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: a terrorist’s sunflowers, spirit photography, a missing cha cha cha, the squeeze box of weeks, and much more. Enjoy.
Here in Palo Alto we live on the edge of a creek (dry since the spring) that is the boundary between two towns south of San Francisco, and tree-lined so that we look at what seems to be a forest, but is really a thin screen of green with houses, apartment buildings and businesses cheek-to-cheek on each side. Why do I mention that? Because straight across from us, a leaf blower has started chasing leaves around the parking lot of the building.
Really what I set out to say is how excited I was to receive a copy of Andrew Sclater’s collection Quite Joyful from Mariscat in Scotland. It is a pamphlet (chapbook) and every poem in it is strange and wonderful and playful and deeply serious. I can’t praise it highly enough. I was so thrilled that I sat down and read it straight through, all 30 or so pages in one — well, maybe 2 — gulps. I’m Canadian, we’re pretty low key, but this book makes me jump up and down inside me. I want to shout to everyone I know or don’t know.
Beverley Bie Brahic, Palo Alto, Friday 12 September 2025
I needed to get out into the woods, but between sciatica and recovering from the sprained ankle, it’s been hard to plan, or for that matter to pick a trail that hits my sweet spot between genuinely peaceful and not-too-rugged. Yesterday my spouse remembered Reservoir Hollow. It’s an obscure out-and-back trail a 15-minute drive away, heading from the edge of a small town into the state forest, climbing a low mountain but gently–and what a perfect morning to walk it, cool and clear, with the blue of the sky deepening as it does in September and just a hint of gold touching the leaves. It crosses streams seven or eight times in the first mile or so, more than I can handle in spring, but the long dry spell made stepping from stone to stone easy. Acorns in shades of yellow, green, and brown pelted around us, but none clocked us on the head, and there were lots of fascinating mushrooms to pore over. It lifted my spirits so much. In the late afternoon I went to a lovely poetry reading (plus guitar) in another part of the county, and we ate a good dinner outdoors. I kept catching my breath in awe at the day’s beauty.
There was a moment, though, when we parked the old Prius with its lefty bumperstickers on that residential-getting-rural edge of a conservative town and I thought: hmm. Am I being stupid? My agitation-machine-of-a-cellphone had been reporting fresh horrors (not to mention the horror of how mainstream media covers them, or doesn’t). The aforementioned spouse has published a raft of editorials in state newspapers lately, about which he gets some thank you notes and some hate mail (here’s his recent blog post about a right-wing alumni group that has called for his dismissal by our employer). He works with a local political organization that got a new death threat yesterday.
Lesley Wheeler, Nuts raining down
Yesterday in the forest, I saw two leaves dangling from a line of spiderweb, twisting and turning. They were just beginning to turn red and yellow. I recorded a few minutes of their twisting. I loved how they appeared to be hovering in mid air like two autumnal ghosts.
When I came home I decided to do something with the video. I was thinking about the varicoloured surfaces, the sculptural shapes and how they turned like dancers or silk scarves making arabesques. In order to highlight the delicate colours, I isolated the leaves in the video and then superimposed three iterations of the leaves.
I love how the leaves intersect in the video, influencing the colour and texture of each other as they cross.
Yesterday I also read a substack by Rachel Rose where she quoted Sartre. (“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”― Jean-Paul Sartre). I’ve been thinking of this in light of, well, the times. What does it mean that “this one is ours”? What is Satre asking us in terms of acceptance and making the best of it (appreciating what we have rather than what we don’t have)? What is he saying about what responsibility we have during this time?
Gary Barwin, “There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours”: Leaves in the forest and being a [Jewish] writer in these times
The terrorist tamps
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Osama’s Sunflowers: A Poem for September 11
down his longing
for the sunflowers he used to grow,
their bright smiles turned
towards blue skies.
He wonders about the different trajectory
had he chosen seeds and soil
instead of flame and ash.
As I delved once again into a well-thumbed anthology, Poets Of The Non-Existent City, Los Angeles In The McCarthy Era, the struggles of those writers of seventy years ago suddenly seemed horribly relevant all over again.
Anything resembling a realistic socialist revolution seems more remote a possibility than it has ever done in my lifetime as Trump and his flunkies, Putin and his flunkies, with violent imitators and sycophants in seats of authority across the globe, concentrate on defending and promoting their own wealth and power at the expense of the poor and voiceless.
