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 poem with a gun in it, some semblance of silence, kernels of clarity, an obsession with ephemera, and much more. Enjoy.
“Is all poetry about death?” someone asked at a poetry reading recently. Sometimes as I read, it seems that way. But I think all poetry is about uncertainty, insecurity, a whistling in the dark. Is a lot of the insecurity about life’s end? No doubt. No doubt. I try to avoid poems about mortality, although they are ubiquitous. I like the poems that grapple more with the other half of the equation. As Annie Lennox sings, “Dying is easy. It’s living that scares me to death.”
Marilyn McCabe, I should not exclude myself from this
When I was writing ‘No Map Could Show Them’, I was commuting to Leeds every day from my little corner of South Yorkshire. I was working at the university. From my tiny office window, the view was dominated by a tree – I couldn’t tell you what kind, just that in my memory it was aways in autumn plumage. Impossible.
Today I went back to Leeds and walked past my old room. Blue skies, liberatingly blue. An encroaching cold. I didn’t look up in case my ghost was still there at the desk. I carried on, past the School of English towards the sports centre.
There: a poem I wrote a decade ago emblazoned across a series of giant climbing holds, multi-coloured and bright. A poem inspired by Alison Hargreaves. A piece set on Stanage Edge. Its stanzas were intended as a spell of sorts, a plea for days when nothing amazing happens but nothing awful happens either. Sometimes, that’s more than enough.
You can now sit on my poem if you want and eat your lunch. I like that. I like the sense of it being overtaken by everyday events, dominated by the mundane or the suddenly important. I like the idea that people might ignore the words entirely, too busy having conversations that matter more. Or less. Or just as much. Or saying nothing, meaning just enough.
Here’s the text of the piece in full:
Prayer
Give us good days.
Days unspectacular but adequate:
the weather neither calm nor wild,
your coat zipped nearly to the top,a silver thermos cooling in your bag,
the sky at Bamford reddening, as if
embarrassed by its own strange reach
and day-old, pipe-smoke clouds.Above the Hope cement works,
Helen Mort, Is it a poem? Is it a climb? Is it a chair?
crows wheel arcs of guarded flight
and when you touch the rock
your fingers hold.
When we first moved to South Florida, I didn’t realize how different the seasons would be. I didn’t miss winter much, and summers seemed similar to South Carolina, but every year I had a fierce yearning for fall. One year we bought two puzzles, and I still remember the one with the autumnal picture. It was a nineteenth century town with horses and wagons and a big dance happening in the center of the village. The trees had the perfect assortment of autumnal leaves and pumpkins dotted the puzzle landscape.
We put that puzzle together in the fall of 2001, when the world felt so topsy-turvy. It was soothing to put the puzzle together.
I was teaching the British literature survey class, and I had Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” on my brain–those figures on the urn, forever frozen in whatever emotional moment they experienced right then. I thought the puzzle offered a similar dynamic.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Autumn Odes and Puzzles
It’s an interesting spiritual question that Keats poses: is it better to be forever poised to kiss the beloved? Is it better to live in the moment of anticipation, rather than having to deal with all the messy humanness that comes after the kiss, once we truly know our beloved?
And there are larger questions posed by both the urn and the poem: how do we stay in the here and now? How do we not get distracted by our sorrows? How do we maintain our faith, in the face of enormous woes? For me, during that autumn of 2001 that broke our hearts in so many ways, the answer came in the jigsaw puzzle.
After months of reading and recording poetry aloud — my own poems and those by beloved poets (Emily Dickinson, Rilke, Sara Teasdale, W.S. Merwin, Teresa of Ávila, and others) — my voice went unexpectedly and inexplicably quiet.
When I look back at this time last year (and the year before that), I experienced something similar, so it might be seasonal. An energy-conserving form of hibernation. A time to reflect rather than speak. […]
Recently, I had a couple of poems accepted by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire for its quarterly publication, Touchstone. The poems are from a chapbook sequence I have been working on about four generations of family history. Touchstone also has an audio edition that will feature contributors’ poems, and Friday is the soft deadline for sending audio files. This means, it is time for me to find my voice again.
Jenevieve Carlyn, “A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall”
Up and down this alley of student rentals,
ritual takes hold of a waning weekend:
late October, Indian summer, ash trees
showering leaf-goldon back-yardlets churning with youthful bodies,
muscled, sweat-slick, bawdy, lit up with victory,
drunk and singing, roaring the last hurrahs of
Homecoming game day.Noise, grill smoke, and memory hold the neighbors
Maryann Corbett, Kudos, O Victors
spellbound at it all, at the pure unknowing
lifted up in these chesty pop-punk odes and
beery libations—
Here in London, Autumn is finally here and today my little backyard is exploding with bright orange marigolds that I do not remember planting, but seem to be blooming just in time for Halloween, All Saints Day and for Santa Muerte herself. With these flowers, I feel blessed.
Before I begin I wish to do some shout outs and thank yous to all the superstar poets I have seen since I last wrote, massive thank yous to all I drank rum with and danced and howled at the moon with. Thank you for joyous times down at Arvon and Totleigh Barton, Hastings Book Festival, Morecambe Poetry Festival, The Hastings March for Unity and to stand up and support the RNLI and also the Cable Street 90th Anniversary. Thanks also to Bradley Taylor, the new Poet Laureate of Birmingham, for one of the happiest National Poetry Day nights ever. This seaside photo above is by photographer Richard Davis taken on the seafront at Morecambe Poetry Festival, ahh we had such a lovely long weekend, an epic marathon of poetry and pints, thank you.
Since I last wrote a long substack post, I have spent most of my hours working on the final fiddly tweaks of The Life Of Life. The good news is we have now managed to send the proofs to print, just around the time of Autumn Equinox and the Harvest Moon. My new novel will be in all of your favourite bookshops in time for the Crow Full Moon, Spring Equinox, on March 25 2027. I’m enjoying my book making being back in synch with the moon cycles again.
Salena Godden, Gathering Sweet Octoberries
I went for a swim with Julie the other day. It was cool and blissful – about the same water temperature as the day in spring when I took a call from photographer Alex Ramsay He rang to let me know we’d been offered an opportunity in Salt, Girona, at the Casa De Cultura Les Bernardes (CCLB) to exhibit Os – a collection of Alex’s exquisite black and white photos of bones and my poems written in response.
I took Alex’s call on my Bluetooth earbuds while swimming head-out-of-the-water breaststroke which added to my sense of being translated, suddenly and unexpectedly, into glamour. “This is what it must feel like to be a star,” I thought.
Everything about our journey to Girona for the launch of the exhibition last month felt like being suspended in good fortune, fun, and generous kindness. We were held up by forces I only partially understand: all travel arrangements made for us; a taxi to meet us at the airport; a fine hotel; dinners of delicious tapas and wine; profound and light-hearted conversations with artists and people who’ve dedicated their lives to bringing the work of artists into collective spaces.
And at the heart of my involvement with Os was collaboration, which for me has been a means of multiplying my creative potential to make more than the sum of the parts I brought to the endeavour. I’ve so enjoyed working with a photographer of such skill and experience – the trip and exhibition were a wonderful bonus.Central to the Os experience at CCLB was seeing my poems translated into Catalan by award-winning translator Jordi Fité – an act of artistic intimacy which I experienced as my poetry being deeply seen. What a privilege to have every word considered, held up to the light, weighed in the palms of someone who is passionate about a language so often persecuted. When I saw my poems in the exhibition space, and heard a couple read aloud at the launch, it felt as if my words had been set to a precious and rare music.
Liz Lefroy, I Am Translated
Generally speaking, ekphrastic poetry is not my thing, but I was recently invited, along with several other poets, to be part of what sounds like it will be, assuming it gets funded, a very interesting public art project that will combine poetry and painting, and that got me thinking about my first ekphrastic poems, which I wrote, also as part of a public art project, about fifteen years ago. I was one of several poets each of whom were paired with artists associated with the Upstream Gallery. My partner was the artist Allen Hart, who provided me with images of some of his paintings. Most were from a series of paintings of insects. We did not use the two original poems that I wrote, “The Praying Mantis” and “On The Mating Of Rhino Beetles,” which made it into Words For What Those Men Have Done […]
For the public component of the project, Allen chose to use our pairing of his painting called The Dwarf In Armor and the title poem from The Silence of Men. The gallery mounted each of the poems next to the artwork to which it had been a response, and I have this memory of Allen being at the opening in his wheelchair, listening intently as each poet read their work in turn, and of him smiling from ear to ear when my turn came and I read “The Silence of Men,” almost as if I was reading it exclusively to him.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, On My Desk Now: Ekphrastic Poetry
I dreamed the first two or three stanzas of this poem, and when I woke the next morning, parts of the dream were still vivid for a short time, so I wrote as quickly as I could. Much of the phrasing and imagery in tho early stanzas are extremely close to my recollection of he dream. Unfortunately, it faded as they always do. The rest of the poem emerged as it wanted. I should add that Guy Clark wasn’t in the dream but did find his way into the poem, and I’m glad he did. […]
This is a poem with a gun in it though I don’t know
Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 15”
how it entered, and I guess I should ask why it’s here.
