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: the tiny clothes of tiny women, weeds in heaven, an expansive view of Pandemonium, the shared texture of echoes, and much more. Enjoy.
Deep in the night: as if the owl had a bit too much to drink: “woohoo!,” it cried, then hiccupped, “oot. Whew!”
Then from the dark sky the great call of geese on the move.
Trees tinged, air nippy. I feel undomesticated, unmoored, half wild, half of me; the other half seeking shelter. In my head I am digging a deep hole, mole-like, My body though sways in the breezes, eyes on the sky. Is everyone so divided? Or am I bewitched by the seasons, in thrall to shifts and change? The garden is blowsy with spent blooms and nodding asters, the last bees butt-up in the zinnias. I am called. I am humming loudly to drown out the call. I may burn down the house. I may never open the door. Who knows?
I was moved by this poem by Erin Coughlin Hollowell from a recent issue of West Trestle Review, its longing and strangeness and the tugging threads of old connections.
Marilyn McCabe, weave a shirt from nettles
This whole festival has been like this: moving between places and events absorbing and connecting. But it’s more than that here, in Haworth. The Brontës are an almost physical presence. On the day I arrive, tired from delays from a broken down train and needing to stretch my legs, I walk about the graveyard, reading the names of the stones, standing and listening to the crows. I walk up a foot worn path to a drystone wall and am met with the moors and an outcrop of rock and the scent of the wind moving through wet grass and in that moment and I can almost see the three sisters marching off on an autumn afternoon walk.
The next morning I take a trip to the house itself; a kind of pilgrimage to the women writers who have come before me. I do the tourist thing – walking between the rooms, marvelling at being so close to the table where the sisters wrote, the fender where Anne rested her feet, the couch where Emily fought so fiercely against death. I look at the tiny clothes of tiny women, and marvel at the pens and ink pots and drawings and tiny books.
Later, as I’m watching a talk by the writer and historian Miranda Kaufmann, on her book Heiresses, I hear her say something like when you stand in a place where history has happened, there is only time between you. That’s it, isn’t it. There is nothing solid between us. I sit in the school room where Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell all taught the poor children of the parish, in this very room, in this very spot, where I am listening to women talking about creativity, about research, about writing. I can see through the school room window the edge of the parsonage and one window, and I think of them all, the ghosts of the Brontës pressed up against the window looking down at us jealously; at our ability to lounge on benches, speak to an audience, to discuss and argue and evolve and create. There are nano molecules and thought waves passing between us. What is a ghost but a collection of atoms returned to the earth at death and left migrate, to float giddily about in the ether. Perhaps they aren’t jealous then, watching from the parsonage, perhaps the Brontë nano molecules are amongst us, in us, inhabiting us.
Wendy Pratt, The Brontë nano molecules are amongst us
The latest from award-winning Saskatoon, Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris is the collection Sleep Gate (London UK: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026). A Canadian edition of the same is scheduled to appear with Thistledown Press in May 2027, the publication of which will mark her first Canadian-made book in twenty years [do you remember when Canadian Karen Solie had similar, a British publication prior to later publication in Canada?]. There’s a tonal quality I’ve long appreciated with Legris’ writing, one of intimate and very precise attention, detailing the science and study of garden technicalities through exacting lyric. There’s a distance to her attentions, also, able to articulate such intimate details exactly through the ability to step back and see fully, with the poems of Sleep Gate also exploring the further elements of dreaming and sleep. If plants have consciousness, might they, too, dream? This aspect of detailed phylum is one her work has been exploring with increasing depth since her debut collection, Circuitry of Veins (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1996), a book I was immediately struck by, when it landed (I reviewed soon after it appeared, back when I wrote for a local entertainment weekly). Are an exploration of gardens Legris’ own variation on Kroetsch’s “Field Notes,” an umbrella under which all her writing sits? Since that long-ago debut, Legris has published an impressive array of collections, each of which step further into what has developed into an extended study of detailed plant life through the lyric: Iridium Seeds (Turnstone Press, 1998), the Griffin Poetry Prize-winningNerve Squall (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2005), Pneumatic Antiphonal (New York NY: New Directions, 2013), The Hideous Hidden (New Directions, 2016), Garden Physic (New Directions, 2021) [see my review of such here] and The Principle of Rapid Peering (New Directions, 2024) [see my review of such here], with even a trio, at least, of chapbooks as well, along the way.
There has long been a meditative quality to the lyric responses around gardening, including collections across the past twenty years or so such as the poem-cycle meditations of Ottawa poet Monty Reid’s Garden (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2014), New Jersey poet Emmalea Russo’s debut, G (Futurepoem, 2018) [see my review of such here], San Francisco poet Hazel White’s Vigilance Is No Orchard (New York NY: Nightboat, 2018) [see my review of such here] and Cole Swensen’s Ours: poems on the gardens of Andre Le Notre (University of California Press, 2008) [see my review of such here] and greensward (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Ducking Presse, 2010) [see my review of such here], to further works by Victoria poet Lorna Crozier and many, many, multiple others. On the surface, gardening lends itself easily to the meditative (see also: Virginia Woolf), with certain poets allowing different elements to shine through, whether instead or alongside the physical act of tending a garden. Legris, of course, is far less about meditative landscapes and cycles than a particular kind of close-look, leaning closer to the ways in which Michigan poet Jen Tynes and Toronto poet Jay MillAr have writ about mushrooms, from her Mushrooms Yearly Planner (above/ground press, 2021) to his Mycological Studies (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2002), as well as more recent further titles: Mycelial Person (Milwaukee WI: Vegetarian Alcoholic Poetry, 2021) [see my review of such here] by Queens, New York-based poet Amanda Monti, and Mycocosmic (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], by Lexington, Virginia poet Lesley Wheeler. Legris’ meditative element of gardening digs deep into study and research, blending two ecological sides, one might say, of the same coin into something far more exacting. Her poems emerge from detailed language, writing of plants without getting all abstract or sentimental, offering, throughout her work as a whole, a deep reading of phylum and season, instead of any specific meditative means through to a separate end. As the back cover of this collection offers, how this new work focuses on “biological dreaming itself: the sleep beneath sleep [.]” Beneath the surface of gardening, the tendrils and runners of Sleep Gate articulate a further element beneath the surface of dreaming, and sleep.
rob mclennan, Sylvia Legris, Sleep Gate
In July, Anna and I delivered our workshop “Writing Bogwise: queer landscapes”, in which we used the lens of queer ecology to consider the bog. As a marginalised landscape in which resilient life-forms thrive against all odds, defying categories, breaking binaries, forming their own habitats in harsh circumstances, we argued, it is essentially a queer landscape. No wonder I feel such kinship with it. And as our workshop went on to show, queer ecology has so much to offer not just our appreciation of the bog, but also our writing.
Take sphagnum, for example: the bog’s keystone species. It grows at the top while its lower layers die and become peat: is simultaneously living and dying. Solid and liquid, resilient and vulnerable, the bog is a living example of in-between and both; embodying multiplicity, instability and persistence. Easy to overlook, it requires and rewards our closest attention. All of this means that it can inform our most fascinating writing, if we approach it as a teacher rather than a subject.
