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: chaos gardening, the father of concrete poetry, rewriting Utopia, hoarding ephemera, and much more. Enjoy.
Someone in the apartment to my left applies his drill to the wall in between us, forcing the hard buzz into the drift of my reading, altering the smooth of images, and I am reminded of how perception in poetry depends on pacing, on the rate of movement and the appearance of speed bumps, sirens, pauses.
It is morning. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind drags its “drunk rooftops” into the light. “The poet’s eye obscenely seeing” — tracking, collecting, studying — “hot legs and rosebud breasts”…
The teens are among the sunbathers today, their voices retreating as they move towards the beach; a clump of busy vowels to which no consonant can cling by the time the teens’ shout ascends to where I stand, watching, from the balcony. Ferlinghetti builds from association and accumulation: the images link to each other mnemonically, like the simple dogs and cats on those flashcards once used to teach phonics.
Alina Stefanescu, “The poet’s eye obscenely seeing”
Maggie Smith and I are hitting the road this September to bring The People’s Project to y’all live and in color! We’re so excited! All the tour information is included below AND here’s a sneak preview of the introduction we wrote for the book! […]
This anthology is a community as a book. As we put it together, we turned to people who we always turn to for guidance, encouragement and truth. These are the people we text and call to talk our way through the path of daggers. These are the mentors, siblings on the page, and friends we trust with both heavy-hearted conversations and laughter loud enough to color a crowded restaurant. We’ve broken bread, poured drinks, danced, and created art with these folks. And now, as both an offering and a prayer, we’re bringing the best of us to you. In a 1982 interview with Kay Bonetti, Toni Cade Bambara said “As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed class, my job is to make revolution irresistible.” The People’s Project is as much about what we need and hope for as it is about who we are.
The fact is, reader, no one is coming to save us but us. Our survival and future—not just through this political era, but onward into the blur of eras that await—wholly depend on our ability to connect with and protect each other far and wide, to share what we’ve learned from our varied and shared histories in order to enrich each other’s wisdom, confidence and imagination. The People’s Project is our attempt to honor the fact that, terrified as we are, we are nonetheless proud to understand the stakes of our work. No way forward but through, together. As it should be.
Saeed Jones, “The People’s Project” is going on tour!
Those tragic headlines crash into well-being, shatter personal alphabets, then leave us to pick up the pieces of broken lives and languages.
I remember when we used to read poetry to one another on the front porch of my aorta,
how every line would beat a distinct pulse of love.
It’s a comforting feeling, like how I know my daughter‘s old baby cradle won’t wake up one day
believing it’s a nest of grenades.
Rich Ferguson, The Inner Workings Revisited
The fire began close to the military base at Fylingdales. 18 bombs have exploded; soft moss and sundew, bilberry, cowberry, lapwing and adder. Where a fire burns, the soil is sterilised and seeds grow slowly. The ground is dry and hard, rain gushes fast from the high ground, hard into the valleys, taking the dry soil with it; hawthorn and rowan, the ancient oak. 12 fire crews are fighting the blaze over 25 km of fire, many of them voluntary. The fire chief thanks the public for their donations of drinks and cake – “We are at saturation point”, he says, and asks us to stop.
The fire broke out on the 11th. On 14th, we watched the smoke in the distance from Blakey Ridge, in the low pink evening. We walked from Grosmont to Robin Hood’s Bay and it felt like my heart was breaking. It’s been a very tough two weeks, for reasons more complex than I can describe in this blog. But I will find the words. That’s what poetry is for, and music, and my own good time.
On Thursday 4th September I’ll be reading at “A Love Song to Peat” at Ponden Mill, on the edge of the threatened Walshaw Moor; there will be music and films and words, there will be miles of moors, the craft of walls, ruins holding their stories. “The wild mountain thyme / Grows around the bloomin’ heather/ Will ye go, lassie, go?”
We write love songs because the landscape inside us is so huge and we are so small. We write love songs because love is all of the oceans and we cannot hold them. Sometimes we are a curlew and we sing for our mate and our chicks, we sing for our land. Sometimes we are quietly on fire and a thousand years burn inside us. Sometimes the flames reach high and we sing so that the fire crews will come, and the people will bring them cake. Look at my flames, we sing, look at my ashes.
Clare Shaw, Love Songs
Nothing of night is left
PF Anderson, Sunslant
in this day; the angle
of the sun promises
more heat; the earth itself
seems slant, matching the sun
I tilt sideways to find
balance. There is a gasp
in the light as if breath
will be lacking. The gasp
comes true. The light itself
cracked and misplaced.
The ziplock of summer fruit is emptied.
I did 3 readings and an author’s day. I sent 2 submissions, and 3 of 4 reviews that I have on tap. I repaired a few book bindings, read a whack of things, located 2/3 mislaid books. I’m averaging a title read every 5 days, some 16 pages, some 400+. I found a new contest judge for next year for the haiku contest I coordinate for Haiku Canada. I’m talking with two poets who might let me publish a chapbook of their poems this fall and spring. Taking a page from Tanis I’m taking names and seeing if we can start a local silent book club. Humming along. […]
I write in fragments whose centre has not been found. Or isn’t needed.