Netanyahu’s relentless pursuit of journalists who attempt to work in Gaza is the most extreme example that comes to mind but there are surreptitious attempts at political control wherever you choose to look. In Britain the news outlets pretty much ignored the election of the new head of the Green Party and his subsequent statements of intent for a better world, but offered us blanket coverage of the extreme right-wing rallying howls of Reform.
Only last week when Trump decided to use the US Open men’s final as a photo-opportunity broadcasters were warned off from showing any negative reaction to his presence. More darkly, the antics of his enforcers are becoming the norm – and therefore perceived as not especially interesting news items.
In Britain, we saw the control of anyone with an alternative opinion with the coronation of King Charles, when people were arrested for holding up placards saying Not Our King, and in one case even a person with a blank piece of paper was singled out as a potential subversive. Now it’s happening with those who happen to think Palestinians have a right to live in their own state. […]
In the introduction to Poets Of The Non-Existent City, I was reminded of the defiance of writer Tom McGrath, who was fired from his job as a creative writing lecturer at Los Angeles State College. He was described as uncooperative in the face of interrogation. He said: “As a traditionalist, I would prefer to take my stand with Marvell, Blake, Shelley and Garcia Lorca… I do not wish to bring dishonour to my tribe.”
And, of course, while some writers might be killed, others imprisoned and tortured, ostracized or simply denied a living, some dissenting voices eventually tend to find a way to be heard and times can and do change.
Bob Mee, POETS OF THE NON-EXISTENT CITY, A TIMELY REMINDER
In Manila, the poor are rattling
mansion gates and pelting glass
windows with balls of mud.When floodwaters rise, they rise
with the force of imperfect contracts—
Would you build a dike lined with strawand filched copper wires? Would you
Luisa A. Igloria, Concatenation
build an empire with melted chains from
designer bags?
Large, robotic arms in the industrial plant parallel both sides of the assembly line of metal car frames that jolt ahead and abruptly stop. Jolt ahead and abruptly stop. The synchronized arms bend and reach over the metallic skeletons. Bolting something into place. Welding something into place. Pressing down. Lifting up. Puncturing holes. Bit-by-bit the car’s frame gains mechanism and the likeness of a car, that is, if you squint hard enough when the sparks fly from the metal, illuminating small orbs of space in the dimness of the dark factory where light isn’t necessary.
[…]
Etiolation is the process in which the seed’s light-intelligent stem elongates, pale and yellow, in the darkness of earthly rot. Spindly and thin, all the seed’s reserves went into the burst of the stem’s quick journey to lux aeterna where finally a leaf will unfurl for a cup of sun. Meanwhile, the cool machinery of roots beneath absorb, store, and anchor amongst the granule and grain of the world. In dark factories, the same granules and grains are manufactured into capsules called antibiotics.
*
Sometimes I finally find the light switch in the dark corridor of my mind and it is one of those glorious evenings where as soon as we stepped outside, I spread my arms wide open up to the sky as if it were reaching for me, too. We decided to take a walk along River Road as distant wildfires rendered the evening sky in a smoky wash. What did you just take a picture of? I asked my husband as we walked along the meandering country lane. Our shadows, he said and I glanced down at our dark companions, the sunset’s sepia reflecting off the asphalt. Our shadows stretched ahead of us, devoid of our dimensions and mechanisms.
Sarah Lada, Dark Factory
I might have expected the wine trade to be affected by tariffs (and it certainly has been), but I didn’t bargain for their impact on my poetry sales. Over the last few months, I’ve found a lot of new readers for my books in the U.S. via social media platfroms such as Bluesky, However, all that’s now vanished overnight due to those darned tariffs!
Right now, there’s no way to post a book from Europe to the U.S. with any decent guarantee that it will reach its destination safely and without extra charges. A big blow for the likes of me, but also for many small publishers who were already struggling enough before this extra stumbling block…
Matthew Stewart, Tariffs on poetry
There is much to see and unsee in the Louvre. The other day, however, I came across a painting that I can’t seem to stop thinking about.
In an almost empty room is Charles Le Brun’s Alexander Entering Babylon, or the Triumph of Alexander painted in 1665. Le Brun, who served as a court painter to Louis XIV, painted the tableau as a model for a piece of tapestry woven at the Gobelins manufactory in Paris. The painting’s description reads, “The triumphant Alexander, standing on a chariot pulled by two elephants, enters Babylon in 331 BC. The city’s terraces and hanging gardens are visible in the background.” The painting depicts Alexander the Great’s ceremonial entry into Babylon after his victory over Darius III at the Battle of Gaugamela but, in the painting, it is rather easy to miss Alexander or his elephant chariot or the hanging gardens of Babylon as right in the centre of the painting is not the great king but, golden and vast like the Sun, the ass of a horse. I sat in front the horse’s ass for several minutes, bemused, sometimes laughing by myself, wondering if that’s exactly what Le Brun intended. There’s something charming about sharing a joke with a dead 17th century painter. Maybe there’s a symbolic meaning behind putting a horse’s ass right in the centre of a painting about a great victory of a great king but I do not know any such meaning. For me, a horse’s ass is the ass of a horse.
