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 veil of the quotidian, a perfectly demotic raven, unborn stars, line breaks in the day, and much more. Enjoy.
Those mornings when I wake and everything feels metaphorical, in the sense I feel the connection, the similarity between each thing and another, see, as a matter of course how a chair is a kind of shoe, a rock is the cupped space a hand makes. Perhaps this is a continuation of a sleep state when the narrative of dream is able to draw into its current any thing viewed on its banks. Or it might be that some of the veil of the quotidian has been drawn back, the pataphysical separation of things, the pre-emptive division of the world into non-contiguous categories in order to enable our movement from one point A to another point B, rather than being pulled into spiritual or philosophical reverie by the vortical relationship of things.
Gary Barwin, Waking up metaphorical
Whew! And wahoo! Like many of you, I’m still absorbing the impact of this historic blue wave, and feeling some combination of elation, exhaustion and relief. It will take some time to clean up the mess this regime has made, and to build a more fair and functional system that works for all of us. Still, we are definitely on the right track now!
Through these difficult years, the day’s headlines have seemed to run on an infinite doom loop.
tipping Monday
out of the pill box
deep NovemberAnd while this historically cruel, corrupt and incompetent administration slides towards authoritarianism, making art sometimes feels pointless. But the saying, “Joy is an act of resistance” has guided me. And creating bright, beautiful art has been one way to light a spark in the darkness.
Since Tuesday night, I keep finding myself unconsciously letting out a long, deep breath. There is work ahead, but we can finally exhale. Congratulations to everyone who helped generate this blue tsunami, and thanks to all who were drops in the wave!
deep breathing
Annette Makino, Exhaling after the elections
the shift from estar
to ser
Tonight it’s all you can do
Luisa A. Igloria, What’s Visible
to keep from dissolving—the sight of people putting
their I Voted stickers on lampposts near where Alex
and Renee were murdered, the news of blue wins in near
every state. Someone you love telling you this is the first
time in years they did not wish, almost every minute,
to die.
After thirty-seven years in power, Robert Mugabe was ousted by a faction of the military and later died of advanced prostate cancer at the Gleneagles hospital in Singapore. When I learned he and his wife, Grace Mugabe, had been placed under house arrest, I flew to the capital, Harare.
If you’d asked me at the time—why is it you’re going to Zimbabwe?—I would’ve said that I wanted to learn from writers and artists and musicians. First, after decades of creating work that might speak truth to power while that power was actively suppressing the people (as well as their own imaginations within the artform), how would the fall of the dictator affect their creative work? And secondly, would they need to reinvent themselves, or learn who they are within their artform, now that they might not be creating work in direct relationship to the power structure of their country as they’d known if for much of their lives?
I landed in the capital in December of 2017 without knowing a single person in the entire country. As I booked the flights, I reached out to poets and friends who had contacts there—and this helped a great deal. Soon enough, I made my way under a canopy of poinciana and jacaranda trees in the Harare Gardens to a thatched roof lapa, where a session of the Zimbabwe Writers Association happened to be meeting. […]
I won’t name the writers and artists that offered me contextual insights into the political nature of their work, or how Mugabe’s rule had affected them. Why? When I asked them, several shared variations of this response: With the old leader gone, the system hadn’t changed; rather, everyone in the power structure simply moved up one rung on the ladder.
That leaves us with Emmerson Mnangagwa, the current president. He was already in charge by the time I’d landed in December, and now, as recently as July of 2026, he’s forced a constitutional amendment to extend his current rule (postponing the planned 2028 elections) to 2030. Even more alarming, direct elections have been abolished in Zimbabwe. Going forward, the president will be elected by a vote of the Senate and the National Assembly, rather than by a direct vote of the people. This is widely considered a constitutional coup, all of it done with pen and paper, under the guise of democratic legitimacy.
Again, I will not name the writers and artists who spoke with me about the politics of making in their society, but I will share that the transparent subtext of my own country seemed self-evident within my questions about power and authoritarian rule, the role of artists under structures designed to silence voices of dissent, the many ways that artists themselves might self-censor within these contexts, and more. In essence, I’d gone to Zimbabwe to consider how writers and artists might survive within my own country, given time, given a deepening authoritarian divide, given pressure from the despotic nature of power in its corrupted state.
Brian Turner, After the Fall of the Dictator
This Sunday morning, I’ll be leaving the Poetry in Aldeburgh Festival at the crack of dawn, because if you’re a brass bander you always have somewhere to be at 11am on Remembrance Sunday. Provided the M25 is kind to me, I’ll be standing on soggy leaves by the war memorial with the band. We’ll play the laminated hymns we always do, the principal cornet will play the Last Post and Reveille, sighing quietly with relief when he completes it clean, all the names on the stone will be read aloud and we’ll God-Save-the-King everyone home. This happens across the country, in tens of thousands of towns and villages simultaneously, and poetry is at its heart:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
And we do. Religion or politics aside, I’m someone who is immensely comforted by a ritual. I love a ceremony. I love a plaque. I love a memorial bench. I wish that more people could be honoured like this every year, that we knew more of their names: people caught up in recent conflicts, people who have been victims of discrimination, people who were just nice people. I’d like to stand on soggy leaves and hear their names and play brass band versions of songs they liked. I’d like little plaques on the handles of supermarket trolleys (for Doris, who always came in for corned beef on a Saturday morning). It would be the opposite of morbid, if you ask me. And there should be poems. Poems everywhere, because poems are for remembering.
This week’s book is an anthology that does just that: it charts the history of the 20th century through poems (The 20th Century in Poetry, Michael Hulse and Simon Ray, Ebury Press, 2011). It’s the size of a breeze block and it came to me as a gift from a lovely student of mine when she left the school. It’s an interesting book because it’s a history of the 20th century via poetry, NOT a history of 20th century poetry, so while there are a lot of famous poems in here, it doesn’t feel like they’ve felt the need to cram every famous poem in for the sake of it. Instead, they’ve chosen poems that specifically address things that happened in the 20th century, poems I would probably never have come across. It’s sobering to flick through, I’ll be honest. There is so much bloody war.
Nia Broomhall, Week 34: The 20th Century in Poetry
The main body of the protest was kettled for a couple of hours very close to my office; I could hear them singing (this video shows the group I could hear, and the very catchy song you suddenly hear everywhere). A few hours later I walked home down the street they’d been on for a while and, along with several less original bits of new graffiti, found this quotation of Victor Hugo, from his poem ‘Au Peuple’ (‘To the People’):
Voici le chacal sur ton seuil,
Voici les rats et les belettes,
Pourquoi t’es tu laissé lié de bandelettes?
ils te mordent dans ton cercueil.Here is the jackal on your threshold
Here are the rats and here the weasels
Why did you let them bind you in grave-clothes?
