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 roundedness of stanzas, the coalfield’s fold, a million year-old fly in amber, Auden as a rapper, and much more. Enjoy.
It is packed and it is calm and it is magical. J reads about living with neurodivergence, S about family, D about joy, R about dancing. In the Open Mic, seasoned poets get up and read, and so do people who didn’t think they would be able to. An older lady in a mask who hasn’t been out since Covid. Teenagers with piercings who whoop and cheer each other. A young man who reads poems he wrote in Nepali first before translating them into English. A woman who wobbles in the middle of her poem until the audience give her gentle murmurs of encouragement. One of my students from school stands up and recites Jabberwocky from memory. At the end, his parents ask if I’ll introduce them to J. I’m buzzing, she tells me afterwards. My poems made a difference to that family. They did. And they were really, really good. Now, the Poetry for Wellbeing group has grown. The poetry is fantastic. We run our Poetry Nights three times a year. We’ve got one tonight. I can’t wait.
Nia Broomhall, Week 32: You’ll Never Walk Alone
The other night, we were driving past the South Loop Barnes & Noble and I pointed out how I once spent an entire summer working on my first book in the cafe there near the windows looking out on State St. It occurred to me later, we are now 20 years out from the release of my first full-length collection, THE FEVER ALMANAC. This seems impossible somehow, not only that that very first book was published, but that now there are many more on the shelves beside it, close to 20. This also seems impossible, though I wrote and collected all of them into manuscripts, then sent them all to publishers with a hopeful blush and somehow they wanted to put them out in the world. Or later, that I not only wrote and edited them, but also did layout, design, and everything else.
Had you encountered me in 2006, I was over the moon when I opened the very first crate of books. It was October, and I was madly in love with the wrong man. I also had a nasty bout of mono (having never had it as a teen, I’d picked it up in late summer when I was just picking up dating again after ending something earlier in the spring. ) That fall itself was a strange fever dream. I was only 32. The world itself seemed both beautiful and terrifying. On the day the books arrived, a building burned to the ground a block from the library. But the fall trees were so bright that year, or maybe it was just my mindset. I was sick and couldn’t seem to get better for longer than a week, setting off a string of various random illnesses that plucked my ravaged immune system. I was also in my final year of MFA studies and pulling together what would become GIRL SHOW (actually what had always been that book, but now with other eyes on it than just mine.) Despite all of this, I blundered about ridiculously happy–about the new romance, about the impending book. It was a few months where life felt weirdly elevated and fraught with possibilities and anxieties.
Kristy Bowen, the fever almanac @ 20
The Bloodaxe Books Launch Reading with Jane Clarke, Carolyn Forché and Chase Twichell gave me another lovely reason to lose myself in poetry this week. I am so glad it was available online because I couldn’t make any of the recent Carolyn Forché tour dates. There was a moment in the conversation after the reading, where the poets were talking about a poem being a moment in time. I found myself talking about this with someone during the week too, and the fact that sometimes a poem only exists because of a moment in time. We reflected on the fact that sometimes when you look back on a poem you notice how much things have changed or that you wouldn’t express it like that now. And isn’t that one of the joys of a poem? To be a perfect place to set things down from a moment in time.
Sue Finch, SHADES OF GREEN AND POETRY
When we talk about the 51st state,
we’re repeating the language of tripwires and hand
grenades. Hospitals. Funerals. Cemeteries.Wind-blown flags over the graves of the dead. […]
This poem began as anger. That anger found its way to the page, at first in half-formed lines and phrases. The lines were crossed out and drafted again. An initial free verse draft appeared. It was a much looser version of where the poem is now. […]
I showed the poem to a couple of my first readers (what a gift to have friends read and offer their brilliant insights!). I took many of their suggestions to help the poem arrive at its current state. In this image (see above), you can see the second couplet I’m working on is an example of me trying to solve a problem that both of my friends zeroed in on as a problem—a simple one of flipping the “metals and oxides” couplet in the poem. (The words dysprosium and terbium were written first, originally, before the context of “metals and oxides,” and they arrived out of the ether with little grounding, throwing both of readers out of the poem.) […]
This is how I often work on paper. Writing a line over and over and over while scribbling out and flipping words around, swapping out possibilities, etc., etc. I imagine it’s the same for you, too? If not on the page then internally, as you work out the possibilities in your mind? Of course, that’s what’s happening here on the page, too—though it isn’t all recorded on paper.
Finally, here’s the first rough draft of the poem as I typed it out, very loose and ragged and then some. I like the jaggedness of it, as well as the roundedness of the stanzas and how they allow the reader to pause and linger in a moment before moving deeper into the poem.