Pearl Pirie, Summer Zipped
Apparently there’s a newish fad in the horticulture world called “chaos gardening.” This is described in UK’s House and Garden as “inspired by the unruly growth of nature and a whiff of rebellion against the control and neatness of traditional horticulture.”
Oh honey, many of us have been chaos gardening for a very long time. […]
I’m mostly at peace with the chaos here, although my better self would like to tend more closely to our gardens. But my husband and I just don’t have the gumption right now to do more. We are exhausted by a country in chaos. Democracy is being undermined by well-funded extremists, authoritarianism is marching in, inequality is compounded, genocide not only ignored but fostered, and all the while the climate every life form relies on to survive is being sacrificed for profit.
Chaos, I’m reminded by evolutionary cosmologist Brian Swimme, is one of the powers of the universe. We’re here thanks to the cataclysmic death of stars. Their explosions provided the iron circulating in our blood, the calcium making up our bones, the oxygen we inhale. Cataclysms on our planet have caused five major extinctions. (We humans are causing the sixth.) We have endured many other catastrophes including wars, famine, plagues. And yet, from the cataclysmic death of stars, we get to live on a planet graced by orioles, humpback whales, monarch butterflies, sunsets, tides, elephants, newborn humans. We are all part of one another, composed of star stuff.
May long and gentle rains like this one fall on every parched landscape. May beauty pair with chaos and peace rise from cataclysm.
Laura Grace Weldon, Chaos Gardening
I do not have brilliant form with Louise Glück. I seem to remember the Poetry Book Society choosing or recommending The Wild Iris in the mid-nineties, buying it, and it completely going over my head. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I find this description, taken from the Carcanet and PBS websites, very appealing, but that is where my admiration, not to mention understanding, has come to a halt: ‘What a strange book The Wild Iris is, appearing in this fin-de-siècle, written in the language of flowers. It is a lieder cycle, with all the mournful cadences of that form. It wagers everything on the poetic energy remaining in the old troubadour image of the spring, the Biblical lilies of the field, natural resurrection.’ Sometimes we encounter books just when we need them. But sometimes this happens much too early. I think this was the case with The Wild Iris.
I gave Louise Glück another go in the autumn of 2020. I’d published a book in 2019, just in time not to be able to promote it during the pandemic and, like everyone else, was generally exhausted. Plus my mother had just died, from dementia and Alzheimer’s. A friend advised me to ignore everything and concentrate on reading four poets and watch what emerged. It was kind advice, meant well. Never having come to terms with my Glück-failure, I bought her massive Poems 1962-2020. But still we did not get on. A few weeks later, the book now discarded, she won the Nobel Prize.
And that was where I was prepared to leave things. Another failure, but hey. It happens. And then Louise Glück died. And I read this extraordinary piece about her by Colm Tóibín in the Guardian and I felt something in me begin to shift:
When I interviewed her at the New York Public Library in 2017, she spoke about the two years of silence, maybe two and half, that came before The Wild Iris, for which she won the Pulitzer prize in 1993. She was not writing badly, she said – she was simply not writing at all. Not a verb. Not a noun. She was living in Vermont and hardly reading anything either. Just gardening books.
During this period, she had just two lines in her head, which had come to her out of the blue. But she had no idea where they might go, or even what they might mean.
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.It struck me because as poets we hardly ever speak about silence, or if we do, only in hushed tones, and certainly not publicly. The silence I’m talking about here is the one we might experience at the end of a poem, or a burst of them, when we feel blessed to have been visited by something from outside of ourselves, giddily and not quite fully believing that the poems were real, or any good, or even written by us. It gave me great comfort to hear about a famous poet experiencing this silence, venturing into it with a mere two lines and a handful of gardening books, and trusting that these would be enough to see her through to the other side and one day writing again.
Anthony Wilson, There was a door
Louise Glück was a pivotal voice in American poetry for the last few decades. She received every esteem a poet can earn: The Nobel Prize in Literature, The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Poet Laureate of the United States, among others. But what is most notable about her is that she brought a new poetic voice to the forefront: not confessional, but mythic; sparse but also poignant.
In 2008, I was lucky enough to be one of Louise Glück’s poetry students at Boston University’s MFA program. […]Toward the end of my time at BU, I met with her for one-on-one conference at her home, over my final manuscript. She told me that she really thought that I had talent. I could’ve about fallen out on the floor to hear her say that, and that encouragement bolstered me up through many a year in my mediocre poetry-career.
Because one thing about Louise: she meant what she said. She could be just as biting and austere as her poetry, but what was so attractive about her and her writing was that it always told the truth, the plain bald-faced truth.
