A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. 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: reading poetry to pigs, yellow stretchy man, the canon of spiteful literature, and much more. Enjoy.
And so, there I was, sitting in a green chair, reading poetry to our new pigs. (Ten-week-old Middle Whites, an endangered breed).
They wandered about in the morning sun, rooting here and there, coming over for a drink every so often, checking the food trough, which they’d emptied an hour before. […]
I had a poetry book in the car – Broken Land, Poems Of Brooklyn – that I bought years ago in the magnificent Strand bookshop in Manhattan for ten dollars. It’s got lots of really good poems in it, centred on Brooklyn. I settled down to read as they milled about, coming close but not too close, always ready to retreat. I began with a bit of Walt Whitman. Sun-down Poem. It begins ‘Flood-tide of the river, flow on! I watch you, face to face./ Clouds of the west! sun half an hour high! I see you also face to face’…
The pigs retreated. As I read the next verse, they took off to the far corner of the pen and stood, staring, waiting, as suspicious as suspicious animals ever get.
OK, I thought. Not Whitman then.
Frank O’Hara. Yes, well I prefer him to Whitman, I thought, so maybe they will too. And the result was an improvement. They came back out of the far corner to Ave Maria, which begins ‘Mothers of America/ let your kids go to the movies/ get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to…’ The pigs didn’t exactly rush over, but O’Hara didn’t seem to worry them the way Whitman had. They held a kind of middle distance, either watching me, appearing to listen, or nosing up some tempting root.
OK, I thought. An improvement. What now? I let the book fall open.
Ted Berrigan, Personal Poem #9, from 1969, which begins ‘It’s 8.54 a.m. in Brooklyn it’s the 26th of July/ and it’s probably 8.54 in Manhattan but I’m/ in Brooklyn I’m eating English muffins and drinking/ Pepsi…’
Maybe it was the mention of English muffins that did it, or maybe it was something about Berrigan’s laid-back, matter-of-fact tone, translated by me, of course, in my flat Midlands accent. Anyway, first one, then the next, and then the third, came over and stood in front of me, staring. Then – I admit I was a bit unnerved – they settled down in the grass by my feet as I read the whole of Berrigan’s poem. They looked at me, all suspicion gone from their eyes. I’d go so far as to say they were relaxed and at peace.
Bob Mee, READING POETRY TO PIGS
Edward Thomas might be widely known as a war poet, but he is also a wonderfully accomplished writer of nature and place – just think of “Addlestrop”. “The Path” was written in 1915, and in “parapet” you can hear hints of war in the first sentence… Notice how that first sentence winds sinuously before delivering us, like a path, to our destination: “There is a path”. Then we shift into a child’s perspective, looking through the legs of the trees, just like children in a crowd will look through adults’ legs. And it’s as if the woodland itself were alive – magical in its gold, and emerald and silver … but ultimately leading nowhere – except perhaps the end of childhood, or the end of memory, or the beginning of war.
Clare Shaw, Walk with Me.
here, where I must
PF Anderson, Honeybees
become common for now, wildflowers
are rampant, heraldic. I slit my eyes
like a sleepy lioness, sprawl out
in the grass. this is a change. sun,
heat, blanketing me with light; eyelids
not curtain enough for any shadow. instead,
thru the tangled lashes everything is hazy
with the red-orange of overripe pumpkins,
the gold of summer squash. heat in me answers
all the altered colours, the dangerous droning
of the pollen-heavy bees, their impossible
flight. there is no courage in me now,
no fear to overcome. around me, the bees
dance until my eyes are dizzy with them.
I’m reading ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk’ by Annie Dillard. She has an extraordinary perspective which includes some direct observations about living, including: “We are here on the planet only once, and we might as well get a feel for the place.” For her, it’s not about the spectacular, but about seeing “what is there” (p.74).
I’ve found I can see what is there in lake Little Norrsjön by swimming. I don’t know about you, but I was taught to swim in straight lines. While I’ve since splashed out into lakes and seas, it’s never struck me before that swimming can be a form of exploration: slow motion, but motion nonetheless. I had this realisation during my second swim, when I went a little further than the first, finding a sandbank and river-mouth.
Liz Lefroy, I Explore by Swimming
In the 5th arrondissement of Paris, next to the street of the cat that fishes, is an old 16th century building from the depths of which people can sometimes hear music. It seems almost like a surreal tableau or a real manifestation of an underground Biblical hell, with hundreds of people, half drunk, dancing late at night to orchestral jazz in a stone cellar. There is a balding middle-aged bartender, wearing skull rings, serving cocktails and flirting with customers. Back in the 1500s, the building used to be a meeting place for Templars and Freemasons and it is possible to fall asleep, with a grenadine drink in hand, on one of the stairs under the eyes of stone cherubs to the rhythmic silence of the mad rush while dreaming about Dom Perlet, a fishmonger from the 1600s whose black cat could catch fish swiftly from the Seine.