They are biting you even in your coffin.Hugo strongly opposed the military coup in 1851 by which the President Louis-Napoléon assumed absolute power and became Emperor Napoléon III. Hugo went into exile on Jersey and from there wrote a collection of political poems, Les Châtiments, excoriating those in power and calling upon the people to rise up. These lines come from the first stanza of one of these poems:
Partout pleurs, sanglots, cris funèbres.
Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres?
Je ne veux pas que tu sois mort.
Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres?
Ce n’est pas l’instant où l’on dort.
La pâle Liberté gît sanglante à ta porte.
Tu le sais, toi mort, elle est morte.
Voici le chacal sur ton seuil,
Voici les rats et les belettes,
Pourquoi t’es-tu laissé lier de bandelettes?
Ils te mordent dans ton cercueil!
De tous les peuples on prépare
Le convoi… —
Lazare! Lazare! Lazare!
Lève-toi!Everywhere tears, sobs, mourning cries.
Why are you sleeping in the darkness?
I do not want you to be dead.
Why are you sleeping in the darkness?
This is not the time for sleeping.
Pale Liberty lies bleeding at your door.
You know, dead yourself, that she is dead.
Here is the jackal on your threshold
Here are the rats and here the weasels
Why did you let them bind you in grave-clothes?
They are biting you even in your coffin!
From every people they are preparing
The funeral train —
Lazarus! Lazarus! Lazarus!
Rise up!Hugo, like Melville, had a gift for memorable invective, here combined with political urgency. (It’s only at the very end of the poem that he hears the distant hum of the people stirring at last to action.) But I was struck by the similarities between Hugo’s rousing call to arms and that of Fisher’s Satan, instigating civil war:
“Surgite Concordes Socii, coeptisque favete:
Ulteriùs pigeat, pigeat latuisse pudendo
Pulvere, & Ignotis animas traxisse tenebris.“Rise up Allies of the Heart, continue what we have begun:
It would be more shameful, more shameful to have lain low in humiliating
Dust, and to have dragged our souls along in shadows of Obscurity.Whether the cause be wicked or just, the call to arms is the same, and perhaps equally seductive.
There’s a topical resonance here too, intended or not. Hugo’s poem laments that the people — like Fisher’s Satan and his minions — are sleeping in the darkness, in the repeated line Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres? (‘Why are you sleeping in the darkness?). A common trope of Gunpowder Plot poems is of Jesuits (or the devil himself) putting on a disguise in order to infiltrate the corridors of power. One of the catchphrases of the current school protests in France, which you might have seen on placards in the news, is Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres. This means literally (but rather nonsensically) ‘In the name of Allah, it’s the darkness’; bismillah is an Arabic phrase that has entered French. It went viral after someone who was widely taken to be an undercover police officer making a risible attempt to imitate the speech patterns of young French men of North African descent in order to gain access to information about the school protests posted this phase in a school students’ Snapchat group (before following up “so when’s the blockade? please add me to the blockade group”). I think it’s unlikely that the hapless police officer was thinking of Hugo, but the student who wrote out voici le chacal to stir passers-by to action might have been remembering les ténèbres.
However inconvenient endless school closures may be, it is hard not to be moved by the energy, joy and determination of French children and students. I am repulsed by what feels now like a police state, with the threat of violence always close at hand. The way the riot police here are clothed makes them genuinely alarming at close quarters, but also easy to demonise: like Melville’s imaginary flocks of Jesuits, they all look the same. (The students often play the Imperial March from Star Wars at them.) A generation of young people are forming their political identity in relation to these (mostly) men in helmets, many of whom must have children of their own. You have to wonder, what is it like to be them?
Victoria Moul, Dans les ténèbres
In Minnesota, where I live, the law gives poll workers the overly dignified name of “election judges,” which is why the sequence that includes the poem below is called “Judgments.”
This year, I chickened out on serving as a poll worker: those fifteen-hour days are hard on my body. But I’ve served several times since first signing up in 2016, and while the job is usually uneventful, it can be challenging. Sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—duty requires that we tell a voter she’ll need to return with different documents in order to register and vote. Sometimes doing one’s duty gets a testy response. It can be hard.
But then there are reminders that voting itself is sometimes a difficult duty and privilege, as it was in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Thus this poem.
III. Afterword
Maybe it makes a difference. In that year
when a vast rage had torn the whole East Coast
to sodden shreds in late autumn, I slumped
at the stove in an election’s morning-after,
absently stirring breakfast. And my brain
snagged on the radio’s voice, the quiet story
telling how voters in a broken city
stood stoic in the day-devouring lines.
People with shattered homes, people exploring
the strange new depth of their old powerlessness,
shivered and shuffled toward their polling places
under a lead-white sky.The voice signed off.
I wept in silence into my scrambled eggs.(From “Judgments,” in the book In Code)
Maryann Corbett, Aftermath of a Different Election Day
We also had a bunch of literary shakeups this week, including the shuttering of Salon, which I remember reading in the early days of the internet, and which I was so proud to be published in, and even more to be listed as “best of 2020” in that publication. Soft Skull Press is disappearing. And the Poetry Foundation did layoffs this week and a huge redesign of its magazine, plus cancelling most of its local programming. Who do they think they are, Amazon? For a place that still has over 300 mill in the bank, it’s interesting to hear it’s shrinking staff. Is it also building a data center? Just kidding, I hope, Poetry. […]
Then we were surprised with the offer of tickets to the ballet to a spook-themed show I really wanted to see. (I mean, when someone offers you tickets to the ballet, or the opera, or a concert, you go, right? It’s a sign from the universe you should be going out into the world even after the Big Dark!)
So, Friday night we got dressed up, went out into the rain and traffic downtown to the PNB Ballet Company’s opening night for Ghost Stories, which is really a set of four smaller ballets.
The most grand of them is the final La Sonnambula, with big costume numbers and grand music, but my favorite (probably not shocking to those who know me) was “The Raven,” an all-dance interpretation of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem with lush music from an obscure musician of the 1840s that captures the gothic drama of the piece. The dancer who played Poe did a great job, but the real standout dancer was The Raven, who has to stand perfectly still for long periods of time and then violently start flapping, attacking, emoting a perfectly demotic raven. Costumes and art were beautiful too. And in the last piece, a woman dancer literally picks up and carries out the main male dancer, who is supposed to be dead. Talk about back strength!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Surprises: Blue Waves, Ballet, and Literary Shakeups, and More
For a reading in an old church last weekend, I chose ghost poems. I’ve written a lot of them, even though I’m agnostic about ghosts. I feel certain lost loved ones hovering occasionally, or the versions of them preserved in my mind. I’ve had odd Ouija board experiences and heard strange voices seeming to whisper from the borders of sleep. Yet part of me rejects the idea as too awful. Certain politicians, well, if they’re doomed to haunt their ill-conceived ballrooms after death, fine. But most humans, after long difficult lives, deserve a better renovation: escape from suffering and worry.