It was already in place when I woke up this morning
and began to write. I look at the page, and see the gun
resting in the first line as if it belongs there, as if
it were waiting, and I don’t know exactly what to do
to get it out of my poem, so I close my journal and
fix some coffee, then come back to the work, slowly
opening to that page— It’s still there.
The artist is a child, with a gift. One who, so endowed, steps forth into the unknown – hopeful, proud, subject to stumbling. The gift is simply an intuition of beauty : coupled with a talent for expression. A capability.
I have been making poems since 1956, when I was 4 yrs old. That was three score years and ten ago, by my count.
Since around 1986, my attention was drawn to long poems. That’s about 40 years ago, by my calculation. And it strikes me sometimes that all these longitudinal efforts seem like variations on one very long poem. I don’t know : they change, they shift into different keys and registers… but the focus remains unchanged.
Henry Gould, Breezeway
I read something this morning that was both reassuring and revealing – a comment by poet and novelist Fred d’Aguiar, about a new collection by Grace Nichols, The Tracks of My Name.
He’s written about her book, “‘To write beyond middle age with anything like the transmuting fire of youth requires – so the adage says – much wilful forgetting in order to remember at a deeper level of meaning for readers.”
I haven’t heard it expressed so well before, this issue of post middle age atrophy. I’ve heard about poets who shone when they were young and never again but not such close attention to that phenomenon. Beyond middle age where do we find that fire, how do we forget? This is going to keep me going for a while.
Jackie Wills, Turning up every day
I have tried various things for Scotstober over the years including finding the words used in other poets’ work when I didn’t trust my own attempts. The past couple of years I try and write a wee poetic snippet using the word each day and then try and knit them together into a poem at the end of the year. Sometimes it works, sometimes, no. I can see a glisk of something coming.
No apologies for my use of Scots. I’m not a native speaker, but I do my best, trying to use the language as I’ve heard or read it in Scotland, usually Glasgow. I’m just having fun.
Day 10
girse – grass thi scrab aiples rottit oan thi girse birsin unnerfit thi juice av October
Day 11 jalouse – to suspect, to think few wad jalouse thi mirk in me tae bite doon on its cauld steel expectin tae taste licht
hinnied-sweet
Day 12 thrawn – very stubborn ah ken theres a hoolin o wind ootside but ahm tae thrawn tae switch oan thi heatin hap yersel wi stockins an woolen blankets jist coorie in
Day 13
stroop/stroup – a spout thi cauld leavin mah banes lik thi hush frae thi kettle’s stroupDay 14 – deave/deeve – to annoy, to deafen murrin at mah feet ah can maistly forget she wis deavin me fur fuid i thi wee oors
Day 15 – quine – a young woman or girl ahm no a quine no a carline no a wifie naebody cries me hen or missus ahm a wummin an auld soul a new soul
a body in mah ain body
Day 17 – flech – a flea or a restless person flechin – to be restless mah hert unsattelt flechin at thi sicht of thi sun trinnlin doon yer jaw ah mind yer wairmth
Day 18 – wrang – incorrect, wrong
smitched wi autumn amh drawn wrang i thi city av gowd and crisp-blae ahm thi shaddae-hauf
Gerry Stewart, Scotstober 2026
holy heck! the book of sentences won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award last night! Huzzah! I mean, I am rather shocked, given how many times I’ve been up for this thing over the years (seven, by my count). My thanks much to the judges, and to Arc Poetry Magazine, as well as to the other shortlisted authors: Nina Berkhout for The Great Wake and Vera Hadzic for Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery. It is an unexpected thing, and a great pleasure and honour! Of course, this means that I can no longer complain about never having won a book award (whether as the Diane Warren or, as Andy Weaver prefers, the Susan Lucci of the Archibald Lampman Award, but that joke may have also just run its course). Also, Christine and I are the only couple to have both (so far) won the award, given she won same in 2018 for her second poetry collection, Charm (Book*hug Press, 2017). Which means: every adult in our household has won the Archibald Lampman Award. Might this put undue pressure upon our young ladies as well, to eventually produce poetry titles to perhaps win the award themselves? We shall see. Aoife (my ten year old) insisted on being at the event last night, and she took an array of photos with my phone, some of which were terrible, and others that were of herself (it took me twenty minutes to get my phone back, once leaving the stage), but at least she did capture the moment itself: [photo]
rob mclennan, the book of sentences won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award!
Have you heard the big news? Kim’s current collection – The House of Broken Things – has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. You’ll probably know that her previous book – All The Men I Never Married – won the Forward Prize. Personally, I think this collection is even better, so I was genuinely surprised when it didn’t make the shortlist for this year, and wasn’t PBS recommended. All that amounts to nothing in the face of the Eliots: it’s safe to say that it’s the most prestigious poetry award in the UK, arguably in the world.
So whilst Kim is in a state of disbelief, I am not. And whilst she won’t allow herself to consider actually winning, I am already planning what she will do with the prize money. First on the list, obviously, is champagne for all the people who are going with her to the awards, ie her family plus Me. Second: a lovely new sofa for me to sit on when I come round. And third on the list is a lovely holiday with her best friend, aka Me.
Other prizes Kim has won include the Eric Gregory, and the Geoffrey Dearmer, the Northern Writer’s Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Award. She’s been shortlisted for a Forward Best Single Poem. She’s won the Ledbury Prize, and the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, and recently she was given the Cholmondeley Award just for existing. There are others, and many more to come.
My Friend the Prize-Winning Poet
by Meg Cox
Of course I had to say I was delighted for her.
In fact be the first of us to say it.
I didn’t think it necessary to mention
that I too had entered the competition.
Of course I smiled and smiled
and said I loved one particular line
in her winning poem – the last is a pretty safe bet
but I hadn’t actually read it
and I won’t be fucking reading it either.
I wonder if the lovely, late Meg Cox was taken aback by how popular this poem is! But if the point of poetry is to speak truths which are otherwise unspoken, to give voice to the things we feel but didn’t know we could say out loud – this poem does it in bucket loads. Being jealous of our friends, feeling somehow diminished by their successes, is an unpleasant quality and a painful experience, and it’s hard to admit that I sometimes feel like this. And in the last week, I heard that my DYCP Arts Council application had been rejected (again), which inevitably added more fuel to my insecurity.
There are ways of facing it. Chief amongst them is the fact that Kim is my friend and a glorious person and I love her, and regardless of my own fragile ego, what makes her happy ultimately makes me happy too. I could tell myself that competitions and grants and awards and book sales don’t matter, but that’s a massive lie. Economically, emotionally, professionally, they make a huge difference, and working very closely with someone who enjoys those benefits whilst I don’t – I have to allow space for how that feels, so I can respond to it and cope with it. I could remind myself that a publisher can only submit four collections to the Forwards – plus any authors who have previously been shortlisted – which means that authors published by big publishers like Bloodaxe are at a disadvantage. But that’s not true for the Eliots. So I remind myself that whilst you have to be an outstandingly good writer to win any big poetry prize, there are lots of excellent writers who never win. So I look after the bits of me that feel sore, and work hard at the things I do well, the things that matter to me.
Clare Shaw, My Friend the Prize-Winning Poet
I’ve been lucky. I’ve won a couple of poetry things, and I’ve come close a few times. I’ve also come nowhere near about a bazillion times; the scrappy Word document on my computer that pretends to be a submissions spreadsheet is highlighted almost entirely in a peppy and upbeat shade of red. Still, lucky. Last weekend I got to go to the Winchester Poetry Festival and my poem wild was commended by judge Julia Copus, which was lovely. Of course it would have been nice to win, though Vanessa Lampert’s winning poem The Rub was a beautiful choice that is still burning away gently somewhere at the back of my head. The best thing about being at these things, for me, though, is seeing your poetry people and meeting new ones, the people that don’t glaze over or look uneasy when you mention the word poetry. It’s nice to be in the room, literally and figuratively, and OK, fine, it’s even better to be on the list.
