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: the miracle of chance, fluff under pressure, a man in a shattered house, a charm against the inconceivable, and much more. Enjoy.
It is the season of unloosening: the chaos of high winds, torrential rain, sudden squalls. Each day’s a contradiction: beauty and decay in the carpets of fallen leaves; bruised skies suddenly punctured by bursts of a retreating sun. Time to prepare ourselves for the exodus of light and the night’s imminent veil.
shavasana*
we all take a little longer
to return*shavasana = ‘corpse pose’ in yoga, usually the final pose of a practice session that allows for mental and physical rest and recovery before re-entering daily life.
Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Almost November
The frenzy of fall
after ceding all
to the sunwe walk into the pause
rapt, the minus,
not the slightest jangle
of cicadasilence
Jill Pearlman, Silent Fall
sucking down
into earth’s own navel
I would like to believe in signs — the owl in the tree right outside my bedroom signifying something momentous is about to happen, that period in my life where I kept dreaming of birds, that rock I found that looks like a road map. But I don’t. Shit happens and it just is, without reason nor the benefit of foresight. Is that a sad way to be in the world? I don’t mind the miracle of chance, or chemical combinations plus time and pressure, or the odd ways in which the brain works its own chemistry. It’s all a wonder to me, even without a message. I’m human too, though, and yearn for some advance notice, some way to foretell whether I’m about to make a good decision or disastrous, some way to catch a glimpse inside the unknown of something I can know and clasp to me like an umbrella in the face of possible rain. But I’m pretty much left with the old death and taxes thing. And whatever I can pick up with my five-ish senses, imperfect as they are, and what mind I carry around from day to day in my head. The other day I looked down and saw a tiny manhole cover, a perfect circle with radiating lines. If I lifted it up I might find a tiny sewer into the center of the earth. Turns out it was the lopped off head of a mushroom. One of those little pointy-headed gray ones stuck upside-down in the grass. Hunh. You just never know, though. Anything’s possible.
Marilyn McCabe, I stay up late listening
As I filtered out of a particularly fun workshop-reading-open mic at BookTree in Kirkland, Washington, one of the participants called back to me as he ambled down the dark street, “Thanks, Professor Mushroom!” The featured image above with its weird reflections, taken at a booth at the Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival, conjures, for me, that slightly wacky persona I inhabit when I bard around with Mycocosmic–as if I know things about fungi (I’m an amateur); am relaxed about performing (ha); and really feel kind of mystical and hopeful about our underground connections to each other (well, that one’s true on a good day). […]
On the trip’s last leg I stayed with Jeannine and Glenn Gailey in Woodinville. Jeannine asked about my favorite moments from the adventure. A few hikes came to mind, but I also found myself saying “talking to strangers.” I’m an introvert who has to pay herself back for socializing with hours of quietness, so this isn’t my usual answer! Maybe it feels true because the “talking” involved a lot of listening. A reading with Matthew Nienow organized by Michele Bombardier, both terrific poets, felt special, as did the open mic that followed and my side conversations with audience members. Open mics feature wide variations in poetic skill, yet they’re one of my favorite formats. There’s something electric about so many people listening hard and taking risks, putting strong feelings out there. The Kirkland one ended with a performance that pinged between witty poetic lines and harmonica riffs–I won’t soon forget it.
Lesley Wheeler, Professor Mushroom listens to strangers
Blah blah blah went the (very well written) review until bang there you were coming alive in your own words (I do like a review that quotes the actual poems): ‘be one who / when the lightest breeze / thrills through you / takes note’ and then ‘a part of you on the rocks / a part of you in bog cotton / a part of you snagged on wire / a part of you unravelling’ and I felt something in me shift, a small but deeply profound intake of breath, somewhere between the words oh and wow. I can only describe it as an embodied moment. We (I, everyone) overuse the word visceral now, don’t we, but that’s where I felt it, in my good old Roman viscera. I knew I had to find more.
A quick spot of googling later and that’s what happened, a whole page of you at the Scottish Poetry Library no less, in a navy sweater (I have one too!) in front of the obligatory bookshelf, not looking at the camera (I’m with you on that), with a full biog at the foot of which an injunction to ‘Read the poems’. Which I did. Drank them, more like, gulping, swallowed them whole, not even touching the sides. At which point I started again.
Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: You are not alone, by Thomas A. Clark
What is it that separates us,
and what keeps us together?
In the garden, I rake
the leaves from the fruit trees.I write,
Kati Mohr, Of Course, The Tissues In the Backpack Are Always Deep Down At the Bottom, Below Anything Else
but my mouth has many tongues—
in the city, all the windows open
in the morning.
I envy, to a degree, all those poets who just build up to a critical mass of uncompiled poems, work out an order for them, call that a collection, then start the process all over again. I can’t do that — it feels aimless. I think in book, as much as I think in poem. I like a book to have a thesis, and to know what it is as I’m writing it, even if — as in this case — it’s not something I could ever summarise neatly.
As for ‘Lightning Conductor’, I like that it isn’t about anything much, that it’s a little bit lazy. Check out that comma splice — I’m always telling my students to take those out. The whole thing’s just a bad pun, a newspaper cartoon. It doesn’t even want to commit to the sex or humanity of its principal character — etymologically, ‘mannequinesque’ means ‘man-like-ish’. I imagine it being spoken by someone who means to convince the listener that much of what seems like power is mere theatrical affectation. All that build-up — all that careful ceremony — just for the briefest of illuminations.
I also imagine the speaker gesturing intently at some shape on top of a building. Probably not a figure at all — probably just a chimney or plumbing stack. They want the listener to do all the work of imagining a person who is imagining themselves to be a wizard. Nothing at all has happened, is happening, beyond what occurs in the mind’s eye — even the city and the dark-blooded glass are illusions cast upon an empty page.
Jon Stone, POEM / Lightning Conductor
I wrote this on a wet October day, looking out onto the stony beach at Borth, its Bronze Age forest part-covered by the sweep of a dull metallic tide. As I wrote, early poems crowded into my mind, shouting for attention – and I saw them in my own hand, written in biro on A4 stapled together – my first collections. As a child, writing poetry was gathering shells, shards, bright pebbles. The universe offered small and lovely objects and I picked them up and kept them, and sometimes, I showed them to other people who thought they were pretty. A pocketful of pebbles and kind words were enough.
That changed as I grew. By my teenage years, bigger and darker things came in on the tide. […]
By the time I was detained in psychiatric hospital in my third year of uni, I’d stopped writing poetry. I was too far from the world, and from myself: I had no drive or hope of being understood. The journal I kept in those years is too dark to read, though I still keep it.
I started to write poetry again in a writing group for survivors of sexual abuse facilitated by the author and teacher Mandy Coe. Mandy is a life-force, bright and loud: we were driftwood, and she carried us. She took us to our first performance poetry night – Dead Good Poets Society; we wrote in the Walker Gallery; we cut up our poems and threw in them the air like David Bowie; we performed our poetry in the Everyman and our friends came. I read a poem about my time on the wards: “small wonder that some screamed or swore/ or crept into lonely corners/ and quietly gave up hope”.
I had a story I needed to tell, and I could not tell it over dinner, or in idle chat. But I could tell it in poetry.
Clare Shaw, Poetry and Wellbeing: part 1
[M]y next book has transformed. If you’ve read my previous post, you’ll remember I undertook extensive revision and redrafting to help the book find its story and tell it effectively. After this work was complete I approached Olivia Tuck, who I worked with on my second book Dust to see if she still offered her “poem whisperer” service. Olivia’s insight and suggestions mean my book has really grown into itself . It’s currently out at publishers and up for judgement in various competitions. I’m really proud of the book it has become and that I’m at the point where I feel it is “right.” This sense of completion means I have space for other projects. My first focus is on creating poems for a competition that couldn’t be more up my street if it tried. I’m so thrilled to have a clear focus and to be working on something that I feel so inspired by. I’m also investigating the possibility of working on a project inspired by the action group This Ends Now who highlight the failures of the press to report violence against women without shifting blame, or diluting reality. I’m not quite sure on the form this will take, but I’ll have more news after my meeting with their CEO on Tuesday. I feel like I’ve found my writer’s groove again.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, Poetry news from Kathryn Anna
A strange week. The structure of the week falling down when my mum’s chemo was cancelled at the last minute. I would have liked to have been one of those people who saw this as an opportunity to have an extra day to write, but we are back to the incessant gnawing of not knowing what’s happening with my mum’s care, and I can’t write when my brain is fizzy with anxiety.