Anyway, for the Samhain event, I read a few poems then sat down in a pew to listen to Jim Peterson. I’d recently read his new-ish book The Towheaded Stone Thrower, about the life and death of his wildly beloved wife, and it left a sort of halo around the world. The autumn seemed brighter and more beautiful, because he had reminded me that darkness was coming.
Then a shadow caught my eye. Something about its movement said cat. But I was in a deconsecrated little church in the woods, next to an old graveyard: no pets. I turned to look harder and glimpsed, more clearly, the fleeting shape of a tail.
My heart started pounding. My first, highly questionable reaction: I’d actually seen a ghost this time!
Then a living cat ducked under the pew in front of me, allowed me to pet its utterly real warm furry head, and drank from a cup of water I’d left on the floor.
More facts: two days later, amid a paperwork tsunami at work, the so-called blue tsunami hit. Even amid cheering news trickling in Tuesday evening, I’d gone to bed with a sense of doom, expecting to wake up to an enraged president bombing someone in vengeance. That specter hasn’t come to pass (yet?–the appointment of Stephen Miller is ominous). I’m sleeping a little better. Fear hasn’t vanished–hope for change is not yet actual improvement in people’s lives, which a disparate, feuding cast of Dems and independents may not be able to conjure–yet dread has ebbed to a more manageable wariness.
Lesley Wheeler, Cat ghosts and rock tripe
Shifty, the morning. We’ve fucked with time again, just as the day is shrinking, and I’m off kilter. Looked up in the morning sky in time to see a wide wave of small birds unroll, moving crosswise to the lowest clouds, which were moving faster than the higher clouds, which revealed some pale sky. Hard not to read signs and portents in all this change. But that’s just the human need to control things, right? Our need to know stuff ahead of time, what’s coming. We’re an anxious species. Jumpy as the rabbit who sometimes shows up in the backyard. Munch munch, then freeze, then leap off into the underbrush, or the squirrel, fervid, burying nuts in the flowerbox. Or is that just me? Who would know the future? Who would tattle? The little birds disappear into the distance. A breeze picks up and the brown smell of downed leaves and wet wood wanders past. If I and everything around me is the inevitable outcome of biological and physical functions, what could the future be but some kind of past? Still, I watch and listen. What should I be paying attention to? Is there something I should know? How should I be preparing myself? Here’s a little poem by Tomaž Šalamun, translated from Slovenian by the author himself and Michael Waltuch.
[untitled]
Tomaž Šalamun, tr. Tomaž Šalamun and Michael Waltuch
Little robin,
Marilyn McCabe, bones pinned to the cosmos
bones pinned to the cosmos.
Who whistles, who calls?
— I’ve been reading poems on happiness just now and it’s interesting how many have people splitting a sandwich, or a dessert, or sipping a coffee. It’s happiness in spite of, often.
— The poem by Raymond Carver is no exception, beginning, “So early it’s still almost dark out. / I’m near the window with coffee, / and the usual early morning stuff / that passes for thought.” (Continue reading).
— Before you die, you should know that Ilya Kaminsky’s doctors “have prescribed happiness.”
— The poet Maggie Smith has gifted up with a list of “poems that make you glad to be alive.” Down with that, yah. Fond of this one by Cameron Awkward-Rich.
— There is no guarantee of happiness. Never has been.
— Some might say the world has enough poems. I say the world needs more poems written by the light in your own skull. How about writing a poem about happiness?
Shawna Lemay, The Taste of Happiness
Mirage of Burning Things [by Ryan Di Francesco] feels like it was born out of a compulsion – a compulsion to notice, to put things on record. The poet-narrator moves through mostly urban environments, less flâneur-ing and more reportage on the fragility of modern life. A tumble of images follows us from page to page. Most of the poems are quite pared back in language and form, with little punctuation and short, staccato lines. […]
Insomnia stalks the collection, bringing a jaded and somewhat hallucinatory atmosphere at times. I particularly enjoyed the poem 3-5am. ‘Enjoyed’ is the wrong word, as the poem deals with some very difficult things. But Ryan has a wry humour that deftly punctures the relentlessness of things when a little levity is needed:
“You know, I have read poems in high-tier journals with whimsical lyric
turning insomnia into a pearl sky.
Those poems make me sick.”There is tenderness to be found, too. In fact, there are two poems called Tenderness: Part 1 and Tenderness: Part 2. But, as ever, the white peonies of love and beauty co-exist with ugliness and decay. The closing poem, Animal Dreams of Other Animals, is an interesting one, as it leaves us with a note less of hope, than perhaps resignation. But maybe there is some comfort to be found in the idea that we are all animals, dreaming of a place of shelter.
Victoria Spires, Mirage of Burning Things
Twenty years ago, Hamish Ironside – freelance typesetter of poetry and academic books, and later to be the driving force behind publisher Boatwhistle Books – wrote a haiku a day and collated the best of them into his first collection, Our Sweet Little Time, published by Iron Press in 2009 (and available here). Here are a couple of my favourites from it:
at the book fair
Darth Vader
gets in everyone’s way
my daughter’s screaming
settled by footage
of war in IraqAs both of these show, Ironside, like a contemporary Logan Pearsall Smith, has a gift for noticing small but quirky things, and for turning them into art: whereas the wording of the first one probably chose itself quite naturally, the choice of ‘settled’ in the second may have needed more thought and is inspired in how it enhances the irony.
Ironside repeated the one-a-day trick in 2017, resulting in a second collection published by Iron in 2018, Three Blue Beans in a Blue Bladder (available here). Again, here are two favourites of mine, both of which speak for themselves:
in her newsreading voice
she tells me someone’s selling my book
for a penny
all things must pass
including my copy of
All Things Must PassIn the interests of transparency, I should disclose here that I provided some (fairly-limited) assistance in the editing process of both books.
Ironside has now completed the hat-trick, having written a haiku every day last year, a selection of which can be found in Down Falls the Lark (hereafter referred to as DFL), which is also available from the Iron Press website, here.