But here’s my hot take, for what it’s worth. It’s not original, but it bears repeating: I’m not a better poet if I win something, and I’m not a worse poet if I don’t. Nobody is. Winning is lovely, and I don’t want to take anything away from that, because that person has always written something that has genuinely stood out. They should be proud of it. That’s incontrovertible. But it’s also true that there’s a hefty dose of chance in the mix. Right place, right time, right judge, right poem, right time again. Lots of people find this stressful, too subjective, maybe even a little unfair, that it comes down to the subjective opinions of a handful of people, maybe just one person. Judges – and winners – can be hauled over the poetic coals, and it’s not pretty. But do you know how unbelievably fascinating this is to someone who’s marked GCSE papers for a quarter of a century? There’s no rubric! No set of externally determined criteria set by shadowy figures who don’t actually do your job! It’s THRILLING. And actually, it takes some pressure off, doesn’t it? All we can do is write our poems and send them, and send them again. We can’t control any of the other factors. And I’m not immune to jealousy or wishful thinking. I’m not a robot. But this way it’s easier not to let these things get you down, and not to let them go to your head. Winning, or not winning, doesn’t change the quality of your writing. It’s not the poetry.
In 2023 I won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize and here’s how down to chance it was: the day after I entered, the week before the deadline, I realised that I hadn’t received a confirmation email for the pamphlet prize, though I’d had one for the single poem competition. I sent a ‘sorry to bother you, just checking! No worries if not! Probably being stupid!’ email (I’ve GOT to stop emailing like that) just to check, and then just to cement my extreme lack of cool, followed up. And it turned out that in fact I hadn’t completed my submission properly and they’d never received it. I squeaked it in by the deadline and that’s how I was even in the running for the thing that changed my whole career. I KNOW, RIGHT?! And even then, on a different day with a different judge and the wind in a different direction, it wouldn’t have happened. Think about it. There are far more excellent, talented, skilful poets out there than there are poetry prizes to win.
Nia Broomhall, Week 31: The Live Canon Poetry Prize Anthology 2024
There are some poets who don’t believe in editing their work. “Once you have finished a piece” they say “It is done, No need to fiddle about with it, Move on to the next one”
Perhaps for them this is true. I’m not sure that I have ever heard anyone who I would consider a brilliant poet say it, but I certainly understand where they are coming from. Occasionally I have a burst of creativity, and a piece just flows from the end of my fingers onto the page and looks great. But in 99% of cases (and yes, I have written enough poems to give an accurate percentage, they need a whole lot of fiddling about with.
I do enjoy those online poetry prompts on Bluesky. I have got into the habit of doing one every Friday morning over breakfast, like some people do the crossword in a newspaper. I take a perverse pride in the idea that I can read the prompt, dash out a dozen or more lines and have it up on the feed all in the space of three quarters of an hour, max.
Of course, once they are posted I usually noticed how I could have said things a little better. And if I ever use one to send to a journal or somewhere, I generally updated it with the improvements that I have noticed. That way I can claim that it’s never been published even on my own social media1. A handful have accepted too. I have to admit that they probably wouldn’t have been quite as appealing in their untweaked form.
Mike O’Brien, A Day at the Races – Poetry Workshopping and Editing
Basically, as soon as I got to ‘Hygge’ and looked up I knew I was living the poem. It’s not a complicated poem by any stretch. It’s short, no big words, no rhyme to skip it along, but it paints a beautiful picture of a time of year that at the time of writing is only 63 days a way. But if ‘Hygge’ is about comfort and conviviality, this speaks a little more to locking the world out, and I like that challenge to the concept. I wonder if the first line of the third stanza can be read as a rule for hygge…”there must be no-one else for miles”, or as a description or observation that follows the second stanza…there must be no-one else for miles”. I’m not sure my italics/bolding makes that clear, but I hope you see which tree I’m barking up.
I think it’s the former on the grounds of the second stanza…the world is being shut out, the night is being held at bay under strain. Some semblance of silence is hard to find and this moment the poem capture is hard one and well-earned (we assume). This peace is needed for good health…and I love the way the poem closes on another word imported from elsewhere into common parlance, Sláinte. This simple thing, this simple moment requires a lot of fighting for. And that’s not a bad thing to capture in 11 lines.
Mat Riches, Harvey’s Rabbiting On
For the English poet John Clare (1793–1864) — born two years before Keats, whose “To Autumn” we revisited last Friday — the sentience of the natural world was as much a given as it was for the more famous Romantics. “All nature has a feeling,” he proclaimed, in the poem of that title featured here in May of last year. Like Keats, Clare intuited the particular “feeling” of the year’s wane. But in Clare’s poetic imagination, as Today’s Poem makes clear, autumn could be less a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” than a season of apocalyptic end, foretelling the death of time itself.
Interestingly — though not that surprisingly, given that the seasons have ever offered themselves as go-to subjects for poetry — Clare wrote many autumn poems. Of all times of the year, for the emotionally fragile Clare the autumn was both the most beautiful and the most troubled. The critic Jonas Cope relates an incident in August 1811, during the harvest and on the cusp of true autumn, to which Clare attributed his subsequent physical and mental afflictions. Eighteen years old, Clare witnessed the fatal fall of a man named Thomas Drake from a “load of hay,” an experience set down ten years later in his Sketches in the Life of John Clare: “the gastly palness of death struck such a terror on me that I coud not forget it for years.”
The trauma, it seems, lay in the instantaneousness of the event: life, its neck snapped, transfigured as death in the time it took a man to fall off some hay. For Clare, this shocking revelation of the nearness of death resulted in disturbingly vivid dreams of churchyards and charnel houses. It also overlaid his waking perceptions with a veneer of horror; in another part of his Sketches , he describes being chased at night by a terrifying fiend that turns out, in the end, to be a neighbor’s stray foal. Told this way, the story sounds comical, but to the poet, as Jonas Cope points out in his account of it, even this mundane explanation for the “monstrosity” amplified, rather than relieving, the grotesquerie of the encounter.
So although Clare would assert that autumn was the season he loved most, the year’s cyclical wind-down brought with it a recurrence not only of the physical illnesses that inevitably attend the colder, wetter weather, but also of the emotional breakdown which, as Clare himself insisted, derived from his experience of that 1811 harvest tragedy. When, in his own “To Autumn,” he exhorts the season to come, it is as “pensive autumn,” whose melancholy and minor-key disorder seem to accompany — and oddly console — his own unsettled mind, haunted by the twin specters of natural and human mutability.
Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Autumn
There’s a gentleness to the way the lines unfold, a tender sensitivity to the things around him, that seems to suffuse the stanza with love. The combination of gentleness with metrical regularity adds to the sense of security that the stanza creates.
So far so delicately lovely. What’s utterly ravishing, though, is the sudden change of tempo and rhyme scheme in the next four lines. Though the underlying sense of security persists, the change itself is as electrifying as the sudden soaring of the treble or soprano high C in Allegri’s Miserere. Steady alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables dissolves into swiftly gliding runs of unstressed or only lightly stressed syllables between the two dominant stresses in each line. The change of metre and rhyme pattern makes the stanza’s form seem alive and vitally engaging, while the shift from more separated to closely successive and very strong rhymes create a feeling of order and containment. Images undergo swift transformations – moon to flower to smiling woman, heaven’s high bower as a trellis woven with the smaller flowers of the stars to high bower as windowed boudoir in a castle – but these images don’t displace each other, they accumulate and shine out together in the imagination.
Shining together is the key. Heaven and earth, the vast spaces of the cosmos and the tiny lives within it are as it were equalised in the loving gaze of trusting innocence. The harmony evoked by the images in this humanised world is underpinned by a lovely pattern of echoing sounds. Among the phonetic echoes I think the long /i/ is particularly important, heightening the impact of shine, silent, I, mine, high, silent, delight, smiles, night. Richly evocative in themselves, it’s as if each calls the others forth as natural answers or complements to it.
Edmund Prestwich, Ravishing metrical beauty: Blake’s “Night”
There’s something slightly complacent about ‘Late Empire’. Partly I think that’s in the verse — the style is just a little bit lazy and redundant around the edges (‘burned to ash’, ‘in the lamplight’), and the simile in the middle of the poem, which compares the boredom that keeps us awake to ‘a mouse chattering on midnight floors’, felt somewhat random and anti-climactic. Why a mouse? Wouldn’t a more specifically modern example have been more effective here? And why chattering? Mice make tiny, annoying scurrying, scuffling and scraping noises, and occasionally you can hear them squeaking to each other behind the wainscot, but then you would need mice, and I still wouldn’t call it chattering.