Brian Turner, Dead Canadians
Starting on Thursday, I was up in Skagit for the Skagit River Poetry Festival, where I taught two workshops – one for high school kids, one for adults – on spooky poetry during the season of the “Thinning Veil” – which was a lot of fun. I also read at an evening group reading ,and got to see a lot of old friends. Here are some pictures, including Elizabeth Austen, Jane Wong, Kelli Agodon, Susan Rich, and more! I also got to see Naomi Shahib Nye (so nice in person,) the beautiful and hilarious Rena Priest, Tess Gallagher, and many other stars that are not pictured here. […]
One thing I thought about after years of returning to this same conference, is missing my friends who are no longer with us, happiness at spending time talking about horror and science fiction poetry with young people (very excited!) and adults (slightly more trepidatious) and listening to the high school kids’ open mic. I also thought about how spending time with poets is great, but I was as excited to spend time with the herons and owls. Am I getting old and boring? Maybe. Also, I wish I could tell you how beautiful the orange moon was rising over this tree – I didn’t have my real camera, all I had was my cell phone, but trust me. The other thing was the killdeer that kept calling late into the night. And another memory – Glenn ordered a Cardamom Cortada from a cute new coffee shop – and I was holding it and it smelled just like fall, and tasted like the woods (with a lot of caffeine.) I wanted to stop in that moment and remember. The orange moon, watching sunsets over the water, listening to the birds call, thinking of poems and hearing other people talk about poetry, a little microcosm of all the things I love about the Pacific Northwest.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Skagit River Poetry Festival, Spooky Poetry Workshops, and Even More Pumpkin Farms Plus Owls
In the afternoon, the fields flamed
orange and light winked
across the water.I returned to the chapel to harmonize
with monks and chant
the Psalms that still speak to us.As the sun sank, across the river, candles flickered
in carved pumpkins and costumed children participated
in a different ancient ritual.As we walked to compline service, monks in white robes
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Abbey Autumnal: Two Poems
walked under trees dripping with Spanish moss,
ghosts from a different century.
I did a short reading this week at an anniversary event for Global Art Point. GAP supports non-Finnish speaking artists in Finland. My writing group, the Helsinki Writers Group uses their premises for our weekly sessions. The event was an oasis of hope and happiness in the middle of everything else going on right now. All the speakers made me tear up with their performances and stories. It was nice to be in such a positive atmosphere connected to the arts, even for an evening. Unfortunately, I had such a rough couple of days, I left early.
It made me wonder what my life would have been like if I had stayed in Scotland and continued teaching creative writing and focusing on my own writing. It’s not a realistic pipe-dream, as I am so bad at networking and self-promotion.
The reading itself went well, I think from what people said. I was so blinded by the spotlight and stress that I don’t remember much, except changing one of the poems mid-reading as I felt it needed something. I had decided to chuck another poem from my reading list in the car before going to the event and then added something things as I read. Which worked according to my writer friend who was there.
I’m always editing.
Gerry Stewart, Thi clock jimps back
I was reading poems on Twitter (X), Bluesky, and Substack, and was fascinated with the form of a short, brilliant poem by , “Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967.” which was based on a photo by Diane Arbus whose works I love and have written about many times. I was struck by his form, three two-line stanzas, and I thought… I want to write in this form since it limits yet allows for many possibilites. 16 found its way. I thought of my world like the world of the twins viewed by Arbus and written about by Snarsky. My poem is nothing like Tom’s, but it began there. Every Sunday, Tom champions small poems from around the world on his sites at Bluesky, Twitter (X), and here in Substack.
Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 16”
With many thanks to editors Kathryn Gray and Andrew Neilson, I have a poem in the latest issue of Bad Lilies, my favourite online poetry journal, among some poets whom I greatly admire, here. (I’m especially pleased to be alongside Geraldine Clarkson, whose poem is her customary magical delight.)
I’m also very pleased to have a poem, about my fellow Kingstonian Eadweard Muybridge, in the imminent (print) issue of Pennine Platform (thanks to editor Julia Deakin), which you can subscribe to here; reviews of enjoyable and admirable collections by Anne Berkeley, Matt Howard and Beverley Bie Brahic (thank you, Ann and Peter Sansom) in issue no. 72, ‘The Library Issue’, of my favourite print poetry journal, The North, which can be bought here; and a haibun in the forthcoming anthology Testament, poems and songs to commemorate a hundred years since the General Strike, edited by Nick Allen and Tim Fellows and to be published by Crooked Spire Press – details of the publication and launch event(s) to follow.
All this goes to show that publications really do come along like buses, or goals scored by hitherto goal-shy QPR centre-forwards . . .
Matthew Paul, Some publication news
every minute begins in silence
ends my end-of-world heartsky holds sunlight on its tongue
gold as robin’s egg bluetonight clears away calendars in the box of eyes
only blue tells timeI took the first poem from TAKE RAIN, Elee Kraljii Gardiner and my forthcoming book of poetry from ECW Press and transformed it through multiple Google translate operations and then by editing it like crazy.
Gary Barwin, River Library and a Tender Witch
The phafours press shop I’ve been meaning to build for a decade or so is now getting up. So now you don’t have to find me in person or at a small press fair to get chapbooks. I put up ones from the last couple years and presume, momentum staying, that I will gradually add others. It has the cover, and sample poem, reviews, and a way to buy. It’s progress. […]
Some chapbooks from the backlist will remain for free access in digital form at Digitally Yours. You’ll notice I’ve made epubs and pdfs of newer ones for sale at a price that allows some income and some accessibility.
Pearl Pirie, Progress,
The importunate campaign for simplicity and directness – for clear, plain-spoken, accessible, and reader-friendly poetry – is always with us, on multiple persuasive fronts. And yet the darkness of the human heart, and the unknown mysteries of the cosmos, call for a different register of realism and mimesis. Thus I hold with William Blake (“four-fold vision”), and Emily Dickinson (“tell it slant”). And with Osip Mandelstam, who convinced me long ago that the enigmas of obscure, allusive poetry – the “games” of interpretation – not only provide sheer pleasure in themselves, but also endow the simplest melodies with depth and profundity. […]
When I re-read this [poem] today, a few weeks after it was made, I was struck by the way the displacement of plain, direct speech opens an extra dimension, a sort of free-flowing channel between words, feeling and meaning. The postponement of immediate meaning creates a sort of pause, a “rest note” – and this is where the emotive waves flow in and fuse with the words.