At or after midnight, beyond the smell of old urine and sound of scurrying rats, one can still see something like the shadow of a cat on the ancient green water of the Seine. Time, like water, runs forward and back. I am sometimes in the 21st and sometimes in the 15th century. What does it all mean? Nothing except that we don’t know anything.
Saudamini Deo, Rue du chat qui pêche
Just a river and a lake it feeds into. Neither very spectacular or busy, no cafe nearby for ice cream. Just an outhouse toilet and a changing room at the sauna. We can’t light fires, nothing interesting, but I didn’t even have to fight the kids to get them there. […]
Diving off that board into the lake is a reoccurring image in my poems, like watching the barnacle geese leave in autumn or the first anemones that appear in the forest. I write about them over and over in different variations, trying to capture something that can’t quite be put in words. Moments that mean more than just the passing of the seasons, though they carry that weight as well, the years sliding by much too fast.
Stepping off that creaking board with no glasses and a fear of heights always feels momentous. I don’t really like swimming. I feel wobbly and uncertain high above the deep, black water, but desperately want to jump in. Water that changes around me, cold to cool to warm, golden to green to clear as I surface. Water that changes me somehow, every summer. So I keep going back, revisiting it in poems and pictures, expecting nothing new, but finding it as I step off that edge and resurface.
Gerry Stewart, A Summer Ending
It was one of my favourite holidays in a long time. Yes, all inclusive holidays are cheesy, and kind of terrible, but I loved not having to cook or wash up. I loved watching my daughter grow in confidence in the water every day, becoming more and more independent, that pull of love and terror and pride as she moved further away from me. I loved watching her make friends with other children and seeing how she gives her heart so completely, how she falls in love with people. I loved that I did get some time to sit by the pool and read, but that I also found it easy to be present and join in with the water slides. […]
I’ll be hosting David [Morley] as the guest poet for the next “Go to the Poets” online event with Wordsworth Grasmere, so I have read his book partly to prepare for this, but mostly because he is one of the poets whose new work I always look forward to arriving. Passion has just been published by Carcanet and it is a wonderful collection of poems. If you know anything about David’s work, you won’t be surprised to hear that his poems are filled with the natural world – in this collection in particular, birds of every description fly in and out again.
Kim Moore, July Reading
Everyone goes insane the canal swarms over our heads our hair turns to weeds we float swiftly down the sharp V slopes of the Dishman Irrigation Ditch prehensile arms outstretched clothes then shoes then underclothes become loose a strange fear and release in the parking garage early in the morning before work the sodium lights sizzling no guards or cameras. I hit the concrete barrier with my car got out lay on the ground and faced a dead mouse oil stains and a fairy circle of cigarette butts. I lay there for minutes listening then sat up and pried my fender off my tire and drove home. I told no one not even my son.
Rebecca Loudon, Chicago
I carried my tv down the stairs buried it on a hill
with a beautiful viewby spring a small antenna sprouted in that place
somewhere under the earth
Gary Barwin, I had a daydream where I gave a tree the Heimlich maneuver: on suicide
wispy clouds and the wingbeats of birds
The baby goldfinches and other birds have been fluttering about, and so too the Anna’s hummingbirds. My folks are coming into town in a week or so, and we’re cleaning out the spare room in the basement, donating items that have been taking up space (goodbye, old television set!) and I’ll be going to the endocrinologist and the endodontist this week (hooray) to check my thyroid and my back tooth. These crowns are so expensive and not covered by my insurance, so every time it’s like an expensive piece of jewelry or a nice fridge. (Boo…hiss….) I hope a future America with universal health insurance also covers dental health…which might be wishful thinking, as this horrid government continues to tear down everything good (this week, PBS and NPR). In the meantime, I’m still thinking about how to earn an independent living as a disabled writer in this economy where everyone is facing layoffs and inflation. I’m not doing the Sealey Challenge this year because of my family visiting, and I’m also judging the SFPA poetry contest, so I’ll have plenty on my plate. But I do love seeing other people’s reads!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, To August: Broken Molars, Garden Parties, Cats, and Cutting Flowers
I was at a poetry retreat recently, theoretically to write poetry. I did a fair amount of reading of poetry, listening to, chatting about, if very little writing of. I had a couple of conversations about line breaks. My favorite poetry tool. I love the challenge of free verse line breaks — where, why, what’s gained, what’s lost. So many options, so much possibility. But look, just because you write some stuff and stick line breaks in, doesn’t mean you’ve done the art and craft of poetry justice. Sometimes a narrative is a narrative, and should just claim the page. Prose poetry. Short shorts. Flash fiction. Micro-essays. All legit. If what you’re really doing is telling a little story, well, why not embrace the prose form?