A close knowledge of the bog can inform the writing process – our Writing Bogwise project was grounded on this belief. Across this year’s series of seven workshops – with just one left to deliver on October 22nd – we’ve explored how the bog teaches us to write with openness and attention, to take our time, to write beyond genre, chronology and established form. It encourages us to break the rules, to push beneath the surface, to be alert to the multiplicity and layeredness of things; to allow for depth, uncertainty, fluidity and complexity in our work.
Clare Shaw, Neurodiversity, accessibility, bogs.
I want to offer a personal and not apparent reading of some lines from the middle of this poem [“Landscapes” by Lee Harwood]: “But there can be no self-flattery on this account / – it has all been decided for us./ The illusions of freedom are at last / shown to be so obviously ridiculous that / most people cry at this point.” I live with a visual artist who cries at paintings she loves. I envy her and study art not least through her eyes. And not least among her feelings is reverence for great paintings matched by reverence for their sensitivity towards light. This is matched in its turn by seeing afresh a particular scene on our travels locally. We may have seen it fifty different days of a changing year. Suddenly it is lit just right. We turn a corner and there is a scene, in just the right light, that makes a shamanistic bonding with the highest possibility of the whole. Maggie O’Sullivan is one of the few who can evoke this shamanism in poetry.
At a moment of the sublime, one hopes for reverence. Reverence can transcend even the worst argument an hour beforehand. One can even argue that human squabbles tee up the possibility of the sublime, such that the freedom human beings tend to idealise while in an argument brings them vulnerable and childlike into the moment. After an argument and the subsequent actions of the body that make me present, I feel, yes, freedom is ridiculous. Beauty brings tears that refresh the eyes.
Ira Lightman, Living In History 1: Harwood
Dear Friends,
This is the last of the questions from my interview with the Persian poet that I am going to post. I’m wondering if any of you have questions you’d like me to write about. If you do, please send them using the contact form on this site.
Richard
Fame means the condition of being well-known. Please tell me what are the good or bad points of being well-known? Anne Stevenson in her book, Bitter Fame, claims that Sylvia Plath’s need for fame could cause her mental distress. James Tate in one of his essays says: “Fame for a true artist is a luxury.” What do you think?
I haven’t read Stevenson’s book and I don’t know that quote by James Tate, so I can’t really use them as the context for my response. It is true, though, that when I first started to think of myself as a poet—I was an undergraduate in college—I wanted very much to be famous. I wanted other poets, critics, publishers—anyone who had anything to say about the value of a poet’s work to society—to call my work important and necessary. On some level, in fact, and it’s a little embarrassing to admit this now, I actually believed I deserved that kind of recognition. Foolish and naïve as I now know myself to have been, though, I’m also grateful for the chutzpah of that belief, since I don’t know if I would have continued writing without it. Indeed, I think all artists, regardless of medium or genre, need to have some measure of that chutzpah, because chutzpah is what it takes to lay claim with your work to an audience’s time (and often money).
You asked me, though, what I think about being famous. Fame—and this is something I wish I had understood a long time ago—is manufactured, produced through a combination of the right kind of self-promotion, having the right connections, having the right people advocate for your work, having the right kind of public persona, and, in general, being in the right place at the right time, both in terms of the kind of poetry you write and the person you happen to be. I know, for example, of at least one very well-known American poet whose fame is due in no small measure to the publicist they hired before their first book even came out—which means, and this is something we don’t generally talk about, they had the money, the privilege, the class status to afford that publicist’s services. This does not mean this poet is not “a good poet,” whatever you understand that phrase to signify. There were in fact moments of real power in their first book, and I am glad I read those poems, but the book itself, in my opinion, did not live up to the hype that surrounded it, which had more to do with what the market wanted than with whether or not this poet’s work added something fame-worthy to the art itself.
I don’t mean to say, obviously, that there aren’t poets who deserve their fame—and you and I might very well disagree about which poets should be on that list—but it’s worth remembering that there are other, equally worthy poets who never achieve fame, who keep writing anyway, and whose work, for those people who have read it, may end up mattering far more than the work of poets whose names everyone knows. I would be lying, of course, if I said I did not want to be better known as a poet than I am. It would be nice to be able to use that fame to make my art the center of my life in the way that only fame would allow me to do; but when I think about whether or not I really want fame, I cannot help but also be aware of how that kind of notoriety brings with it a set of audience and market expectations and how maintaining your fame can come to depend on your willingness (and ability) to continue to fulfill them. I am also aware that the fact of fame can end up conferring on anything you say or produce, no matter how poorly thought out or shoddily constructed, an aura of seriousness it clearly does not deserve; and I am sure we can all think of examples to illustrate that fact.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, What Are The Pros and Cons of Being Well-Known?
It’s been a rough few weeks for this news geek. I suppose they all are. But with the story about the “Cornell 7” breaking in mid-September and developing daily since, it’s been particularly tough.
It’s exhausting to be trapped in the loop of victim blaming and shaming. The loop of being scolded for not adequately protecting ourselves and being forced to hear the other side of that mouth insist men present no danger. The loop of standing together saying #MeToo and I Am Jane Doe and “believe women” while knowing they’d already have put a stop to this type of harm if they wanted to.
And while I believe that patriarchy, misogyny and rape culture hurt men, too, the power dynamic is undeniable.
I’m sitting on a full-length poetry manuscript that launches itself out of that space. It’s “about” feminine rage but not for its own sake and not even for revenge (though I have some flash fiction ideas about that LOL). My “Gertie” manuscript is about rising up for its own sake. It’s about pursuing pleasure and being loud and taking up space because autonomy and authority must belong to all of us.
It’s tempting to believe that Gertie would have given us so much to hang onto in this news cycle and that, since she’s still unpublished, the moment is missed. But that’s the thing: History tells us otherwise.
The loop of misogyny never going out of style.
I keep being reminded that this manuscript is my persistence, my insistence, my defiance. And even though prior versions are 0 for 30 (at least) and this version is 0 for 3 so far in 2026, I’m still poised to fight for her. One way or another, her voice is going to be heard.
Carolee Bennett, What Are the Things We Musn’t Lose?
On Saturday, I went to Doncaster for the launch of The Fig Tree Women’s Poetry Anthology, available here, co-edited by Stephanie Bowgett and Susan Darlington and published by Crooked Spire Press. It contains 68 poems by 53 poets, including, as well as the co-editors and Julia Deakin who contributed a foreword, some well-known poets like Sally Baker, Claire Booker, Rachel Burns, Sarah Leavesley/James, Maria Taylor, Jackie Wills and Sarah Wimbush, alongside lesser-known ones equally deserving of having their poems selected for this excellent and timely anthology. About 20 poets read in Doncaster, the last of whom was Sarah Wimbush with an immensely powerful tour de force, her list poem ‘The Girls’. […]
Nest Saturday, I intend to go along and see John Birtwhistle read in Sheffield. I (mostly) enjoyed his Partial Shade, subtitled ‘Poems New & Selected’, Carcanet, 2023; and the following Saturday, I’ve sacrificed going to see the mighty QPR play Birmingham in favour of seeing both Carolyn Forché and Kwame Dawes read in Sheffield, which will surely be amazing. It’s all happening.