But the complacency is also in the tone and in something like the rhetorical attitude of the poem. This is hard to pick apart because of course the poem is about a kind of complacency or at least passivity: the ‘we’ of the poem didn’t do anything to change or even object to their circumstances; they just got on with life, taking comfort were they could — going to ‘noisy bars’ and, as the last line has it, ‘We gossiped. We believed what we were told.’ The poem is obviously not condoning this; it is asking us to recognise it (in ourselves) and condemn it. I think what bothers me about the poem is that it feels rather as if it is calculated to acknowledge the reader’s guilt and complicity just enough to make them feel as if they have done something by reading it. Ultimately, I find its rhetorical strategy slightly revolting. (Though you might of course feel that this is both intentional and indeed the point.)
All the same, it’s impressive to see a contemporary poem in English even attempting to ‘capture the mood’. Rarer still, I think, is the topical or political poem that does something more than just package and present its readers’ attitudes back to them — I mean, one that attempts instead to intervene in our interpretation. I’ve written about it briefly before, but the example of this that has stayed with me the longest is Heaney’s ‘Anything can happen’, a version of Horace Odes 1.34 first published as ‘Horace and the Thunder’ in the Irish Times a couple of months after 9/11 […]
Victoria Moul, What makes for a good topical poem?
In 1922, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) wrote a curious sonnet — a poem that essentially undermines a good portion of the endeavor of poetry. We may think we see the beautiful or sublime in the striking vistas of nature. We may declare the power of art to find the truth of beauty. But if beauty is a formal entity — an Idea, in Plato’s sense, as something supersensual that is imitated, instantiated, or shadowed in the physical objects that participate in it — then beauty in itself, Beauty, is beyond all sense. And the beauty of mathematics, geometry in particular, can give an intellectual vision of that Beauty, unhidden by the masks of the physical: “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.”
A Petrarchan sonnet with a slightly eccentric sestet (rhymed abba-abba in the opening octave and cdd-ccd in the final six lines), “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare” dismisses those who “prate of Beauty.” Millay, in fact, compares them to geese who gabble and hiss — “but heroes seek release / From dusty bondage into luminous air.”
“Luminous” is a curious word here. I suspect it’s drawn from the Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, where those who escape the deceitful, non-philosophical life, taking shadows for reality, emerge from the cave into the light of the true sun that is the Good. But Millay extends the image into a description of Euclid’s grasping a Platonic form: “O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day, / When first the shaft into his vision shone / Of light anatomized!” (“O holy, terrible day” gestures, I think, toward Good Friday, and “light anatomized” toward Newton, a curious combination.)
Ageōmétrētos mēdeìs eisítō (“Let no one ignorant of geometry enter”) was inscribed above the door of Plato’s Academy — or so the almost certainly apocryphal story has it. Millay echoes something of that thought, at least in the sense that geometry is a flowing of Beauty into intellectually graspable shapes that are true, elegant, and universal — transcendental characteristics of Ideas. And she calls “fortunate” those who have heard, even if “once only and then but far away,” the sound of Beauty’s step: a “massive sandal set on stone.”
Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare
No one will map for you the path by which you must cross the wilderness of your own life — not your parents or your teachers, not your heroes or your lovers, not the self-help books or Shakespeare’s sonnets. Some may give you signposts, some may become turning points, but it is a path you ultimately make by walking. Along the way, you mistake dreams and desires for destinations, only to find that they have been way-stations — as soon as you attain them, you begin longing for something else. This Möbius strip of longing is the root of everything we suffer in the fangs of the Wanting Monster, but it is also the root of our creative vitality: the restless urge to make, to leave a mark that says “I AM,” a monument to having been. It is our incompleteness that maps the territory of the possible in us. It is our existential wanderlust that makes us what we are — pilgrims of mortality, forever coming home to the horizon of tomorrow.
Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) captures this paradox, with subtlety that doesn’t offer an answer but whispers the living question back to you, in an unedited poem found among his papers after his death, beautifully read in the original Spanish by my Patagonian friend Manuel Gutiérrez — a communicator of wonder through theater, music, and humor, whose hospitality made the serpentine birdworlds possible and who is always teaching me how to navigate the terrain of life with an open heart for a compass.
Maria Popova, The Map to the Route of Your Life
I am the king of poems
Gary Barwin, On Detective Fiction. Also Moby Dick.
because of the wings in my head
and I bow before my sandwich
like time before space
where do we put the bullet holes
except in place of stars?
Bishop enjoyed her comforts. She took many lovers, including the wife or a prominent visual artist in Seattle, but that’s another story. There are, however, at least three novels written about Elizabeth Bishop’s life. Her reticence to expose her private life when she was alive, seems to have left space for others to make her life their own imaginary pathways into her private life. “Sometimes I’d rather they simply kept things to themselves,” Bishop said in an interview when asked about the confessional poets. She was not a fan of self disclosure. She was a fan of beauty and truth and Keats.
We do know that Bishop wrote some of her first great poems while in that Paris apartment. My favorite of this time period (one of my favorites is, “Paris, 7 AM,” which begins here:
I make a trip to each clock in the apartment
Some hands point histrionically one way
And some point others, from the ignorant faces.
Time is an Etoile; the hours diverge
So much that days are journeys round the suburbsThose first days in a new place. Time is a star! Time has a fluid character all its own that changes with the hands of one clock to another. And yes, the apartment was known to house the Contesse’s impressive collection of clocks. I believe Bishop wrote this poem during her first weeks in Paris, still adjusting to the time difference and exploring a city that looms large in any writer’s imagination. The poem also has her (and us) staring out windows:
Look down into the courtyard. All the houses
Are built that way, with ornamental urns
Set on the mansard roof-tops where the pigeons
Take their walks.There are echoes of her earlier poem, “The Map,” here. And I wonder if this is where “the suburbs” first shows up in a poem. The camera angle of “look down” creates a cinematic touch to the poem — something Bishop became well known for: a shift in perspective, a sleight of hand.
Susan Rich, Elizabeth Bishop in France: Mystery & Adventure
maybe I’ll call gillian anderson (Broken Sleep Books, 2025), a pamphlet by the award-winning Welsh poet Rhian Elizabeth, is a candid and psychologically astute exploration of maternal identity at a moment of profound change. Taking a daughter’s departure from home as its emotional centre, the collection moves between the mother’s difficult memories of her own early independence and her anxiety for the daughter now making a life beyond her care. Throughout, grief and vulnerability are tempered by sardonic humour, while ordinary domestic details acquire the weight of symbols. The result is a distinctive and accomplished meditation on memory, separation and the painful but necessary transformation of love into trust.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘maybe i’ll call gillian anderson’ by Rhian Elisabeth
“Sappho Wept” has a strong feminist viewpoint and focuses its concerns on how women’s voices and art have been erased from the history books, not just by simply omission, but violently, e.g. through paintings being drawn over and replaced with men’s art. Dunn also explores how traditional roles for women have restricted their ability to speak and explore their own talents in favour of being pushed into a supporting role, away from the limelight and away from historical records. Dunn uses direct, straightforward vocabulary so her point does not get lost through misinterpretation or euphemisms. Although “Sappho Wept” will strike a chord with women generally, it deserves to be read by men too. The poem “Robert Dudley” asks them to consider what it might feel like to be overlooked and sidelined.
Emma Lee, “Sappho Wept” Wendy J Dunn (Other Terrain Press) – book review
In a 2009 interview, in response to the question of how closely [Claire] Crowther drew on her own experiences, she said:
In a way I always do but only as a starting point. I have always felt what I write about – that’s the genesis of a poem. But the detail varies from my own experience – it could be that I observe other families interacting and freely bring in their details. I never feel I have to stick to any one set of facts – I mingle and match facts I’ve observed to serve the poem which becomes something different. In the end, there is rarely any autobiography at all – the poem has taken over completely.
The innate questions of this mix’n’match approach are whether the effort required to try to locate the emotional heart, and the point, of each poem justifies the time spent. I confess that my first read-through was challenging and that the poems – or, rather, some of them – only came alive on a second reading. Perhaps that is a good thing – like music whose depths only reveal themselves over several listenings. […]
In reading such a generous selection of Crowther’s poetry, it becomes a struggle to know when she is making serious points and what they are. The density of her writing, albeit often exquisitely crafted in musical lines, inhibits simple, or simplistic, exegesis and therefore prohibits much in the way of an emotional reaction other than a degree of frustration and, inasmuch as one can judge the tone, a wry smile at the fun Crowther appears to be having, as if one isn’t quite allowed in on the joke. Surely, though, kernels of clarity are gradually revealed over multiple re-readings.