I think about these things as creating little rooms inside which an intense experience can be had. Or a loose one. Some rooms are crowded and fascinating or even alarming, some are spare, and the windows are open, and a breeze moves through. Some rooms you walk into and a short play is happening. No matter what, though, there’s an intensity of experience. I mean, it’s a small room! All those walls. The door shut.
Marilyn McCabe, past: spores, gills, fins. No roots or leaves. Then birds cloud the skies, giant animals
I’ve been sending out a few pieces of new work, and some old work that I’ve been revising. I’m also putting the (I hope) finishing touches to a new mini pamphlet, in a similar format to Foot Wear (in other words hand-made and self-published). Working title is Yo-Yo. I plan to sell it at readings from the autumn.
Usually it’s autumn when I get that feeling of needing change, or a re-boot, but it’s upon me already. Maybe because everything in the garden is ahead of itself so I am too. Peter and I have decided to make some changes to Planet Poetry. It’s now our summer break, and we’re still coming back for a sixth season, but the time, energy and costs involved have taken their toll. We both need space to work on our own projects and even spend more time with loved ones. So it will be a slimmed-down podcast that re-emerges in the autumn.
The quarterly spreadsheet is also crying out to be something different. I’m still working out what that is! Answers on a postcard please.
Anyway, I hope you’re having a good summer. I’m sure we’ll all emerge refreshed in September.
Robin Houghton, Summer, busy, change, decisions…
審判のゐないテニスよ夏の雲 遠藤容代
shinpan no inai tenisu yo natsu no kumo
tennis match
without a judge…
summer clouds
Hiroyo Endo
from Asu No Kaban (Tomorrow’s Bag), a haiku Collection of Hiroyo Endo, Furansu-dō, Tokyo 2025
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (August 1, 2025)
[This is where I write then delete the paragraph about how world violence overshadows my small worries. Both the erasure of that perspective and its performance–briefly, apparently virtuously but with no special insight, to an audience with similar politics–feel wrong. No wonder this isn’t my best summer for writing. The world is so much bigger than the page.]
Yet I’ve been reading poetry gratefully, meandering through books I picked up during this injured but wide-traveling spring and summer, remembering the authors I met along the way. I’m giving the small-press books social media shout-outs, although I’ll hit pause on the Sealey Challenge while I’m in Ireland. I’ve never been successful, anyway, at actually reading a poetry collection per day for a month; one or two a week feels better suited to the genre’s intensity. But most people posting under the hashtag aren’t either. It’s still a kindness to other authors to use it, I think, because it slightly amplifies their accomplishments as well as the efforts of poetry publishers.
[While slightly amplifying the person doing the posting, too. Social media highlights the trickiest parts of poetry’s economy, mostly gifts but sometimes barter and, worst of all, in a way that’s monetized by tech bros. I still hope someone posts about Mycocosmic during this month’s Sealey Challenge flurry.]
Lesley Wheeler, Poetic feet [sprained]
The future ticks its out-of-tune
Luisa A. Igloria, Exhibit
hours. Inside the cool marble vaults of mansions,
a taxidermied history hangs on the walls. Pelts
of animals tuft the floors and couches— bear
and raccoon, gazelle and leopard; the marbled
brilliance of their omniscient eyes.
In yesterday’s post on this blog, I wrote: “In a week of Churchwide Assembly considering the “filioque” and voting for bishop of the ELCA means there’s lots of discussion of the Holy Spirit. I have been thinking of a poem or perhaps a work of theology that talks about the Holy Spirit as the one who wreaks havoc–it might be good havoc, but it’s the kind of thing that can leave ruins in its wake, Holy Spirit as disruptor. We often think we would like that, but we often fail to consider how changed the landscape would be.”
I got to work and spent the day capturing lines that became a poem about the Holy Spirit deciding she has had enough. It’s not the poem I was thinking I would write in the blog bit above. In the poem I actually wrote, the Holy Spirit is decidedly female and so very tired of being in relationship (in relationship with the Creator, in relationship with the Son, in relationship with humans, and in relationship with angels and all the hosts of Heaven).
This stanza gives you an idea (and if it sparks an idea for you, feel free to run with it):
The Holy Spirit hides
in an unassuming house,
an old bungalow built
for a previous century,
cramped for a crowd,
comfortable for one.In terms of title–I like “The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday.” But in the poem, is she on holiday or permanent vacation? Perhaps the ambiguity works.