Yesterday, Lyn and I walked a long way in the yellow sunshine, to the place where my favourite wild apple trees grow, and got a big rucksack-ful that ought to do us – well, me really – through to the end of November, I reckon.
Matthew Paul, October
When and how were you introduced to haiku and Japanese-related poetry?
About six years ago, in one of my online writing retreats with Natalie Goldberg, with no technical instructions or background, she began to encourage us to write haiku, after zazen and breathwork. She just told us to write those “Three Simple Lines,” which later became the title of her last book, narrating her journey to Japan in the footsteps of the Haiku Masters. So, I did. Right away, it became a passion, something I couldn’t stop, nor would I even try to. I made a radical choice: I let each haiku tell my love story. I let the red-headed cranes show the reader into its unfolding, and let my inner voice guide me in creating every beauty-full detail in the book and move the reader over that arc of narrative.
Then I realized that the first poem I’ve ever written, decades earlier, was a three-line poem in Italian that I carried in my mind for years while living in the USA. It described the beauty of a summer night near my place of birth by the sea:
luccichio di mare
profumo di gelsomino
nel silenzio lunare
glittering sea
scent of jasmine
in the lunar silence
Autumn Moon Journal 6:1, 2022/23When my haiku book was ready, I asked her—who first gave me the inspiration—to write a blurb, but she became seriously ill and withdrew from the world.
What do you enjoy the most about haiku, tanka and other forms of Japanese poetry?
A haiku…
Captures a moment in time and makes it last… forever, in its element of surprise or insight. To me, that moment is sacred, filled with a reflection of Truth, which is always in front of us, because it is pure consciousness, but it is unveiled in that unique moment and way. Every word holds infinite power. Monoku (one-line haiku) have, over time, become both a spontaneous and an often considered choice. Most of the Touchstone nominations I received have been for a monoku of only four or five words.
A tanka…
Allows more easily for the lyrical expression, the unfolding of a multilayered story. I started writing tanka only three years ago, yet it has immediately become the perfect way to open a music box, with that last line releasing the music, after the key winds it up… It’s the soul singing.
These very concepts that I fully embrace have been expressed in my favorite review of both my haiku and tanka books by A.A. Marcoff. In Blithe Spirit 36.2, he describes my poems as “flames of consciousness” where “both joy and sadness make the soul sing, and sing, and sing”…
A rengay…
Is a dance between poets that becomes more and more dynamic, intimate, at times provocative, and that ends in total harmony. Syntony in the relationship is key.
Jacob D. Salzer, Rita R. Melissano, Ph.D.
That “every lover of English poetry should read, and every student of English poetry should study” George Herbert, was T. S. Eliot’s opinion, of his co-religionist’s work. We should read Herbert not for the “exquisite craftsmanship,” or “the extraordinary metrical virtuosity,” or the “verbal felicities,” but for the “content of the poems”—a strange reason, surely? Great poems are great for the how, not for the what, or never just for that, is this not true, and common knowledge? Even Eliot’s diction works against him: “content” sounds so bland, after the excitement of “craftsmanship,” “virtuosity,” and “felicities.” George Herbert was a poet, not, in the horrid phrase that’s seized our time, a “content creator.”
What is the “content” Eliot was so high about? Many of Herbert’s poems record spiritual suffering, presumably his own, and appeals to God for solace or understanding. There are accusations against God, and pleas for relief. But this is not a new story, and versions of it are told, I’m told, even in the Bible. Contra Eliot, what makes Herbert worth reading—what makes his versions stick in the mind—is their unique mode of expression: their “verbal felicities.”
Consider “The Cross.” Herbert wanted only “some place, where I might sing, / And serve thee,” but as soon as “this dear end” is “given,” his “power to serve” is taken away, by illnesses physical and spiritual. Herbert’s description of these illnesses culminates in a perfect line of verse:
One ague dwelleth in my bones,
Another in my soul (the memory
What I would do for thee, if once my groans
Could be allowed for harmony):
I am in all a weak disabled thing.The obstacles are outside as well as in, and Herbert blames God, in another perfect line:
Besides, things sort not to my will,
Even when my will doth study thy renown:
Thou turnest the edge of all things on me still […]Even the most harmless things have a dangerous “edge”—what an idea. Also good is the first line, “things sort not to my will,” as if a human could have such power, that things would, of their own accord, do the bidding of his desires. Later in the poem is a shocking comparison, articulating the misery of his helplessness:
To have my aim, and yet to be
Further from it than when I bent my bow;
To make my hopes my torture, and the fee
Of all my woes another woe,
Is in the midst of delicates to need,
And even in Paradise to be a weed.This is Herbert the equal of Donne, finding truth in paradox, for how can there be weeds in heaven?
Brad Skow, The Problem of Evil
In 1832, as John Clare’s brief but intense celebrity as a quaint rural poet waned and he began to slip further into mental illness, his patrons, no doubt well-meaning, set him up in a cottage with a piece of land in Northborough, Northamptonshire. It was less than four miles away from his home village of Helpston. It was a disaster. Within five years he was admitted to an asylum, and in 1841, not long after walking the eighty miles home in an attempt to get back to his long-dead first love, he was moved to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he remained ‘like a memory lost’ in the ‘vast shipwreck of [his] life’s esteems’ until his death twenty-three years later.
The move to Northborough wasn’t the root cause of his mental illness, of course, but that’s the part I keep thinking about. People who haven’t been villagers don’t understand about villages. Four miles is an inconceivably vast distance. John Goodridge, in the introduction to this selection of Clare’s poems, says ‘it might just as well have been on the moon.’ That’s how far away he was.
When you grow up in a small village where your family has been established for generations, you are in the weft and weave of it, more than you even know. You walk to the shop and everyone you pass knows who your grandad is. You know, pretty much, who lives in every house and who their children are. You know the village characters and which ones your mum says to watch out for (“have a nice time and don’t look H___ in the eye!”). The next time you see your grandad, he knows you’ve been to the shop. This is lovely, if you’re used to it. It can be suffocating, but mostly it’s lovely. It’s also why it’s hard to fit in if you move to a village – it’s not you, it’s that they don’t know who your grandma is.
This may happen in cities too – I wouldn’t know – but in a rural village you are also geographically remote. Your community literally ends at the sign that says the name of your village, and there’s a mile or two of lanes and green stuff between you and the next one. We moved to the next one when I was nearly fourteen. It was a a distance of one mile. It was weird. It was really, really weird. I cannot imagine what moving four miles did to a man like John Clare, who loved home so much that ‘the very crow/ croaked music in my native fields’. I’m glad that John Clare the poet was feted for his poetry, and that he was there for it. But I kind of wish they’d left John Clare the man alone.
