share of this undying, racial subjectivity – the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul, art finds its . . . field of action and its main content’. He then remembers concluding that ‘the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience’ (tr. Manya Harari, Poems 1955-1959 and The Essay in Autobiography, Collins Harvill, 1990).
In Pasternak’s own work these ideas emerge in poetic form in moments such as ‘I want the heart of the matter / Always in work, / The chaos of feelings’ (‘I want the heart of the matter’) and ‘Success is not your aim / Nor noise, but gift of self’ (‘Fame’s not a pretty sight’). In struggling to complete ‘Essays in Island Logic’ I felt I had been blocked because I have been too anxious to ascertain, or assert, its meaning. Returning to the sequence again after a few months I felt more sanguine about this – chilled and allowing. As Pasternak is saying, all my work argues my own matrix of experience – it’s not me but mine. The objective world (though unknowable still) is processed through my own particular mesh – my set of harmonies and disharmonies – and must emerge coloured, spun, almost texturised, according to my personal self. As Pasternak argues though, each individual self has sufficient in common with all mankind so that only the extremely eccentric individual will be unrecognisable to anybody else. Hence experiences are both unique and common. If this was not the case, then art would be either excruciatingly dull or utterly alien to us.
It strikes me this is not far from Keats’ valley of pain. We begin with the fundamental matrix of any human being – a body, drives, senses, loneliness, seeking love and companionship – and this is grown on through the hornbook of our individual experiences, becoming, as Keats says, more unique the more we experience. These days I feel the truth of this more and try to understand it far less – the accumulated complexity and richness of even my relatively narrow life. This is the root of my railing against fundamentalism (of any kind): that it denies access to mature experience. It short cuts the truth – at least the only one we can get to. It may seem attractive at times (of trouble) but it is always an error. Odysseus learns this I think in the ‘Essays’ sequence since his earlier self was a fundamentalist soldier (almost tautologous – the perceiver of vivid contrast of necessity, us and them, victory and defeat). His previous egotism, eloquence and persuasiveness suggest this. In the past he has always employed language as persuasion, and I remember how Auden became so wary of the persuasive powers of language around 1939. In my poem, the aging Odysseus no longer wishes to divide and persuade but rather to take life as a whole.
In contrast, his son, Telemachus, remains locked into his search for a form of fundamentalism – what he regards as a cause, a purpose. He has yet to (may never) grow into the more complex jacket that he needs to wear. Poor Penelope has led the restricted life of a conventional woman (her tending the geese as a child, her long waiting, her role in the house etc) and she quietly envies male mobility and their encounters with the world. I have not been radical with her portrayal – yet she too is best seen as seeking the complexity of truth. So there are three souls in the poem sequence, all variously encountering the world. The tourists are equally in search of a rather simplistic remedy to their lives elsewhere: vainly seeking in the wrong places, the beach, consumerism, sex, geographical escape. The solution – if we can speak in such terms – is an openness of soul. There: I’ve said it. This is the first occasion on which it does not feel pompous or laughable for me to talk in such terms. It is the goal of the wholeness of our awareness that suggests the holiness of self.
Martyn Crucefix, Another Look at Odysseus (after seeing Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’)
Here is my interview at Lithub with Emily Wilson. I really enjoyed doing this—keeping the focus on translation.
One of the most celebrated classicists writing today, Emily Wilson achieved a rare kind of literary stardom in 2017, when her translation of Homer’s Odyssey made her the first woman to publish a complete English version of the epic. Her work, which spans Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca as well as Homer, is known for its rigorous commitment to traditional meter and its startling clarity.
Increasingly a public figure as well as a scholar, Wilson found herself at the center of the cultural conversation again this year when Christopher Nolan cited her famous opening line as an important influence on his own conception of Odysseus, only for Wilson later to publish a sharply critical review of the finished film.
Like a lot of people, I was greatly looking forward to reading her new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, which will be out in the US this September from Liveright. As a translator myself, I was especially eager to talk with her about the choices that make translation such an endlessly provisional art: what to preserve, what must inevitably be lost, and how to make an ancient world intelligible without losing the strangeness of it.
Leanne Ogasawara, Emily Wilson Talks Complicated Men, Celebrating Strangeness, and Why There is Always Another Way to Say It In Conversation
If you happen to be a writer, do you find there are times you doubt your audience? Are there readers (of your work)? Do they bother to pay attention, maybe for longer than 20 seconds? Can you name some people who support what you do as a word-artist? –I hope the answer to this is yes, but sometimes that dead-air drone of a satellite picking up no signals can feel discouraging. Literary journals that don’t get back to you for many a month; independent presses that offer no feedback for why they kept your manuscript for a year and then rejected it; I could go on, but you get the picture.