Renee Emerson, Louise Glück: a poet of precision
I’ve returned home from August, and from the resolve that emerged as I went into this gift of a month that I’d swim outdoors each day. It wasn’t a rule so much as a blessing I’ve given myself, and that was given to me by spending most of the time on P’s farm in Sweden, a few hundred metres from a beautiful lake.
Something about taking this love of mine – for water – sacredly has been part of a cleansing that I’ve felt on my skin and within my body. […]
This morning, I swam out of August’s final day in the River Severn just along from where I live. It was J. who helped me to see I could find my way home like this. All these years in Shrewsbury, and I’ve never swum in the river which characterises the town’s year with its floods and lows, its duck families, weir, and leaping salmon. Without the peaty clarity of Norrsjön it has its own beauty of trees, swans, and tiny fishes.
And on my allotment, I’ve started a new project: Biscuit Tin Lake. I won’t be able to swim in it until I work out how to shrink down to Lilliputian height. But I’ve sunk the tin into soil, filled it with water, and surrounded it with stones, shells, and prunings, and floated a few flowers on its surface in memory of friends. And maybe, in September, there’ll be birds that come to drink, and to bathe.
Liz Lefroy, I See Myself Home
the shrivelled plums
Jim Young [no title]
showing the summer sunshine
their deep blue hearts
I dropped Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear (Mr Lear) two-thirds of the way through, not because I wasn’t enjoying it but because I felt I’d got to know Lear already and didn’t need to know how it ends. Which is often the way with biographies.
Lear must be best known now for his nonsense poetry, but he was also an incredibly talented, astonishingly hardworking and very well-travelled painter (Auden: He became a land). He also hero-worshipped Tennyson and spent a lot of time with the poet’s family on the Isle of Wight. Tennyson, being Tennyson, kept him at arm’s length: Lear’s friendship was with Emily. Lear was very good at making friends, yet always seemed to be at arm’s length, everywhere. Uglow brings out just how important the cartoons are to his limericks: and how often his character’s expressions complicate his words…
Jem Wikeley, Some reviews I didn’t write
i have been a pig in another life.
Robin Gow, street sweeper
i wrote poetry & shared it with the others.
we plotted ways to take over the government
but then we died. they sensor death
on the internet these days. people say,
“unalive” as if death were an erasing instead
of a return. i was sitting & eating lucky charms
last night & thinking about how one day
all the buzzing in my head will be nothing.
i don’t know how to make sense of death other than
to watch the street sweeper go by & panic,
wondering if i remembered to move my car.
I spend as much time as I can around death. I know that sounds morbid and absurd. But I literally have a dead katydid on the table next to me as I type this. I found it on my porch, likely a “gift” from one of my cat friends. On my walk on River Road yesterday, I came across a dead raccoon lying on their back, their gaping mouth full of pulsating maggots. Their little arms and legs were reaching upward, hands open. I knelt down next to them and held their little hand for a little bit. This reminds me, I think I have a skull or wing or something in one of my fanny packs. I have to go find it. I don’t know if I want to find it? I can’t even remember exactly what it is? You’d get a kick out of how horrible my memory is.
Sarah Lada, Are You There, Mandy? It’s Me, Sarah
Rilke wrote about
living the questionsnot searching for answers
and so I will sit here and listento the rain on the glass roof
my heart like a fulcrumbetween joy and sadness:
Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Not Knowing
the sweet spot of not-knowing.
I was attracted to this blue morpho butterfly in Sheffield’s Millenium Gallery today. The exhibition was all about colour, how we perceive it, what it signifies etc. Writers have often used it as a unifying theme or motif (the blues that immediately spring to mind are Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and, more recently, Debbie Strange’s haiku collection, Random Blue Sparks (Snapshot Press 2024). Rereading Haiku 2024 (Modern Haiku Press, Ed. Scott Metz & Lee Gurga) I came across this monoku by David McKee which uses blue in a way that seems to allow for lots of different possibilities, something I always admire, and invariably feel a little envious of too!
blue note scale model of her heart
David McKee
whiptail 7So, note to self- try to be a bit more experimental. And use some colour!
Julie Mellor, Blue
Blue sweater with a hole
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Blue
for the head. Blue sky
through a hole in the
head. Blue head. Blue
sky. Blue river. Blue
bridge, empty, quiet,
spanning blue night and blue night.
The latest small edition from Barley Books is a themed sequence of poems from Beau Beausoleil, with textile images from me. The book on top of the packet is an unbound proof. The packet contains the first ten – of an edition of 100 – which I’d hoped to post to the author in San Francisco today. When I got to the Post Office counter I was told that a new memo stated that no parcels should be accepted for sending to USA. If accepted, they would be either returned or destroyed.
The 10% tariff comes into effect in two days’ time. It will have a massive impact, both financial and administrative, on any business exporting to the States. Private individuals like me are currently unable to send parcels to friends and family, until further notice. A report from The Independent here.