Nia Broomhall, Week 29: The Works of John Clare
I am doing a rare thing and sharing a poem that I’m not intending to publish anywhere because my heart can’t take it being rejected. On this day, 32 (!!!) years ago, my husband and I went out on our first date. Shortly thereafter his parents came down to campus, and we went for a walk to look at the turning leaves by the Potomac River. That is where Jeff’s mother, the ever lovely Gail/Grammy Liss, took this picture. (May she rest in peace.) […]
Could we have been so young? Sometimes I stare
At us beneath the leaves. We’re not just friends.
The light is glinting off the river, there
Behind us, as we look into the lens
To smile our careless smiles. How unaware
We were of the jobs we’d quit, the moves we’d make,
And all the kids we’d have, without a plan. […]It’s a sweet poem. Nothing to write home about, but it’s my Substack so here it is!
Another poet friend who married their college sweetheart is A.M. Juster who just had his 70th birthday yesterday. Ken Gordon over at The Sonneteer has a lovely sonnet (of course) by B. N. Faraj celebrating Mike. Funny enough, this means that he has just passed the age of the guy he’s recently translated, Petrarch, who is said to have died the day before his seventieth birthday with his head resting on a manuscript in his writing studio. And Petrarch also wrote about love, but in his case he didn’t get to marry his beloved like Mike and I did. Poor Francesco!
To you who hear within these bits of rhyme
the sound of sighs that used to feed my heart
throughout my youthful follies, when in part
I was somebody from some other timeIf you haven’t gotten a copy of Mike’s new translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere you really should. I thought Andrew Frisardi’s introduction was excellent as well.
Zina Gomez-Liss, Youthful Follies with Staying Power
In two and a half years, we’ve twice featured comic verse by A.M. Juster (b. 1956): his “Epistle to a Friend Concerned about the Ivy League,” in May of 2024, followed by the epigrammatic “Stern Warning to Canada,” to mark our first publication anniversary in early January, 2025. It’s high time we turned to him again. As Joseph Bottum has remarked, Juster — the pen name, as we seem bound to reiterate every time we do turn to him, of former Social Security Administration commissioner Michael J. Astrue — is an American treasure, even if America hasn’t quite figured out what to do with him.
Juster’s literary output bespeaks a dazzling versatility. He has produced thirteen books of poetry and translation; as I wrote of him in 2020, reviewing his collection, Wonder and Wrath, for Plough Quarterly,
A.M. Juster, poet, translator, and critic, has called his latest book, Wonder and Wrath, his first “serious” poetry collection since 2003. In fact, in the last seventeen years, Juster has produced translations, all from the Latin, of Horace’s Satires, Tibullus’ Elegies, the riddles of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Aldhelm, the Elegies of Maximianus, and those of the young John Milton. He has published as well two volumes of comic poetry: Sleaze & Slander, and an excruciatingly accurate book of parody poems, The Billy Collins Experience. If all this output falls short of the “serious” mark, you might be forgiven for wondering what “serious” actually means.
Add to these achievements the publications of a children’s book in verse in 2025 and, this year, a landmark translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and you begin to see that the model of the scholar-poet in government service did not die with Milton and Marvell.
Juster’s tight, crisp formalism lends itself readily to many modes and moods. In Wonder and Wrath alone, there’s the self-deprecating pathos of a man in a doctor’s exam room, meditating on the differences between the English depression and the Spanish dolor, juxtaposed with the marveling note of another poem’s description, in alliterative Old English cadences, of the encroachments of coyotes on a peaceful, domestic winter evening.
But Juster’s timing and precision serve him especially well in comic verse, whether he’s parodying another poet (Bob Dylan as well as Billy Collins comes under the axe), writing with grim gallows humor about terrorist threats, or — as in Today’s Poem — couching a father’s love for an adolescent daughter in the wry, ironic terms that parents of teenagers do learn to use, if they want their messages to land.
Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Untamed Daughter
All Donne’s editors prefer […] to gloss rapidly over his third epithalamium, written for the marriage of Robert Carr (a favourite of the king, then recently made Earl of Somerset) and Frances Howard on 26 December 1613. The Carr/Howard marriage was notorious. Howard had been granted an annulment of her previous marriage to the Earl of Essex on the grounds that the marriage had never been consummated and that as a result she was still a virgin, a claim that was widely disbelieved. The couple were hugely ambitious and — at the time of their marriage — enormously powerful and obviously corrupt.
Donne was far from the only person who had to grit his teeth and churn something out and its not surprising that his editors have been largely embarrassed on his behalf. Donne places the actual epithalamium as an inset song reported within a pastoral poem set in the chilly countryside away from court — an obvious and, in the circumstances, understandable if perhaps slightly cowardly distancing device. We might detect a hint of irony, too, in his stanza on ‘the bridegroom’s coming’ (i.e, to bed):
As he that sees a starre fall, runs apace,
And findes a gellie in the place,
So doth the Bridegroome hast as much,
Being told this starre is falne, and findes her such.Editors point out that this alludes to an early modern belief that all it is left from a falling star is a kind of jelly, but even so it is an odd image, with its emphasis upon falling and — surely— upon disappointment. I don’t think it’s accidental either that it recalls Donne’s own lyric, ‘Go and catch a falling star’ in which the itemised series of adunata (impossibilities) are all intended to exemplify the point that ‘No where / Lives a woman true, and fair’. The true adunaton is a faithful woman.
By far the best set of marriage poems for this unfortunate wedding, though, are the Latin ones by William Alabaster, which are both exquisitely written and hilariously sarcastic. I am honestly surprised he got away with it, but I suppose he probably copied them out and presented them to the happy couple along with everyone else while crossing his fingers and hoping they never got round to reading them.
Victoria Moul, Donne’s epithalamia in context
he stands, leaky and revealed. on monday,
Fran Lock, DO US PART
its vernacular of headaches. faint smile
somewhere between serif and seraph. on
the whetstone of my weariness i have
sharpened this rage; studied and extended
its music over my black grid of days.
now i feel nothing.
The ancient Chinese believed that a great guihua桂 tree grew on the moon, and that when it blossomed in autumn, the moon blazed brighter than at any other time of year. The idea sailed to Heian Japan along with everything else in the Chinese books. But in Japan, the character 桂 was read katsura, and the katsura is another tree entirely: native, deciduous, without a fragrant blossom to its name. Its leaves turn gold in autumn and, as they fall, smell faintly of burnt sugar.
So a Chinese flower, read with Japanese eyes, became Japanese autumn leaves (if I am getting all of this right!). And that is how we got one of my all-time favorite waka, from the Kokinshū:
久方の月の桂も秋はなほもみじすればやてりまさるらむ ただみね
Might it be because
the katsura tree on the moon
changes colors in autumn
that the autumn moon shines so brightly? —TadamineTadamine’s moon tree isn’t blossoming at all. It is turning color, like the maples. And Tadamine had never seen the tree the Chinese poets meant. Neither, as it turns out, had anyone else in Japan: kinmokusei would not arrive until the Edo period, centuries later. The whole poem rests on imaginative transmission, one of my favorite tropes, like the elephants carved at Nikkō by sculptors who had never laid eyes on one.
And speaking of the moon tree: in China, it comes with a man. Wu Gang is a woodcutter condemned to chop forever at the great 桂, which heals itself with every blow. Leave it to the monster-loving Japanese to turn him into a heartthrob. In Japan he became Katsura-otoko 桂男, an impossibly elegant and handsome demon of the moon, and women might be warned never to gaze at the full moon too long, lest he beckon them away and steal years from their lives.