Saudamini Deo, The Louvre and the ass of a horse
Recently one of my (very much appreciated) “founding members” wrote to ask if I could write something about Dante in early modern England. (I promise to write, if I can, on any topics requested by founding or paid subscribers; but all readers, not just paid subscribers, are very much encouraged to make suggestions and requests.) This was an engaging challenge, because direct references to Dante in sixteenth and seventeenth century England are actually fairly uncommon. Certainly, he’s mentioned much less than Petrarch, for example.
But as soon as I read Tim’s email, I thought immediately of one of my favourite and most enigmatic probable Dante references, which is found in the title of a very enjoyable bit of mid-sixteenth century invective, a topical satire on the death of Sir John Gresham (c. 1495-1556), which in one manuscript source is memorably titled: ‘Epitaphium crassi illius ac sordidi Johannis Gresham militis stercorarii cum dante in inferno sepulti’, that is, ‘Epitaph of that stupid and sordid usurer, John Gresham, knight of the dung-heap, now buried in hell with Dante’. Knight of the dung-heap!
Victoria Moul, Now buried in hell with Dante
We have been to a thing. Breaking with this blog’s tradition of oblique references to low-level gossip and self-recrimination at various things over the years, I disclose we were in attendance at the memorial of our friend the literature festival director and educator Kay Dunbar. With her husband Stephen Bristow, Kay co-owned and ran the Ways With Words literature festival, and associated events across the UK, from 1992-2022.
If you have been to Dartington, and sat in its medieval Great Hall, you will know that its height, stone walls, wooden floors and giant fireplace make it a deeply resonant space in which to listen to words. I’m deeply grateful to Kay and Stephen for putting on so many memorable events there over the years. My mind goes back to the waves of love passing to and from the stage where Seamus Heaney read his poems, a year or so after his stroke in 2006, palpable and mimetic. As Stephen spoke in thanks and farewell to Kay, I saw those same waves drawing us all in.
Towards the end of Stephen’s wonderful speech, he invited Blake Morrison to read a couple of poems in tribute to Kay. He began with ‘Covehithe’, the name of a small village just up the coast from Southwold, one of Ways With Words’ many venues. It was not a poem I knew. It begins innocently enough, with bald, almost bland statement: ‘The tides go in and out’. Before you know it, we are confronted with the reality of coastal erosion, the ‘creep’ of cliffs ‘stuck in reverse’ towards the ‘graves of Covehithe church’. A subtle poem of mourning and loss, it was perfect to its occasion.
The turn, when it came, was not one I expected: ‘I blame the dead’. Tonally, it’s out of keeping with the plaintive ‘What’s to be done?’ that preceeds it, not to mention the previous stanzas. I admire it, not least because it risks saying something you would never confess to in normal life, let alone in the solemnity of a memorial gathering. Like a gauche eruption at a dinner party, it brings into play forces, in this case the agency of the dead, that would normally stay silent. But then again, if a memorial gathering teaches us anything, it’s that we aren’t here long. Pick up that pen and write that poem, that memoir, that blog post, that one-woman show. There’s no point in blaming the dead. We’re here now.
Anthony Wilson, I blame the dead
Reader: Your chapbook “Diaspora of Things” stems from the occasion of dismantling your mother’s house. In the commentary, I read that the speaker moves from inert mute grief and disorientation to a greater understanding of differences and similarities –moving towards a polyphony.
Author: Excellent reader. I wish I’d said that!
R: I’m thinking about the word polyphony. You use words that start with “poly” often.
A My neighbor has a booming voice, and my windows are open. Her name is Polly.
Jill Pearlman, A Short Interview with Myself
I don’t hold too much stock in ideas of the muse, instead seeking the attention of craft. The working class farm-lad in me, I suppose: writing as simultaneous muscle and study, a blend of document and pure sound against and through meaning. Sometimes one needs to simply repair the fence, milk the cows, put up a new building. One doesn’t have to get all abstract about it.