Matthew Paul, Three reviews I wrote two years ago
The remarkable late flowering of Peter Dent continues unabated in these two most recent pamphlets from two of his own micro presses. To quote the opening lines of ‘Market Reaction’, one of the twenty prose poems that make up Riverside Scuffle:
Being at the peak of my decline she grumbled they’ve finally
caught on and realised my achievement.Where the ‘she’ could just as easily be ‘I’, the poet whose decline peak is higher than the peak of many another’s success.
These prose poems consist of sentences placed beside each other that both resist and strive towards narrative coherence; our readerly urge to create coherence is an intrinsic part of the making of the text. They are, in a way, instances of the ideogrammatic method operating at the level of the sentence.
But I find it hard to articulate the experience of reading these poems. It might be better just to read one, a reasonably straightforward one, at that:
CONSTRUCTION SITE
The girl in front’s hair is dipped delicately into an inkwell.
A sign on a classmate’s back says ‘beware’ or words. An-
tics help pass the day taking the edge off a teacher’s stare.
Oh the angst of mother the chuckle of father the symm-
erty of our days. I repeat myself ad nauseam but still
don’t vomit – why? Latin wasn’t English but that was its
virtue. I flip and flop to the whims of the monsters I’d
like to believe in but can’t. Cuffs override my thumbs –
a useful feature in Winters like this. Homework tonight
will no doubt be no more than half-done and not by me.
I’m just a card in a box the Head relies on come Parent’s
Night. Thoughts of getting at it will keep me awake.
‘Lord’ – I turn the dog-eared page – ‘dismiss us with thy
blessing…’The basic analogy of school = construction site, a place engaged in the making of educated adults, is clear and obvious from the beginning, but one subtext is that teachers, creatures who, by the nature of their job, tend to repeat themselves ad nauseam, are also being (re)constructed at the same time. And all of this is underpinned by the careful selection and placement of individual words: ‘vomit’, a word with deep Latin roots not the more English ‘retch’ or the more recent and vernacular ‘throw up’; ‘override’ with its sense of replacing or controlling the thumbs, not merely covering them; ‘beware’, a sign more often seen on an actual construction school than on a student’s back; that deft, illuminating ‘delicately’, summoning up an entire relationship; the final quote from an 18th-century hymn written in that fiercely unreconstructed of places, Hebden Bridge. And then there’s the enjambment, the syntactical motor that drives poem and reader forward, creating linkages across images and ideas.
There is an element of social commentary here, alongside some degree of implied autobiography, given that Dent was himself a school teacher; these are not hermetically difficult texts designed to alienate the reader, they just require us to engage beyond the surface, to participate as readers in the act of creation.
Billy Mills, Two More by Peter Dent
I wrote several poems this week. I credit the book of poetry I’m reading, Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola, as recommended by Alyson Dutemple. It’s extraordinary and is seemingly jumpstarting my poetic impulses. All the poems are fresh and exciting to me but I particularly like “helen of troy runs to piggly wiggly” and “helen of troy goes parking with the defensive tackle”. My unexpected explosion of writing (right after I said I’m not) reminds me of the song “All Four Seasons” by Sting. Well, I do tend toward mercurial. I feel a bit relieved to be writing for myself in this way with no plan or agenda or timeline or desire to share it.
Charlotte Hamrick, Unexpectations Do Happen
My Name is Swan is a book best encountered out loud, and I don’t know if I’ve ever said that about a poetry book before. I enjoy a good poetry reading or performance immensely, but for me, nothing beats the quiet, private hours I spend communing directly with the words on the page. Swan, however, is a different beast, and I strongly urge you to watch this poetry film in full before you encounter the book. Go on, it’s incredible, and award-winning.
Have you watched it now? Good. Now you have entered Swan’s (and Reynard’s, and Body 115’s) world, and you will hear their voices when you read. You will read with their rhythms and cadences, and that is important. Jan has talked on his Substack about how three sequences that, together, make up My Name is Swan came into being, how they lived in other formats for a long time before they made it into print. He has also spoken, in a recent interview with Cara Waterfall, of how
“My Name Is Swan owes much in its construction to artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat, in pace and composition to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, in beat and meter to Art Blakey and Elvin Jones”
Without knowing all of these musicians terribly well, I can hear these sonic influences in the ebbs, flows and stutterings of his lines. The book has a compelling forward momentum – being composed of three long sequences (or one longer meta sequence in three parts), it’s not one to dip into, but one to be carried along with. My initial read was of the whole thing in one go; subsequent reads have zoned in on different segments but you can only really grasp it as a totality.
As such, it’s very difficult to quote from (although I will try!). There are many blindingly good turns of phrase, many skillful sonic echoes and syllabic reverberations, but plucking them out of their place in the score steals away some of their impact.
Victoria Spires, Swanning around with Jan Noble
Mike is an actor. He’s been in films with Peter Sellers and Kevin Kline and has spent decades in TV and theatre. He came to see my show Body 115 on one of those Tuesday nights when there was nobody in. Afterwards he told me a story about a similarly grim experience he’d had when he was starting out, a matinee performance where the theatre had sold just one ticket.
There’s an unwritten rule that if the audience numbers less than the cast then you don’t need to go on. There were two of them in this particular play but they decided that instead of heading off to the pub for the afternoon they would treat it as a rehearsal before the evening show when a decent crowd was expected. They went on and did it, for the joy of it, and performed to an audience of one. They took their bows at the end to a solo standing ovation. Later they learned that their singular audience member was in fact the show’s writer, that he’d driven all the way down from the North of England in order to see his work staged London. He was thrilled. And so were they. And this is art.
It doesn’t stop being art if nobody sees it or buys it or reviews it. Mike told me that he read my poem My Name Is Swan aloud in his flat on his own the other afternoon and loved it. “It’s just magnificent” he said. Sure, a mention in the TLS would be nice, coverage in the Paris Review would boost sales and bring me greater visiblity but Mike, Mike the actor, performing a one man show of My Name Is Swan to no one but the gods poetry, that, my friends, that is art.
Jan Noble, Nº86 Absent without leave
What Emil Cioran called “the curse of being born” was not far-fetched to Delmore, whose own family hailed from what was once Romania. Even his own name placed him beneath the cursedness of his birth in a land without roots, in what Mlinko calls “the the social covenant of his very name — Delmore, a clumsy attempt at assimilationism.” Throughout his writings, Delmore would mock and parody his own existence under the sign of “Delmore”, playing with alter egos or secret “Others” like “Hershey Green” and “Shenandoah Fish.”
“In his last years, Schwartz had girls like houris lining up to take care of his sorry alcoholic ass, and it still didn’t matter. He wrote almost nothing after his mid-forties, held forth at White Horse Tavern where Dylan Thomas met his demise (beware those Mozartian talkers!), and died alone,” in Mlinko’s words.
When Delmore Schwartz had a heart attack in the hallway of a cheap Manhattan motel, it took more than an hour for someone to call an ambulance. By the time the sirens arrived, Delmore was dead. His corpse lay unclaimed in the morgue for two days. And his literary corpus remained unfinished. Delmore had started an epic poem titled Genesis, but the protagonist only reached the age of seven after two hundred pages… If Delmore wrote himself repeatedly, he was also written by friends. Saul Bellow painted a portrait of Delmore in his roman-a-clef, Humboldt’s Gift. Ashbery said Delmore’s late poetry seemed “to lack the electric compressions and simplifications that animate his early writing, tending toward bald assertiveness.” James Atlas says Delmore spent his last days sitting in the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, “filling one notebook after another with incomprehensible novels.”
Alina Stefanescu, Dream addenda: 1
There is space here and no need for ghosts
in this thin strip of life we walk through
today, temporary as bees and butterfliesbetween celandine and thistle heads,
the flash of silver birch tugging our eyes
in wind warm with rain. Birthdays,deathdays, and what lies in between:
Chris Edgoose, Sweetbriar 7
about five miles from here where we can walk
way up to where we can no longer breathe.
When I learned in August that Seattle poet, memoirist, and editor Koon Woon had died, I added to my morning list, “write blog post for Koon.” What happened?
This morning, I am remembering Koon’s generosity. And I have much to be grateful for, as Body My House would not exist had Koon not contacted me in 2018 and asked if I had a poetry manuscript Goldfish Press might publish. I recall that I was busy with teaching, and with family responsibilities. I didn’t have a manuscript. Although I was already percolating the poems that would become The Pear Tree, I wouldn’t be able to finish that book until after my mother’s death. And who knew when that would be?