Not long ago I read Australian Gerald Murnane’s fine novel, The Plains. The parodic, satiric ironies manifested in this work – by means of obscurity, displacement and solipsism – are complex, mournful and hilarious, all at once. Murnane is able to evoke, simultaneously, both the visceral, emotional power of the great, dry, remote central plains of Australia, and the obsessive, autotelic culture of a boyar-style landowner class – intent on erecting absolute, inaccessible walls around its “plains” domain, by means of bizarre critical-aesthetic rituals, along with intense communal dipsomania. Murnane formulates his narrative along a midline between the sensuous description of the vast, unadorned landscape, and the baroque isolation and alienation of the “plainsmen”, as well as the narrator – both striving to evoke and hoard their cryptic visions of those plains. “Plain speech”, ironically, is rendered impossible in such a vertiginous hall of mirrors.
Henry Gould, The Plain and the Plains
Today we tend to refer to poems by their titles or, for older collections without titles, by a reference number (such as Catullus 64, or Shakespeare Sonnet 18). But the standard use of titles for poems is quite new, a product of print culture and ‘page’ poetry. In early modernity, poets only sometimes assigned specific titles to their poems, and even if they did, they were easily altered or dispensed with. In a more oral culture, the natural way to refer to a poem is by its first line or, perhaps, a summary of its content (“you know, that rude one about the Duke of Buckingham”). And that’s what you see in manuscripts: when people refer to or cross-reference a poem without writing it all out, they do so either by the first few words, first line or couplet, or by mentioning the author and/or the topic. Many complete poems in manuscript have no titles at all, and when they do have titles, they are most often descriptive ones added not by the author of the poem but by the copyist. Indeed, you quite often see the same poem circulating with many different titles, reflecting different interpretations or applications of the poem: for instance, to successive political scandals. For all these reasons, titles are not a good way of tracking the circulation of poems in this period, and scholars generally use first lines instead.
In early modern England, manuscript was one of the main ways that poetry was circulated — a bit like how readers today may encounter, read and look up poems as much or even more online than in print sources such as books and magazines. If you looked only at the poems that were printed today you wouldn’t get a very clear idea of who and what was actually most read: for that, you’d want to see which poems get most likes, retweets or shares on social media. Last week I wrote about one of the poems from the most recent issue of 32 Poems — Morri Creech’s ‘Late Empire’ — because this was the one poem from that issue that was being quite widely circulated online. Looking carefully at surviving manuscripts is in that sense a bit like having access to (some of something like) the early modern internet.
Victoria Moul, On first lines
A decade ago, I spent one December writing only sonnets. One each day. The experience solidified the sonnet (and, in particular, the American sonnet) as one of my favorite poetic forms to read and write.
I agree 100% with Kim Addonizio when she says this about the sonnet’s appeal:
“I continue to be drawn back to the spirit of the sonnet, especially its fourteen-line limit, which encourages the writer to get something meaningful said before the poem is over. Also, it can fit on a cocktail napkin, should the writer find herself with inspiration but no paper.”
The sonnet is compact. Its appearance is often tidy. And, having forced the poet to find freedom in constraint, the sonnet unlocks a kind of magic.
My American sonnet poem-a-day (during a 2015 “residency” with the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project) helped me learn how I wanted to use the form. While I do not stick to any syllable count or meter, I almost always utilize a rhyme scheme and rely on a volta. […]
At its simplest, an American sonnet is a 14-line poem that includes a volta — a turning point in the poem that shifts the poem’s energy, intelligence, or meaning. American sonnets may, or may not, use rhyme in homage to their much older cousins: the Petrarchan Sonnet and the Shakespearean/Elizabethan sonnet. (You can learn more about each of these, including how they rhyme and where they place the volta, here.)
But here’s something fun about the American sonnet… nearly all the rules are squishy, including that “it *has* to be 14 lines.” It’s probably more accurate to say that American sonnets are 14-ISH lines. And the volta? That’s optional, too, though I highly recommend it.
Straightforward definitions are rarely sufficient to capture the spirit of the sonnet.
Carolee Bennett, “Subversions and Appropriations:” 40+ American Sonnets
Jeremy Wikeley: Perhaps we should start at the end. One of the things that struck me as unusual about Dirt Rich was your commitment to the final flourish. “Eternities”, “Bearings”, “Short Day”, or “Bramley Seedling”, which I’ll quote when we come to write this up as text:
Stored winters apples’
breath on my face:
warmth in the cold.
A river unravels
to that orchard place
in the coalfield’s fold,
to that brick box built
where the uprooted railway’s
now a cinder track.
The years’ black silt
was to bury me always
but I live. Take me back.You forget poems can do that. In your conversation with Rebecca Watts for Poetry London you describe them as a “ta-da”, which is too self-deprecating. Why do endings matter so much? How do you get there?
Graeme Richardson: Well, I want a mix of Aristotle and Agatha Christie. Endings matter because unity and coherence matter (Aristotle), but a twist is also good (Agatha Christie). You should try and achieve an ending that’s both a satisfyingly unifying conclusion – and also one that surprises or jolts the reader in some way. The great mid-20th century poems realize this: Elizabeth Bishop “One Art” or James Wright’s “A Blessing” or Larkin’s jizztastic ending to “The Whitsun Weddings”. I don’t know if (unlike Larkin) I “get there”. But you certainly need time. It’s the classic thing we all know from daily life – “I came up with the perfect come-back, but only in the car on the way home”. If you’re a poet, you’ve got time to wait for that perfect come-back, and stick it in – Elizabeth Bishop took years, sometimes, to find the right word or formulation. I like “final flourish” more than “ta-da!” certainly! I think poets have forgotten that jokes have punchlines, and whodunnits have solutions, and albums have closers… people like endings.