The composition of the book of sentences (2025) began in 2019 and ran two years into the Covid-era, stretching out as our small quartet-plus-cat remained home, home, perpetually home. During those last few months of 2019 and into the first Covid-era spring I was thinking about poems, but also not really. I was thinking about poems, in-between caregiving my father occasional weekends across his final months through Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and the onset of attending Rose in her second half of grade one, shifted from in-person to online. Aoife still sat as a preschooler, then. Throughout my father’s final sixteen months, I had developed a writing routine of alternating between my own work and poetry book reviews: a weekend attending him while sketching out reviews, before two weeks at home on my own work, and then back to a further farm weekend of reviewing. It was hard to write creatively amid his requirements, so I simply focused my time on reading and sketching out notes for later revision, once back at my desk. I saw a full year of this until Covid lockdown, when my anxiety landed directly into the pandemic-era creative non-fiction project, essays in the face of uncertainties (2022): the first one hundred self-isolated days, as the crisis threatened to distract from work, so I made crisis the work. One hundred days from start to finish, almost as a kind of blip in my writing, attempting to return to poems once that project exhausted. I spent that summer sketching out poems, occasionally inflating a backyard wading pool our young ladies ran around and through, wet footprints across the stretch of our first floor, from bedrooms to hallway to living room to kitchen.
Sentences, across the length and breadth. With that first Covid-September, as both our young ladies began online school in earnest (grades two and junior kindergarten, respectively), Christine attended work mornings in our sunroom, converted into her home office, as I sat in the living room, with notebook and pen, and a stack of reading. Rose in grade two, at the dining room table, a few feet away. Rose required an ear, but Aoife, in junior kindergarten, an eye. Once their first session ended at 10:30am, I would have forty minutes back at my desk before rising to prepare our young ladies’ lunch, and Christine would take over in the living room for their afternoons.
Routine is how I get work done. Routine is how I get anything done.
rob mclennan, the book of sentences
I suspect only artists at the beginning and end of their careers have much insight into their own medium. What the art could be; and what, in fact, it was. In the middle, we just become the medium. We’re just part of the current, and far from either the individual source or the communality of the open water. Artists who die young serve to remind us what the clarity of that first inspiration felt like. It felt … personal. Urgent, sharp, immediate, fearless.
We all know what happens if you gaze long into the abyss. [Francesca Waldman’s] photographs give me the Void’s perspective on matters. (It’s so thoroughly invoked in her work, I feel I should capitalise it: respectfully, pretentiously, existentially, Gallicly.) No one is behind the lens, so nothing’s taking the shot. The Void is given an eye. But now I have the Void’s perspective: again and again, I my gaze is met by the artist. Imagine how the Void must’ve felt. The nerve! Of trying to stare me out! … But the Void always wins, the way the house always wins. Anyway, it’s not the really the Void you should be worried about in this life. It’s the Stuff. The mirrors, the doors, the specimen cases, the cold stone floors, the windows. […]
Men and women are bound to read Plath and Woodman’s work very differently. Although the academic quarter are now far more careful (so careful, indeed, that they have backed into whole new fields of screaming prejudice), Plath still occasionally draws some of the old-school misogyny she always did, where her ‘self-dramatising’ – which is literally what poets do for a living – is upgraded to ‘histrionics’. That said, one cannot, I believe, make a non-gendered reading of ‘Daddy’, and it remains one of those great poems which will tell you more about the interpreter than the interpreted. […]
I’ve written a couple of poems on Woodman’s photography: two sonnets made of couplets. (There’s one here, if you’re interested.) They didn’t come easily. They were written to accompany paintings that my old friend Alison Watt made for her Hiding in Full View project, of which Woodman was the presiding genius. I’m surprised I didn’t make any mention of that collaboration in the first version of the above essay; it was a bizarre and unconscious deletion. Although I do hold the slightly perverse position that one’s genuine, organic collaborations with friends – as opposed to the others that folk often kindly arrange for you –– are too private in their exchange of symbols to talk about in public. More generally, if I don’t feel queasy talking about the ‘process’, I suspect the poem of having cost me little.
One of those poems ends ‘All rooms will hide you, if you stand just so. / All ghosts know this. That’s really all they know.’ It’s a tautology, but there’s not a lot to do in limbo but hang out. I don’t think ghosts have a complex gig: they are what they are. They only just push through, so they’re very flat. You might as well make a photograph. Photographs can haunt almost as much as the real thing, and ghosts aren’t that much more real. Ghosts show or hide themselves, and they haunt us, and that’s pretty much the whole show. We conjure them to remind us we are alive. From which one might conclude that those who insistently conjure their own ghosts need the keenest reminding. I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am. ‘Brag’: Sylvia, honest to God.