You must have so many poems, Koon said. Send me sixty other poems and we’ll talk.
Toward the end of the process, I wasn’t happy with the design. After much hand-wringing, I contacted him, offering to pay an outside designer. I feared Koon would refuse and we would end by parting ways, the book unpublished, feelings stomped. Instead, his email back to me was jolly. Yes, of course, whatever I wanted. He ended with “Less work for me!”
So, my apologies for the late eulogy, coupled with my certainty that Koon would laugh, and respond in his typically gracious manner.
In addition to his work on Chrysanthemum and the press, supporting other poets and the poetry community, Koon wrote several books, including Water Chasing Water, poems, and Paper-son Poet, his memoir. His poems chronicle his journey from China to America, from Aberdeen to Seattle, through bouts of homelessness and mental illness to his life as a writer. His particular genius is precise description and image, as in this passage about his grandmother’s hands:
The past folds up like an origami bird,
Will not dissolve like candy.
Grapes cling to the vine, hands weave bamboo baskets,
Hands supplicate and light incense,
Buddha holds her in his palm.
I fold paper for hands of ancient vine,
Hands that couldn’t come along
And hands will open gates if I should return.—Koon Woon, excerpt from “The Memory of Hands”
I found other tributes on the Internet (see below), and want especially to point you toward this one (courtesy of Cascadia Poetics LAB) with its link to Koon’s interview with David Gilmour.
To Koon Woon, life is a series of rented rooms. Some—like the village [where] he was born or the three-bedroom house on Oak Street in Aberdeen that he moved into at age 12—are literal. “Everybody in a sense is living in a rented room,” he said in a phone interview last week, “In a more profound way, we are all renting time on Earth.”
—Ryan Teague Beckwith, Daily World writer (from Paper-son Poet, p. 130)
Koon Woon’s influence will continue, but his physical presence in the world is much missed.
Bethany Reid, Koon Woon, 1949-2026
My nose has been deep into books and other fancies, so my apologies for not publishing here. For the longest time, Anne Carson’s book Autobiography of Red has been on my shelf. She recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature and thus, like many folks, my eyes gravitated to her work which I’m learning I love very much.
Also. About half my life ago, I picked up Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, a very compelling look into the senses. I loved the book so much—half my life ago—that after a few dozen pages I had to put the book down. Her mind resonated too much with my own. I couldn’t continue. I had to go live my life and live through my senses as deliciously as possible before I could open the book again. So, half my life later I decided it was time to pick the book up again. But I also wondered what Diane Ackerman had been up to lately. Where is she? What is she doing? And it turns out that she has another book coming out in January and miraculously, it’s a compendium book further examining our senses. What are the odds? And then I realized that she has a Substack. I’m not too sure if it’s because she wants community online but part of me suspects that it has a lot to do with marketing for her new book. But there’s something so intriguing about inaccessibility, as well. Or is it just me? And wow was I star-struck when I commented on her Substack, telling her my story of reading part of her book, and she responded! She was touched!
Anyway, like many folks, I’m sorta demystified by the internet lately. I have been finding it easier and easier to miss out and instead take a walk, read, spend time face-to-face with folks, and create/enjoy things. During a commute home from work, I listened to a commute-long (35 minutes) poem/performance by Anne Carson called “Lecture on the History of Skywriting”. It inspired the following poem about unwebbing.
Sarah Lada, A Poem about Unwebbing
A while back I had not one but three people contact me about a poem of mine titled “What The Onion Teaches.” This is a highly uncommon occurrence for a writer of my anonymity. Even stranger, that poem had been published a decade ago.
It turns out my short and simple poem had been assigned in some college lit class (I’m guessing freshman) along with the ubiquitous questions on what the poet meant, why the poem’s images were chosen, and worse. I had an engaging back-and-forth with one student who really wanted to get extra credit on his assignment. But I didn’t have answers for his professor’s questions.
To me, none of those questions get anywhere near why we read, let alone write, poetry. Such questions often turn readers away from their own experience of a poem. (Reading imposed for the purpose of assigning a grade may be a main reason why so few people read for pleasure once they’re out of school.)
I am incredibly fortunate to be in a longstanding poetry workshopping group. The five of us gather once a month around a picnic table in a quiet nature preserve to read, discuss, and hopefully improve each other’s newest poems. Very often we find meanings, metaphors, and other juicy bits the poet hadn’t anticipated. The eye of the beholder and all. Oftentimes the poet, too, finds what they hadn’t realized was there.
The process of recognition can be delayed, the way it was when I asked an artist friend about her fondness for painting a pond close to her home. The spring pictures were gorgeous, but I thought my favorites were her autumn scenes. Until I saw her winter versions. Each painting included three foreground trees and a misty, out-of-focus tree beyond the water. I asked if it was always misty when she painted. She told me there wasn’t really a tree on the other side, it just made for good perspective. Much later, when we were talking about our offspring, she mentioned for the first time that she’d had a fourth child, a full-term stillborn son. I asked (probably too directly) if he might be represented by that fourth tree, always present with the other three trees. “Oh my God,” she said. “I never thought of it that way.”
The poems we’ve loved have a way of deepening in us, so I’m no longer surprised when a poem I haven’t encountered for years speaks to places in me that have evolved since I last read it. That’s true of poems I’ve written too. The presence of something significant can be right there, waiting till we see it, like that misty tree.
Laura Grace Weldon, What A Poem “Means”
Long ago in a foreign land I attended a reading by the poet Les Murray. One poem I wish I could remember had an epigraph to which he referred, with what degree of irony I couldn’t gauge, as a ‘sky note’. All at once that evoked music, elevation, weather, flight.
Some years before, engaged in the trying task of judging poems for a competition, the panel was considering one example. A gifted younger poet dryly observed ‘This poem has two things I dislike: one, an epigraph, and two, worse still, an epigraph in Latin.’ I was struck by his assurance on an issue I’d never considered an issue. It came as a challenge and a breath of fresh air. I also agreed with what was being implied: that poems shouldn’t be a display of learning. They shouldn’t strive to be excluding. Heavens knows, with such a small audience, why try to thin it down even further.
Still, I didn’t feel the argument was settled. Something should have been said, and wasn’t, on the other side. Firstly, what’s so wrong with having another voice positioning or counterpointing the voice of the poem? Secondly, although it’s the source of a large portion of English vocabulary and ubiquitous in college and institutional mottos, Latin is for most of us a dead language, and yet…do we want it proscribed for that? The continuing emergence of new translations of poets such as Virgil, Ovid and Catullus would strongly suggest there’s life in it still, even if a borrowed one.
Another consideration that has surfaced decades after this discussion is the presence of the internet and the facility, a matter of seconds, to track down, source and translate any quote from another language at least in roman script. Latin presents no obstacle. So, the question comes down to whether an epigraph, in whatever language, in whatever way, adds something to the poem. If so, well and good.
Gerard Genette in his great taxonomical treatise Paratexts is surely right to see paratexts as thresholds (Seuils is the French title), as “a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition, but also of transaction.” Only in his claim that paratexts are “in the service of a better reception for the text” does his argument seem too functionalist. What about the possibility that they may serve to confuse or subvert or discomfort reception? That they may challenge or even discredit the text, or indeed vice versa?
Jamie McKendrick, The Use of Epigraphs and the Importance of Patches
One thing I appreciate about the current generation of U.S. undergraduates–at least the one I get to teach–is how literate many are about mental health. They reveal more of this likely hard-earned knowledge in writing than in classroom conversations, not surprisingly. I just finished grading a batch of short essays on mid-20th-century US poetry. Some students wrote insightfully about the activist dimensions of poems from the Civil Rights era or related later work–Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa. Others focused on Confessional poetry that overtly engages psychological crisis. The last few considered how Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” suggests an author trying not to fear bipolar disorder; a young mother’s detachment from her baby and her own body in Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song”; and anaesthetized avoidance as a way of coping with trauma in Plath’s “Tulips,” a poem the student argued characterizes identity as a state of change. The prompt was to consider what authenticity and/ or selfhood seem to mean in a single piece. Through all the essays, I sensed real humans engaging with complicated poems they felt drawn to. The essays weren’t perfect, of course (no AI assistance allowed), but it was a pleasure to spend time with them.