This book will be available in UK from me for £10, as soon as I have made some more. It is printed on ‘Elliepoo’ recycled paper with ‘Denim’ flyleaf, and the cover is ‘Flat White’ card made from recycled take-away coffee mugs. All three of these are now unavailable. When I run out, I’ll have to find something else.
Ama Bolton, How love sustains us
Eugen Gomringer died on 25th August 2025 at the age of 100. It seems appropriate that the life of the man known as “the father of concrete poetry” should have achieved the round number of a whole century, with all the simplicity and symbolism of its single line and two circles. Born in Bolivia and educated in Switzerland, Gomringer’s work embodied a modernising spirit of gleaming idealism and comic-strip humour about the world of international signs and logos in which we live. “Our languages,” he wrote, “are on the road to formal simplification” — a fact that the poet must work with. His poem “roads 68”, for example, composed in English, captures the monotonous phenomenon of the petrol station by repeating the names that loom up along the motorway in different combinations, then giving them a final, rhyming twist:
TEXACO and
ESSOESSO and
BPBP and
SHELLthe common
smell[…]
One of the best descriptions I have read of how Gomringer’s poems work (or play) comes from Greg Thomas’s Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (2019):
Gomringer’s earliest concrete poems […] tend to rely on an impression of objectivity involving implied referential accuracy. Many of these poems employ a tiny lexicon of words, each imbued with a sense of precise aptitude generally enhanced by repetition. That impression of accuracy, coextensive with an impression of universal intelligibility, is often achieved by using words coherent across several different languages, as in Gomringer’s 1952 poem “Ping Pong”. Indeed, in this poem, the onomatopoeic title-words seem not so much multi-linguistic as meta-linguistic, foregoing semantic language entirely in order to relay the universal, differential structures of linguistic cognition from which specific statements take shape.
This nicely describes how concrete poetry verges on an abstract verbal art, concerned with the dynamics of relationship. But I think there is still an important element of semantic or referential content in “Ping Pong”: the visual 2-3-3-2 rhythm of its shape, made of overlapping lines on a diagonal axis, wittily suggests a rally across a table tennis table. Gomringer said of his word-shapes that “the constellation is an invitation”, and here the reading eye is invited to bounce around like a player at the table, or even the “o”-shaped ball itself. In this way, he hoped, the poet could “help” the reader to find the poetry in modern life through a new “kind of play-activity”.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #35: Eugen Gomringer (1925-2025)
Many, even most of the poems in Imtiaz Dharker’s Shadow Reader present some form of suffering, cruelty, oppression or abuse. However, they don’t cloud our impressions of these things by pushing the poet’s own emotions at us; presenting scenes and situations in a gently understanding way, with a polished musicality of sound, they let the beauty or cruelty of what they show speak for itself, in all its subtlety of nuance and overtone. In other ways, they’re highly varied in style and imaginative mode. Some offer what appear to be direct accounts of literal events, letting broader metaphorical or representative suggestions shine through by implication; some, at an opposite extreme, are like pieces of fairytale or myth; many include elements of both. The lovely ‘For the Girl on the Elizabeth Line’ is an example of the first mode. Its language seems simple and transparent, achieving power by a sudden deepening of tone in lines three to five:
Standing by the door
the way young people do,
as if a seat is a waste
of life, you are lostin each other.
Only in the third stanza does it emerge that what we’re seeing isn’t the scene of joyful young love it seems at first glance. The whole poem reverberates with complex suggestions of power, oppression and helplessness, both in the couple and in the passengers who silently watch them. The way our understanding of the couple’s relationship changes is a wonderfully delicate evocation of how liable we are to misinterpret our fleeting glimpses of other lives. At an opposite extreme, formally speaking, we have the sonnet ‘For the Woman Who Changed Back to a Snake’. Addressed to the woman / snake by someone who may be her mother, this poem seems to create an original, profoundly ambiguous myth related to the myth of Persephone and folk tales of the selkie or seal woman. Its vivid, highly wrought language makes a series of intensely sensuous imagistic impressions so that on one level it’s very concrete. It might be called abstract on another because we can read such very different stories into the chain of metaphors. These stories converge to suggest ideas and feelings about female beauty and the habitual mistreatment and proper respectful treatment of women in a way that’s the more powerful and the more wide-reaching for being indirect.
Edmund Prestwich, Imtiaz Dharker, Shadow Reader – review
In his preface to Studies in the Unnatural World, Keith Tuma writes:
I started writing Studies in the Unnatural World before Allison’s initial diagnosis. I have long been interested in the prose poem. I’m equally drawn to works that complicate the definitions of (and boundaries between) genres and disciplines, particularly when such works examine the relationship between nature and culture. I began this project with the idea of writing short works of prose or prose poetry comprising anecdote, discourse, metaphor, and speculation. These were to be organized and generated by the name of a particular discipline (I speak to friends of my “ologies”). That was the plan.