It’s not a perfect poem, but it’s closer than many I’ve written. It’s the time of summer when I’d be relieved to produce anything that makes me feel like my poet self–so to have a poem arrive close to fully formed is an unanticipated gift.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Process Notes–“The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday”
Yesterday I shredded a letter from 2012 that told me something about the care we received when my daughter died in 2010, a letter that confirmed that clinical negligence had a part in her death. I still felt like I needed to hold on to it, as if I would need at some point to go back into battle again and fight to have policies changed, to have better checks put in place around maternity care at the hospital. I kept putting it to one side and not shredding it, as if that piece of paper, that proof of what happened might be needed as a shield. How exhausting is this grief – a kind of alertness that you can never quite put down. I dealt with the letter by picking it up and putting it down repeatedly, feeling for a weight in my heart when I did so. What purpose was it serving me? Had I actually escaped from that place, or was I chained to that experience by these physical items, these documents? I decided that that part of my life was past. I shredded it. I let it go. I have released myself from the weight of that single piece of paper. […]
I have a point here, […] and it’s this: rejections don’t happen in an emotional vacuum. They don’t always happen when your life is about surviving and not killing yourself from the sad, but they do usually happen when you are dealing with small and big griefs, work exhaustion, world events exhaustion, secret sads that you don’t tell anyone. All of this adds weight to the rejection.
There’s a real push towards accepting rejection as part of the life of being a writer, and it absolutely is a part of the whole journey, but you have every right to feel bruised about it. It’s another small sad to add to your pile and that stuff is overwhelming.
Delete it, shred it, bag it up until you re strong enough to deal with it, but don’t give up on yourself.
Wendy Pratt, Rejection doesn’t happen in an emotional vacuum.
How many times have I tinkered with a poem before realising that I’ve overcooked it, so then had to undo the change? It’s a good job I’m not a builder. Sure, no one wants to read the obvious word every time, but poets can of course overdo the tweaking by replacing the early-draft choices with alternatives whose other connotations are so far from being synonymous that they blur the original meaning and/or unbalance the syntax to an unbearable degree.
In his Paris Review interview with Frederick Seidel, Robert Lowell said this:
You think three times before you put a word down, and ten times about taking it out. And that’s related to boldness; if you put words down, they must do something, you’re not going to put clichés.
And this:
Almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of maneuvring.
By that, I infer that he means how the emotional kernel of the poem is conveyed and encased by the rest of it. The best advice I ever received from another poet was to ensure that every poem, like the Tin Man, had a heart.
When Seidel asked him if he revised a great deal, Lowell’s answer was emphatic: ‘Endlessly.’
Matthew Paul, On revising poems
The past couple months I’ve been ferrying back and forth between projects, which is nice since it allows me to work without getting fatigued on one or the other, but also means they may be slower going and likely to be abandoned, at least temporarily, should I get distracted or mired in another bit of shiny. One was the swamp bird women poems, a shorter series, the second THE MIDNIGHT GARDEN, a prose-ish narrative project that will hopefully be more book-length when finished. The third of course, is another delve into mythology subject matter with CLOVEN. I’ve been sharing bits on IG and sending out individual poems this summer, including a couple of video poems (one of which you can catch this coming week as a Patreon subscriber.) These pieces number close to 30, and have some attendant collages I started a couple years back. It’s almost a reverse of GRANATA, its companion book, which was composed poems first, art second.
Kristy Bowen, summering with the greeks
Alt text says this week’s photo shows a yellow plastic toy on a wood surface. I say it is an intact yellow stretchy man who I am not currently stretching. Instead I have placed him on my writing desk for a photo opportunity. I am giving him a nod of thanks, and I won’t be pulling his arms too hard. In fact I am going to put him a jar of his very own to keep him dust free and away from my grip.
Some time ago I bought one of these for each of the people in my supervision group. Delighted to be able to play with mine at the meeting I was a little over zealous in stretching his arms out and perhaps enjoying the elastic stretch and boing of him rather too much because all of a sudden he snapped. I was left holding his arms whilst gazing at his body on the floor. I found myself laughing at the very surprise of how quickly he was altered at the same time as feeling rather disappointed that my toy had broken, and there he was simply smiling back at me.
Choosing to frame the moment in a poem was important to me for a couple of reasons. One, being to capture a moment in time and my observations of his “bitten muffin” shoulders. And the other being to remember the joy of that supervision group and its importance in giving me a safe space to be myself. A space I truly valued. A space where the busy world paused a while for deep reflection and thought. The members of the group brought listening ears, laughter, shoulders to cry on and made a real difference to me. A group that saw you step back out into the day with relaxed shoulders, a clearer mind and a focussed way forward. I think they would like the poem dedicated to the yellow stretchy man and I am glad that it has found its home in Steel Jackdaw Magazine.
Sue Finch, YELLOW STRETCHY MAN
Despite
everything, there is still this life. And inthis life, as you try to dream, a star will
give you a poem. If you just keep doingthe things you cannot but do, completely
unfathomable theories will curl togetherin your mind and explain themselves to
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Despite
you.