Don Paterson, On Francesca Woodman, Plath and Spirit Photography
At the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, where I work, there is a longstanding departmental culture that keeps open a speculative space between literary criticism and creative writing. According to Carole Angier’s recent biography of W.G. Sebald — who was Professor of European Literature at UEA — the German writer strongly resisted what he saw as the value-for-money “Stalinization” of higher education under Thatcherite policy in the Eighties, to the point where he is said to have shown the door to Department of Education inspectors who came to conduct a Teaching Quality Assessment. And although Sebald was employed as a literary critic, it was at UEA that he wrote the dream-like blendings of history and fiction that made him famous: Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz.
At the end of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald draws a melancholy parallel between the work of scholars and the silk weavers of Norwich, whose history he has been researching:
It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.
“Even after the end of the working day” is an important qualification — whether we like it or not, much academic research is unpaid because the mind does not put aside its puzzles as easily as a shut-down computer. Nor does the fully funded imagination always work more happily. I often think of the poet and critic Tom Paulin, who in 2000 was awarded a National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts worth £75,000 (equal to almost £150,000 today) to write an epic poem about the Second World War — a windfall that the Guardian reported at the time as
almost too good to be true [and] the antithesis of the Thatcherite notion that all cultural activity should have an economic pay-off.
Unfortunately, Paulin only ever published the first instalment of what he himself called a “monstrous project”, The Invasion Handbook (2003), and seems to have written very little poetry since (so I was pleased to discover, researching this, that he has a new collection, Namanlagh, coming out with Faber and Faber in November this year).
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Unfunded Hobbit Research
It’s not uncommon after a break-up for unbidden images from the relationship to surface and all sorts of wish fulfilment and ‘what ifs’ to play out. The poem appears again, but as a redacted/erasure version. All that’s left from the quoted section is,
“saltwater
dreams”And a third version of the same poem has the opening seven lines completely blanked and ends “in a salty tear”. These dreams offer no comfort but serve as a reminder of what’s lost. However, it’s also true that the dreams only offer one side of the story. We never know what the other person involved might have thought. Have they moved on or are they also suffering.
“Life-tides” explores both sides. It starts with a picture of a boy in the ocean playing, and then a man drowning and concludes,
“They are the same poem
names written in the sand,
unaware of
how these words
will blend
into
high
tides.”It’s centred on the page. The first stanza is left aligned, the second right aligned. The centring is a visual representation of the third stanza as a conclusion of the first two. The boy playing is innocence and fund. The man drowning has lost his innocence and become overwhelmed. Meanwhile the waves erase the names in the sand. It seems neither story will survive.
Emma Lee, “Dreamescapes” Jorge López Llorente (Alien Buddha Press) – book review
I used to teach this poem in poetry workshops. It was sort of a dare: beginning poets don’t like to write sentences or tell stories. For all my love of formal acrobatics and linguistic density, the urgency of compressed and original language, the kind of stuff I am typically trying to do myself, I adore a poet like Gerald Stern. I find him instructive in everything I do not think I am good at: frankness, candour, big heartfelt feeling. This one: oof. It’s how unassuming he is, how disinterested in impressing us. He goes around looking for moss. He looks at a line of sticks. He speaks easily, without urgency, lines broken at natural pauses. It’s a delight to read this poem aloud. Try it; I dare you.
As ever, it’s the turns that do me in, here combined with anaphora: the offhandedness of the register abruptly amped by the oblique reference to “a sudden fit of violence” meeting the syntactic pattern “as if,” the lines trying on various relationships between pain and clarity, the grappling with the past, trying to find a way to live with it. The answer, it seems, has to do with myth; we return to the god of rain, the locus of sadness, of pain, and see how his suffering transforms the earth: from his pain comes violets.