Leanne Ogasawara, Kannazuki 神無月
October is my birth month / I have been thinking about what it is to be a writer / what it is to be a river / what it is to be / I am tired of / I am tired
Unseasonably mild / lying with the window open / body aching heavy with manual work’s residue / a fluting blackbird / vague road sounds / coffee in the air / a snatch of quiet hours / I thought I heard a nuthatch earlier but could have been mistaken / in my eyes / sunlight / sunlight / sunlight
The leaves aren’t yet burnishing gold / copper / pecan / don’t line the streets and pavements / with evidence of having lived / as a child I carried a carnelian stone / courage / creativity / vitality / I don’t remember what age I put it down / the last time I saw its chestnut / russet / warm-blood / hue / when I last believed in things that could guide me
Rachael Hill, With the window open
A psalm is, strictly speaking, a song of praise, most famously the 150 that make up the Old Testament Book of Psalms. Alan Baker’s A Book of Psalms contains a more modest 64 relatively short, numbered pieces, with an epigraph, one of two, from George Oppen’s own ‘Psalm’:
The small nouns
Crying faithAnd the poems that follow focus on the small nouns, by and large, the faith they sing, much like Oppen’s, being mainly secular in nature. Of course, the biblical psalms do more than just sing praise; there are laments, social commentaries, and cries of despair among them. Baker’s poems do all these things, and more:
Psalm 15
I stood at my garden fence one autumn day, sounds
Of a man digging nearby, his muffled radio, an electric drill
Punctuated by twittering sparrows, it’s of this
The world is made, an expansive view of Pandemonium
From the newsfeed, a column of ants, people who don’t belong
Here are the sources of our problems, migrants and resident song-birds
Sanctimony and certainty prevail, to write it all down
The better to forget, some skies are cloudless, some speak
Of weariness, some lour over shoppers and café crowds
And take a prurient interest in their gossip, or would
If skies weren’t empty wordless and indifferent to our fateThis poem is as good a place as any to start reflecting on what Baker is about. The world is indeed made of these ordinary things, suffused with the light of the observing mind. And there is, of course, darkness and light, the human and the not human, the sublime and the pruriently sanctimonious, and all is set against a scale in which our petty notions of, for instance, national superiority, are seen for the trivial little things they are.
And the non-migratory sparrow, along with various other birds, sings through these pages, appropriately enough given the second epigraph, a quote from the Bible ‘Psalm 102’:
I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.
I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.The sparrow, in particular, carries a range of emotional weights through Baker’s book. […]
As I read I realised that each line starts with a capital letter, but unless I missed one, there is not a single full stop in any of the poems. This has the effect of making each line, even when the sense runs over, feels like a new beginning, one that does not find resolution. One line tumbles to the next, where we start again, like water over rocks. It makes extracting lines to quote difficult; each psalm is stitched together by the punctuation, whole and indivisible. It’s a key part, to my mind, of the book’s dynamics.
Billy Mills, Paul Vangelisti and Alan Baker: A Review
The anthology […] has poems about brass foundries and button factories, tobacco farms and river bridges (though regretfully, it doesn’t mention the bridge over the Connecticut River that appears in Billy Joel’s 1993 music video for his hit song, “River of Dreams”).
Blizzards and other natural disasters are well documented, including the devastating 1938 Hurricane that swept away much of the state. These poems contrast with pleasant nostalgic memories of childhoods marked by ice cream trucks and trolley rides to Savin Rock Amusement Park, where the Thunderbolt rollercoaster stretched into Long Island Sound on a wooden pier.
I realized while reading that there were certain local places I was hoping to see reflected through the poems, and when I didn’t see them, it occurred to me that I might have to write those poems myself. (Some I already have).
One of my poems does appear in the anthology, a holiday poem about the local hospital where my father spent many of his final days. Most people reading this blog will already be familiar with that poem, since I read it aloud last December (the video appears at this link). It was first published in last year’s Winter Anthology from Black Bough Poetry, and I was grateful to see it included there, then again in The Nutmeg Anthology this year.
I often feel a tenuous connection to the place where I live, and never feel entirely myself here, but these Connecticut poems are a wonderful tribute to my home state. The anthology is a beautiful keepsake, and I’m glad to be part of it.
Jenevieve Carlyn, Poetry from the Nutmeg State
Kim Hyesoon began her literary career in a South Korean publishing house in the late 1970s where she frequently found her work censored as an editor. As a writer, she developed an elliptical style with occluded truths. In 2014, she began publishing blog posts anonymously, only pausing during the Sewol Ferry Disaster, under the heading “Thus Spoke Ahn-ah”, becoming Lady No in English. The posts are set in Aerok, a mirror version of Korea. The first piece notes “From Aerok, I write” from this place:
“The loneliness of a star called Earth floating in the cosmos.
Clinging to a corner of this lonely star, the country of Aerok cradles her tiny skeletal mountains. They are like so many insects banished from outer space.
Like the intoxication with echoes from a well with no water, this writing, is it to be drunk with loneliness?Here
to live.
To love.”A star feels more fleeting than a planet which adds to the sense of aloneness. Like Korea, its mirror-image country has a boundary of mountains, that appear tiny in the greater scheme of things. As humans are tiny in the universe: almost specks of irrelevant dust. However, Lady No sees humans as living things with a need to connect, to live and create a community. And to witness, as poets (and writers generally) feel compelled to do.
Some of the pieces consider poetry. From “The Name of Poetry”,
“Poetry goes beyond a ‘name,’ beyond identity, toward the pattern I drew as I was washed out into anonymity. The design of that pattern. Where verbs and adjectives try to fulfil themselves by drawing patterns inside the design, where pronouns and nouns turn into verbs and scatter. It is the secret of their escape.
A nameless one.
A nameless one, s/he whose name no one knows in the world,
The one whose name everyone else has forgotten
Is coming down the valley.
S/he kisses the stream of the valley and drinks its water.
The blue sky clings to his/her sleeves.”To be truly open to a poem, the poet has to drop their ego, and let the poem speak for itself. The poem’s speaker has lost their name, but not their connection with nature.
Emma Lee, “Lady No” Kim Hyesoon translated by Jack Saebyok Jung (Ecco) – book review
I should type quietly since the cat’s asleep beside me, having entered her autumnal snuggle-close mode. Even with the windows closed, the house is now in its liminal seasonal moment, poised between not cold enough to turn on the heat and too cold to sit without a blanket. Meaning, it’s perfect.
And, it makes me wish I were so. I’ve been so lucky these past seven months to see many of you and to share poems around the country, while celebrating both The Book of Marys and Glaciers and the 20th anniversary of Black Ocean and our incredible list of writers and translators with books old and new. I am so grateful to all of you who have made your way to one or more of the readings this year. Thank you! Yet, after all these months, I’m missing the sensation, a feeling of being fully in myself, that comes with seeing a poem through. All this time, I’ve been performing the role of poet, but not actively writing. It’s not writer’s block (the ideas and the desire and the project are there), but a suspension, the writerly me frozen in place waiting for the thaw of stillness.