No, not a review. I have no right and no ability to do that. Instead, five reasons to buy it and read it. […]
3: the section ‘Starting Eleven’. Ah, gentle reader. It isn’t about concepts, is it? But… what a concept. One poem each to commemorate the bold sporting stars of a club we have followed. And this one the unglamorous, not-even-nearly-men of an unfancied 80s football team. In this section 12 players come together to be honoured in ‘Starting Eleven’ (I’ll just wait here whilst you catch up on that one). If you have ever mistakenly bought me a drink and listened more than you should have done to me talk about the difficulty of poetry you will have heard me say that the problem with poetry is that often the best poems happen outside of the poem. Outside of the raw words. We are not formalists, m’duck. And here that is the case. This section conjures the rare, pure belonging of following your sporting communitas. Millions of people will disagree, but actual proper football happens in the lower tiers, where intelligent people pay ticket money to see their team never win a league, or a cup, or even a sodding game for three years. And the reasons for that are complex. But, my word, you will find flashes of that complexity illuminated here. Sporting poems are not new, but good ones are rare. I recall SJ Litherland’s book of poems about Nasser Hussain from Iron Press. Like a moth you try to rescue from a high window, I would destroy most of these by quoting them partially – with the possible exception of ‘Ian McDonald’. Customary with these poems, Stewart gives us the flash of genius that maketh the sporting man; here it is the ‘knack for bringing long punts down’. All lower league and non-league fans will know that every player has their moment, their special thing that gets the faithful (ten? hundred? thousand?) faithful on their feet. Here these men are ennobled for that flash; they are not described as nearly man, or also-rans. And that just because you aren’t playing for Real Madrid your life, or your worth, is still fully appreciated. Go on, Basho: have a go at that, then. Stewart also touches on the way that crowds (dare I type ‘of men’ here?) find empathetic understanding and learn about what life is truly about on rainy nights out at Darlington, away. But back to Ian McDonald, who the crowd understands why he ‘lifts his foot out of fifty-fifties/ through the slurry of the centre circle.” Pause to enjoy that gorgeously ugly metaphor, ‘slurry’ and remember those 80s games (go and Google it, if remembering the 80s is not something you can’t do). The crowd, as one, understand the player’s past – the way that includes the horrific injury that ended his time at Shankly’s Liverpool but also brought him to them, at Aldershot. People think they know about football, but what they know is hooliganism mythology of the past and the Coca-Cola-isation of modern times. The human purity of bonding, and empathy is the beautiful thing – the game isn’t the beautiful thing; like certain other human pastimes it is used to divide us. Rather deftly, Stewart shows us how the regard we can have for others, our faith in them as people, and in not glory-seeking or vainglorious pride and affected tribalism. That said, I do totally understand Stewart’s admiration for ‘Ian Phillips’ who can put ‘right-wingers/ straight into the advertising hoardings’.
Andy Hopkins, Matthew Stewart’s ‘Whatever you do just don’t’ (Happenstance Press, 2023): Five Reasons to Read.
A few years back, I reviewed Mave O’Sullivan’s Wasp on a Prayer Mat, a masterful book of haiku and senryu. This new book, Where all Ladders Start, is, in many respects, a different beast. To begin with, while there are some haiku sequences and haibun scattered through the book, O’Sullivan experiments here with a wide range of western forms. These include sonnets, villanelles, a sestina, mirror or palindrome poems in two stanzas and poems in unrhymed stanzas. There’s even a foray into visual poetry, with the title poem being laid out as a stylised heart shape.
And that title is key, a quote from Yeats’ ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’, the lines that contain the phrase acting as epigraph to the book. In Yeats’s oeuvre, the poem marks a final turning point, an acknowledgement that the myth and mysticism that informed his life’s work no longer serves and that he now has to look to his own emotional experiences for poetry. It’s tempting to see O’Sullivan borrowing these words to mark a similar turning away from the relative impersonality of the haiku to a more personal, confessional, mode here.
And the poems tend to bear this out. There are poems on family:
Yourself and Eileen reared a brood so fine:
young men and women, smart and loving all –
oh grandfather, our lives barely entwined.The Kerry accent was the only sign
of deep roots in that dark, secluded vale.
I pass your workplace on the way to mine.
(from ‘Civil Servant’)on former partners and failed relationships, and for friends, especially women friends.
Throughout, O’Sullivan handles her formal experiments with assurance, and she has an unexpected facility for well-placed rhymes and a lightness of touch that carries over from her senryu, I suspect, as in ‘As Evening Draws In’, a sonnet in praise of a warm fire on a cold evening:
Oh speckled firelighter, square igniter,
I torch your corners in the cottage grate.
Don’t let me down: make this fireplace brighter.