As you can see from the poems above, Ironside is best-known in the small pond (replete with frog) that is the English-language haiku world for his senryu; that’s to say haiku that are principally concerned with the foibles, frailties, confusions and contradictions of human behaviour, not least his own, and which are often very funny. His preoccupations are largely unchanged: the pitfalls of the day job (‘before I press send / I check the pronouns / for the fourth time’); passing observations of creatures, including humans, acting in unusual ways; jokes at his wife’s and his own expense; wry existential despair (‘in the middle of the night / I can’t help imagining / the unimaginable’); the parent–child relationship; the similarity of birds’ flight and other actions to other objects (‘pelican preening / unfolds itself / like a Swiss Army knife’); and – among all the levity and self-deprecation – the occasional humdinger of a poignant, heartfelt and resonant haiku.
Matthew Paul, On Hamish Ironside’s Down Falls the Lark
The poems of Sara Teasdale (1884–1933), as we’ve had ample opportunity to contemplate here, bear their freight of emotion beneath a skin thin to the point of translucency. Even joy, as in “A Winter Blue-Jay,” has its boundaries; beyond those boundaries lies grief. The beauty of the titular “Blue Squills” assails the senses as, almost, a form of pain. The love in “Summer Night, Riverside,” is no sooner experienced than lost. Even the consolation that “There Will Be Stars,” always and forever, fails to promise that anyone will be alive to see them.
In Today’s Poem, part of Teasdale’s 1926 collection Dark of the Moon, landscape — or rather, seascape — functions as subtext. In three tetrameter abcb quatrains, this brief lyric sketches physical detail, but also emotional undertone, to create a compressed drama of things that go unsaid. But then, those things hardly need saying, once the scene itself, as narrated by the first-person speaker, has fallen silent.
The first stanza might be the beginning of any nature poem narrated by an observer who might content him- or herself to remain outside a visual frame dominated by murmurations of migratory birds, whose presence on the sky overshadows the briefly mentioned dunes. With the synecdochical “wings” of line 3, the speaker in one rhetorical stroke reduces the birds to one great motion of leavetaking. These “wings” become a tide themselves, more real on the page than the actual sea, as they swirl away “[o]ver the dunes and out of sight.”
In Stanza 2, however, the seascape gains a human population, a “you” and a “me,” and with these two characters, a new level of clarity. We know now that the “I” is speaking, and that whatever this “I” narrates is meant as half a conversation, aimed at the “you” who might or might not answer. The second stanza, actually, poses a question for the “you”: Why did you bring me here? Or more precisely, Why did you bring me here NOW? And what is the here? What is the now? It’s the sea at ebb tide, the cold, uncongenial end of the year. Everything is departing: the sea, the birds, the time itself. Even the fish-hawk, there in its natural element, isn’t fishing, but “flying.” And why? Because “[n]othing is left,” that’s why. “Nothing is left but the old year dying.”
Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Low Tide
The latest from Pennsylvania writer Kirsten Kaschock is the poetry title AutoPortrait (as flotsam) (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2026), following Unfathoms (Slope Editions, 2004), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press, 2011), WindowBoxing (Bloof Books, 2013) [see my review of such here], The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press/winner of AWP Donald Hall Prize, 2014), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press, 2017), and Explain This Corpse (Lynx House Press, 2020), with a further, Docenture: A Tale of Hue as Told by the Estate, forthcoming from South Indiana Review Press. As the back cover offers, this collection is arranged as a kind of gallery-walk response to the works of other artists (predominantly visual artists), as Kaschock offers individual responses across the lyric to works by Paul Gaugin, Alice Neel, Mark Rothko, Vincent Van Gogh, Joan Miro, Amadeo Modigliani, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Theo Jansen, Arthur Garfield Dove, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pablo Picasso, Jacob Lawrence, Sinead O’Connor, Michael Stipe, Paul Klee, Edvard Munch, Donovan, Eva Hesse, Berye Saar, Joan Mitchell, Lucille Clifton, Romaine Brooks, Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Chagall and Francisco Goya. “They will never know what not to do / with you. This is a layering,” she writes, to close the poem “Contingent,” citing Eva Hesse, “a vanish into / potential, a technique to impossibilize / biography. My material they may long to have // illuminated. But I am no monk, no man- / uscript. And within this doubt / no woman you cannot.”
Structured in three parts—“Maiden (woman),” “Daemon (bird)” and “Nomad (star,” each section holds a cluster of poems, offering her individual responses to specific artists, many of which then extend from that initial response as a kind of prompt into further exploration through memory, memoir and specific experiences. It is as though her poems responding to artists are utilized as touchpoints; offered as a way to jump further into and through specific subjects, memories or conversations. “What happens / happens because of the way light twists / as it filters in.” she writes, earlier in that same poem for/after Eva Hesse.
rob mclennan, Kirsten Kaschock, AutoPortrait (as flotsam)
I’m curious to hear about your career. What do/did you enjoy the most about your career? How has your career/past jobs influenced the way you live and write poetry?
My career was a way to engage with people and make my mortgage payments. In that way, it was a win-win. When I worked as a lawyer in Tokyo, the partners would help translate my haiku in Japanese. They encouraged me to send my haiku to the English-language newspapers published in Japan, most of which have a haiku column.
You have been a long-time haibun editor at Modern Haiku. What advice do you have for those who are new to writing haibun?
Modern Haiku, under editor exemplar Paul Miller, is a multifaceted journal which is known for its high-quality haiku, essays, art, book reviews, and haibun. We publish only a handful of haibun in each issue. It is a very high bar. My advice to those new to haibun is to read as many haibun published in Modern Haiku (and other high quality publications, including both haibun and literary journals), as possible. Don’t waste time on cover letters that list all your awards and publications. Just send your single best haibun. One other thing: if your haibun is AI produced or is plagiarized in whole or in part, things won’t go well for your submission. Similarly, try to get along with the editor. Don’t complain to the EIC (Editor-in-Chief) if your haibun doesn’t get picked. And remember to treat your editor as you would like to be treated, both privately and publicly. Give credit where credit is due. The relationship between haibun writer and haibun editor doesn’t end when one’s haibun is published. Currently, Modern Haiku nominates haibun for various awards, including Touchstone, Best Small Fictions, and the annual Red Moon Anthology.
You co-authored Haibun: A Writer’s Guide with Rich Youmans and Lew Watts. What did you enjoy the most about working on this project?