I am very not good at sitting still. Yet, stillness, in space and in mind, is a frequent craving.
I think we’re all built of these paradoxes of needing the one thing we seem most incapable of giving ourselves (and it’s not something that can be given by any other).
Yes, I know I should turn myself into someone who meditates, but what I love most about yoga is the moving in the moving meditation.
So, while I’ve been moving, flying, biking, walking among the readings as of late, reading poems but not writing any, I’ve been thinking about the boxes of books in my basement. Boxes mostly of my first and second books, Intervening Absence and Forty-One Jane Doe’s, that I acquired on the close of my publisher–Ahsahta–and Small Press Distribution. While I don’t write poems in anticipation of a reader (I’ve never been so presumptuous to hope), there is a particular kind of sadness about books of poems that have not found their readers and don’t have the opportunity to do so.
Carrie Olivia Adams, Sitting in Wait
My daughter, a veterinarian, has had a wide range of experiences with animals–working at an equid center in Morocco and on a sheep farm in Scotland, observing the feeding habits of platypuses in Australia, and caring for the health and well-being of small domestic animals at veterinary centers in North Carolina, Portugal, and New Mexico. She was briefly here in Pennsylvania, recently, to participate in my mother’s memorial gathering, and one morning at breakfast I mentioned that I have been buying amazingly good sheep-milk yogurt at our local farmer’s market. “It’s so expensive, though,” I told her, “Ten dollars a quart!”
“I don’t know, that sounds a fair price, actually,” she said. “Have you ever tried to milk a sheep? It isn’t easy!”
Well, no. I hadn’t given sheep-milking a second thought. And now that I’ve looked at a few YouTube videos…let’s just say that sheep-milk yogurt is a splurge for me, but certainly a good value for the price.
It’s little times like these–moments that could be so mundane–that keep me from becoming too blasé. My daughter inadvertently reminded me that I need to stay curious and not take things for granted, that while looking deeper into a topic may complicate my understanding, complexity and depth are good results! Her worldview varies from mine in interesting ways, and I always gain information from her; sometimes, what I learn finds its way into a poem (see my poem “Drought and Blood” in Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis). But aside from so-called poetic inspiration, what I cherish are those opportunities to look at experiences, places, and people from another perspective.
That’s why I love reading. I read books about history, geology, the cosmos, physics, biology, botany, philosophy, theology, economics, even entomology. It’s also one of the main purposes that people should read fiction and memoir: to get a view into how someone else thinks, lives, experiences the world.
And, of course, it’s why I enjoy poetry.
Ann E. Michael, Perspective, again
When I read this poem for the first time, I probably shrugged and turned the page over, like I always do with poems that I later grow to love. It took reading the Adrienne Rich essay and watching her grapple with it for me to begin to love it, and since reading that essay I’ve never stopped. I think I read this poem, once upon a time, and realised I needed to create a house where this poem could be true, that it might take years, that it was time to change my life. As Rich says, a poem can’t ‘free us from the struggle for existence’ but it can uncover our desires, it can imagine a world for us that we might not be able to imagine on our own.
I ran a workshop a few years ago, and shared the Wallace Stevens poem with the group and then asked everyone to write about an experience of reading late at night. I wrote as well, or tried to write about staying up late one night to read the novel I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. My office has patio doors out to the garden. It was pitch black outside, and I kept thinking I could see a face peering into the room from the garden out of the corner of my eye.
I wanted to write a poem that was like Allison McVety’s poem ‘To the Lighthouse‘, which won the National Poetry Competition in 2011. I love the way this poem wrestles with the book, how the speaker maps their changing feelings about the book onto their changing life. I wanted to write like that about the Chris Kraus book.
It felt like fighting my way inside a very complicated maze trying to write the poem. At some point I fell asleep whilst I was trying and had a strange dream where I argued with my friend and ex-boyfriend M about I Love Dick. M had died in his mid forties in a road accident a few months before. It was a shocking and sudden death – but in the dream, we carried on our twenty-year conversation, our twenty year habit of disagreeing with everything the other person said. And we carried on loving each other in the limited ways we always had, even after death. He hated the book in the dream, as he probably would have in real life. So the poem became a re-creation of that conversation – but in the poem, it is just me talking. It felt like too much of a trespass to put words in M’s mouth when he wasn’t there.
Now I think that I thought I wanted to write a poem about a book I loved, but what I wanted to write about was limerence, and desire, and shame, and the refusal of shame, and women who come undone from what holds them to their normal, everyday lives, and the way some people will always be with us, even after death. And I wanted to write about M, and what Luce Irigary calls the ‘between-us’ – the complicated, beautiful, messy space between two people, and how all of it carries on.
Kim Moore, The House of Poetry
Oh I don’t know. I went walking yesterday and saw this bag hanging from a tree and so took a short video of it moving in the wind. I’m some kind of writer and so I thought this looks like some kind of art, some kind of prompt for writing. I’ll probably want to do something with it. Of course, I was walking because I was taking a break from sitting shiva for my father-in-law so everything felt like a prompt, like it had potential meaning, that I should triangulate between how I’m feeling and what the world suggests, or looks like, or is presenting some kind of objective correlative for me to consider. There is a kind of stark beauty to this moving bag. I might have just filmed it and then presented the image, but I felt compelled to speak to the experience of observing it. So I made this poem and music to accompany the image of the moving bag. Alert the authorities.
Gary Barwin, Bag in the Tree: everything is (a) prompt
Last night, after a tiring and chaotic return from Italy, Janet and I went to Rother Street Arts Centre in Stratford (upon Avon) for an open mic run by writer and teacher Lucy Parrott. There were about 35 people there in the end and it was good to sit at the back, listen and watch. There was the usual variety of stuff – some to my taste, some not, as you’d expect – and, as usual, some people either don’t practise reading and timing the pieces they plan to read, or just don’t have an accurate clock in their heads in order to stick to the five-minute per person rule. Sometimes it’s down to inexperience, sometimes to a genuine error, sometimes to an oversized ego.
This is a shame because, although the Stratford event was relaxed and easy-going in general, the basic principle is that if you take too long, the someone else later the programme is going to be cut short – or even cut out.
I will try to go to the next meeting and this time read something from Poems In The Key Of Aardvark. (If I’m allowed back after spilling my large glass of Malbec over the table and floor…)
I remember the last open mic I read at in Stratford was going way over because two people read for about eight minutes each so I read one poem that lasted 30-40 seconds to help get it somewhere close to being back on track. I didn’t really mind but shouldn’t have had to do it to accommodate the carelessness of others.
Poems In The Key Of Aardvark continues to sell, thankfully, though much of the interest has been from outside the UK. This surprised me until I looked at the statistics for this blog, where it’s probably advertised more than anywhere else. OK, it’s a modest attempt at communication, so it’s not high profile, but of the 512 visitors in September only 36 have been from the UK. That’s seven per cent. Most people who come on to read the poems or blogs are from the USA, China and India. The rest are spread among almost 40 countries – and relatively few of those are in Europe.