Vanessa Stauffer, “God of Rain, God of Water” by Gerald Stern
The idea of ‘missing’ and ‘missing out’ is an important one in this collection. As a consequence of her deafness, Hamlett misses trains, misses out on conversations, and, perhaps most significant of all, misses out on the joys of nature, for [Jenny] Hamlett is a naturalist, who takes much delight from the natural world. Nowhere is this more movingly conveyed than in the poem, Silence and Sound, in which she expresses her desire to go back in time and enjoy again ‘the scuffle of vole,/ the hum of insects,/…the rustle of gorse, the mutterings of willows/…the bluebells whisper, a blackbird call,/ a pigeon breaking cover.’ There is a grief here for what she has lost, and yet in other poems in the collection, she shows she is still able to gain some pleasure and compensation for her present state from the other sensory delights in nature, its sights and smells. In Night Garden, Hamlett paints a vivid picture of its complex medley of fragrances: ‘such a complex maze of fragrance/ paints the garden with colour’. The synaesthetic nature of the imagery here suggests the capacity of one sense to compensate for another. Although the poet can no longer enjoy the sounds of nature, there are still other sensory pleasures to be had and which, as she writes in the final line of the poem, ‘allow peace in.’
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Sorry I forgot to pack my ears’ by Jenny Hamlett
In Ireland, we have a number of examples of poets creating urban haiku, notably Michael Hartnett’s Inchicore Haiku. The two books reviewed here are notable additions to that nascent tradition. For Liam Carson, who grew up in Belfast during ‘the Troubles’, images from that experience can serve to mark the seasons better than nature words:
busses on fire
in the Belfast night
long hot summerHowever, Carson remains attuned to the long tradition of his chosen form; the first sequence in the book (there are no individual haiku here, but sequences of varying lengths) is called ‘Road to the North’, a clear nod to Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi, and there are images in the sequence that recall moments from that work:
road to the north
the weight of ivy
on a ruined cottage[…]
I first encountered Tim Murphy’s work when we both had haiku included in Pat Boran’s Local Wonders anthology a few years back and just a few pages apart thanks to the wonders of alphabetical order. One of those haiku, also collected here, reads:
lockdown
do the birds wonder
where we are?eight words that encapsulate what was a shared experience of Covid times, the sudden awareness of the natural within the urban as a reciprocal arrangement that so many of us shared.
Billy Mills, Two Irish Haikuists: A Review of Liam Carson and Tim Murphy
Ethel Romig Fuller (1883-1965) was born in Big Rapids, Michigan. In 1906 she moved Portland, Oregon, fell in love with the landscape, and after climbing Mount Hood dedicated herself to writing poems about the northwest; “Possessor of ‘a husband, two sons, and a most happy home’, Fuller is a Portland writer who has often appeared in The Lyric West, and in other California and Eastern publications.” (The Lyric West, 1927)
Fuller went on to publish three books of poetry, showing her skill at both both rhymed and unrhymed forms of “new” poetry: White Peaks & Green (1928), Kitchen Sonnets & Lyrics Of Domesticity (1931), and Skylines (1952). While her poems address many aspects of the Oregon landscape, the mountain ranges—and especially the Cascade Range, containing Mount Hood—were particularly significant to Fuller, both physically and metaphysically.
Fuller was also an editor, and in the 1930s when the local newspaper The Oregonian announced it was going to stop publishing poetry, Fuller “persuaded the paper to create a weekly poetry section, insisting that poems from all over the world be published, not only those from Oregon, [which] she edited from the early 1930s to the late 1950s.” (Hill, Oregon Encyclopedia, 2022) Fuller’s own work continued to grow in popularity as well. In 1939 the New York Times reported that her poem ‘Proof’ was the most quoted poem in the English language, and in 1957 she became Oregon’s third Poet Laureate. […]
After Ethel Romig Fuller
Dick Whyte, Ethel Romig Fuller – 4 Mountain Poems (1927-1928)
by Dick Whyte
I.
what the mountain taught me:
there is something beyond exhaustion,
trees will not judge you,
the sky is a mighty long way,
silence is not the absence of sound,—
II.
ah! the valley approaches, emptying itself
of synthetic gods,
like a sack trying to hold a river:
we leak
I’m so honored to have my poem “The End of October” included in Denison Museum’s current exhibition M(otherhood)s—open and free to the public until December 5th!
The exhibition “brings together more than a millennia of art, poetry, and film to explore the many ways mothering—by birth, by choice, by circumstance, and by community—takes form across cultures and generations. From the ancient Indian sculpture The Goddess Lajja Gauri and the Renaissance vision of the Holy Family to bold contemporary works by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Judy Chicago, Tracey Emin, and Titus Kaphar, the exhibition invites reflection on care, identity, resilience, and the complicated realities that live alongside love. The works span painting, photography, print, sculpture, video, and the written word, creating a conversation between the intimate and the political, the historical and the now.”