JW: I’ve been reading Ian Samson’s book about Auden and he makes the point that Auden had such a strong sense of structure (1 September 1939: A Biography of a Poem). Most poetry happens “in the middle” of the poem, Sansom writes, but Auden always makes the start and finish count. Sansom suggests it was almost a commercial instinct (and also connects it to Auden’s interest in detective fiction). Luke Kennard writes that Dirt Rich “felt like finally being spoken to as an adult and realising that’s actually quite rare”. One of the reasons one feels that way (and he’s right) is the way in which you write so frankly about death. Is it fair to say that your experience in the Church has a role to play there? I was about to say that a lot of contemporary poetry seems afraid of death, even as it clearly can’t avoid it, but if I’m going to generalise wildly I’ll say it’s afraid of both death and sex, or at least very rarely deals with them in a satisfying way, even if those — and intensity of feeling more generally — are the topics most casual readers associate poetry with. You do both.
GR: I’m very much formed by being a Christian and a priest in an age of aggressive atheism. Especially 20 years or so ago, at the time of “The New Atheism”, I was being told every day that I believe in a sky-fairy, and my faith was just wish-fulfilment, I couldn’t deal with sex and death and the hard facts of life. And it pissed me off. Christians don’t refuse to face hard facts – we have a dead person on display in our churches, an innocent person who has been tortured to death. All his friends had left him to die, and we remember that, and regret it, and try to be there for him now. So we will be there when others don’t want to be. Towards the end of my time as a Parish Priest, I was starting to get fewer funerals to do. People were opting for humanist ministers, often a nice middle-aged lady with a clipboard, or a young out-of-work actor. These are no doubt good people, but they’re not there in the way the Parish Priest is there. An example: I always did the funerals of babies who’d died at our local hospital. 9am at the Crem. I could do that, because I could do it without a fee. The humanists couldn’t – or at least, at that time, didn’t. Tell me again how it’s just comfort, and wish-fulfilment, and “All Things Bright and Beautiful”… For me poetry is about intensity, and obviously the intensity of human experience is greatest around death and sex. And Christians, far from being meek and mild, we are in those places of intensity. Even if we believe in a fairy-story, it doesn’t give us a comfortable life. And that’s what I want to deal with in my poems.
JW: You also write about your experience growing up in Nottingham’s coal fields, and of course coal is intense too: it’s packed down, and then after years and years it burns. So, there’s the intensity that comes with time, which is so central here. Like you say, the time a poet has to wait for the ‘perfect’ ending is a time in which they’re living and so transforming the material of the poem. The confluence of form and theme is uncanny.
GR: Yes, but unintentionally so. It turns out those themes are what I write about.
Jeremy Wikeley, “People like endings”: Graeme Richardson on Dirt Rich
Sakiru Adebayo […] is an assistant professor and the James and Eva Good Chair of African and Postcolonial Literature at Western University. Before moving to Western, Adebayo worked as an assistant professor in the English department at the University of British Columbia Okanagan from 2021 to 2025. He is the author of Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa (shortlisted for the African Literature Association First Book Award and finalist for the Memory Studies Association First Book Award). His work has been awarded the Nigerian Prize for Literary Criticism and the Amílcar Cabral Prize. Adebayo hosts “The New African Diaspora Podcast” and lives in London, Ontario. […]
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I would say my mother tongue, Yoruba, is a very poetic language. It is full of metaphors, ironies and, especially, euphemisms. I am so grateful I have proficiency in that language because, really, learning it took my brain to wild and imaginative places. I also grew up around older men and women (women especially) who understand the power of poetic language and know how to wield it. That was my first introduction to poetry. And, of course, in primary school, we had to learn/memorize all kinds of poems for all kinds of activities. I also came across fiction (through folktales) very early in life, but poetry has always been part and parcel of my life and culture. Therefore – by the time I acquired English as a second language and became proficient in it– It became a no-brainer that I started to write poetry. […]
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I believe writers have many roles in the culture. I think writers are the conscience of society. They are part of the thinkers or, you might say, intellectual backbones of society. Like the olden days, writers are scribes; they document our civilization. Tell me one civilization or society that does not have its writers. Writers, literary or non-literary, are important to every civilization. So, to the question: what do I see the current role of the writer being in the larger culture? We need our writers now more than ever because of the onslaught of artificial intelligence. We need our writers to weave their metaphors, similes, humour, and ironies in ways that remind us of our humanity. In a time when politics has gone berserk and empathy has become a scarce commodity, we need writers to help us imagine what it feels like to be the Other. In these times when we are seeing the plotted death of the imagination, we need writers who will insist on the magic of the imagination. We need writers who will take us to the unexpected places of the imaginative plane.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sakiru Adebayo
Time has always fascinated me. The past seems almost touchable, yet gone; the present always transforming into the future. Where do we actually live?