I haven’t done any creative writing of any kind since I sent the chunk of my novel to my agent to see what they think. Within two days of sending it I realised there were darlings still to kill. I could lose three thousand words of what I think might be writer-scaffolding: the story that I’m telling to myself before it becomes the story, and it would work better. But I’ve decided to wait and see what my agent’s initial reaction is before I scythe a massive chunk off it. I’m actually quite glad to have a week or so away from it.
I’ve used this week to consider what I want to do with substack, and to update it accordingly. I’ve used a lot of feedback from some in person events to shape how I think about what I present here. I’m not sure I mentioned in my last diary post that I was on a bit of a workshop running marathon, piling through a load of pre planned appearances and workshops facilitation which I’d set up before we found out that my mum’s cancer had spread and her care needs would be increased. So far I’m still managing the workload, around mum’s increased needs, possibly because there is an end in sight. A previous version of myself wanted to see if I could reduce my workload, if not take a complete break, in December, and I have left that whole month clear of workshops and mentoring, with just creative stuff and this substack to write.
I’m looking forward to embracing December as a writer, but the truth is that I’ve had a bit of an epiphany while I’ve been out of the cocoon of my writing room and actually speaking to real life people, and that epiphany is that this element of my work, alongside writing on substack, not only nourishes me as a person, but also as a writer. I’m so quick to grumble because so much of non writing work takes me away from actual writing. What I am becoming more aware of are the benefits of non-book-writing on my own writing practice, stuff that bleeds into my long term writing.
Wendy Pratt, Notes from My Writing Diary – Part Two
Over the summer I followed along as his collection of raw photos grew and he started winnowing them down into a smaller, curated selection. Recurring motifs started to emerge: People standing in the sun, big trees with broken limbs, detritus strewn in the park. People embracing trees or plants. People closing their eyes and turning their faces to the sky.
As JP’s photo collection took shape, I started scribbling notes for poems. Some were a direct response to his photo or the theme of the Sun’s rotation. Haiku and tanka seemed particularly suitable to the theme of transience, so I wrote a handful of each of those. Since he’d shared unedited photos with me, I decided to do the same with my drafts, and shared photos of my notebook pages.
As JP entered the final weeks of his residency, he began preparing the gallery show that would be its culmination. This prompted me to edit and finalize my collection of poems, which I shared with him.
It was then that JP surprised me for a second time by asking if I would do a Listener Poet session for him. Of course I was delighted by this request: as a newly certified Listener Poet, I’m eager to share this practice with others. So we spent half an hour one morning talking about his approach to photography, and in particular one portrait session he’d done recently in Berlin. After that, I spent a couple of days letting my notes steep, and then I drafted a poem for him, “Portrait of the Photographer.” (see below)
JP’s show went well. The gallery space looked beautiful, and even though I couldn’t visit Berlin to attend, he shared a video walkthrough of the space. And that’s when he gave me a third surprise: At the end of his video, he zoomed in on a handout that the gallery curators had included as part of the show, including a few of my tanka and haiku.
Dylan Tweney, Collaboration and photography
Albert is taken from my second pamphlet, Case Notes, which is based on my own experiences, both in hospital practice and as a family doctor.
Albert was the first really sick patient I looked after as a newly qualified doctor. Youthful inexperience gave me complete faith that medicine would make him better, despite his age and frailty. […]
The consultant was old-school, with a pin-striped suit and an aura of importance. Despite Albert having been in the services and used to obeying orders, both he and the kindly consultant taught me the need to respect patient autonomy.
My first pamphlet, Patient Watching, features a sequence of poems in the form of a heroic crown, in the voice of a single-handed GP in the Black Country featured in John Berger’s book A Fortunate Man. Berger’s book includes wonderful photographs of his encounters with patients, which I used as a prompt to tell stories from my own patient experiences.
I use the same device in Case Notes, writing in the voices of doctors who cared for actors and artists from the past, including Frida Kahlo, Sarah Bernhardt, Andy Warhol and Wilfred Owen. The added advantage is not having to protect patient confidentiality.
Drop-in by Judith Wozniak (Nigel Kent)
My poetry writing goes in cycles. The cycle I like best is the one where I have a glimmer of an idea for a poem, a glimmer that takes shape throughout the day as I think about it, and by the time I sit down at my writing desk, I’ve got a shape of a poem to work with–and yet, there’s still a delightful surprise or two.