And maybe the problem, if there is one, is that you’re not keeping up. No dedicated website, not enough social media presence, no X thread, no podcast, no Tik-Tok book launch, no visual excitement. I mean, I get it. One reason I left academia when I did was that the university was making a change in its education LMS platform. I would have had to re-do all my tests, assignments, syllabi, etc. to mesh with the new platform, which would have required hours of Zoom and in-person training for which I would not be remunerated. Oh, that and the spectre of ChatGPT/Claude. And fibromyalgia symptoms taking over my days.
Nope.
I’m just going to sit with this knowledge for awhile, see whether I can balance 1) my desire to reach people through poetry in books and journals and online with 2) my desire to opt out a bit further from the popular culture that I and most US citizens grew up with. Poetry and popular culture overlap occasionally but not often [Rupi Kaur & such like], except in the poems themselves, since poets can hardly help but live within their cultures/societies. In contemporary poetry, I’ve seen references to cell phones, credit cards, artificial intelligence, smart cars, social media, celebrities. Heck, I have used those things in my poems. I love the metaphorical possibilities of the GPS, for example.
Ann E. Michael, Radio Nowhere
I’m not a believer in a writer being a “channel” for receiving language from some other-worldly place. I know that it is me writing the things I write, though I try to remain open to possibility, to play with sound and language in ways that are pleasing to the ear, to freewrite into weirdness. And these can lead to unexplained juxtapositions and successful moves I would not have come up with otherwise. But sometimes, I can arrive at a place where I surprise myself, write a line or an idea that makes me wonder “Where did that come from?” or “Did I really write that?” And, in my experience, that is when I know I have something.
I think this may be the reason that topical prompts usually leave me cold. When I set out to write about a specific topic, or focus on a linear narrative type of prompt (i.e., “a time when”), I lose the very thing I love about writing—the play and the experimentation. The magic beans in the breakfast cereal. The horns pushing through a nightgown. The meandering and the mess. The trusting of the internal compass to lead me to a place that is both crafted and “witch-crafted,” by which I mean, built with intention but also allowing for the unexplained to creep in.
More often than not, this approach leaves me with poems that never see the light of day. Journals and computer file folders full of them, to be honest. I just threw away a giant plastic tub’s worth of journals that have been collecting dust in the basement for years, thinking they held some kind of magic or mystery. But as I flipped through them, I realized that they were not special. They were frighteningly similar in some aspects over the years—entries about teaching stress or my frustration with my weight in the pages that weren’t poem ideas, and poem ideas that had either been fleshed out and moved long ago to the computer or died on the page. There was no need to keep them, and tossing them out felt a little like lifting an anchor, leaving me ready to sail on into whatever unexplained mystery comes next. In writing. In living. In a place where not everything needs an explanation to feel true.
Donna Vorreyer, Unsolved Mysteries
Writing poetry is a bit like a sculptor at work, carving a block of stone. The art is inside the stone, and all the excess must be removed to get to the art itself. An important point to remember is the finished statue or carving already exists inside that block of stone, but excess and portions of rock must be continually removed until the art is reached. But it’s there waiting. It’s been there. […]
The poem I was trying to draft became knotted, jumbled, unclear – too much telling on my part and even, in some lines, too much showing. Both may be equally damaging to the piece being written IF the poem is something else entirely. If my feeling about the subject matter is large, I might think the writing needs to be large. No. It’s not always that way. With this poem, “9,” my feeling was large, but the writing needed to become more laser-like, more focused. I began to cut away, to let go of phrasing, of images – and the piece found the page. The poem isn’t haiku, but it is fairly brief, twelve lines. My feeling was intense, and I wanted the poem to be long, to be full. My want for the piece was getting in the way of a poem. The poem wanted and needed something else, something less.
Sam Rasnake, Here, Let Me Bore You for a Bit
I never automatically assumed that poetry primarily belonged on the page. I wrote exclusively with live audiences in mind. When I came into a windfall after doing the Nationwide ad, I never even considered a collection — my money went on taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017, which then toured UK theatres in 2018. It was only when VERVE approached me to publish the show’s poems in a book that I even began to consider them on the page.
I also believe that class plays a role here. I come from a working-class background, and whilst creativity was always encouraged (my dad is a very talented painter), the publishing industry always seemed way out of reach, to the extent that it wasn’t even on my radar.
Finally, I have to confess that impatience is also a factor. Which makes sense considering I was diagnosed with ADHD in June last year, but when I first started, ADHD was just a lyric in a Natasha Bedingfield song.
If I’ve written a poem, I want it on MySpace Music within the hour, and I want to perform it at Escobar when I’m hosting an indie gig tomorrow night. No way am I spending two years chipping away at a manuscript with all of the poems in the dark.