Allison is, or was, his daughter and the diagnosis was of an ultimately terminal cancer, and so the ‘project’ became entwined with that most unnatural thing, the loss of a child.
The pre-diagnosis pieces are characterised by sharp observation and a dry humour:
Promenadology
We called him Chucky, I can’t remember why—after the movie maybe. He raked leaves, cut grass in town. Had a bulldog face and aggressive gait leaning forward, working his arms with a sense of purpose. Glowered. We put his IQ at 85; we were cruel like that. Then one day we saw him pushing a baby stroller. How can he have a baby? we said. We snuck a look. He was pushing his cat around. Hmmm, we said.
The distancing created by the undefined ‘we’, the implication that the story does not belong to the narrator alone, sets up that punchline which gently ridicules both Chucky’s behaviour and the responses of the ‘we’. It’s even funnier in Tuma’s delivery when reading. Much later on, in a piece called ‘Gerontology’ (all the pieces have an -ology title), we get a glimpse into the impact of Allison’s diagnosis that (in)directly reminds the reader of these earlier poems:
But six years of living with Allison’s illness did plenty to change the ways I look at things too. My sense of humor is not what it was. My tastes in music and literature have shifted, though not in every case. Roger Grenier’s The Difficulty of Being a Dog remains important to me: “And what if literature were a dog tagging along beside you … that hurts you by dying before you do, short as a book’s life is these days?” Though Diane’s problems with her short-term memory were getting worse, I said to our neighbour ‘We’re going up to Maine for the end” and packed up the car. The dogs, at least, were ready.
In between, we read of life in a rented house in Lewiston, trying to get ready, gruelling drives between there and Oxford, Ohio (‘home’ not home), and get more insight into Diane Tuma’s developing health issues, as well as Keith’s own heart problems. There are ekphrastic pieces and observations of what passes for the ‘natural world’. But the dominant thread is the cruel inevitability of death:
We have only the one plant beside the garage, and only one daughter, also dying. Who would want to read a miserable poem about that? Maybe the gods would if I ask nicely, or if I cry out. The gods love best those who die young, but what do they know? Some say Peony is from Paeon, who died when his teacher Asclepius thought he had become too beautiful. Zeus turned him into a flower to save him from the consequences of that observation. Good job, Zeus.
(from ‘Phenology’)That punchline exemplifies the journey from the dry humour of the earlier poems to the increasingly and understandably bitter flavour of the post-diagnosis work. But that bitterness is handled with a quiet dignity that impresses the reader. In the final piece, Tuma and Diane are taking the final drive home when they find themselves behind a truck bearing a sign that reads ‘Allison’, which Diane photographs (the photo graces the book’s cover). Tuma takes it as literally the sign he asked his daughter to send him from beyond the grave. It’s scant consolation, but consolation nonetheless. Life goes on, like it or not. A deeply moving book, one that will live long in the reader’s mind, despite Grenier’s observation.
Billy Mills, August 2025: A SoundEye Review Special
Inger Christensen’s long poem alphabet was published in 1981. Its backdrop, and the backdrop to much of her work, is the never-ending Cold War and the real existential threat of nuclear conflict. Denmark, “a strategic giant” according to Nato and “a weak link in the chain” according to the Soviet Union, lay in a highly vulnerable position between East and West. “I did not set out to write an apocalypse poem,” said Christensen; but as the sequence progresses, ideas of alienation and ecological collapse force their way in. Its world is shaped by a sense that we are living with a profound environmental grief (daily life in Denmark at the time was punctuated with preparations for nuclear attack). Yet there is also a human process by which we knit together our ordinary world in all its profusion of living things and objects that hold meaning for us, and from which we create some kind of hope.
Lesley Harrison, Writing the Last Word
You studied poetry under David Ferry at Wellesley and co-founded MIT’s literary magazine Rune (1976). What are the main things you learned under David Ferry? What kind of poetry did you study? Who were some of your favorite poets?
David Ferry was probably the best teacher I ever had. I learned an awful lot about both the art of poetry and the art of teaching from him. Wellesley was full of young students who had led pampered lives, which showed up in their attitudes about poetry and about themselves. Prof. Ferry was a master at commenting on the poems produced. He was always – always – able to find something positive to say about any student’s poem. His charity and generosity were beautiful to behold.
I think the secret of his pedagogical style was that he viewed each poem as a starting point, an initial expression of the student’s insight, and helped the student think about how to push the expression further. It’s what I call the dynamic perspective on one’s life or work, as opposed to the static perspective. Not “where have you arrived at?” but “where are you going?”. I recently wrote an essay on this question: https://writersinkyoto.com/2025/07/31/nonfiction/doko-iku-where-are-you-going/
[…]
In general, what are the key aims that you have when translating Japanese poetry into English?
When translating Japanese poetry into English, my overriding priority is to capture the spirit of the poem. Often the spirit of the poem takes the form of a specific image, but there is typically a meaning associated with the image. Sometimes, it is a fragment of action or dialog. Sometimes (especially with classical tanka poetry), it is more of a feeling or an emotion.