Of course it’s the cycle I like best. Who wouldn’t like this part? It’s where I feel like I’m doing what I’ve been put on earth to do. It’s the part of the cycle where I feel like I’ve come across some secret portal, available to all but undertaken by few, where I glimpse the secrets of creation (which I mean in all sorts of senses of that word).
Usually my writing process is more like this: I have a line or two, I see what I can do with them, I come up with a bit more but not a complete poem, I put it aside to think about it later, and I rarely return. It might be for a happy reason: the fragment leads to a more solid idea. It’s more usual that I put it aside and then a week or two goes by, and I don’t have any additional ideas, and life gets hectic.
Lately I’ve been stuck in the cycle I like least: no ideas, no glimmers, no lines that fizzle out and go nowhere. I feel like it’s been months since I wrote a line, although that’s not true.
Yesterday, much to my delight, I came up with two poems. In the morning, I had a flash of an idea about gingerbread houses being evidence of a woman working out her trauma. I decided to go big: make the speaker the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story. It’s not done yet, but here is how the poem starts right now:
I deal with loss by baking.
My gingerbread structures tell
you all you need to know
about the trauma that still lives
deep inside me.In the afternoon, I had the idea to have the gingerbread house speak. The gingerbread house says that its not its fault that it bewitches small children. From there, the poem devolves a bit. I had been listening to coverage of the book published by a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein, and the stories are harrowing, and those stories were in my mind as I wrote. I need to do some work on getting the symbolism squared away. The gingerbread house is not Epstein–that would be the witch. Or maybe I want to back away and go in a different direction.
Or maybe not.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Two Rough Drafts Composed of Gingerbread
’Tis the season of mists and fellow mutefulness, apparently, and there being no one else available to write the substack this week (the other NSPs are all currently on the road or under the cosh) I thought I’d scribble something about fluff, or at least fluff under pressure. Lint, possibly. The poem below was a commission for Radio 4’s The Verb about three years back. The Verb has been on my mind this week. Late last year, in the course of a conversation with Ian MacMillan about the poetry of train stations, I had foolishly volunteered that no poem could possibly be written about Leuchars. For reasons both topographic and personal, I have long found it the least poetic station in the UK. Obviously, the poem was commissioned on the spot.
Leuchars is the closest station to the University of St Andrews, where I taught for a couple of happy decades, and with which I am still gently affiliated. But the station itself just reminds me of all the hours I spent freezing on a bench outside a locked waiting room in pitch-dark December, trying to mark exam scripts in the teeth of a North Sea gale, while yet another fighter jet from the airbase tore up the sky twenty feet above my head and the board told me yet another train had failed to make it out of Aberdeen. The Leuchars poem may or may not be any good – you can and will judge for yourselves, if you happen to be near a wireless next week – but as a rambling meditation on war, teaching, cutlery, dementia and death, I don’t think it can count as genuine fluff.
Unlike the poem below. It’s really a piece of occasional verse, the occasion being the BBC’s centennial: a few of us were charged with coming up with some kind of poetic tribute to the Reithian project, in whatever form we fancied. Writing poems for BBC radio is done for love, and often just for the love of Ian MacMillan. As a casual contributor, one is rewarded, more or less, only for the amount of airtime one destroys. A sonnet that took you three months will pay you roughly the same as someone else will get for breaking wind across the same minute. Lacking the normal incentives, BBC commissions can therefore sometimes be … deprioritised by more financially urgent work, which is a way of saying that I totally forgot to do this one. The dedicatee here is the poet Denise Riley, for two reasons: a) Denise reminded me that the poem was due in 48 hours, and b) she actually likes this sort of thing, or claims to, and indeed is very good at it herself. (There may still be a few who persist in thinking of Denise solely as some kind of doyenne of the UK avant-garde, but I suspect most of you know she’s many other things besides, and besides was never quite that thing in the first place.) By way of competitive encouragement, she sent me a fine poem on the now-lost rite of the 5pm Saturday footie results, specifically on the cadences of the sportscaster – his ‘RP weighty, self-assured and calm, / avuncular with its velvety inflections’ as its rise or fall foreshadowed the fate of the club. One could be certain Stenhousemuir had nilled again, well before the nil was confirmed.