It was wonderful to finally get the project up and running, which wouldn’t have been possible without my two co-authors. I had the publishing contract in my hands for a couple of years, but it was only when Lew and Rich came aboard that things coalesced. We each have our strengths and they came together, thanks in large part to an outline for the book Lew did early on. Rich and Lew really kept me on my toes! I love them both for their willingness to go above and beyond to make Haibun: A Writer’s Guide a resource with universal appeal. I would encourage anyone submitting haibun for publication to do a close read of our book.
Jacob D. Salzer, Roberta Beary
The narrator continues to wander and finds himself walking past an advertising hoarding, “The slogan: A home with no food/ Is no home to embrace” and reminds himself the advert isn’t targeted at him, “For I be the one who wanders/ I can survive the cold”. His wandering continues, waiting for the sun to come back, until he finds himself “Waiting for the sun to get its comeuppance” where he’s been awake all night and
“My arms are like octopus arms
My soul is a trash can overflowing
Because my body won’t go
To sleep I know it’s irrational
For one who’s been awake too long
The fear I’ll explode
This body, viscous flesh bomb”That liminal state between awake and asleep turns into a nightmare until,
“I’m awake
For a moment in time, I see you
Watching me from the foot of our bed
As golden morning light peeks in
I reach out to touch your hand and I’m not sure what I grab
And I explode
Again and again and again”The sense of explosion recurs, however, this time it’s positive, bathed in sunlight so the sequence ends in love.
“Sun Come Back” lives up to its promise of a narrator journeying to find his way home. Elements of the journey are dream-like and other elements more rock solid. Ultimately, [Daniel] Newcomer posits that, even on a solo journey where the traveller is seeking themselves, we are seeking connection because that’s what makes us human. “Sun Comes Back” reflects that with its pared back, focused, plain-speaking vocabulary that eschews overly-poetic language in favour of seeking to connect with readers.
Emma Lee, “Sun Come Back” Daniel Newcomer (Resource Publications) – Book review
I spent the first half of the retreat obsessing over my Walt Whitman class for the Creative Retirement Institute. (Inspired by him, I confess to writing some “catalogues” of nature observations, including the miracle of six deer pecking along the shoreline like sanderlings.) Now that the class is behind me, I’m working on my new poetry manuscript, and reading books by local writers: The Light Between the Pines, a novel by Warren Read (which I recommend), and books by poet, poetry mentor, and therapist Joan Fiset. […]
Last month I attended the launch of Joan’s latest book, Unborn Stars. I brought it home, along with some other titles from Joan’s book table, and put them in my To-Be-Read pile. Not long after, while talking about books of “flash” fiction or nonfiction, my friend Andrea Lewis recommended Now the Day Is Over. That title sounds familiar, I said. It’s the title of a hymn, Andrea said. Not just that, I said, I think I own that book.
A local writer, Andrea told me. Joan Fiset.
I went home and began reading. Then I read the next book, Namesake, also flash non-fiction, then I read the two books of poems in my possession. In a nutshell, Now the Day Is Over is about Fiset’s father; Namesake, about her mother. Both delve into substance abuse and mental illness. Unborn Stars is about Fiset’s son and their delicate relationship. All of them interweave external, exquisitely detailed events with interior awareness, doubt, and a growing sense of dread. […]
Although Unborn Stars is better described as hybrid, and includes some longer, prose pieces, most of Fiset’s poems are short and imagistic. The science of protostars is a thread running through and pulling the sections together—”Luminous fragments / too tiny to gather or shape”—though the poems are as much about human grief as astronomy. Here’s one example:
Quickening
overgrown with weeds
a further silence
where the nest wasclose to the water
I recall a first flutter
becoming you—Joan Fiset
In her poem, “Grief,” she writes: “Grief // moves slowly through afternoon, stands / behind me as I wrap gifts // snow has fallen all day and will continue…” Exactly that. Quietly permeating every moment.
Bethany Reid, Back to Glen Cove
Nonsense is hard. Lewis Carroll wrote nonsense verse, and is famous for it, but his verse ‘has an idea behind it’; there is a perverse kind of sense, or a shadow of sense floating on a darkness void of meaning:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;[Marcel] Duchamp wanted none of that. He wrote his piece Rendezvous of Sunday, February 6, 1916, with ‘great pains’: “It took me at least two weeks to do it because I would immediately see some sense coming up, so I’d have to rewrite it.” To sweep away every speck of meaning was an exhausting enterprise. Here’s part of the result:
Afterward, seven or eight posts drink some consequences now appointed; not to be forgotten, between brackets, that without the économat then, with many a similar occasion, come back four times their enormous files.
Duchamp does not say (in the interview I’ve been quoting) what he aimed for, with all these renunciations. Skill, taste, sense—these had to go, but for what? Fun? The sake of something new? He thought they’d lead him astray, they were corrupt, not to be trusted, but what was the pure or perfect goal that could be reached once they had been, painfully, removed? Maybe it was a kind of freedom.
If not in his aims, at least in his methods, Duchamp is a strange echo of St. John Climacus’s advise to ascetics, in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, a 7th century treatise written for aspiring monks. Climacus tells the “athlete of Christ” of the need to learn obedience, which is “the tomb of the will.” One must become as a corpse, which “does not argue or reason as to what is good or what seems to be bad”:
Obedience is an abandonment of discernment in a wealth of discernment.
Abandonment of discernment: in a different domain, that’s what Duchamp wanted.
Brad Skow, Ascetics / Aesthetics
A book about faith is as much about “engagement with beauty, hope, doubt, and fear” as about belief (or not) in your god. Nowhere is the truth of this statement more evident than in A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith (Tupelo Press, 2014).
In their co-edited collection of interviews, which are presented in essay form, author and translator Ilya Kaminsky and novelist Katherine Towler share their conversations with 19 poets about the “difficult topic” of creating and sustaining a spiritual life that is not defined by the limits of being named Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant, “believer” or “atheist,” unaffiliated or “non-religious,” but by willingness to be, in the words of contributing poet Kazim Ali, “not certain” and ever-seeking. […]
The following brief quotes are intended to give readers some idea of the line of thinking of the interviewed poets, whose writing lives, it is clear, are bound to and animated by a connection to the spiritual or the divine that finds its most personal expression in language.