The break in Italy – the island of Ischia to be precise – got me writing in longhand in a notebook, so I have to decipher that and see if there are any half-decent poems lurking there. It also gave me time to re-work Novel No.4 which stubbornly refuses to be abandoned. I think I found the key to why I didn’t think it was working, so have begun to re-write and develop it. We’ll see what happens. Part of the fun, of course. I’m only 32,000 words in so who knows if, or for how long, it will survive.
Bob Mee, THE GREAT VALUE OF OPEN MIC POETRY EVENTS
Rare for me to manage to get down some words about an occasion before it happens, but this time I’m very much in the organising chair. Thankfully not the Festival Director’s chair — that responsibility belongs to my friend Angus Allman, compere of CB1 Poetry — but I’ve been heavily involved with this resurrection project from the beginning, and suddenly it’s just around the corner.
Cambridge Poetry Festival originally ran from 1975 to 1986, biannually, and hosted Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, Roy Fisher, Octavio Paz (etc, etc — you get the idea!). The 2026 version will feature international guests (China’s Ma Yongbo, South Africa’s Athambile Masola), along with current and emerging poetry stars (Zain Kakooza, Clare Pollard, Jade Cuttle). Perhaps more importantly, it draws together most of the local poetry scene in its programme of fringe events, salons and workshops, as well as weaving in some more unusual types of activity. […]
What else to say at this point? Well … it’s been predictably exhausting and frantic behind the scenes — especially alongside the start of a new university term and my current editorial duties (both for Sidekick and the upcoming Game Poems Magazine #2). We’re doing it all on a threadbare budget — essentially, just money raised from various warm-up events that have been staged over the last year-and-a-half. Between us, the organising committee have, I think, zero experience of staging things on this scale. Then again, it’s really just a bunch of regular-sized events strung together, so what could possibly go wrong?
Don’t answer that.
Jon Stone, DIARY / Cambridge Poetry Festival
I told you when I started that I am bad at schedules and consistency, and so there has been a gap in my poetry memorization. Nor have I retained everything I learned earlier this year. Sad, sad, very sad! Still, I have a lot more of it than I used to. And now I have this splendid poem by Wordsworth by heart, one of the ‘Lucy’ poems, which almost clung to me like a magnet, as the best poems so often do. You can find it on Poetry Foundation. My other recitations are here. […]
And here is the passage from ‘The Uncommon Reader’ by George Steiner that made me realize I had stopped memorizing for a year or so and really ought to start again more seriously.
Le Philosophe lisant, like the cultured men around him in a tradition which runs from classical antiquity to, roughly, the First World War, will know texts by heart (an idiom worth thinking about closely). They will know by heart considerable segments of Scripture, of the liturgy, of epic and lyric verse. Macaulay’s formidable accomplishments in this respect — even as a schoolboy he had committed to memory a fair measure of Latin and English poetry — were only a heightened instance of a general practice. The ability to cite Scripture, to recite from memory large stretches of Homer, Virgil, Horace or Ovid, to cap on the instant a quotation from Shakespeare, Milton or Pope, generated the shared texture of echoes, of intellectual and emotive recognition and reciprocity, on which the language of British politics, law and letters was founded. Knowledge by heart of the Latin sources, of La Fontaine, of Racine, of the trumpet-calls in Victor Hugo, has given to the entire fabric of French public life its rhetorical stress. The classic reader, Chardin’s lisant, locates the text he is reading inside a resonant manifold. Echo answers echo, analogy is precise and contiguous, correction and emendation carry the justification of accurately remembered precedent. The reader replies to the text out of the articulate density of his own store of reference and remembrance. It is an ancient, formidable suggestion that the Muses of memory and of invention are one.
I hope you will join me in memorizing more poetry. It might be the best contribution we can all make to literary culture! Soon I will record the Herrick poem I memorized last year too…
Henry Oliver, A Slumber did my Spirit Seal, by William Wordsworth
Emily Dickinson warns that one shouldn’t lose connections to memories. I believe we should keep the good ones close to us, holiding on to them as long as possible. They should be, according to Dickinson, rooted in us. Here is poem #1508 (Johnson ed.) that fully expresses her feelings about memories:
You cannot make Remembrance grow
When it has lost its Root—
The tightening the Soil around
And setting it uprightDeceives perhaps the Universe
But not retrieves the Plant—
Real Memory, like Cedar Feet
Is shod with Adamant—Nor can you cut Remembrance down
When it shall once have grown—
Its Iron Buds will sprout anew
However overthrown—“The Basement Stacks” is my way of holding on. The pieces, for the most part, are so personal I’m not sure how relevant they are for readers. But, memories have surfaced during the writing that I’d simply forgotten. This series has allowed me to rediscover so much about myself.
Sam Rasnake, New poem: “The Basement Stacks: 13”
Let’s start with the news that a new magazine was born today. The proud parents (William Thompson and James O’Hara-Knight) have called it Yield and you can read it here. I have this morning and enjoyed every page. I won’t call out specific poets otherwise I have to name them all, but go…read it..Yield to the poems and thoughts it will yield. Oooh, you see what they’ve done there. You can if you want/like me also listen to Pearl Jam’s Yield album while you do it.
I had submitted to Yield and was unsuccessful/rejected/declined, etc (delete according to your own brand of not getting in to a magazine, etc), but reading the issue I can see why. Onwards and sideways there, especially after a week or two of other rejections from The Rialto and Northern Gravy. I’ve got a big pile of poems waiting to go out, so I should get on with that.
Mat Riches, Bees wearing boxing gloves
I had been trying to write about Nancy Drew taking up quilting. I was leafing through A. E. Stallings’ Afterlife, her wonderful collection of mostly published poems, and came across “Medea, Homesick.” I thought about Nancy Drew, homesick for her youth. And a poem just tumbled out of me.
This morning I’ve been looking at rough drafts of poems that I’ve composed in the last 2 months. My goal for Fall Break is to finish one or two. I am delighted to realize that I’ve written more than I remembered, although some of them are just some lines that may or may not have potential.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Rough Drafts and Fall Break
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is a work that I adore. It sings off the page, is beyond form, it bumps and lurches, it isn’t perfect but it purrs. Oh it purrs. It is an extraordinary free verse symphony. I read it in one sitting and then bought everything I could find by (and about) Elizabeth Smart. I researched her story in depth and detail, I even wrote a screenplay about her and George Barker’s affair. Smart herself had tried to write it for film but didn’t manage it with much satisfaction. I got as far as meeting the woman who owned the rights to the book who served me with a politely disguised cease and desist notice. “You need to find your own story” she said, “go write that instead.” And so I did.
There are three works in my collection My Name Is Swan, the title poem, its sequel, Reynard, and the concluding piece, Body 115. This final, long-form poem owes much to Smart and her odyssey, the harrowing opera that she scripted and lived before ever writing it down. In the last act of a tempestuous relationship I, against all reasoned advice, set off across Europe to meet my estranged lover, on New Year’s day outside the Duomo in Milan. I knew in my bones that such gestures rarely bring about meaningful reconciliation and I was driven by the poetry of the occasion. Little else could save us. In any case our story needed a conclusion and I wasn’t entirely surprised when she never showed up. But I got my ending. Sitting outside Milan’s Central station in the January rain I knew at least I had a poem to take home.