All of which is to say … This poem was written in a tearing rush. As my NSP colleagues know, I suffer from Pascal syndrome. I often lack the time to make things shorter. I wrote the poem in a form I know I can deliver fairly quickly; this is where a certain motor-skill relationship to the old 4×4 can come in handy, and the rhymes left to dictate much of the poem. The poem had to find its way to its own conclusion, as none had been planned. It takes a while to yak its way there, but I kind of enjoyed the passivity. As Erroll Garner once said after an overlong piano solo, ‘I’m sorry – I just wanted to find out what happened in the end.’
Don Paterson, North Sea Line Caught, #2: ‘Kissing on the Radio’
Tomorrow I’m recording a tutorial on Horror Poetry for Writer’s Digest and the 30th I’m talking to a class at University of New Orleans about publicity and poetry. Doing the tutorial was an opportunity for me to do more in-depth thinking about what makes a horror poem a horror poem—does Sylvia Plath count? Louise Gluck? Am I a horror poet?
But real life threw in a real scare in the middle of spooky season—my father went into the hospital last night with a serious illness, so we’ve been texting and talking to mom and dad back in Ohio. Hopefully he’s in recovery by Halloween.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Poetry Friends and Readings, Horror Poetry, Halloween/Samhain and Some Real Life Scares
In the year following the death of my mother, I wrote a single poem a day for a longer, sustained span of time than ever before. It was the first time I’d ever successfully completed NAPOWRIMO, but then I just kept going for months. […] Part of it was a way to feel more focused, more present in the world. Part of it was a renewed sense of mortality. Soon, I had an entire book about mothers and mothering, some with very gothic undertones, that became my collection FEED. When my father passed nearly exactly 5 years later, I went through a similar spurt of new poems built around memory and grief that formed segments of RUINPORN. These series and poems were much less about working things out (my relationship with my father being very much less complicated than that with my mother–at least from the standpoint of making art within my grief. ) They jived well with other themes in the overall book and formed the backbone of a collection that also explored societal grief and the loneliness of the internet. […]
[G]rief is always a kind of haunting–not supernatural, but just as real as any emotion. The sense of unreality. For months, my mother was in my dreams, not knowing she was dead. Sometimes, I knew this and had to tell her. Sometimes, it knocked the wind out of me to be discovering it for the first time. I would wake up startled and sweating and sadder than I’d gone to bed. It waned after a few months, but would still occasionally happen. I chalked it up to the fact that I was not there when she passed, nor did I want to see her body before cremation. I later thought maybe doing so would have stopped the dreams. When my dad died, it was more sudden, a few weeks of decline vs. several months of hospitalization/care center. But I was there for his last breath in the hospital bed. We sat with the body for awhile after he was gone. My brain decided this was enough, and when he appears in my dreams on occasion, that shock and realization doesn’t come into play.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, about how horror as a genre gives us permission to explore the darker corners of human experience. And grief? It sometimes lives in those corners. Even if you can’t see it, you know it’s there. When you’re grieving, people often want you to be “okay” as quickly as possible. They want the neat narrative arc: sadness, acceptance, moving on. But grief isn’t neat. It’s messy and recursive and sometimes it looks like a creature that shape-shifts every time you think you’ve got it figured out. One day it’s a whisper, the next it’s got claws.
Horror poetry lets you name that monster. It gives you the vocabulary for experiences that polite conversation won’t touch. You can write about death not as a gentle sleep but as the violent rupture it actually feels like. You can describe the emptiness as a void that actually swallows things, because that’s what it feels like when grief takes your appetite, your sleep, your ability to remember what life felt like before it existed. There’s something deeply validating about using dark imagery to describe dark feelings. It’s honest in a way that all the usual euphemisms never are.
Gothic literature has always understood that grief and horror are close cousins. Think about all those Victorian poems dripping with mourning imagery—the crumbling estates, the ghosts, the women in white wandering the moors. They weren’t being melodramatic (okay, maybe a little). They were trying to externalize an internal experience that defied ordinary description. When Poe wrote “The Raven,” he wasn’t just crafting a spooky poem. He was writing about the way grief makes you interrogate the universe, demanding answers you know won’t come. That bird repeating “Nevermore” is the truth grief forces you to swallow: they’re not coming back. No matter how many times you ask.