The air is chilly and it’s getting late.There are, however, moments when it feels a bit like the content is being squeezed into a predetermined form. On the whole, I feel that the most successful work here is among the haiku sequences and haibun:
hug on the street
the bagpipe’s notes
mellifluoussponging champagne
from the check picnic basket –
new moon in Leo
(from ‘Situationship’)A subjective view, I know, but the restraint, the coolness of these poems actually conveys more emotion to me than the more expansive confessional work that surrounds them. O’Sullivan is a fine, accomplished poet, but an exceptionally good writer of haiku.
Billy Mills, Recent Reading July 2025: A Review
My greatest pleasure just now is the long, slow process of unpacking all of my books. We left London four years ago now, but because initially we expected to be in France only for a year or two, we didn’t bring our furniture or most of our possessions with us. Most of our (many hundreds of) books as well as all the lovely — albeit unfashionable — nineteenth-century furniture I have bought at auction over the last twenty years has been languishing in storage somewhere near the M25. A great deal of my books are still in boxes, but a few have begun to emerge and today I thought I’d look at a random selection of poets who have ended up on a shelf together and whom I’ve enjoyed revisiting this week: a funny old mixture of Lawrence Durrell, Richard Murphy and Alex Wylie. […]
My copy of Richard Murphy’s Selected Poems is also a Faber edition, but a much older one, printed in 1979, which I bought at some point second hand (but apparently unread) for £3. (It’s currently available on Amazon UK for £2.79 + delivery, in case anyone would like a copy.) Murphy was an Anglo-Irish poet who died not that long ago, in 2018; he was quite well-known I think in his day and was published by Faber between 1963 and 1989, but I haven’t heard anyone mention him for a long time. Some years ago I was on the interview panel for an academic job and one of the candidates was a specialist in modern Irish poetry: I asked a question about Murphy, out of genuine interest and not at all intending to catch them out, and saw a look of panic flit briefly across their face.
So possibly no-one reads Murphy any longer. I find his poems interesting because they are undeniably good in very many ways but I almost never find them wholly convincing all the way through. Different poems here reminded me of poems by Charles Causley (‘Years Later’), Keith Douglas (‘Coppersmith’) and Seamus Heaney (many of them), without ever quite living up to the parallel.
There’s something particularly self-conscious about Murphy’s diction which tends to break the spell of his verse: over and again I found myself distracted at just the wrong moment by an unusual word or uncommon usage. This is such a delicate thing to get right: of course you want a poet to have a wide vocabulary and know how to use it, and different styles suit quite different dictions. An unusual or unexpected word, perfectly deployed, can be the making of a poem and I often enjoy learning words from poets (Toby Martinez de las Rivas is particularly good at this) — but somehow Murphy’s word-choice too often gets in the way of his poems, making them feel overwritten. This is hard to demonstrate, because it’s a cumulative effect, but here for instance are parts of the poem ‘Care’, about a tame goat, which begins:
Kidded in April above Glencolumbkille
On a treeless hill backing north, she throve
Sucking milk off heath and rock, untilI came with children to buy her. We drove
South, passing Drumcliff. Restless in the car,
Bleating, she gulped at plastic teats we’d shoveCopiously in her mouth.
In these lines I was distracted by kidded — which you’d think would mean ‘having given birth to kids’, i.e., referring to the mother, but here must refer instead to the kid itself; then, though less so, by throve, which is correct but still unusual and perhaps a little ‘loud’; and then finally by copiously, which is I suppose partially transferred from the milk itself, which it would more naturally describe. These are all the sorts of detail and the kinds of poetic technique which could work very well, but somehow here trip me up rather than clarifying. The end of the poem, though is very good. The goat has been so carefully cared for, become so trusting, that it is accidentally poisoned:
So when a child mistook a sprig of yew
And mixed it with her fodder, she descried
No danger: we had tamed her instinct too.Whiskey, white of egg, linseed oil, we tried
Forcing down antidotes. Nothing would do.
The children came to tell me when she died.Here I think he gets away with ‘descried’, given the pathos of such a high register word applied to a kid. But too much of the rest of the poem — and of his poems in general — are spoilt by obtrusive words.