Poetry is punk, it’s DIY, it’s urgent and essential. Spoken word poetry (or poetry spoken aloud) requires no barriers or equipment: it only needs an audience, an opportunity, a moment. This is what I loved about it in those early days and what I still love about it now. It can happen very quickly and spontaneously when it needs to, and if there are two things that a poetry collection isn’t, it’s quick and spontaneous.
On submitting my collection for typesetting – guest post by Matt Abbott (Trish Hopkinson)
Performance establishes the tone much more clearly, makes the main thrust of the poem unmissable. The print version, while initially harder to penetrate, permits more nuance and subtlety, and ends up feeling more complete and cohesive.
But is it true to say that there have emerged, broadly speaking, two distinct types of poem: one attuned more to the page, one to the stage? It’s hard to deny it entirely. When you listen to the kind of work performed at poetry slams, then turn to what is published in prominent poetry journals and award-winning books — or even if you compare poems distributed in video form to those published as texts — it’s apparent that different traits are prized. […]
Essentially, one might say that the stage poem is angled toward the limbic system — the part of us that feels and reacts instinctively — while the page engages the neocortex, the part of the brain that processes ideas, patterns and language more deeply and methodically. As such, the ‘page poem’ has come to be defined in contrast to the stage poem, as a primarily intellectual form — a vessel for new, difficult and delicate ideas which are unlikely to provoke immediate excitement.
The full picture is more complex. Page poems, of course, also make use of rhythm and rhyme — effects that are felt before they are understood. They are full, too, of emotional cues. And it is possible to find a balance; skilled performers and writers can come up with work that fits comfortably into both environments, even if it means they don’t take full advantage of one or the other.
Additionally, the two modes have actively sought compromise. Poetry publishers desire the larger, more diverse audience that the stage poem is able to draw so much more easily, while performer-poets and their promoters are attracted by the less short-lived nature of a successful book, as well as the stronger claim that page poems have to an artistic lineage. So both will sometimes imitate aspects of the other, and individual poets will often try to straddle the line, with varying degrees of success.
Jon Stone, RESOURCE / “Are stage poems and page poems different things?”
I suppose now is a good time to read the comments from one reader and then another. They represent two types of negative commentary: incurious and curious. One expresses what he believes is “fact” while the other admits his comment is an “opinion” based on evidence. One wants attention but is resistant to intellectual engagement while the other one desires a conversation.
From what I gather, the section of the poem which reads the most like “crumbly cement” is where I employed apophatic rhetoric, meant to riff on one of the most poetic sections of the New Testament, the definition of love explored in 1 Corinthians:
“Love is always patient and kind; love is never jealous; love is not boastful or conceited…”
There are things in the first half of the poem that have hidden meanings for me and my husband, such as the fact I have a severe allergy to the cherry blossoms that lined the large avenue near the university where we met. And there are no quiet Sunday mornings because getting five children ready for Mass isn’t a quiet affair. (It’s mostly me shouting, “No one’s going to church looking like a HOBO!”) However, I wrote all of these in a way that I thought would be relatable to any reader. Do they read like a string of clichés? I guess to some yes, and to others no? The editor who chose this poem for publication didn’t think this was a problem.
I tried to keep memorability and musicality front and center through the use of anaphora (“It’s not…”) and strict use of iambic meter with absolutely no substitutions, which is meant to mimic the beat of the heart. (The only line that appears headless or acephalous is preceded by a line that has a feminine ending.)
The “trite” title is borrowed from a song in Disney’s original Cinderella (1950). “So This Is Love” contains lyrics like “so this is what makes life divine” and “the key to all heaven is mine / my heart has wings.” In the movie, the words simply mean the couple has fallen in love, but when considered with my poem the “heaven” is more literal. The line “I heard you hum” which describes what I saw when my husband held our baby also evokes the humming in the original song.
I’ve been reading Joshua Hren’s title essay from his new book More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature. He references Scottish philosopher David Hume’s thoughts about beauty as being personal sentiment. From “Of a Standard of Taste:
Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (ST 7, Mil 229-30)
However, many philosophers have argued that beauty isn’t purely subjective. To counter Hume, Hren brings up German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand’s “Aesthetics” which argued that beauty “adheres to the object as a quality, independently of whether someone understands it, reacts appropriately to it, or enjoys it.” Just because someone enjoys kitsch doesn’t mean it should be celebrated as beautiful. There is a certain level of discernment that must take place, not relying on pure sentiment, and this is something that Hren understands as the co-founder of the University of St. Thomas’s MFA program where I am a student. All MFA candidates are required to take a course called Philosophy of Art and Beauty where we become well acquainted with Plato, Aristotle and other early philosophers who create a foundation for exploring Thomist aesthetics which defines beauty using the three main conditions of integritas (wholeness), consonantia (proportion), and claritas (radiance or clarity). These are things I constantly think about when I write my poetry. I’ve taken Craft of Poetry, another required course, where students learn the strictest definitions of metrical order. Most of the poems I have published are pieces that I have worked on for many months, if not years, because I am working to bring a wholeness, proportion and clarity to my verse. “So This Is Love” was written over the course of a year. I challenge anyone who tells me that I don’t know about craft and that this particular poem I’ve published in Nimrod is objectively and thoroughly bad.