In our classroom discussions, we’ve been probing what the textual markers of authenticity might be among these poets and among readers now. Not that authenticity, whatever it means, matters to everyone. Plenty of poets and critics don’t find the concept useful or interesting, and that’s fair. Poetic voices are shifty, performing selves as well as expressing them, even when the material is autobiographical. But authenticity certainly meant something to the Beats, Confessionals, Black Arts, feminist, and gay liberation poets of the era we’re considering.
Some stylistic elements can make a poem feel real, beyond pronouns and paratext: sensory and other details that conjure an experience with vivid authority. The dashes and panicky pivots in Komunyakaa’s “Facing It,” suggesting PTSD. Obscenities and painful bluntness about taboo material: allowing yourself to look bad, in essence. Self-questioning moments that manifest the process of thinking and writing within the final product of the published poem (“(Write it!) in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”). Documentary elements such as referencing history, dating or footnoting poems, etc. If you register other kinds of textual detail as signs of authenticity, whatever that means to you, I’d be interested to hear them.
Lesley Wheeler, What makes a poem feel authentic
I returned home yesterday after spending 4 days/5 nights in Grand Junction, CO, at the brand new Grand Lodge Writer’s Retreat. This retreat is a new endeavor run by writers Tammy Bendetti and Minadora Macharet, who I have long “known” on the Internet. Due to some last minute cancellations, I had the whole comfortable house (used as an Air BnB during non-retreat times) to myself. Being at the beginning of what could be a new manuscript in a place that is just beginning to provide a space for writers seemed like a great fit.
And it was. I was very productive, taking time to work on things that I would not do at home. Wait, I thought you were retired? some imaginary reader just said. Don’t you have time to do this at home? That is technically true. But home always has other callings. For example, spending three hours finding a poem I was unfamiliar with and loving it, clocking that it used some sort of nonce repetitive form, color-coding the poem to see how the form worked, and then trying to use that form in a draft of my own? All in one sitting? That would have been a week or more of work at home.
I also began the tedious task of going through poem files to see if any of the new work I’ve been doing plays nicely together. So…an hour plus re-reading about 50 poems, deciding if they might work or not, pulling titles into a document. Then my favorite thing to do when starting to see if the poems might flow together in a new manuscript: first lines/last lines.
This also takes a long time as it requires opening each individual file to pull those lines (I don’t have all of my poems memorized, sorry, not sorry) and place them with their titles into a document. (I think it took me a couple of hours to do this with 50+ poems. ) Why? This resource, once I think I might have a manuscript, is the first way for me to see how one poem flows into the next. It gives me the entry and exit points of each poem so that I can find language, images, or ideas that connect the individual pieces, even if they vary wildly in content. It also saves a lot of paper—before I print anything, I can just move the blocks of first lines/last lines around in a document.
Did I do new drafting? Yes. Did I work on revisions? Yes. Did I accomplish a couple of submissions? Yes. Did I read? Yes. I spent approximately 8-10 hours of my day engaged in language with no interruptions except walks, stretching, and food. That is not something that is tenable to do when at home. And that’s the beauty of a retreat or residency. It’s permission to do whatever you need to do in service of the writing.
To eat hummus and pita chips and olives for lunch or dinner because you are in the middle of an idea and you don’t want to stop. To work diligently in the morning and give yourself the afternoon to walk to the Botanical Garden and Riverside Trails for time outside to think and look at something other than a screen or a blank page. And for me, a change of landscape, the high desert mesas and rock formations a complete departure from the suburban Midwest.
Donna Vorreyer, Begin At the Beginning
I love seeing where poets choose to break their lines and I so admire a great line break. It brings me great joy when I see it done well and I aim to improve my work in this area.
So this week I was editing some poems and thinking about how effectively I had broken the lines. After a while it was becoming laborious and not very productive, so I went for a walk to clear my head. As I was pacing out, I remembered the time I stole a ‘word break’ from a newspaper article about a discovery in the woods… I was lying in bed one morning completing my daily word puzzle and contemplating the things in my day. I happened then to skim the news just to check in on the world before my shower. After reading the main articles I came to one about a discovery in a wood. And it was with such delight that I saw the word broken over two lines so that it became ‘disco very’. My poet brain was alive and I recalled a dream where I had looked out of the window to see a pelican dancing on the patio. That was it. The two things had to go together. And later that day I wrote the poem.
Sue Finch, A PELICAN IS DANCING ON THE PATIO
A good friend often likes to remind me “the journey is the destination”.
Poetry’s a long game, and if we’re playing to get the ‘endpoint’ there’s a lot along the way that could leave us sad and demotivated. If, however, we’re playing for the love of the game there’s a lot about this strange bumpy ride to enjoy.
I’m prone to emotional permanence, present time orientation, and black and white thinking. What that actually means is that I find my current NOW all consuming; it’s really difficult for me to zoom out and see the big picture. In practice this usually results in: ‘today I received a rejection therefore all my poetry is awful and I should just accept I’m a failure and give up’ or ‘today I received an acceptance/good news therefore the future is bright and glossy, I’m unstoppable and all my dreams are about to be realised’ or ‘I’ve had a run of being at work and not having time or capacity to write much therefore I’m no longer part of the poetry world’. The reality? Somewhere in the middle: good things and less good things are ebbing and flowing, every day I sit down to write is a success because I am writing, I’m still a poet even if I’ve not been very involved recently.
A poetry life isn’t just about submissions and rejections, though I know I get sucked into focusing in on that pretty regularly. It’s also about connection with other poets (even though my Au side finds this haaard), reading and/or listening, enjoying the act of writing, spending time at poetry events, moving around the poetry world, and just knowing I’m still a poet even if I’ve not got out much.
Rachael Hill, A recent writing-life roundup
Looking for work gave me a chance to ruminate on years of getting by on freelance writing and editing, teaching adjunct at an MFA program, and generally trying to make a living as a writer of poetry—it’s tough! Until we get more support for the arts, I suspect I’m not the only creative that’s putting their resumes out there for jobs so we can continue buying candy for neighborhood kids and paying for good and shelter and expensive doctors. What do you think, fellow poets? As long as everything keeps getting more expensive and poetry continues to pay almost zero, I think folks with trust funds or tenure track jobs may continue to poet, but the rest of us may be forced into commercial work for a bit, at least.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Job Interviews and Medical Appointments, Fox/Coyote Magic, Fall Reading and All the Fall Feels
I was approached to run some children’s poetry workshops on the theme of autumn. I did some research and was fascinated by the fact that deciduous trees don’t turn red, orange and gold, but are always that colour. It’s just that sunlight sparks the release of chlorophyll in them, and a green colour comes in and dominates. Trees shut the tap on this come September, and so the leaves revert. They don’t become red, orange and gold.
I asked the children to imagine this, and to consider it as a metaphor for everything else about aging (in grandparents, say) as not decay but revelation of what lay under all along. I thought I was being terribly clever.
Then I came across exactly this idea in an Annie Ernaux book. I’ve Googled it just now, because I couldn’t find it in my downloads or kindle library, and I definitely didn’t read it on a physical page. The infernal kid brother know-it-all that is Google’s AI assistant tells me that Thomas Merton said it first. I ask for specifics and a text, and it backtracks.
I am immensely comforted that in an Annie Ernaux book I may never encounter again there is a development of the autumn leaves idea, and sounded out as much texturally as anything else. I’m also glad for the children’s excited faces and also giggles as they pitched variants on the theme, more of them SNL joke makers than future Nobel prize winners. But I can’t remember any specific line or even concept that the children created (a decade ago).
In something of this, is a joy AI will, at best, facilitate. I did once meet a young man now all grown up who had attended one of my workshops, and he was very kind and flattering, despite the fact he was a sober and not particularly arty Geordie male. Again, this is about the near misses, and the nebulous that might rain down complexity. And somehow AI is chlorophyll in my allegory and we need something else in (as) autumn, winter and spring.
Ira Lightman, Bots and Bods
Interviews With Vampires is a series of poems I’m writing about evil. Many of them are about Nazis, or atrocities the Nazis committed during the Holocaust. I can’t say I quite know why I am doing this.
Evil seems at once easy to understand, and completely unintelligible. The Nazis as a whole, and some of them individually, were bent on pursuing evil in its most pure and total form. When a thing is done as part of this project, the connection is usually easy to understand. See, to become good is to acquire the strength to do what one knows is right, and the ability to see opportunities for good that before one was blind to. The inverse of this, the truly evil man, is someone who notices ways to do evil that would never occur to the rest of us. The death camps were set up to kill human beings and dispose of their bodies with maximum efficiently, to make possible the destruction of human life on a massive scale, and their design, while horrifying, is not surprising. What’s surprising are the ancillary evils the Nazis were able to insert into the process. Why did they shave the prisoners’ hair? Wasn’t that a waste of time—in camps that often “fell behind schedule,” with transports lined up waiting to be “processed”? You might think, well, they wanted also to humiliate their victims, not just eliminate them. And that’s true. But they also packaged the hair up and sent it off to factories, to be made into textiles for personal and industrial use. It was even used to make mattresses. Who even thinks of doing that? The surprise is not that an evil person could do such things; the surprise is that anyone could have so much talent for evil, that doing them would occur to him.