I think too many translations get bogged down in the pursuit of literal accuracy and academic respectability. Sometimes, of course, this requires a freer style of translation, but I think that makes the poems more accessible and inspiring to ordinary people. I may try out as many as four or five different versions of a poem before selecting one.
You co-translated They Never Asked: Senryū Poetry from the WWII Portland Assembly Center (Oregon State University Press, 2023) with Shelley Baker-Gard and Satsuki Takikawa. What did you enjoy the most about this project? What were some of the challenges of this particular project?
The aspect of this project that struck me most deeply was developing a sense of empathy with the wide range of emotions articulated by the senryu poets. There was raw anger, to be sure. But there was also biting sarcasm, sharp humor, ironic detachment, and a kind of Buddhist resignation in different poems. Appreciating the resilience of the human spirit in the face of such treatment was nothing short of inspiring.
Jacob D. Salzer, Michael Freiling
I’m intrigued by this title by New York-based poet and translator Grace Nissan, The Utopians (Brooklyn NY: ugly duckling presse, 2025), a book that but hints at the structure of the constraint used, through blurbs offered by Hannah Black, Kay Gabriel and Ted Rees. As Black offers: “Using mostly the para-colonial language of Thomas More’s Utopia, Grace Nissan has made an almost shockingly compelling book out of a formal constraint as sharp and absurd as the limitations of living in these trivial, awful, genocidal, yearning times.” Gabriel, also: “Rewriting Utopia using, mostly, Thomas More’s own language, Grace Nissan poses in a different way a classic organizer’s question: how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want?” It is only through the publisher’s website that one might find this (arguably offering little more than what the blurbs provide, and not assisting to spell out Nissan’s specific constraints through this project): “Built around a sequence written entirely with language from Thomas More’s Utopia, The Utopians invents a new world, from the pieces of the old one, to formally explore the contradictions of liberation. A series of letters to Thomas More, and a poem called ‘THE WORLD’ about Utopia’s vexed escape, encircle the remixed no-place as they elaborate Utopia’s double edge.” Or, one can seek through the text itself to hear Nissan’s own thoughts, set close to the end: “that the dead mix freely / in a spirit of reverence // this translation is based on / death / terribly well, I must admit // they cremate the / discussion / to accept it [.]”
Nissan is also the author of The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books) and War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions / isolarii), and their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were exhibited in the 59th Venice Biennale.
rob mclennan, Grace Nissan, The Utopians
Twenty years ago, New Orleans was being slammed by hurricane Katrina. I’ve heard and seen a report or two, and it’s fitting that New Orleans gets the focus. We lived in South Florida at the time, and South Floridians have their own Hurricane Katrina memories, which can be dramatic, on an individual level. […]
If you want a book-length treatment of hurricane Katrina in poems, I recommend two wonderful books. Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler does amazing things, an astonishing collection of poems that deal with Hurricane Katrina. I love the way that Katrina comes to life. I love that a dog makes its way through these poems. I love the multitude of voices, so many inanimate things brought to life (a poem in the voice of the Superdome–what a cool idea!). I love the mix of formalist poetry with more free form verse and the influence of jazz and blues music. An amazing book.
In Colosseum, Katie Ford also does amazing things. She, too, writes poems of Hurricane Katrina. But she also looks back to the ancient world, with poems that ponder great civilizations buried under the sands of time. What is the nature of catastrophe? What can be saved? What will be lost? […]
You did not expect
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Hurricane Katrina Memories, Twenty Years On
that months, even years afterwards
you would find yourself inexplicably
weeping in your car, parked
in a garage that overlooks
an industrial wasteland.
Katrina was not a natural disaster. It was a man-made failure of engineering and resources made even worse by a racist disregard for the lives of black people.
Speaking personally, it was also the moment in my own radicalization when the final piece of the veil was ripped away and I realized that no part of the official apparatus of our society was here for any reason other than service to capital.
Jason Crane, 20 years since Katrina
August has turned out to be a quiet month for the Gulf South (knock on wood, still 3 days to go) on the hurricane front. I’m sharing my monthly Listopia today because it is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and I want to raise my small voice in gratitude that, while I will never forget the pain and trauma of that experience for myself and so many others, art and beauty survives and thrives in our imperfect, challenging world. Art and beauty sustained me personally in the long, hard months (& years for many) after the storm when we lived in a truly apocalyptic city.
In reviewing what I accumulated over the month in this post, I realized almost every entry centers on pain. The stories, movies, books, and music I chose this month feels like an unconscous choice to roll in pain then purge it. I’ve shed a few tears for many reasons that lead back to the big one. But, although pain is the theme, it’s written to share and share we will.
Charlotte Hamrick, August Listopia 2025
August has been a month of firsts. First memoir event with my children in the audience (at Chautauqua in New York). First driving lesson with my daughter. First time cheering on my son at a cross country meet. First time riding on the back of a motorcycle. I love that midlife is still full of firsts.