My new collection tips its hat to the idea of multiple worlds, multiple ways of viewing self and others, of living within an experiential palimpsest of ‘could be’, ‘is’, and ‘was’. A parakeet feather arrives, then mysteriously disappears; my father returns through the framing of a childhood picture; a foetus passes through many animal stages on its way to becoming human; whilst in Listening to a Scriabin Piano Roll, time dissolves completely and we hear a modern piano play exactly as the composer did over a century ago
I studied history at university, and as a child would get very excited standing exactly where events happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago. I still do. Worn treads of cathedral steps, a million year-old fly in amber, a battle field or house where a favourite author worked – so many places where time breaks down, if only for a moment, and we no longer inhabit a single world.
I was recently bowled over by some of the earliest human art when I visited the museum at Blaubeuren in Germany’s Schwabian Alps. I immediately felt a connection with the unknown person who had created an exquisitely carved diving bird. Time dropped away, we seemed to breathe together – the artist, the bird, the sculpture and myself.
Drop-in by Claire Booker (Nigel Kent)
The whole account reads like a Cinderella story. Frost turns up to this party as a nobody, at the life-volta where youth gives way to middle age. Somebody says to him, “Have you met Ezra Pound?” Of course he hasn’t met Ezra Pound. How on earth would he have met Ezra Pound? Mere days later, the man’s card in his hand, he has met Ezra Pound. And from there? Henry Oliver writes,
Within a year or so, everyone knew his collection North of Boston, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and he began his career as the great American poet of his generation and of the century. Before he died, he became a household name, quoted by schoolchildren, whose work was used in advertising and at a Presidential inauguration.
In that same year, 1913, he published A Boy’s Will. In America it wouldn’t be published until after the 1914 North of Boston which, engaging the New England terrain that would become Frost’s signature poetic landscape, eclipsed those earlier poems. A Boy’s Will includes a small handful of poems to which anthologists still return. “Mowing,” for example, and “The Tuft of Flowers,” both look back not only to the Romantics in their attention to the natural world, but reach even farther beyond them, to touch Andrew Marvell and his sequence of “Mower” poems.
These poems would be overshadowed by the “Frost’s Greatest Hits” of North of Boston, chiefly “Death of the Hired Man” and “Mending Wall.” But they reflect the way that nearly forty years’ life experience, coupled with an adult life spent reading and reflecting on literary tradition, was beginning to coalesce into the voice and vision we most associate with Frost: the melding of the local and immediate and uniquely American with the inheritance of English verse and the works of the classical poets who had informed it. There is also, already, the Frostian sense that the world’s beauty is veined with darkness and the menace of its own mortality. Already, in this early work, the poet intuits that “nothing gold can stay.”
Today’s Poem, taken from A Boy’s Will, is not one of those famous ones. Compared with later poems, “October” seems almost an exercise in what would become the poet’s signature terrain: an examination of the natural world’s phenomena, with their larger, darker existential implications, in a formal setting so smoothly executed as to prevent the reader’s noticing how complicated it actually is. He would quickly abandon this poem’s self-conscious apostrophizing and archaism of diction in favor of a subtler kind of artifice, an utterly natural-sounding voice arising from sophisticated, controlled verse technique. But in this early work of a later-emerging poet, the serious themes and concerns are already present.
The apparently effortless iambic tetrameter dominating these lines — with the intrusion of dimeter in line 4, and the spondaic “Slow, slow!” of line 17 — will recur in what is possibly Frost’s most famous poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The rhyme scheme’s complexity, moving forward, adding in new end-rhymes, but cycling relentlessly back to the rhymes of the opening abab quatrain, echoes, in its dynamic, the reality the poem acknowledges.
Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: October
It all began when Jeremy Wikeley — who writes the excellent A Poetry Notebook — commented in a note that
The kids on YouTube, for reasons I can’t discern, have discovered Night Mail — and are showing due respect for its reader “spitting bars”.
He then linked to the video below, which excerpts the final three minutes of Night Mail — that is, the part which features W.H. Auden’s poem “Night Mail”, accompanied by Benjamin Britten’s music: [link]
I scrolled the surprising number of comments, enjoying the many that compare the rat-a-tat 1930s voiceover with hip-hop stars (e.g. “Eminem has been real quiet since this dropped”, “This ain’t 50 cent it’s fifty shillings”). “Spitting bars”, for anyone unfamiliar, is freestyle rapping over a beat. A more technical definition I’ve seen specifically describes it as 16 bars of rapping before a song gets to its hook — and, strangely, the first part of “Night Mail” is eight rhyming couplets, or 16 lines, long.
I’m not about to suggest — as many of the YouTube comments do — that Auden invented rap here. But the technical resemblance is interesting. The poet was brought in at the end of the film-making process to write words to the edited footage, a task which required the use of a stopwatch to ensure an exact fit. So the form of the first, and most famous, section of “Night Mail” is not arbitrary: its 16 lines make for 55 second of narration over a segment of film showing the overnight train passing through dark moorland in the north of Britain (the next section begins with dawn in Glasgow). “Night Mail”, in other words, was written to fill about one minute of cinema, just as 16 bars of rap might fill about one minute of a song (“In many rap songs, a 16-bar verse lasts around 40 to 60 seconds” — Raptology.com).
We are only at the top of the rabbit hole here, though — daylight is still visible. Let us go down.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Bringing the Jacob Coastal Order
In his critique of Marriott’s book, Henry Oliver made the point that ‘it is my suspicion that what a lot of people who agree with The New Dark Ages’ description of modern culture really regret is not the death of print but the winnowing of upper-middlebrow culture: BBC documentaries, intellectuals on talk shows, Kenneth Clark, Melvyn Bragg, that sort of thing.’