Victoria Moul, Three books from a box
How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I first came to poetry as a child. I began dancing when I was 3. I began reading and writing when I was 4. Growing up, my family was very mystical, musical, spiritual, so at home it was easy for me to “be” a poet, meaning I could explore and deepen my neurospicy sensibilities—I was a sleepwalker as a child, I had incredibly vivid dreams that I could recall with great detail, I began astral traveling, I was deeply connected with spirit realms, could commune with spirits, other entities, was incredibly sensitive (secretive), had a lot of imaginary friends, would spend hours preoccupied within the invisible realms in our backyard, on camping trips, or just drifting around aimlessly in my own imagination, I could easily imitate the sounds of other people’s voices, could sing lyrics to songs even if I had never heard the song before and was singing it for the first time, had an episodic memory that felt almost epic, for the most part all of this was fine in the context of my family. I went to a public, creative arts school, I was in a magnet program, so I was involved with various creative practices as a child. In first grade, I guess around age 7, I started reciting poetry by Harlem Renaissance poets, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, other greats like Emily Dickinson, because my teacher, mom, and assistant teacher—three Black and Brown women who were all about Black history and Black poetry—co-created a daily practice that they collectively reinforced at home, in the classroom, at recess on the playground, and in the world. My mom would have me read poetry aloud to her most nights when I was young, she taught me how to type on her typewriter at the kitchen table, she also taught me how to sew, so poetry became something embedded within my daily practice of reading, studying, playing, moving, making, breathing, speaking, being. Just this very natural thing. I finally began writing poems around age 14, which makes sense to me now because that was around the time when I told my mom I wanted to begin practicing witchcraft and I was no longer interested in going to our Christian Science church. Fortunately for me, she listened and supported my decision.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with fahima ife
In her ‘Notes on Spite’, Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) has suggested a productive new area for enquiry. What are the great works of art and literary criticism about spite? Hollis says “Spite may be the most undertheorized force in creative achievement.” Is that because spite is so hard to define? Even Johnson could only manage a string of epithets: “Malice; rancour; hate; malignity; malevolence.”
Spite is a species of hate, somewhere between revenge and contempt, in which our scorn for an enemy, pest, nemesis, or rival is made into a productive capacity, overwhelming us by becoming the motivating energy of action. Spite ruins mediocrities, but sets genius alight with a brilliant fire that sustains itself by consuming itself, attracting more and more fuel as it becomes notorious to others and preoccupying to the hater.
Spite is the release of unreasonable feeling; it is a partisan, chauvinist, personal expression; spite pretends to principle; alas, it has none. Politics is the great art of spite, followed by poetry, the allocation of capital, and family feuds. None of these is primarily, or purely, an art of spite, but each has the greatest potential to achieve something significant for the sake of malice towards another person. Some spites are general, as in the rage of party politics, the bigotry of policy, but all have some personal correspondence. We never hate entirely in the abstract. Spite is a kind of desire, the lust of despising, the thirst of dismissal.
There is a canon of obviously spiteful literature, such as the Dunciad and The Bickerstaff Papers, but a great deal of the traditional canon is full of spite, too: parts of Dante, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Goethe, Gogol, Hans Christian Andersen, Zola, Hazlitt, Bronte, and Grimm; and so much of Shakespeare: what is Hamlet but a study of spite? (“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”); then there is Iago, Edmund, Romeo killing Tybalt, Beatrice (“kill Claudio!”), Bertram, Portia—, indeed, the great achievement of The Merchant of Venice is to show that the spite which underlies traditional comedy like The Comedy of Errors can be brought to the surface, viciously, unrelenting, and the play can still end with the final act where all are married (Antonio aside). We have a great tolerance of spite, even when it exposes itself and all our hypocrisy. Paradise Lost is the great epic of spite, providing this whole area of study with its epigram: “Done all to spite/The great Creator.” A motto for our envious, entitled, rash, and bloody times! Milton’s poem is often about spite, and provides another good definition: “the hateful siege/Of contraries: all good to me becomes/Bane.”
Henry Oliver, What is spite?
I was astonished to learn recently that Asymptote, “the premier site for world literature in translation,” now charges $10 for general submissions. I consider this fee outrageous. Should this become normalized, writers could spend hundreds of dollars simply trying to place one work. Many will be barred from submitting at all.
Upon investigation, I’ve found high fees at a surprising number of places. Minerva Rising, a press that “prides itself on building a supportive community of women writers,” also charges $10. Red River Review charges $15. 34th Parallel charges $14.50 for general submissions. Limit Experience charges $11.11. Half and One charges $9.
Clover + Bee does not charge a fee to submit. Yet if your work is chosen for publication, you must pay them. […]
This has to stop. The transition to online submissions and the use of submissions software was meant to make processes easier for everyone. If the process is harder, and therefore more costly, something is wrong. At the very least, charging $10 or more per submission is absolutely unsustainable for writers.
Going forward, I will not interview editors of lit mags that charge more than $5 for submissions. I don’t know that I ever did, but now this will be official policy here. I will also aim to focus more on magazines that charge no fee at all.
I’ve spoken to Ben at Chill Subs (who, special thanks, helped me gather some of this data). He told me that they will soon be introducing badges to identify lit mag fees ranging from “free” to “low” to “lol, no.”
Becky Tuch, I Need an Around the Way Lit Mag!