Another one: my first anthology, co-curated with my dear friend Saeed Jones, is here! Early finished hardcovers of The People’s Project arrived at my house, and they are beautiful. The book is officially out on Tuesday, September 9, so you still have time to preorder copies for yourself and the people in your life who could use some community in book form right now. (That’s all of us. Get copies for all of us.)
Book tour for The People’s Project starts a week from Monday, and Saeed and I would so love to see you out on the road. All of the info and registration links are here. We aren’t in this alone, and let’s not forget it.
Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff
As August haze gives way to the sharpening clarity of September and school, it feels like a good time for this poem which was published in ionosphere along with The Work of Poetry in the Age of Large Language Models. You can find the issue in print here. “The Reckoning of Salt” shares some of the thematic concerns of technology and memory that I was playing around with in “The Work of Poetry”. Looking forward to the use of salt in our energy storage future as well as backward in the way salt mines are used to hold our history, the poem explores the incredible power and potential of this quotidian substance, with a nostalgic turn at the very end. I hope that you enjoy it.
Ruth Lexton, The Reckoning of Salt
When it comes to submitting poems to magazines, we all have our favourites.
UK institutions like The North and The Rialto are two of the places I am grateful to for having published some of my poems over the 15 or so years since I began sending them out. Where to send is a matter for the individual poet – why send work to magazines whose contents don’t generally appeal?Despite the limited number of poetry publishing outlets, there are magazines, both in print and online, I haven’t and probably wouldn’t submit to. Some, because I have never seen a copy, others because I don’t fancy their name, style or editorial content. There are one or two magazines and newspapers that I would not want to have work in due to longstanding political alignments that I disagree with.
Sometimes, partly due to intermittent impatience with the (often understandably) glacial pace of poetry magazine publishing, I will send some poems to a small online magazine or perhaps a blog where I know I will receive a swift response. Once or twice I have been asked for a poem by an editor, which is very nice.
Roy Marshall, Light Work
I think a fair amount about ambition — often inspired in that thinking by the frequent rejections sliding into my email account — lit mags, publishers, film festivals, whatever else I’ve put my work out for. I wish I could move beyond this need for external validation for my creative work, but I haven’t quite developed past it yet. Not quite that evolved.
But I think too about a different kind of ambition, the ambition for any of my pieces of creative output — poem, painting, other thingies. That feels like a less needy form of ambition. The desire that what I’m making become the best it can be, the best I can make it through my work. The operative word being “through,” as this kind of ambition seems to me to be a bit otherworldly. Which generally is not a thing I believe in. Something about being a vessel. About being confident in my abilities enough to step aside, to set my conscious mind aside, to let, to allow. Even if it means ruining the very thing I’m making. Taking that risk. And I fail regularly, both through that self-consciousness leaking through, or through allowing…but things go awry anyway. It happens.
It’s something about trying without trying, making an effort without it being effort-ful. That kind of ambition is worth working toward.
Marilyn McCabe, I am working on drying up the rain that puddles in my subconscious. I am working on sleeping
This morning the air brings the faint smell of wood smoke and whispers Autumn. […]
I have taken a glance backwards this week to see where I have come from to get to this point. So many years of September marking the start of a new year makes this the kind of habit that is ingrained for me, and I do like the freshness of any kind of new beginning. I can see I have been determined to improve my fitness, and I love the way I have heard continued echoes of self-encouragement as well as wonderfully wise words from friends and family. I have definitely improved my ability to work within a stretch zone instead of a comfort zone, and I can see how I can make even more of this going forward.
There is something spangly about this being episode 99 of this particular blogging where each Monday sees me recording what the air smells like, and I love the fact I can clearly remember some of the scents without even rereading the entries. A webinar with Ruby Wax this week (and I am still kicking myself that I didn’t speak to her when I saw her walking the same road as me in in Chester) made some interesting points about mindfulness. For me the anchoring of my sense of smell and the rhythmic nature of walking are my favourite ways of being in the moment. They suit me and do me good.
My new relationship with Monday mornings began two years ago when I made the promise to myself to get up early each Monday and see what the world smelt like wherever I was. It came about because I knew I wouldn’t be driving to work each morning and therefore my morning tweets would disappear. It was also enhanced by my noticing that the air smelt of raw meringue one day when I was out walking in the rain.
Next week to mark episode 100 I would love you to join me in recording what the air smells like where you are and if you think you might forget and want to take a deep in breath through your nose today instead then feel free to send me your observations.
Sue Finch, COBWEBS BLOWN
On the cusp of September, I have many things planned for the new month, including digging into a new poem project.
I’ve been working on an article on junk journaling for Classpop!, which I haven’t done in a while, tending toward more digital artwork of late outside some random watercolors every once in a while. I have been hoarding ephemera like a mouse with a tiny nest of dried flowers, postcards, etc I hopefully will get to use as fall creeps in. Tomorrow, hopefully I can polish that off and work on some layouts that have been lingering unfinished in the chaos.