I know people who hate heavy metal, and I know people who love it. I know people who hate modern art and those who love it. I know people who hate any trace of didacticism in poetry, and whose who don’t mind it, or even enjoy it. I know people who like dry, crumbly scones and those who like moist, buttery ones. There is such a thing as taste, and I am willing to concede that what I write is not to someone’s liking. What I would like critics to consider is that maybe there is something good and true about a poem despite not liking it.
I am the type of person who doesn’t want positive or negative critique; I want truly critical reviews that seek to improve poetry and ask questions about it, with charity and curiosity. The goal of my life is to seek the good of others, and one of the ways for me to help other writers is to understand the craft myself. One of the skills I’ve had to develop is how to receive negative feedback — publicly and privately. But I’ve also learned that sometimes the feedback reveals more about the critic than my actual work.
Zina Gomez-Liss, Love’s Labor is Lost on Some
once, in the early pandemic, i bought
Robin Gow, 9/8
a teeth whitening kit. i was spending
way too much time with my face. mirrors
bloomed where there never had been before.
i missed everyone who used to hold me.
my flesh, like a stage curtain. i put on
a whitening strip & turned off the tv.
silence, lapping at my feet. teeth ringing
like tuning forks. when i took it off,
there wasn’t as much change as i had hoped.
instead, a soft white across my mouth.
i smiled at every mirror i could. threw out
the rest of the box.
The trouble with literary criticism—whether it is done by school children or professors or freewheeling writers—is that it cannot be defined. Some critics write about biography, some about historical context, some about the dreaded French Theory, and some pick a poem apart word by word, as if they were stripping a Sunday chicken, ready to be broken up, put back into the pot, and boiled to make stock. This is by no means an adequate list of the various ways of reading. But we can make a distinction between those people who care about the way a poem makes you feel and those who care about how it is done.
This is the distinction, as Adam Kirsch puts it in The Modern Element, between “art and magic”. We call this the distinction between enchanters and engineers, or between Prospero in his cell and Faust in his study. The magic of poetry is the way that it can create a new sense of the world—can make you believe in things not merely unbelievable, but which we know to be untrue. The art of poetry is in the specific wording of the spell—change the words, get the order wrong, and the magic will not manifest.
Critics are often divided into two groups, like sheep and goats—Iliad people and Odyssey people; comedy people and tragedy people; Tolstoy people and Dostoevsky people—and we can divide them along the lines of art and magic too. When I was young, the two most obvious examples of these groups were Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom. Vendler was a practitioner of Art criticism: no word could be examined too closely, nor related too carefully to the rest of the poem. Bloom was a Magic critic, who believed poetry was what Keats called “A drainless shower/Of light”, which illuminated new realms.
Of course, all such distinctions are to some extent false. You might think Samuel Johnson was an Art critic, judging poets’ care for their meter and rhyme, but we find him under the sway of poetry all the time. He was often overpowered, especially by Shakespeare, who haunted him always, by what he called “the force of poetry, that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter.” That force is the essence of poetry’s magic.
For some of the Magic critics, poetry gives us access to a divine realm, a place beyond this world, Platonic, eternal, higher. Poetry is Magic in the sense that it is spiritual, giving access beyond what we can ordinarily experience. For the Art critics, Kirsch says, following Poe, poetry is a kind of mechanism that plays upon our feelings and evokes sensations. Clearly, both sorts of critic believe in Johnson’s force of poetry, but for different reasons: one because of the spiritual power of the poet, the other for his ability to work a technical use of language.
Again, we are loaded with a false distinction, but still a useful one. It is merely a trick of the rhyme, or is there a “really real” dimension of poetry, something spiritual, closer to prayer? Is poetry Longinian or Aristotelian?
Henry Oliver, What is literary criticism if it is not close reading? Art, Magic, and Common Sense.
In my classes, I’ve often used the work of Federico Herrero to talk about attention. Herrero is a Costa Rican artist whose paintings bring together vivid color, irregular shapes, landscape, abstraction, and the visual language of lived environments. One piece I’ve returned to is “Caravan,” a large 2018 oil and acrylic painting on canvas.