Carolyn Forche´ — “We are beings in process, in a deep spiritual process that we recognize and intuit and do not understand at all. . . If we live long enough, if we are given enough time on earth, we can live to see the spiritual potential of human beings. What else do we need? We’re in an incredible adventure here with God.” (p. 16)
Gerald Stern (1925-2022) — “ Poets — maybe all artists — get away from their own religious upbringing in order to arrive at a condition of faith.” (p. 21) “My faith is in existence.” (p. 26)
Kazim Ali — “Prayer is speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you’re allowed to be the most honest that you can be. . . Prayer is not a refuge of shelter, so much as it is an opening of arms, an acceptance into whatever storms exist in the world.” (pp. 41, 42)
Jane Hirshfield — “The only way we can know anything is with our own eyes and our own looking.” (p. 51)
Jericho Brown — “. . . poems ask us not to understand in the same way that we often find ourselves not comprehending the possibility of a God in this world.” (p. 89)
Li-Young Lee — “For me the question of what is poetry is very narrow, but then my definition of what is God is very wide.” (p. 130)
Alicia Ostriker — “Like other poets, I am often asked if I have a spiritual practice. Yes, writing is my spiritual practice. Ultimately, the words come from somewhere beyond myself. . . .” (p. 146)
Marilyn Nelson — “Surely everyone has a spiritual journey. . . Mine began with wonderment.” (p. 153)
Maureen Doallas, ‘A God in the House’
when i say “god”
Robin Gow, supply chain issues
i always mean the soil & sometimes
i mean the sky. i hope in my next life i get
to be at the purgatory of the food chain.
call me a decomposer. my friends
are isopods & earth worms. my friends
have eyes in the roofs of our mouths.
I’ve been in Banff, Alberta for a couple of weeks now: teaching, researching, listening. Every time I visit, I try to find a route I haven’t run or walked before. A few days ago, I struck out past the historic Cave & Basin site (home to lemon-seed sized endangered sinister snails) and ran to Sundance Canyon, along a snow-feathered trail. Apart from two ravens, I didn’t encounter another soul. This was something of a relief after days of rich conversation, artistic revelation.
I wanted to be a path-out-of-season, unvisited.
Whenever the programme for the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival gets underway, I begin to suffer from something I call ‘epiphany fatigue’. It is a great privilege to call oneself a sufferer. The panels and presentations and films are so numerous, so varied and thought-provoking I need a notebook next to me at all times. Each event tends to spark intense conversation from the attendees, a lithe and intent questioning after. I need space between things to take them in: little stanza breaks and line breaks in the day.
Yesterday’s epiphany-fest included data scientist, artist and climber Heather Dawe talking about her book ‘Think Again’. Heather’s latest work draws links between a career working with data and artificial intelligence and a lifetime spent moving through mountains. In it she explores her own understanding of intuition: what it is, where it comes from, and what is at stake as we hand more and more of our thinking to machines. How might we intervene in the human-AI relationship at this critical juncture?
Later in the day, I heard Gloria Dickie, Trina Moyles and Claire Cameron discuss their research on bears around the globe and bear-human coexistence, how the possibility of bear encounter can make us pay closer attention to the land. Things I wrote down in my notes included:
Do bears have ‘main character energy’?
Bears are a mirror species that complicate our lives.
A skinned bear looks a lot like a dead human.
To get to know a bear, you follow its stomach.
What I didn’t scribble down but logged fiercely in my brain was the discussion around misogyny in bear studies and bear biology, from one woman being described by a male scientist as a ‘bear groupie’ when doing fieldwork to the sexualization of women researching bears (Gloria Dickie was often asked if she was going to call her book Bear Naked. And that’s before we’ve even talked about the ‘Marian Engel effect’ – if you know you know, and if you don’t know, you must read her brilliant, uncanny ‘Bear’ novel immediately).
The panel was revelatory in its format too – no chairperson, just three women giving each other equal space, a perfect balance between structure and spontaneity, no talking over each other, no questions-that-aren’t-really-questions.
In Banff, I always roll into bed with my mind fizzing.
Helen Mort, Epiphany fatigue!
Last night I went to an interesting talk by Dr Kate Rhodes. She said that she wrote nothing but poems for a decade, getting poems shortlisted for the Bridport and Forward Prizes and having books published. She thought of a poem as “a bullet to the heart”, something that had to be written. Then she went on to write about 20 thrillers and YA novels, including 2 series. One of those novels was self-published because the publisher didn’t want to continue the series but she did. That novel got the best Goodreads reviews, she thought. She’s also ghosted books with non-disclosure agreements. It seems to me that she’s covered the spectrum of answers to the “Who do you write for?” question.
In Whom Should You Be Writing For? Yourself or Your Readers?, K.M. Weiland has “7 Reasons You Should Be Writing for Yourself” then “6 Reasons You Should Be Writing for Your Readers”. I think it’s quite possible for a writer to agree with all these reasons. She writes that “If you’re writing solely for yourself with no thought for the reader – or solely for the reader without tapping the purity and sincerity of your own artistic instincts – then your writing is bound to suffer”. All that sounds useful. Someone added a comment that first drafts were for the writer, and last drafts for the reader, which also makes sense to me.
I think the viewpoint I find difficult to agree with (I’ve seen it online) is that writing for oneself is free and pure, the only alternative being to write for the market. I think that even if you’re writing for yourself, there’s likely to be an implied audience and self-censorship, and your writing will be influenced by the styles you’ve read. I think one can write with others in mind without pandering to market forces. I think I most often write with readers of literary magazines in mind – me, friends, and people I’ve never met with similar interests to me.
Tim Love, Who do you write for?
I was on the verge of deleting this entire publication the other day: I felt it had served its purpose, and I am increasingly conscious of not wanting to leave the world strewn with my digital garbage. Too, I am deep in the unbelievably rapturous throes of another project that has retaught me how to really write, and my scratchings here feel vaguely embarrassing. But something told me to chill the fuck out and I am glad I listened, because this morning I couldn’t stop thinking of this poem, which is speaking to me in a way it has not in decades, and I wanted to share it with you. My Lynda Hull attachments are on display in the post below, which I wrote more than a year ago. I am not going to reread it. It feels like a lifetime ago, and I think, in some ways, it is.
This is the first poem in Hull’s first book, Ghost Money. It acts as a kind of prologue, so it’s set in italic with centred stanzas, and as far as I am concerned is the only acceptable example of the latter to have ever existed. (It’s also gonna display weirdly on your mobile device because of it; sorry about that.) Typing it out I noticed, for the first time, what a perfect pair it makes with “The Window,” the last poem in her last book.
It was the phrase “for they have carried you to this / wild incompletion” that suddenly rang like a bell in my noggin this morning and called me back to the book to read the whole thing. I have so much to say about that. For now I’ll only say: I am surprised by joy.
Vanessa Stauffer, “Spell for the Manufacture & Use of a Magic Carpet” by Lynda Hull
I told the dead about you, how you were saving all the broken things,
that’s what you called it. The fairy damaged in a storm, the plate,slipping from my hand—Do you remember? We were washing dishes.