In my case that is absolutely true, but one might also argue that the two things are linked: that the high-minded documentary making of the 1970s was written, produced and commissioned by people who had grown up in a print culture, and this is not true of the generations that followed. As print declined, so television came to serve a population that had adopted a more oral culture, lacking the ability to follow content with the same depth. The decline of reading, and the decline of high-minded, quality television – what Oliver calls the ‘passive high-brow’ – are part of the same trend.
That is from Ed West today. I quite agree about the print-television link and the subsequent decline of television, but if you want it back you have to care first and foremost about books. One way of putting this point is that if the people who think the decline of reading is a civilizational crisis are serious, they ought to get a lot more old fogeyish about reading. Turn off Kenneth Clark and pick up C.S. Lewis! Stop talking about the decline of reading (and television) and start reading a hundred pages every evening and blogging about it! It really is time to start memorizing Shakespeare in public. (Much to his credit, this is exactly what James Marriott is currently doing.) Follow ’ lead and read all of George Eliot’s novels. Or do what does and publish a monthly reading diary. (None of this is meant to be “against Ed”—for all I know, he is a reliable reader.)
What people like Ed really ought to care about, it seems to me, is whether children are made to memorize poems, how well the elites know their Shakespeare, that sort of thing. Worrying about democracy, culture, and attention spans seems quite speculative and too far down the chain. I recently spoke to a young waitress in a small town in Pennsylvania who listens to one book a month, spends a lot of time on TikTok, doesn’t know who Jane Austen was (seriously), and who gave the impression of being utterly smart and sensible. She is relatively apolitical but is taking an interest in the midterms so she can vote for the first time. Democracy is quite as safe with her as it was with my grandmother. I don’t think she lacks the ability to follow content at all. Naturally, I would love her to read Jane Austen, but we shouldn’t be too pessimistic about what will happen if she doesn’t. My grandparents never did, and it didn’t stop them contributing to the war effort and living as the sort of solid citizens Ed and James are worried we are now losing. Not everyone is a reader.
Henry Oliver, A brief reply to Ed West about reading
The act of reading Vox Wah Wah (New Walk Editions, 2026), Hilary Menos’ recent pamphlet, provokes wider questions, Through them, the specific is found opening an invitation to the universal, which is perhaps a useful analogy for Menos’ approach to poetry.
Matthew Stewart, From the specific to the universal, Hilary Menos’ Vox Wah Wah
In these twenty-one poems, Menos is certainly specific in many ways. To start with, they’re absolutely littered with proper nouns, from the names of guitars, groups, songs and concert venues to the man, Andy, whose implicit presence course through them. One such example is ‘Used & Vintage’. It begins as follows…
His first was a Fender Squier made in Japan
which he part-ex’d at Mansons in Exeter for an Epiphone
which he traded for a pretty little Rickenbacker Jetglo
which he swapped for half a car and a Gibson Les Paul Studio
which he lost to the drummer in a late-night drunken bet…
This isn’t a list poem. It’s a sequence of experiences that portray Andy’s passion for the instrument and the music that he plays.
However, the closing lines confirm extra layers…
…the sap settling in sweeter patterns the more you play
so with use and age come depth and resonance
and I look at him and think, yes.
The male’s deep feelings for guitars are juxtaposed here to the female’s deep feelings for him, allowing the reader to compare and contrast both sets of emotions. Furthermore, it also contains the revelation that an extended metaphor and analogy have been building throughout this poem, thus encouraging an immediate re-reading (which is always a good sign!).
The Book of Joy gathers together 100 poems, some no longer than three or four or five lines, a few spanning two pages. Each one contains the word “joy” (sometimes cleverly hidden), and all appear in the book in the order in which they were written. It took L.L. Barkat a bit more than a year to write them. […]
Barkat sometimes strikes the universal truth, as here in one of her most moving poems:
Term
I have carried
the weight
of your
absence
for nine months.
Mysterious
you, your joys and
sorrows
ever hidden,
epitome
of the old proverb
“Each heart
knows its own
sadness.
And no one
else
can share
its joy.”In every poem in this collection, however circumscribed the boundaries of her quiet life in New York, however doubt-filled she might be on any one day, however bereft, L.L. Barkat still manages to find both the small and larger spaces where her joy finds outlet — in the way a purple lantern tree “dips and swings / its blooms” (“On Route 9A at 2:15 in the Afternoon”); when her daughters surprise her with “[o]range roses, / like a sunrise. / And dark chocolate / to take me / into the night.” (“Mother’s Day”); where “black-capped chickadees play // round robin with a she-cardinal” (“Spring Joy”); while observing the honeysuckle “tumbling / her lavish / curls“ (“Scents”); how “a single / red leaf / aglow” can lift the spirit with a “gentle / shock / of joy” (“Japanese Maple”). Where her senses come alive, her imagery grows rich.
Maureen Doallas, ‘The Book of Joy’ by L.L. Barkat
Things changed in our house in the mid 80s. I was a kid when my mum cut her hair short, bought a pair of dungarees and a copy of The Cranks Cook Book. It wasn’t exactly a suburban revolution, more a quiet awakening and my brother and my father and I observed the transformation with little commentary. There was no great upheaval, no sudden shakedown in the order of things, this was no domestic insurrection but a sea change was taking place. Out went the Findus Frozen Crispy Pancakes and chips and peas with everything and in came the lentils and something called moussaka. I think my dad even tried to do the washing up once but only after he was asked. Things evolve slowly, especially in Surrey.