In “Caravan,” blocks and patches of color gather across the canvas in ways that feel dynamic and alive. There are shapes that suggest buildings and bodies, signs and landscape. Color suddenly feels like movement. Some areas feel dense and social, others more open. The eye keeps having to decide where to go, then revise that decision. The painting does not give itself over all at once.
That is part of what I love about bringing this kind of work into a classroom. It asks us to slow down and notice how we notice. The more time I spend with “Caravan,” the more I see how attention and looking are active relationships. The painting changes because I change in front of it. Or, more accurately, I become better able to see what was already there.
This connects to revision because when we return to a draft, it can be tempting to arrive with an agenda. But sometimes the draft needs us to sit with it first and let the page teach us how to read it. Revision becomes a practice of renewed attention.
José Angel Araguz, Federico Herrero and Revision as Listening
A few years ago I received an email from the great (and now, sadly, late) theatre director Michael Boyd. He had been commissioned to direct a production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo for the Royal Opera House, and he asked if I’d be interested in making it singable in English. Michael told me he’d read and enjoyed a version I’d made of Rilke’s Die Sonnette an Orpheus, and had hoped I might do a similar number on Alessandro Striggio’s libretto for what is often considered the first modern opera. With the benefit of hindsight, ‘hard pass’ was the one sensible answer available to me; but in my defence, I was not in possession of all the relevant info. I forgot to ask. My ego – the antihero in this little tale – was too busy with ‘It’s Michael Boyd! It’s the ROH! It’s Monteverdi! It’s Orfeo! Maybe I’ll get on the poster!’ So I agreed, and with reckless alacrity.
I’d worked with composers before. These relationships were usually described as ‘collaborative’. In my experience they were more accurately ‘cooperative’, me with them, and correctly so. Whatever you may have been told, the music is more important, and your text is going to be used primarily as a way of shaping the air; composer’s edits can therefore be anything between pitiless and nonsensical, and feedback can be light. (I recall David Harsent telling me that he once delivered a libretto to Sir Harrison Birtwhistle, whose only comment was to weigh it up in his right hand with ‘Well it’s not fookin Siegfried, is it’, and then open a bottle. I’m sure his subsequent notes were more extensive.) My previous disagreements with contemporary composers mostly revolved around a bizarre collective refusal – widespread, if not universal – to take much interest in either the prosody of the English line or the form the poem supplied. A poem written in ballad meter, say, would likely end up set as something totally bonkers that made no reference to the song-form from which it was derived.
No one is suggesting that all ballads should be set to ‘Oh Susanna’, but there are plenty of sympathetic alternatives; however the power imbalance has led to a general ignorance among composers of the better solutions available. For example, while iambic pentameter can’t be sung well in 5/4 even in Bulgaria, it’s very easy to set it in a half-time 3/4 – in other words, nearly all Shakespeare works just fine as a slow waltz, e.g. Shall ONE compare thee TWO a summer’s THREE [duh dah] / Thou ONE more lovely TWO more temper-THREE [duh dah] Rough ONE do shake the TWO-ling buds of THREE [duh dah] … etc. Which, while a useless way to scan it – Nicholson Baker got too excited over this old idea in The Anthologist – is an elegant way to sing i.p., and once the bar is established, you have a lot of freedom over placing the stress. (I.p. also works great in 4/4, where you split the line over two common-time bars: go and listen to Chet Baker singing ‘There Will Never Be Another You’, rare amongst jazz standards in that it features several lines of immaculate pentameter.) But surely L’Orfeo would be a far easier job? The music was finished. The text was already half written. Best of all, Monteverdi and Striggio were dead. Despite their poor rep, I have always found the dead to make wonderful and generous collaborators. I mean some of my best friends are dead.
Don Paterson, On the Importance of Doing a Bad Job
I’ve fallen in love with the wind.
Gary Barwin, Sonata for Horse Costume
Why? Because it sounds like poetry.
Like feeling romantic with the sea
or the barn one has already left
lured by what one imagines to be
(missing, after all, a front end) the scent
of long grass and the possibility
of great distance.
Plato believed in the primordial
horse costume, each of us united
with our other half in a utopian range.
I like the unobstructed view
and the gap.
If you, like me, have been saving up poems to send out in September when lit mags tend to open, albeit briefly (onto that in a second), you may have noticed a frustrating trend: the day the magazine opens for submissions, it hits its whatever cap on Submittable—and closes the same day. I spent two hours this week trying to submit but finding every place that advertised being open actually closed because of this “cap.” A terrible way to run a lit mag, and an institutionalized way of making writers feel powerless and worthless—and believe me, we already feel that way without lit mags charging $5 to reject us after six months if we are lucky enough to get in the three-hour window (East Coast time, of course). I almost gave up submitting poetry for good. I know I get discouraged with the poetry world, the lack of acclaim, money, respect, etc.—but this new hurdle is so rotten for any working person, caregiver, or West Coast person, honestly, I thought I needed to raise the issue.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Submissions, September 11, Setbacks, and the DMV
Over the past month or so, I’ve been seeing more and more publishing opportunities for AI-generated content.