Deepest thanks to Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach for including me alongside so many gorgeous artists, including stellar poets like Joy Harjo, Kai Coggin, Keetje Kuipers, Ada Limón, Maggie Smith, Kendra DeColo, Erika Meitner, Victoria Chang, Ajanaé Dawkins, Luisa Muradyan, Traci Brimhall, Ellen Bass, Danusha Laméris, Kelly Grace Thomas, and her own dear self.
Do check out the exhibition website which includes a guide with all the poems.
Hyejung Kook [no title]
I took my selected poems of Wisława Szymborska off the shelf recently and I keep returning to it. It’s titled View with a Grain of Sand, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. It’s where I started with her work, later picking up the collected works but this one is hit after hit. Highly recommended. There’s a great article here about where to start with her literature, which begins with the tale of her sneaking out for cigarettes with the King of Sweden during the Nobel award presentation. […]
The world is a lot these days, shock after shock. There’s another poem in View with a Grain of Sand where she says, “After every war / someone has to tidy up.” I always visualize a house party that’s not quite over yet, and the host of the party is going around cleaning up the glasses and mess ahead of everyone leaving. On angels, “If there are angels, / I doubt they read / our novels / concerning thwarted hopes.”
Her poem “Thank You Note” has always been there: “I owe so much / to those I don’t love. // The relief as I agree / that someone needs them more.” Those who don’t love us now will probably never love us. That’s fine.
The angels are too busy now to read our novels or to put the drinks glasses in the sink. I doubt they’re reading our social media posts. I guess this means we’re going to have to do stuff ourselves. Start cleaning up those things in our vicinity. Our poems won’t change the world, says Patrizia Cavalli, in a poem that changed my world. What will?
Shawna Lemay, The Most Pressing Questions – Revisiting Wisława Szymborska
There was a brief period of my life – when I was a full-time PhD student – when I wasn’t tied to the rhythms of the educational year. I still remember the feeling of freedom and giddy excitement that swept through me that first September when I realised September didn’t mean the same thing anymore and wouldn’t for a while.
Now I’m teaching again, but it’s a very different rhythm to my music teaching days. Our teaching doesn’t start till October, but there is preparation and induction events and emails and continued supervision of MA students and PhD students, and left over marking, and meetings and strategy days.
And now I’m a mother and I get to September with feelings of sadness and relief. I’m sad that another summer is over, and this one felt years long and days short. We spent eight days in Spain in a pool and my daughter swam all day, getting stronger and stronger and more confident in the water. I examined a PhD viva. We went to see the live filming of Gladiators. I finished a lyric essay on motherhood and it has been accepted for publication. We went camping with five other families in Cheshire. I marked all day and into the early hours of the morning. I spent all afternoon by the river and watched my daughter learn how to make a bow and arrow. I went away for a week and taught poetry. I went to the Museum of Childhood and watched my daughter shop in the pretend shop, get money from the pretend bank, post pretend letters. I edited my poetry collection. I played Junior Monopoly.
I gave up on trying to have two separate lives and just let them push up against each other. There were no clean borders – motherhood and my writing and my job are distilled into each other, like ink into water, although which is the clear water and which is the ink is beyond my knowing.
Kim Moore, Back to school vibes
“Which kippah goes better with this?”
Rachel Barenblat, Before School
My teen gestured to his blue sweater.
We chose the navy blue one with
robin’s-egg squares, like a
Sol LeWitt painting in miniature.
We’d been listening to Beethoven
while he finished his AP Euro reading
and I nursed my first cup of coffee.
He glanced at his watch, grabbed
two clips to keep his Jewish identity
steadily visible on his head, and
dashed out the door to catch the bus.
In the silence after he left
all I could think about
was the parents of the two teenagers
shot by a fellow student yesterday
in yet another school, yet another town.
A good week to avoid social media. Also, I’m considering becoming a youth influencer for things like empathy, love of science, poetry, and feminism. Any podcasts hiring? (And I want to say more, but you know what? I’m not.) […]
The reality of life for poets can be tough, and our time together brief, so celebrating the wins of your friends is important and deserves time and space. So I got together with a few young local poets who are burning it up – Catherine Broadwall’s new memoir, Water Spell, is being launched at J. Bookwalter’s the 25th and me, Erika and Kristine Iredale will be opening for her, so come on out. That talented girl also just signed for a new poetry book with local press Girl Noise Press, so double the congrats.
In the middle of the week, I was feeling pretty heavy, so it was a good surprise to see my Rainier cherry tree break into blossom, and the little hummingbirds can not leave it alone.