I also remember my mum had new friends who came over. There was coffee and conversation and sometimes something called poetry was discussed. Poetry, this was definitely something for grown ups and it wasn’t spoken about openly. Poetry was for quiet kitchens, for small front rooms, it was part of the closed door talk. Poetry wasn’t for people who ate Findus Frozen Crispy Pancakes, it was for those who knew what moussaka was.
I do remember a specific book being discussed. I think I was off school that day and why I was party to this particular conversation, how I came to be invited in to the secret coven. It was a slim volume, one that had just been published and the name of its author was easy to remember: Douglas Dunn. I said his name over in my head: Douglas Dunn. Douglas Dunn and I built a mental picture up of him. He was about a hundred years old. With a beard. All poets were old and white and male or dead and none of them ever did the washing up. […]
I don’t recall which poems were discussed or even if any of them were read out, I just remember a thread of conversation, that this was an important volume written about the poet’s wife, about her illness, about how he cared for her and his grief when she died. It was grown up stuff and a poetry book, we were told, that was to be read from one end to the other. This was not something you should dip in to, it demanded your attention and my mind began to wander. […]
When I heard of his death last week the childhood memories of a poet who, back then, I’d never read, returned. How subtle, I thought, or accidental our introduction to poetry can be, how it may take years before we begin to appreciate its magic, before its vibrations truly resonate with us, how randomly we are touched by its necromancy. […]
While I’d filed Douglas Dunn away after my first early encounter, I had, diligently, a decade later, bought a copy of Elegies in a second hand bookshop in Stoke Newington. I never took the coffee morning advice, I didn’t read it from one end to the other in its recommended chronology but neither did I just dip in. I dived. Heart first.
And I remember the poem I immersed myself in. It was called Second Opinion, a work set in a doctor’s consultancy room where “the minutes went by like winter.” Dunn’s poetry worked on me slowly and deliberately, it delivered its lines deftly and subtly. It didn’t light me up initially, or turn me on dramatically. I was still young and in my blood and thunder phase, I was starting out myself when I first read him but I do remember thinking, “this is how it’s done.” And I wrote a hundred poems in imitation and maybe one, just one, came close to doing the thing that Douglas Dunn does.
And what does Douglas Dunn do? He operates at the intersection of craft and instinct, he lets the feeling cool off a little and while its metal is still malleable he hammers it into shape. The blades he makes are sharp, there are no rough edges here, it is all precision and fine engineering. And this is why his lines cut deep.
I have just taken Elegies off my shelf again. Maybe another ten years have passed since I last read Douglas Dunn but the poems have not lost any of their lustre.
Jan Noble, N°87 That’s how it’s done, Douglas Dunn
About 8 years ago I was working on my first full manuscript. I think the title at the time was “Cartography Lesson.” It was the collection of all of the best poems I had written at the time. And I’m an eclectic writer with eclectic interest so the poems had wide ranges of styles and subject matter. There were poems about my parents next to poems about swans, and poems about swans next to poems about sex. What held the collection together was basically that all the poems were the best pieces I had at the time. That’s all.
At one point I got word that the book was a finalist for a prize from Moon City Press. You’d think I would be excited about that, but as soon as I saw it listed, I actually had a very surprising reaction. My stomach clenched and I heard a voice say, “Oh my god, I hope I don’t win!” […]
Fortunately, I didn’t win. The poet Jeannine Hall Gailey won for her book Field Guide to the End of the World. And I was relieved.
I’m serious here. I’m not just having sour grapes about the fact that I didn’t win. I really, sincerely hoped that I wouldn’t. Because, even though I believed in the individual poems in the book, I did not believe in the book as a whole. What was I thinking, having those sex poems in the same book as the poems about my parents???
Ew.
I had put that book together not because it was ready, but because I was impatient and wanted a book out. Over the next few years I took the book apart. I divided the poems into different categories, poems about my family, poems about nature, poems about being young in the city, poems about romance and sex.
Turns out I didn’t have one book. I had the start of 3 different books.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think a collection needs to hit on the same note or theme over and over again. I have a number of favorite collections where the poems cover different topics and have different voices. But I also love books that really feel they belong together. My favorites at the time were Bruce Snider’s Paradise Indiana, and Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler. The truth is, I wanted to see if I could write a book that focused more closely on a theme. A book that felt, maybe a little, like a novel in verse, or, at least a collection that explored a specific voice.
Tresha Faye Haefner, From Muses to Manuscript: What I Wish I Had Known Before Assembling My First Book
One of the challenges we have in discussing AI writing in the literary community is that most of us are writers. We are deeply invested in the art and the labor of writing.
We take AI-generated literature very seriously because we understand the threats it poses—to our livelihoods, to our minds and our culture.
But I want to look at this conversation from another angle, from the perspective of readers. Specifically, readers who are not writers. Readers who just love to read.
Recent data is heartening. Based on a survey of 5,025 people in the U.S. who purchased a book in the past three months, “just 22% are okay with the use of AI at any stage of creating a book, including the writing, while 28% don’t want it in books at all.” Interestingly, younger people seem more comfortable with AI usage. “36% of teenagers are open to AI being used at any stage of the writing of a book, while only 11% of people over 55 agreed.”
Of course, this is just one survey and we know nothing about the participants. Crucially I would want to know the reason for not wanting to read AI-crafted books. Is this for ethical reasons? Or is it because these readers feel the quality of AI-crafted work is subpar? How might that change as the quality of AI-crafted writing improves?