Nicole Foor, Managing Editor of NewPages, has launched a new magazine, Beat My AI. She wrote to me,
[W[ith AI policies hitting more and more mags, it is always interesting to see how journals choose to actively incorporate AI into their journals. Such is the premise of Beat My AI which accepts two kinds of work: Works where 1/3 of content is generated by AI and original human works responding and changing the AI portion of a piece into something wholly human written and “better.”
The project looks interesting. The editors argue here that no matter what your opinion about it, “AI is here to stay.” Rather than draw a hard line against the technology,
Beat My AI implements a different approach. Because no problem has ever truly been solved by burying your head in the sand or looking the other way.
But before you rush to groan or condemn them, note that their submissions guidelines are not quite what you may think.
Here, they invite works that are human-created, but which have a clearly marked section that is AI-generated. This is called the “Original.” Writers are then invited to submit work, which seeks to improve upon the AI portion. This is the “Contender.” Over six weeks, readers vote for which contender piece fits best with the original. Hence, beat my AI.
It seems like a magazine actually more dedicated to human writing than AI writing, albeit using AI as, well, a prompt to stimulate human creativity.
Whatever you think about it, I’ve certainly never seen a lit mag that openly invites submissions which improve upon what has already been published. Since, in this case, the portion to be improved upon is AI-generated, presumably no one will take offense at the suggestions!
Becky Tuch, Happiness is a Warm Lit Mag!
I have the distinct impression that written-page poets and print-based publishers are currently suffering from a growing struggle to reach their readers and customers, having gradually shifted their means of communication from snail mail to email newsletters and then to social media over the past twenty years.
Matthew Stewart, Communication
Insta has always been more focused on spoken word, so the poets and publishers in question tended to concentrate their efforts on Facebook and Twitter. The former is now weighed down by ads and reels, meaning that it’s hard for posts to gain traction. Meanwhile, the average age of its users is rising.
And as for the latter, Twitter became the social media of choice for umpteen publishers and poets. Many had huge follower counts, got numerous shares and likes on their posts, and managed to drive much of their online promotional, marketing and sales activity through it. However, Twitter’s change in ownership, name and algorithms has ripped all that asunder. Many people and organisations have given up on X or limited their use of it, while the reach of posts has dropped through the floor.
In this context, a lot of outfits and individuals in the poetry world saw Bluesky as a natural alternative and rushed to open up new accounts there. A few months later, the majority of those accounts have been abandoned. I’d argue that this is because barely anybody stopped to consider that Bluesky works differently from X/Twitter, and your posts will wither and die if you attempt to follow similar communications strategies on both platforms.
Nevertheless, whatever the arguments in favour or against Bluesky might be, the fact remains that the core of U.K. written-page poets and print-based publishers are scarcely using it. But what’s their alternative plan? How do they intend to maintain contact with their readers and customers over the coming years? Given the atomisation of social media platforms, many new titles, launches, reviews, sample poems, etc, seem to be disappearing into the void. As a poetry lover, I find this situation deeply concerning. How can we communicate better?
To round off the review, Mark [Fiddes] kindly agreed to answer three questions about the collection [Hotel Petroleum] and I have included his answers in full below.
Your work combines elements of reportage with deeply impressionistic, lyrical expression. How do you judge where to strike the balance between the two in a poem, or indeed across a collection?
At a time when the leader of the free world has effectively turned current affairs into a reality TV show with him as the host/ringmaster, you want to say “Stop! These are real people. Real schools. Real bombs.” At the same time, you need to take a breath and say “Wait, have you tasted the pomegranate juice?” I believe our role as poets more than ever is to restore some sense of humanity and vulnerability to our increasingly transactional discourse.
Another strain within your work seems concerned with accenting, even playing with, the absurdities of modern life, e.g. rampant consumerism, the hyperbole of ad copy, the dehumanising language of bureaucracy. Where does this influence come from? Do you draw on your experiences as a creative director and formerly as a journalist?
Yes. I have had to write in many different modes and voices over the years, from investigative reporter at the Pentagon to scripting for National Geographic and even Durex. It’s hard not to let that language leak into the poetry – or sometimes to adopt it as a template. For example one of the pieces in the book came from an Out Of Office vacation message that grew into a poem. Last week, I flipped an irritated email to IKEA into a lyrical design brief for a new sofa.