I’m ready for some rejuvenation, the hope in falling leaves of new birth, the unexpected flowering.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Tough Week with Bright Spots: Celebrating Poets, Fall Feels and Surprise Cherry Blossoms
i want to reject nihilism & embrace a thing
Robin Gow, quiet game
with feathers. there is a zoo up the street
from me & i wish the cages were bigger.
what a ridiculous dream? that’s what everyone
has been saying to me though, “don’t you want
a bigger cage?” no i do not. i want a meadow.
Art and writing these days feels like a strange disassociation from the world of screens spewing horrors that grow more ridiculous every day. I am not sure how to reconcile what happens in my head with the world outside it. And there are many good things coming, from new dgp chaps and shop offerings to cool stuff I am cooking up for Patreon in the coming months (including things like Edgar Allen Poe tarot cards and a designing a daily planner that should be available by the time November rolls around if not sooner.) I am knee-deep in a promising new series of poems set in the mid-century, which borrows its tones and inspiration from things like The Twilight Zone and Welcome to Nightvale.
I am looking for the spaces inside these poems to work out my feelings, here in the 21st century, but its slow going. As someone who considers my overall genre to be horror, its a strange place to be making spooky things when the outside world is more disturbing than fiction. […]
The sun raising a frequency
Kristy Bowen, September Paper Boat
in our blood. A hum in the molars
that signaled doom, weighty as a rock
through the window. Glass fragments
in our hair and in our tea. We’d smile
while our gums bled. While our tongues
probed the holes we didn’t quite believe were real.
Why is creativity so important, especially right now? Because it stands in complete opposition to the destruction, violence, and lack of caring that we’re witnessing every day, in politics, in society, and in the environment. When these dark forces enter our bodies continually, through the news, social media, and real-life conversations, they work destructively upon us, weakening our natural defenses — which are hopefulness, positivity, creativity, and love. And those negative forces are so pervasive now that unless we actively seek to strengthen our defenses, we’re going to feel overwhelmed, hopeless, exhausted, paralyzed, unable to resist. That’s the goal; that’s exactly where they want us to be. So I want to encourage you to do something involved with the arts, every day if you can, to remind yourself of the positive forces you have inside yourself and which have always existed throughout time, finding expression through human endeavor and inspiring us, no matter how many centuries stand between us and the creators.
Beth Adams, The Arts and Creativity
these hands are like brothers. one weaker than the other.
one loved more. one wields the knife. the other cleans
a small church. we have great admiration for their faith.
Grant Hackett [no title]
Each morning I listen to the stream, its steady murmuration, plus strange gunks and grgles. Often overhead the scree of jays. Yesterday a gronk and then a shatter of crows, a scuffle between them and a hawk. Low huff when a deer I haven’t seen sees me, gives away the whole game. Which makes me think of performing my poems with a dance troupe, their exhales signaling the next movement. I have tinnitus, so the world is always accompanied by a high chord. I say I haven’t been writing much lately, but I find written things. Prosaic, mostly, and missing something. Music, I think. Rhythm. A cha cha cha. So important for a written thing, a poem, specifically, to have some, sometimes subtle, percussion — a tocketa tocketa, a little high-hat. And to have a glorious array of consonants, a pattern of vowels. What I love about speaking French is that it requires my mouth to move in a different way. I have to hold my face differently. It wakes me up, in a way. I like poetry that requires the involvement of my mouth. This poem I found in the Adroit Journal demanded to be read aloud. I like a poem that gets in my face. It’s yet another yet another yet another elegy. Can’t escape ’em. The dead are everywhere. And life keeps getting in their way.
Marilyn McCabe, through a sieve quick & gone—
a pin in night’s blanket,
the shrewd, the nimble,
the saguaro
and its breathing skin, the field
itselfI want an acre
Charlotte Hamrick, Us, On Any Given Day
with which to do nothing
Time makes an awful racket until you learn to play it competently. All this expansion and contraction and wheezing the old squeeze box of weeks. Fumble the keys like a bare sweaty foot slipping off the gas pedal. It ain’t always pretty but the lack of pretty makes for authentic. More authentic than grocery store bagels.
The more diverse your days the slower the time because less living on automatic. Unless you have fast diversity in which case it’s a blur whir that you let slide past like so much scenery. Trees, Got it. People, Sure. Trauma. War. Screw-up. Sleep. Yup.
To be present and slow down, feel the air temperature, check in with the feet, try to let the parachute settle over your face. You won’t suffocate. You’ve landed.
Pearl Pirie, Time’s Accordion