Whenever this conversation comes up, people insist that they read in order to connect with the humanity of the author. What is the point of reading a work of literature, if not to connect with another human being, a real human heart on the other side of the page, a fellow soul?
But not every reader reads for that purpose. Not every book is meant to connect a reader to the writer’s soul. And even if that were the case, who is to say that AI writing does not, or will not soon, make a reader feel that way?
As I mentioned last week, many editors are starting to let AI writing slip through the cracks of their magazines. I believe this is unintentional. But clearly, they felt something when they read those works. They believed a soul was present. They believed a connection was happening with a human on other side.
Hence I ask, if a work is good enough to feel human to a reader, does it matter that AI assisted in writing it?
Where do we draw the lines for acceptable AI consumption in our lives?
Where are readers, not writers, drawing those lines for themselves?
Becky Tuch, Q: Does AI writing matter for readers? Should it?
You’re a writer. It’s what you do. What you’ve always done, as far back as you can remember anyway when the desire to create something has taken hold.
And then grief hits you. Smashes into you. There is no avoiding it. There’s no predicting what it will do to you. Writing, which has challenged and sustained you for so long, is pointless, trivial, impossible to contemplate.
The world is full of dreams, day-dreams, nightmares, pointless but inevitable what-ifs. You get the jobs done that must be done. You live around your grief minute by minute, hour by hour. Stuff goes on. You’re in the middle of having a new kitchen fitted. People come in, go out, you make them coffee, you talk about what they’re doing when it’s required. You try to remember who it is today – electrician? plasterer? fitter? or just a delivery? You talk in person or on-line to well-wishers, friends, people who knew you years ago and have something kind to say. Cards come. Flowers. Even neighbours with meals. Nobody really knows what to do. You’re grateful all the same. And it is all the same. Numb. Pointless. You tell yourself ‘others have had to live through this, so we will’. You say it, even if you don’t believe it.
And then from somewhere, a line arrives in your head, a phrase. You write it down in a notebook. Of course you do. It’s what you do. And then an image that seems as if it might be developed. Oh, of course it’s far too soon to think about that now. Not any time soon. But sometime.
And you know, for good, indifferent or bad, you’ll do this useless thing called writing again. It’s what you do. In life, with life, outside of life, without it. You will steal your grief, a line at a time, you will use it, indirectly because you don’t write therapy, you will abuse it, you will probably despise yourself for doing it. But you know you will do it.
Bob Mee, GRIEF: WHAT DO YOU DO WITH IT?
morning walk
Tom Clausen, tapestry
the slow dissolve
of world news
— I often think about Cixous’s line about how “you are not an employee.” And you’re not, you know? Sure you need a paycheque and have a job, most likely. But you are not an employee. You are a soul.
— Inspiration perhaps in this next poem:
Our Real Work
by Wendell BerryIt may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
*— These days, I know that I need to remind myself that Instagram is not my work. The work is the photo, the seeing, the walking.
— My work is to see and write and make what I can from where I am with what I’ve got. My work is not to doubt. My work is to encourage others to do same. My work is to protect the horizon for myself and others. My work is to say what I can say and to speak even when I stutter and turn red because my speaking is also worth something. My work is to also be a chaser of beauty. (See header photo in the browser if you’re reading this in your email).
— My work is to continue to engage with the world via the soul. My work is to stay calm and drink my tea so that others may also stay calm. Which doesn’t mean my work isn’t also to be angry at all the injustices and the fuckery of the world.
Shawna Lemay, Your work is
The woman in the workshop
Luisa A. Igloria, Entr’acte
tonight spoke of what she called red doors—
those threshold moments that tick like a lure
and like a warning, and after you’ve crossed
into them you realize there’s no returning.
The scent of spores, of old musk, lines the air.
How many more calendar squares are left
in the year? To be cocooned in cold, to slowly
run out of words.
I’m deeply immersed reading two very different new books of poetry. First, the late Harry Humes’ new and selected, Going across the Water, is out from Ohio University Press–a lovely, large collection that includes some biography and commentary, as well as some never-collected new poems (Harry’s former student and long-time friend, Daniel Donaghy, edited and co-compiled the selections). Some of the poems are a re-read for me, as I have most of Harry’s books in my own library, but they’re poems well worth many reads. And the work I’m less familiar with is rewarding. He was so good. The other collection I’m perusing at present is Daisy Fried’s brand-new My Destination, which could hardly be less like Humes’ in terms of topic, content, style, you-name-it. Katie Peterson writes that Fried’s book succeeds because of “the poet’s unapologetic curiosity about experience, and her remorseless hunger for the right words to know her moment…” I’ll concur, though I am only part-way through the collection. It’s fascinating to find myself enjoying the work of two such dissimilar writers at the same time; and I find they do have “things to say to one another,” at least through me as intermediary. Strongly evocative and well-observed poems in both cases.
~
And today I spent awhile obtaining a more complete idea of how much time and effort I’ll have to put in to my own artist book endeavor. So many new things I’ll have to learn to do, and how I’ll have to be much more finicky and careful than I usually am, if I want this book to be worthy of its story. Any project of value is liable to take energy, time, resources of one kind or another, and will require at least some revision, however. That’s my line, and I’m sticking to it.
Ann E. Michael, Decisions, revisions
The insomnia knitted into our sleep lets us witness the moon and sun’s changing of the guard,
and contemplate how the scatter and scat of dead leaves across sidewalks sing the jazz of another year almost gone.
All the notes rushing into us and leaving.
What remains, the song of why we live.
Rich Ferguson, Reckoning