Brad Skow, The Kindly Commandant
/ this poem is my going and i cannot stop.
Fran Lock, “a song and a mistake”
/ silence has an anger. has an edge.
/ how spite can enter a gesture of retort.
/ make a rage beyond retort. is its own shuddering nest.
/ i survive.
/ to become an arbiter of dull expletives.
/ how laughter gleams between the teeth.
— If you’re a poet, I recommend reading Ars Poeticas by Julianna Spahr. Don’t hold the Pulitzer Prize against her. The poets are frayed, (I never know whether to say we or they anymore, lapsed poet that I am), we, let’s say we, have a “frayed relationship to poetry” which Spahr says is “an almost universal condition.”
— “A poem, I understood, to be a place for the questions, not for the answers.” Spahr. It’s a book I’ve read but am still absorbing. It’s a book I want to absorb though. Not to be read just once and set aside.
— That poetry can still get at the predicaments we are all in. It feels she says, as though “there is only one way out.” And this is an idea that feels “impossible / to include in a poem tells us something / about the new feats of imagining we / have yet to embrace.”
— I’m always returning to C.D. and her Cooling Time. “We are indispensable to one another. We keep the language machine going — often in different directions at once.” I do think this is our obligation as writers right now. To guard your writing, to be fecund, fertile, protective. Language, says CDW is a bloody Odyssey. Okay what she really says is, that we must “rise above one’s failures, to wrest hope from the next disappointment, to feel such clarity and happiness, to indulge in one’s own fertile mind — the great rush to participate in the odyssey of language, to take up the leaky pen of a long, wended life…”
Shawna Lemay, Basket of Flowers
What do you enjoy the most about haiku?
This is perhaps a strange claim, but I am convinced that haiku already exist, and until they are written, they are waiting to be discovered and uncovered for the world to read and hear them. I have come to realize that is how I approach writing haiku, as a process of revealing and liberating, rather than creating. The method is simple: we experience the world with our five senses, which when we write become images. The experiences might be from our earliest childhood memories or as recent as this morning’s tea and toast. We recognize, though, that our moments, no matter how small, are all momentous. The challenge, which makes writing haiku such an arduous task (at least for me), is to find the right words with the right sound in the right order. I think it is not enough that a poem pleases the poet. I see haiku as a communal process, and so, during the drafting, I believe the poet must serve as a proxy for the reader. The closer a poem becomes to being finished, the more the writer has offered to the reader. The path is difficult and the responsibility is profound, but I thrive on the process. When my haiku have the right sound and cadence, when the fragment dovetails with the phrase to fit together seamlessly, and the gap of understanding has been narrowed just enough for the reader to bridge it, then I know I am on the cusp of giving life to one breath’s worth of words.
Jacob D. Salzer, Steve Bahr
Around two and a half years after I first heard the quiet but insistent voice of the book that would become Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change asking to be written, I’ve just last week submitted the final draft to my publisher. There is still much to do–permissions requests to make, and all that goes into the copyediting, production, and promotion processes–but nevertheless it feels like a huge shift, a turning point in my mind and heart. That particular labor is in the past, and I’m trying to allow myself to rest, at least for a moment, in the satisfaction of having done what I set out to do and said what I wanted to say. […]
The book submission was perfectly timed, because it coincided with the inaugural Hellbender Gathering of Poets in Black Mountain, North Carolina, amidst the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains. (A naturalist there told me that the Appalachian Mountains are older than the rings on Saturn!) This new conference, named for the beautifully primordial hellbender salamander—the largest salamander in North America and currently listed as a Vulnerable species—and born from the chrysalis that was the Miami Beach Poetry Festival, is the vision of the wonderful poet and human Nickole Brown. Its mission is to combine poetry, environmental science, and community, and after spending nearly a week at the gathering, I believe they are already successful. Like the School for Living Futures, Hellbender sees potential at the intersections of artistic practice and other kinds of earth-knowledge, and I was inspired to meet so many other poets who are also tuned and tuning into those connections.
The defining feature of the conference was its bringing on local naturalists and botanists to lead a series of “awe walks” on the surrounding trails, helping us poets learn more about what we’re seeing, new ways of looking, and what questions to ask. For this purpose each participant was gifted a magnifying loupe along with our information folder and tote bag upon registration. I learned quite a few things I’ll be taking with me from these walks, including how to distinguish between white and red clover, the best time (spring) and place (the very center or very edge of a patch) to find four-leafed clovers, three styles of spiderwebs (orb, sheet, and tangle), and how oak galls—little ball-shaped things I’ve been noticing all my life but didn’t know what they were—are made. Our guide, Haley, told us that she’s in the habit of collecting oak galls whenever she finds them to give to an artist friend who uses them to make natural ink and dye.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Hellbending
I’ve read several poetry books in the last few months. Hundreds of poems from books published through traditional or hybrid publishers, by poets known and unknown. And I have, more often than not, come away dissatisfied. Not dissatisfied as in critical. No. Not even as in unmoved. There was so much to love. So much that I have underlined, so much I have noted in the margins. But dissatisfied as in a little heartbroken. And it is not the fault of the poems.
Are we expecting too much from a book of poetry. Expecting it to elevate the reader – into a vault of stars, into clear air, into the swirling heart of a tornado? Or at least to leave them stranded on the highway, in the path of incoming traffic? To reveal the eighth colour in the spectrum? To be god?
I have no illusions about my own ability as a poet. Remember when they used to say (was it Malcolm Gladwell who said it first?) you have to put in 10000 hours to become a master at something complex. I have barely notched a thousand. And it shows ever so often. Even as I cover those failings with linguistic straw and dung.
And there are a number of masters. Their shadows fall in rarefied air. But the world is changing every day. The problems are bigger and harder and more obvious than ever, yet seemingly unfathomable. So much seems existential that each day is like an unearned reward. When our eyes shift from the news to a poem, are we expecting to be lulled into a false calmness, find validation or reprieve, or discover a silver bullet between the lines? Or all of those at once?
I will quote Amiri Baraka because I feel that hope and that sadness. Both.
“And now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won’t come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.”
All over the world, young people are on the streets, trying to win a future that is sustainable, meaningful, safe, equitable, and free. What is the lexicon the older generation must employ to echo their voices? What are the poems they should write? Or is that poetry redundant already? I see how my words mock me – old, rusty, and anachronistic even as I write them. I have spent the last few weeks desperate for new words, even as I have been following the news and reading other poetry books. The intensity of the written word is still fumbling for the intensity of a single morning of rebellion.
I have nothing. No answer. No solution. No poem. Not even an apology.
What is the purpose of poetry?
Rajani Radhakrishnan, A little heartbroken
writing downwards into the spaces
adding wisps of colour
dripping the modifier into
the origins of the alphabetthe point is the paper
Ama Bolton, ABCD October 2026
start with collage
and a Blackwing pencil
Thinking about paper brings to mind my on-and-off obsession with ephemera over the years. I do love paper and things made of it, things that are probably not meant to last, and are fragile or easily destroyed. I’m not the only human who feels this way, which makes me wonder why ephemera is so appealing to some people, while granite or marble monuments are so appealing to others. I enjoy visiting Apport Used Books, the bookstore itself and its Instagram online “catalogue,” because Ben is one of the folks who finds, sells, trades, and shares postcards, letters, photos, chapbooks, poetry books, occult items, poetry broadsides, collages, and other fragile and nearly-lost things. I can drive over the hill and get my fix of wonders, though I don’t buy much because these days I’m trying to cull my own collection of books and oddments.
I also wonder why some of us write poetry, and others among us need to create architectural wonders. Which is no guarantee of lasting into the future: think of Antiochus I, whose tomb and history was lost for millenniums, while Sappho’s poetry fragments and Beowulf remained active in the minds of humans, who are certainly ephemeral creatures.
I don’t expect my current poetry chapbook project, or any work of my own, to live on after me. Paper and humans–we don’t last long on earth. Like butterflies, so temporary and so fascinating.
Ann E. Michael, Paper