Notebook “tours” have popped up in my email newsletter subscriptions lately, complete with scans of handwritten pages from writers willing to share their doodles, scrawls, sketches, and scribbles. I find these fascinating from two perspectives: in addition to giving us a glimpse into a private space, they reveal something crucial about the creative process. These excerpts show, literally, the bits and pieces of language that might become a poem, essay, or story, or might just stay on that page, complete in themselves.
Handwriting grabs our attention in ways that printed words simply don’t. As I watched the recently released documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, images of Joel’s lyrics, penned on white sheets of paper, spread across the screen: long sentences filled with words and phrases, some crossed out, some traced over and over. Here was evidence of a creative mind at work; Joel’s words were like a sculptor’s fingerprints in clay.
I started keeping a notebook at the age of ten, continued on and off throughout my teens and twenties, and then in earnest in middle age. As I review these pages, what I left out often strikes me more than what I wrote. My earliest notebooks, for example, completely avoid the elephant in the room: my parents’ marriage was falling apart, a fact that haunts those brittle pages like a palimpsest of memory.
Erica Goss, The Notebook Tour – What Shows, What’s Hidden
Folded layers of scent draped in colours of the setting sun, the rose is a symbol of love, romance, sadness and joy. The RHS deemed it the world’s favourite flower, dedicating whole book to some forty varieties, Shakespeare mentions roses seventy times in his writing and a speedy google of “rose poems” delivers dozens of words devoted to this enduring symbol of emotion. There are those who despise the rose – in England it conjures ideas of old lady perfumes and suburban fussiness. I was largely indifferent to them, with a vague sense that they were rather old fashioned, until received one as a birthday gift, and was breathed in fragrance that is both exotic and familiar, watched the way the colours change as the rose ages and fades, the way shell shaped petals circle their central sun – I was in love. […]
Roses represent much more than romantic love. Their role within the socialist party dates back to the 1969, when Marc Bonnet drew the rose and fist logo, with the rose as a symbol of hope, and the fist as a symbol the activist commitment and solidarity necessary to achieve a better life for all. In Italy and Germany, the white rose was the symbol of resistance and pursuit of good. Give us our roses while we’re still here is the rallying cry of trans day of remembrance, held in November each year as powerful and moving reminder of the consequences of bigotry.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, Where the wild roses grow
the mountain
Robin Gow, tunnel breath
is known now for her wound. sometimes i would
call you before the tunnel on purpose.
i wanted to see if the call would get dropped.
only once did the signal carry through.
it is so human to try & test the limits of our voices.
from how far away can you hear me? i wish the tunnel wasn’t
a passing place. i imagine it at night when a car
only slips through every hour or so.
i wanted to walk with you there, the whole mountain
breathing above us.
Who we are is what we think about. I recently visited a friend who told me that she hadn’t been living in her body, and I thought, I can relate to that.
My life is being a writer, travel, exercise, family. My life at work is editing and running the press, but we are growing the press, so it’s become all fundraising, swallowing every breath I take so I can’t remember to focus on the other parts of my life, and consequently, I miss them.
Who are we when we lose our essential selves?
We must have realized at some point that our country is becoming a kleptocracy. Our president, a shadowy monarch, taking planes, swords, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts from foreign governments, and, since his election, going from a net worth of 2 billion to over 6 billion. We watch friends get abducted by hooded men in broad daylight. Eventually, we won’t be able to remember who we were when we lived in a free country.
I remember.
I remember being a writer, a thinker. A goal maker. I want to be that person again. I want to have time to walk my dogs.
Which brings me to my vision of the future, my Black Swan dream.
The idea of Black Swan events, outlined in the works of statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, comes from the fact that for a long time, there were no black swans that anyone knew of. People thought they didn’t exist. We humans lived in a world of exclusively white swans.
Then, Australia was discovered. Here was a whole continent where there were black swans. This is the basis of a Black Swan event: it must create a shift in what we think, how we live. Unexpected. Unforeseen. The event may initially seem small, but it is followed by a cascade, ripple effect that changes the world.
When people think of Black Swan events, they think of 9/11, the 2008 crash, major events that reshaped society and the world.
But the original discovery of black swans in Western Australia was a good surprise, and Taleb argued that these events can be positive.
I believe in the possibility of a positive Black Swan in this country. America’s demise is not inevitable. We will not return to life as it was. We know that we have to fight for democracy.
I am not the girl walking down the path to feed the chickens, thinking of running away. I have a small garden with herbs and unsuccessful tomatoes and peppers. I think the pumpkins will make it.
I tell myself every day, “Go to work as if you are the beginning of a Black Swan event.”
Kate Gale, I Hear the Black Swan Coming
Everything has been falling apart for so long.
How long must our hearts be cracked open?
Sorrow seems our constant companion.Help us to believe
that better is possible.The walls have come down.
Rachel Barenblat, Fifteen glimpses of Tisha b’Av
Here at the bottom, do we dare to look up?