I particularly enjoyed those poems in Hotel Petroleum where you seem to be in conversation with certain representatives of the canon (Larkin, John Clare…) and with the idea of what it is to be a poet. What do you think about the state of poetry today? Are we in good health?
In theory, yes. Global sales are up. Distribution via social media has never been higher. But poetry must take on today’s big challenges to remain relevant. First, Populism and its goose-stepping algorithms that divide and ‘other’ society. Poetry is the opposite. Its power is the power of belonging, to remind us of the basic humanity that unites us. The second challenge is artificial intelligence reducing the agency we have over our own lives. Poetry can be the wake-up call not to outsource our curiosity and experience but to relish the lucidity of the present moment.
Mark Fiddes lives in the Middle East and Catalonia, although he is currently in Prague as poet-in-residence in Kafka’s House for Prague UNESCO City of Literature. He has written three other books of poetry and a libretto ‘Threadlands’ with composer Joanna Marsh. His work has won the Ledbury Prize, the Oxford Brookes University Prize and the Ruskin Prize with awards in the National Poetry Competition, the Forward Poetry Prize and many more.
Victoria Spires, Welcome to your chosen moral universe, enjoy your stay
i’m currently preparing some notes towards a round table discussion on resisting the right through arts and culture. one of the provocations i’ve been set to think about is why the right are winning the war of ideas. to which my still incomplete answer is something like this: it’s not a war of ideas, it’s a war on ideas, one the entire media and communications architecture of the twenty-first century is geared to facilitate. it isn’t just that new platforms facilitate the spread of right-wing ideology, but that the kinds of discourse that they foster favour fascist thinking: shallow, aestheticised content, encouraging (also monetising) extreme declarative speech acts that admit no doubt, no otherwise, no challenge; information returned to us by algorithm, the nuance shaved out, instant answers only as good as the questions we know to ask. the medium matters, and this medium shapes and delimits thought, allows only certain forms of thought to root and spread. of course there’s a love-in between tech-bros and far-right politicians: tech is bringing about the material conditions for the fascist mind-virus to thrive.
sorry, that last sentence got a bit matrix-y, didn’t it? how early aughts of me. but it has been on my mind. it was on my mind when i sat down to write the poem [here], wondering if a poem could be a material tool/ an enabling architecture for (mental) resistance, could foster or incite another kind of thought – slow thought, ambiguous thought, historically and sympathetically rich thought? i don’t meant to suggest that my poem in particular was doing this, just that poetry in general, as a mode, might. which is where I chose to end the poem, on a fighting back that is first the writing of the poem, the reading of the poem – any poem – and a mental effort of understanding towards people whose moral position we find utterly repellent. can art create these conditions?
i don’t know, but my thoughts lead me back to “noli timere”, which is a call to courage, but also an offering of aid. the message i want the work to carry – the intention i want it to transmit, whatever it is ostensibly about – is something like “i am with you”. to raise a voice and a mind. like a shield, like sword. a torch to light our way…
Fran Lock, “NOLI TIMERE”
On the news this week, it was reported
that we claimed ownership of the moon—its hammered surface rising over beaches,
schools, parking lots, and detention centers;its cratered Sea of Tranquility where Apollo 11
touched down and the astronauts left bootprintsthat are still there because the moon has no weather
to wash them away. Perhaps someone will also tryto claim ownership of the bees and their gold
cells, the rivers and all their tenants folding silverlight beneath the bridges.
Luisa A. Igloria, Declaration of Ownership
You will hear the word culture used a lot. Often angry, pink-necked men will roar about ‘their culture’ being threatened, perhaps without really knowing what ‘their culture’ is. And this is understandable because culture is always changing ownership. The other week I performed ‘My Name Is Swan’ at Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare on the banks of the Thames. It was, you might say, an evening of culture, of music and poetry set in an idyllic location. For some, this kind of event is culture, high-brow, removed, separate. I feel uncomfortable with spaces that are reserved for art, domains distinct, detached, divorced. I’m not entirely sure this is where poetry belongs.
The Garrick Temple was commissioned by David Garrick, an actor and theatre reformer who changed culture, on one hand by making theatre more professional and on the other by making it more exclusive, expensive and elitist. He converted ‘the pit’ from standing to seating, championed a naturalistic, expressive acting style, introduced moveable scenery, lighting and stagecraft. He made theatre respectable but, with the introduction of higher ticket prices, he also excluded poorer, working class people who had made up the majority of the audience in Shakespeare’s day.
This is cultural erosion, this is the big steal. The denial of access to the arts leads to the kind of civil bankruptcy and social insolvency that has angry, pink-necked men roaring about the good old days without really knowing what the good old days actually offered. While they do know something is missing from ‘their culture’, while they may point accusatory fingers elsewhere, they are perhaps unaware that what they are being denied is poetry.