You fixed that plate. An antique window you wouldn’t let go of.
You found other uses. “Everything has a purpose,” you said.Especially the little things, I added.
Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 18”
Everything at the moment feels like a box-ticking exercise to get to a place I’m not even sure I want to go. My life is full of shoulds and have-tos and I feel their tug-of-war with my wants constantly. Even the cakes and now the salmon in the oven are things on a to-do list, I have to feed the kids and use up the apples from the garden.
So I steal little things for myself, a poem written in a cafe on a wet Sunday with a big pot of tea, a game of 4 deck solitaire online between working on plans, not folding the laundry, but giving it to the kids to do and having rugby on as much as possible on the weekend.
Mini-rebellions from being a mum, a professional and a student. I’d love to just be a writer again, but it’s just not possible.
I see people on social media who are at residencies, travelling to or living in interesting places to write. Finland no longer seems like someplace interesting. It’s a have-to.
I once had six months of just being a writer while I was on a bursary, over twenty years ago and it was so amazing. I’m jealous of others’ creative lives, but I have to accept the choices I’ve made and where I’ve ended up as a result. In Finland, fitting writing in the cracks of an over-stuffed life.
I’ve been working on my Scots poem inspired by my Scotstober snippets. I’ve also had a couple of acceptances in the last few months though I’ve barely submitted to any journals or anthologies. Those should come to fruition by the end of the year. I need to record myself reading one of the poems. Not my favourite thing to do and with my students searching me up on the net for kicks, I’m wishing there was a way to do it without my face.
Gerry Stewart, Wasting Time in a Life Full of Have-Tos
Ok, why would these people contact me? Why would they want to push my book, of all books. Oh, yes, yes, they find the title interesting, the whole thing fascinating, a literary gem, blah, yes, blah. But so have others – and they haven’t asked me to join in a community and do interviews.
The idea of an interview confuses me anyway. I can just imagine it now. Along the lines of:
Interviewer: It’s an interesting title, Poems In The Key Of Aardvark. What made you choose it?
Me: Well, there’s a poem in the book called Poem In The Key Of Aardvark. So it kind of fitted. Or seemed to.
Interviewer: Yes, I read Poem In The Key Of Aardvark. It’s a strange poem. What inspired it?
Me: I don’t know.
Interviewer: There’s a whole range of different types of poem in the book, aren’t there? Did you set out to write a book like this?
Me: I don’t remember.
Interviewer: There seem to be so many different realities on offer in Poems In The Key Of Aardvark. Is this intentional?
Me: Well, there are so many different realities on offer in life. [This would be the most meaningful answer I could come up with and the sheer effort would reduce subsequent answers to ‘Maybe’ or ‘Probably’ or ‘I’ve forgotten’.This is a fairly extreme stretch of imagination, of course. As stressful as I might find the moments leading up to it, if anyone were mad enough to want to interview me I would try harder than that. (A reading of one’s work or an interview on YouTube is obviously a perfectly valid idea in itself.)
Nevertheless the base rule is that chats with poets are usually about as insightful as chats with footballers at the end of a match. And about as relevant to normal life. I write the poems. Mostly I don’t know why. Mostly I forget them quite quickly. I suspect that only very rarely might I have anything interesting to say about them. And I suspect that the more co-operative I might try to be, the more confused – and confusing – I might become.
Bob Mee, ANOTHER LITERARY OFFER DROPS INTO THE IN-BOX…
The question you get asked the most when your book is on a shortlist is what does it mean to you to be on the shortlist? I think for lots of people this feels like a very easy question to answer. People say ‘It’s amazing’ or ‘I feel so lucky”. I feel those things as well, but when someone asks me that question, my mind spins off into other answers that are less easy to articulate clearly. I want to say it means both everything and nothing to me.
Being on a prize shortlist changes things externally, and winning one certainly does, and it might even change things internally for a while in terms of how you feel about the work – and that can be very seductive. But it runs out – and then you are left feeling how you always felt about yourself, about the work – and this is where the nothing comes in. I have to feel the way I feel about the work, despite what happens to it. And that still doesn’t say how I feel about it. […]
One of the things that winning a prize does, or what winning the Forward Prize did for me was to make it impossible to justify. I couldn’t say ‘yes, but it only happened because’ without insulting the judges and the rest of the shortlist. I couldn’t make an excuse or be self-deprecating. It is a gift – but it is a gift that I didn’t need to pick up and carry – it’s more like a bird that sits on your shoulder, but it’s more active than that – a bird that flies before me, a bird-shield I can hide behind. […]
When I won the Forward Prize, I wore a dress covered in birds. A few weeks later, someone sent me a painting of myself in that dress. It’s one of the few visual records I have of my outfit – I don’t know where the photos are from that night. Perhaps I didn’t take any. I still don’t know who sent that painting. It arrived on my desk at work without a note, and I still don’t know who sent it. I close my eyes, imagine one of the birds lifting away from my dress, taking on its own extraordinary life. […]
Imagine divorce as a body of water I am swimming through. Imagine the Eliot shortlist as a raft that I can use to get me through the year. I don’t think that is one of the things that people usually answer when they are asked how it feels. It’s a raft to get me through the rest of the year.
Kim Moore, On Friendship and Prizes
We spend a lot of time pathologizing and romanticizing the writer’s life—the writer we used to be, the writer we want to be. Maybe that is a sort of fuel. Or maybe it’s an albatross. Our lives change as we grow up. Our bodies change as we grow up. And our writing may change as we grow up. I think we ought to spend more time practicing empathy for our creative Creature selves—how we shift, adapt, and show up. Can we be every writer within us? Can that be enough?
In the writing workshop I’m guiding right now, I gave everyone an exercise: Write a beautiful poem just for the sake of it. Don’t worry about linearity, message, or sense, I told them. Just unravel into the meadow. Don’t question it. Be in the hugeness of it all.
I did my own assignment the other night. I did it in earnest. And it let me access a place inside me that felt luminous (numinous!) and familiar and messy. It didn’t cost me my marriage or my friendships or my reputation. I didn’t have to ruin anything. No devils, just a little darkness.
I’m her, I’m me, I’m all of us in here.
Lisa Marie Basile, When writing is like bloodletting a stone
I have never followed or for the most part particularly liked the music produced at Def Jam records, but I’m finding Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being to be a calming, Buddhist approach to living an imaginative life. It’s the kind of book I can read in short bits at a time; frankly, having studied creativity and Buddhism and the arts for many years, nothing in it is exactly new to me. Yet the book acts as reminder and affirmation, for which I’m grateful.