Jan Noble, Nº84 By Milano Centrale I sat down and wept
Initially I didn’t want to add a note to this poem. Our custom is to share our work and give some insight into its composition, but – really – I didn’t want to say anything about the sadness behind it. However, a couple of months have passed, and I can see that a large part of the poem’s drive is in addressing these terrible, conflicting emotions after a loved one takes their life. But what can one say? I wanted to be true. In the afterwards, we veered through every feeling. We accused ourselves. And him. We swore at him and what brought him there. It was huge. So hugely awful – but so simple: prior to the funeral, there was just a box in the room. We were angry – but God, we loved him then too. I did dream of him afterwards. And though I’ve never asked, I’d swear that others must have too.
We are at a point where around 7000 men and women take their lives each year in the UK. What can we say about the grief of such a situation? I do not know. I just know a miserable regret. The world is missing a graceful and beautiful man.
Niall Campbell, The Garden
What is your mood going into October? Right now I’m cooking pumpkin goat cheese pasta and Glenn is putting up Halloween lights (Glenn goes all out for Halloween decor!)
Since I was sick for several days last week it was nice to get out on a really perfect fall day (not too hot, blue sky, a chance to enjoy the fall leaves and flowers before they’re all knocked out by our usual October wind/rain storm.)
I also am happy to report I have a poem upcoming in Uncanny, which is a really cool magazine I had never submitted to because of its “hard sci fi” reputation. I spent September sending out work, and I’ve already had a couple of acceptances and rejections from that. October is seeming a little more productive, with me finally thinking about the next book after Fireproof, writing new work in a little but more of a playful vein instead of sticking to a theme or pattern. I’m also thinking about writing in other genres a little bit more – there’s no rule that poets can’t try other genres, and I think I like the challenge that other shapes and rules give me.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Skagit Weekend with Pumpkins, Gardens, and Amazing Light, Owls and Coyotes for Spooky Season, October Moods
— I’ve shared this quotation by Adam Zagajewski before from his book Eternal Enemies, and don’t we all have a few of those by now?
“hey, friends, courage,
life is beautiful”— I wrote Courage, life is beautiful, on a mirror in red lipstick, thinking I’d said something original before rummaging around in my memory banks for the AZ reference. The trouble with often quoting a line by someone else, it starts to feel like your own. I’d like to think I had his blessing for the use here. He’d probably write a dry poem about the obscure Canadian writer quoting his work in lipstick. […]
— I once owned a copy of Siding with Things, a now out of print translation of Francis Ponge’s thing poems. The book’s binding had disintegrated and at some point I let it go. In 2016 A new translation Partisan of Things translated by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau appeared and I’ve just now got to it. Corey says in the intro: “To exist in this world is to be fragile, subject to constant change; to find acceptance of that fact is an act of heroism…” He goes on, “For Ponge, the world is something that must be made, and this happens when we give le monde muet, the silent world, a voice.” And then he quotes Ponge, “We have to flourish, develop, produce the world around us — bathed and immersed in the silent world — that is our natural environment, our only true home; around us, through us, feeding us; we are part of it…”
— It seems notable that it was written in the preamble to WWII, during which Ponge fought for the resistance. How can our attention to things now be a sort of resistance?
Shawna Lemay, Courage Ongoing, Tone, Flourishing, Acknowledging
What will happen to text
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Transport
in a place where time does not exist? There
are children holding planets and truth and
glimpses of tomorrow. Dead before they learnt
to put down wonder. I carry an excess of fury,
they say. I can pay, perhaps? Haven’t we always
paid for all the anger we cannot hold and cannot
speak and cannot translate between their lines
of acceptability.
But we need to keep going, don’t we? To believe that humanity will meet the challenges posed by climate change, and find a balance between the great promises of artificial intelligence and its great dangers. To believe that fascism will not gain a permanent upper hand, but begin to be beaten back by moderate and progressive voices. To believe that those whose lives are motivated by greed, power, and domination will not have the last say.
What helps? For me it’s keeping busy with work that I find meaningful, being involved with others in social and community projects, remaining always in sight of the beauty of life and trying to share it with others.
This past week I played a short flute recital at the cathedral, in a concert with other musicians that I helped organize, for the annual province-wide Journées de la Culture.
I also gave a relief printmaking demonstration as part of the cathedral’s weekend roster of events; that was well-attended and a lot of fun for me to plan and present.
Another recital at the Armenian Cultural Center, scheduled for yesterday, had to be postponed because the organizer and main pianist had an accident and hurt his leg.So now that I don’t have to practice quite as strenuously as I have been lately, I can return to drawing and painting, and hopefully finish the book that I’ve been working on this summer and early fall. The drawings and watercolor in this post were all done in the past few days.
Beth Adams, Taking the Long View
Who said to me once, You write so well
about suffering? That gave mepause. And another time, I am so glad
I don’t have to think of things like that.
Trees bent by the long monsoon,unceasing eddies in the lake; mildew
Luisa A. Igloria, Not Just Suffering
collecting intentions on the bathroom
walls— Do these, too, speak of suffering?
I recently found my first conker of the season during a stroll in someone else’s town, and I brought it home to place by the front door. Perhaps it is true that the scent that they emit whilst drying is a deterrent for large spiders, perhaps I have just set myself a reassuring ritual for each autumn. Feeling its smoothness reminded me that I had written a poem about a conker so I was eager to rummage through my poetry files to find it and see if I thought it was any good on a reread. I do rather like it, and it was fun to receive some positive feedback about it when I shared it on social media and then in a writing workshop. And my thanks to a person from Australia in the workshop who asked me what a conker was, and therefore reminded me that my thought about taking one with me would have been a good idea after all. Sometimes I overthink things and talk myself out of them whilst wondering if people will think I am silly or childish for taking a conker or my special glass marble to a poetry workshop. And actually those are the things that run through the core of me and make me me… I will take this as the perfect reminder to pop such things in my workshop bag in the future.
Good friends are a wonderful reminder of what’s in the core of you. People who really see you and know you, and I felt my soul become as shiny as that conker during the week when I went for minty tea with a lovely friend. Mix that in with shenanigans in a zoom room and a night out at the theatre to see Susan Calman and my soul felt super zingy.
There’s a romantic nostalgia that has been rising in me these last few weeks and music and sunset drives, as well as all those good conversations and laughter have been asking me to notice the change of season, and how I am standing in it. As a gentle nod to this I have decorated the fireplace with autumnal things. I am motivated to dust things properly when there is going to be a new arrangement, and I have loved seeing the simple display of ‘things’ that signifies I am observing the tilt of the earth. I have even been heard to say that I am going to make the mantelpiece seasonal every month.
Here’s to friends, to candles that can be lit in the darker evenings, and to remembering that licking conkers is not a good idea.
Sue Finch, CATERPILLAR OR SHOELACE
autumn silence
Tom Clausen, autumn silence
the clippers found
rusted shut