At the time of Shakespeare’s tricentenary in 1864 it was well understood that the poet had been appropriated by the wealthy and the well healed and that it was time to reclaim him for the people. Shakespeare had after all been born of the working man and the Working Men’s Shakespeare Committee was set up in opposition to the official, government-backed National Shakespeare Committee who, it was felt, were using the anniversary to promote a pro-Empire, elitist narrative. To recast Shakespeare as a democratising figure, a satirist of corrupt kings and courts the Working Men’s Committee decided to mark the 300th anniversary of the poet’s birth by planting a tree. They didn’t create an effigy, they didn’t build a temple, they planted a tree in a public space as a reminder that poetry, as well as being a living art-from, should be free for everyone.
In 1864 100,000 people marched through the streets of London to Primrose Hill to witness the act of putting in a sapling for a poet. 100,000 people walking for poetry. I think it’s important we consider that occaision, reflect on what it was they were walking for and, at a time of huge social and economic disparity, think about who poetry belongs to today.
Last week two of us went to visit the tree. It’s not the original, it was replanted in 1964, but this what poetry teaches us, if an idea dies you plant another. Naomi [Foyle] spoke eloquently about re-enchanting the world with poetry and while walking is still free I’m trying to find enchantment between sites, at locations, in doorways and under the branches of trees. I am still moving toward poetry.
Jan Noble, Nº81 The Shakespeare Oak
“What I fear most is despair
for the world and us: forever less
of beauty, silence, open air,
gratitude, unbidden happiness,
affection, unegotistical desire.”— Wendell Berry, from This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems, page 192
[…]
— I’ve been thinking about happiness, and the first poem in this post and the phrase, “unbidden happiness” has me thinking. I’ve been also thinking about contingency a lot lately, the idea that “if not this, then that.” And that led me to cracking open The Affect Theory Reader and looking again at Sara Ahmed’s essay, “Happy Objects.” Ahmed acknowledges “the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, the drama of contingency, how we are touched by what we are near.”
— “It is useful to note that the etymology of “happiness” relates precisely to the question of contingency: it is from the Middle English “hap,” suggesting chance.”
— What are theories of happiness beside happiness itself? Does one practice happiness? One practices the piano, we take up a practice of writing.
— Bruce gets it. Trouble is never far behind. But we can hold another in our hearts. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi says that “happiness, in fact is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated and defended privately by each person.” (from TATR).
— What are the conditions of happiness now? Being human means we have the very weird capacity to be both happy and sad simultaneously. Melancholic with intermittent happiness. Wild, right?
Shawna Lemay, Against Despair
Dolly Parton’s death was a gut-punch. I was a lifelong fan, discovering her old 1970s television variety show when I was 5 years old. I was so obsessed that my parents bought me the Dolly doll that was released in 1976 when I found it at a KB Toy Store (remember them?!) in the mall. I’ve still got her, as you can see in the photo. […]
In 2023, my poem “Roosters & Hens” appeared in Limp Wrist and was then selected by co-editors Dustin Brookshire and Julie E, Bloemeke for inclusion in Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology published by Madville (who also just published the Stevie Nicks anthology I co-edited). The poem is a roman à clef about seeing “9 to 5” that first time under very strange circumstances. You can read that poem here.
We are living through a particularly dark time, with the nonsense coming from Washington, D.C., the ongoing wars, the economy, the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Dolly was an antidote to that darkness. Her empathy, positivity, and embrace of all kinds of people were a counterbalance to the politicians and policymakers who try to divide us.
As a cancer survivor myself, I am awed that she was able to continue making in-person and social media appearances. Always with a smile, always with hope, even as she must have been exhausted and in pain. That selflessness is a lesson for us all.
Dolly famously joked about her appearance, often repeating the line, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” The truth is that behind that sassy persona was a woman who believed in the basic goodness of people. She didn’t make a spectacle of her generosity, ask for buildings to be named after her, or play favorites. Dolly said that when she saw a need, she immediately wanted to help, and she did.
May we all be more like Dolly.
Collin Kelley, I will always love Dolly Parton
And of course the Contral, with its three wheels,
was never going to make it. And long before
it sinks into sand out in the fathomless desert,
Auguste understands failure is not the point.
He bends to kiss the clogged carburettor, sits
in the perilous seat one last time, weeps.
My beautiful girl, we did try, didn’t we.He drains the radiator into a water bottle,
Bob Mee, POEM IN THE COMPANY OF AUGUSTE PONS AND PETIN THE SHORT
walks slowly east, retracing tyre tracks, dreams.
He prays for his miracle – and nomads appear
on horseback, incredulous to see such a thing:
a fat man in a suit and beret. They give him tea.