Reminder that with a little objective space between me and my life sometimes, I can be reminded of my perspective and think more kindly about others’ perspectives. Reminder that whatever my readers take from my work, however they interpret it, however they critique it, whatever does or does not resonate with them–the work remains my own expression. It’s the best I could do at the time.
Reminder that the work of creativity doesn’t have an end point. Well–death, I suppose, ends the individual body’s ability to create; but if there is work out there in the world (music, poems, novels, films, paintings, sculpture, and so on), the creative acts of the past can continue. They continue to offer perspective. They continue to invite interpretation and expression.
This sort of reminder is good when I’m involved in making an ephemeral and very limited set of objects, a poem series made into an artist book. It’s so minor in the scheme of US culture in the 21st century, and so very much an expression of my own thinking, about which a limited number of people can possibly care. Rubin says that doesn’t matter–the culture, the popularity, the quantity. [Interesting, coming from a guy who has clearly made considerable money, and helped musicians earn considerable fortunes as well, and who hangs out in Tuscany much of the year.] But I don’t discount his words. Certainly, if I had been writing to make an impact on culture, to be popular, or to make money, I’d have stopped long ago. So I keep working, all in the fullness of time.
Ann E. Michael, Kairos
The title of my poet-friend Robert van Vliet’s excellent book seems very apt, for poetry : Vessels. A poem is a sailing ship, each scribbled canvas-page pregnant with sea-wind. Words strain against the narrow ribs of rhyme, syntax, form – they would be going somewhere, as fast as they can.
But then perhaps the deeper secret of poetry’s power is : stasis. Not the sailboat, but the Chinese vase : Giorgio Morandi’s clay pots : the “Grecian urn”. Pure stillness at the center.
I’ve been writing poems for over 60 years. Many of these poems are in books. Books which are still in print. Nevertheless I can identify with that Distinguished Author Conrad Aiken : mentor of Malcolm Lowry, Poet Laureate of the State of Georgia – who late in life described himself as “the best-known unread poet of the twentieth century”. (I feel (un)seen, there.)
After a few decades, you have this curious sense of being systematically ignored. But then you think : That’s sour grapes. You’re just not that interesting. But then you think again : hopefully, because you have to have hope : underneath everything, the root cause is that primal stasis – silence, Holy Sabbath, rest note – which is true poetry.
Maybe. I really don’t know. All I do know is that apparently I’m like the loud Mississippi cicada – buzzing, droning, unmoving, one deep note (OM?), unceasingly. And also emerging from hibernation every 17 years.
Henry Gould, Same Old, Same Young
Something else that I enjoyed here was the love of language this poem embodies. Like an actor interrogating a script, or a therapist noting a client’s phrasing, the poem invites us to be curious about words. At the centre of the poem is that word attends, which feels exactly what the poem does itself – a conscious, step by step by step attending to the fabric of a word, the meanings and worlds half-hidden within its utterance.
You’ll often hear poets talking about how a poem can surprise them in the writing. Similarly, as therapists, the destination is never fixed, the journey rarely clear, and typically littered with surprises. Such is the potency of language; far from a “code” or set of tools whose use we can master, working with words is almost like working with living, breathing creatures. They speak to us in ways we can’t always fully discern, shapeshifting in the hinterland between conscious and unconscious. Peopled and historied.
All therapists will recall moments when they have somehow landed on a particular phrase or metaphor that speaks to a client, which can almost seem to unlock something for them. In therapy, as in poetry, it seems to me, experimentation with words and language has the potential to change our relationship to our experiences, and with language itself. As Seamus Heaney put it, “If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way”.
Jonathan Totman, On Weariness and Wonder
This week I needed a poem for a thing, and I wasn’t sure whether I had already written something useful or not. This sent me searching through a variety of folders on my computer. As I was searching, I found a poem from 2023 called, THANKS FOR READING EMILY DICKINSON TO ME OVER THE INTERCOM AT PRICE CHOPPER. It’s one of those poems that wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t been scrolling social media at a particular time on a particular day, and I decided it would enjoy another outing of its own in this blog. It was a post from Rishi Dastidar that inspired the poem, and I rather like the fact that I can clearly remember writing it even if I had sort of forgotten it existed.
And this makes me think of the joy I get from setting down words. Often that joy is from setting down my own words, but I am also lucky enough to spend time at a Retirement Village setting down words with members of a poetry group there. A session there last week started with me reading back to them the group poem we had created for National Poetry Day on my previous visit. And the part that made my heart sing this time was that there was something palpable about the way the poem landed in the air around us as we listened to it again.
I love the solitary nature of poetry where I am reading silently to myself or being a member of a zoom room audience, but I also love poetry in different places. It was my passion for poetry being out in the wild that spurred me on to find a place to be for National Poetry Day each year when I was no longer working in education. That’s how I found a seat in a comfortable chair at The Retirement Village. Prior to that, in 2023, I walked up and down my local high street asking people if they would like to hear a poem about conkers or a poem called Darling. (It was a 50:50 split.)
I still take poems to the local town on National Poetry Day. And recently it delighted me to discover that one of the people I gave a poem to now has it taped to the wall next to their work area. “Now I can read my poem whenever I want to,” she told me when she showed me where it was.
Sue Finch, THANKS FOR READING EMILY DICKINSON TO ME OVER THE INTERCOM AT PRICE CHOPPER
Thank goodness for a good election result. The whole planet can let out a shaky breath. It’s not solving everything by itself but at least it’s a good direction again, to build safety and justice, health and hope.
What I hope is that locally, we come together for that shared purpose of exchanging ideas, whether in conversation or in zines, poems, weird art. I love a room of people who gather for mostly leftist aims. The small prophets of our time, instead of profits necessarily. Trade economy, giving your ideas a shot without quite so many intermediary agents. Author to author.
I like the openness of it. I also work well with constraints and deadlines. It’s good to have the Ottawa small press fair twice a year to corral my focus. To have an excuse to make, collaborate. Making is healthy more than consuming but we need to do both.
Some new poets like to llama and [ahem, excuse me auto-correct], like to la-la-la, and insist they don’t want to be influenced by others. I’m a big fan, me, of being influenced. I like to hear what others think and how. I like to be swayed, changed, engaged.
So Saturday is a blow out for that sort of thing. This Saturday afternoon the fair is back at the Tom Brown Arena, 141 Bayview Station Road, Ottawa, courtesy of our local super-connector, rob mclennan. […]
If you can come, do set aside a chunk of time, and take breaks, because there are lots of tables of goodies. And a free table to unload what needs new hands.
Pearl Pirie, All’s Fair, love not war