I am working on some new little bits for Patreon as well in the form of collage postcards that will accompany the September mailing. I sent off the last of the August packages the other day and am excited to get to share not only books and poems, but also art this way in the form of some prints, postcards, bookmarks, and stickers (you can subscribe to the paper bundle tier that includes all this for only $13 a month.) There will be some kind of print edition included in each mailing including a luxe hardcover edition of EXOTICA I put the finishing touches on yesterday. October, if I can make it happen logistically, is another little surprise Patreon-exclusive. Having closed the lid on the CLOVEN project, there is that to return to in September to start the road to publication. I was aiming for the new year, but if I move swifter through the process, some early copies may be available as quickly as November. I will be showing off the cover design for that soon.
This past week has bought some rejections from that big batch of submissions earlier in the summer, but some poems did appear in the Tide Driven issue of The Solitude Diaries. These are some of the sea-inspired poems of DEEPWATER of which there are more out in the submission wilds that will hopefully find harbors.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 8/27/2025
Although it’s still warm (with wildfire smoke), fall is approaching, and I’m already ready for dishes featuring delicata squash and our late-harvest corn. Getting the house ready for more visitors, I’m also trying to make space for my books (which my unread stack is now big enough for its own Ikea bookshelf) and changing up decor. My latest stack of books includes collections of ghost stories from other cultures, which should be fun. Our winery book club is reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier for September, a book referenced by so many of our recent club picks, it’s amazing. Were we all super spellbound by that book as teens, and now it’s creeping into our selections?
I’m also judging yet another poetry contest, this time for the SFPA. I judge contests once or twice a year, and I always wonder if people are sending their best work. I don’t send to many individual poetry contests, but I’ll tell you this—you probably have more of a shot than you think. You never know what an individual judge will like. And don’t take not winning personally. Who knows what any judge will like or dislike?
I’m also getting ready to get into poetry submission mode, as I haven’t been sending out poems much in the last few months. Too busy? Too discouraged? Feeling like poetry is maybe a waste of my time after twenty years and feeling like maybe I should switch genres? Maybe a little of each. September is a month of renewal, after all, with its shades of new pencils and new sweaters and of course, more new books. Housecleaning, closet cleanouts, and yes, taking stock of our writing and deciding where to spend our time and energy, with bouquets of dahlias and sunflowers around the house and pumpkin apple muffins in the kitchen.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy September! Last Days of Lavender Gardens and Hot Air Balloons, Judging Poetry Contests, and Preparing for Fall
We are here
Luisa A. Igloria, Ceremonial
with our long-held hungers, our dying
for a taste. We go home with oily newspaper
parcels, the ink of what has happened in the world
pooling into each morsel. Dizzy with pleasure,
we cannot tell when our mouths become raw,
and wake with the sensation of stampeding
beasts, released from the cage of our bodies.
“I wish we humans could be so cooperative,” said one of my neighbours as we watched the chimney swifts circling about the tall brick chimney, their home for the night. This is a sign that fall is coming. As the birds sank down into their chimney, so the pink and orange light fell out of the clouds, and the twilight became dark. Soon they will migrate to Peru.
To begin with, there were half a dozen birds or so. They flit and dart, making no noise. Over the next ten minutes, they are joined by dozens and dozens more, perhaps two hundred. Their flight becomes more patterned. They make loops and figures of eight. Sometimes they crowd above the tall chimney; sometimes they bulge away from it.
Occasionally, one or two birds dive into the chimney; mostly they circulate. At one point, they went so far away, we thought they might spend the night in a nearby chimney. The flock moves in a way that seems intentional, but it’s like watching Brownian motion. You cannot guess how they will be formed in the next few seconds.
Then comes the circle. All the birds, with more and more twittering, started rotating in a great “O”, wider at the top, as if imitating the shape of the Guggenheim Museum. Round and round the chimney they turn, tweeting more quickly. We chat about how this must be it, they must be about to go down.
Then they flex out, make more figures of eight, more wide flights away. Twice more this happens. And then the circle moves faster, tighter. They cohere. The descent begins just as the colour goes out of the evening light.
As they fall into the chimney, a little trickle at the bottom of the large funnel, it looks like a film being run backwards, of smoke escaping in reverse. The coordination required for a dozen birds to descend so closely to each other into the chimney without getting hurt is extraordinary. It almost feels like a visual trick.
Henry Oliver, Chimney swifts on Labour Day
次の世のしづけさにある黄菊かな 浅井一志
tsugi no yo no shizukesa ni aru kigiku kana
in the tranquility
of the next world
yellow chrysanthemums…
Hitoshi Asai
from Haiku Dai-Saijiki (Comprehensive Haiku Saijiki), Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 2006
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (August 28, 2025)