Kristy Bowen, horror and grief
I remember that strange month, sad month, odd month. I remember listening to these tapes and hearing my boot heels clicking on the pavement, then being surprised by voices, how many kind people called out and spoke to me as I walked around my London: Hello Salena, they said, Alright, mate! Sometimes they called my name like this, Hello Salena, passing someone crossing a busy street, Hello, as you bump into someone in a pub. Hello Godden they’d say on these tapes – not knowing I was observing my life in audio, not knowing my pockets were stuffed full, spare batteries, blank tapes, a notebook and pen.
I was a little scientific and analytic about it. But I was also quite smashed a lot of the time, so I would make mistakes, flip a cassette tape over and record over the same side twice or forget to change the batteries and lose some crucial evidence, events and late hours. It was pot luck what actually got recorded and saved and what was lost forever. I know I was behaving unnaturally, performing, sometimes thinking I was being clever, knowing I was on tape, telling people they were on tape and us all performing to the tape. Telling folk it was a wild experiment. And people would change the way they spoke to me. Or react as though I was a journalist interviewing them. All the time I wondered: How much of life is a performance? What is real? Authentic? True? Why do we change when we know there is a recording of our idea of self ?
Each morning I would wake up and make tea or pour a beer and smoke fags and record myself listening to the recordings from the day before and type poems and write diaries about the audio content: how it made me feel, what or who was I hearing. Writing and processing the images and emotions and soundscapes I’d captured. These morning poetry sessions and recordings became a loop of the days before-before-before and the typing-typing-typing and the sound of writing-writing-writing. A mirror looping into a mirror looping into a mirror. I remember I wrote about the sound of October and the autumn leaves and my adventures in Soho and all the people I’d bumped into and chatted and drank with the day before. I wrote about performance, how we perform when we don’t need to. What is real and what is unreal. What is expected? If nobody is looking, are we more ourselves to ourselves?
In pubs and bars (for I was mad and young and out drinking every night) I would tell people, I am recording my life on earth, it’s a poetry experiment and notice them begin to either shout and perform for me and the tape, or go quiet and change when they knew, I knew, they knew they were being recorded.
I forgot about it until now. I’m not going to open the box, not this year. Maybe in another ten years’ time. I know the box is down in the basement, but no, not now, I won’t open it now, it is enough to know it is there, sealed and dusty, it is good to know it is down there. I am gazing out of my window at the orange leafy October light and remembering it and that era.
I recall one tape: I’m with my mum in an M&S changing room as she is making me get fitted for a new bra. We are laughing. It is a moment of intimacy and love. And on another tape I’m with Oli, we’re drinking absinthe up high on the edge of the Hastings cliffs and singing death wishes into the abyss. I want to jump into the stormy sea. I record a taste of loss. Now we are here, and in this October, and the leaves
still
fall.
Salena Godden, October Tape Experiment
On Friday, I was one of six readers at an Off the Shelf Festival event in the University of Sheffield Drama Studio’s theatre, as a celebration of forty years of my and every other UK poet’s favourite poetry journal, The North. Hosted by the co-editor (and co-director of the Poetry Business), Peter Sansom, it consisted of a delightful 20-minute reading by the Sheffield Poet Laureate, Beth Davies, whose pamphlet The Pretence of Understanding won the New Poets’ Prize 2022, and then short readings – by Peter, Alan Payne, James (Jim) Caruth, Kate Rutter and me – each of three poems which had appeared in The North. I read Stephen Payne’s superb villanelle, ‘Dai’, Victoria Gatehouse’s brilliant, and brilliantly-titled, ‘Reservoir Gods’, and my own ‘The Prang’. It was another very memorable event, and a fitting tribute to Ann and Peter Sansom’s work over the years to cement The North as a hugely important pillar of the poetry scene in the UK and beyond.
And then yesterday, I went to my third poetry event in as many days. I have to say that by this point I was feeling as though I was permanently living in a bubble of poetry.
Matthew Paul, On the last while
Are you ignoring my message or are we
in the middle of some strange
literary cliffhanger?I’m pitching real readers, real reviews,
Luisa A. Igloria, A Marketing Bot Reaches Out in Vain (a partially found poem)
real visibility, and you’re giving me
the silent treatment like I’m asking you
for your Netflix password.
Delivered by the postal service earlier the week, a book as mesmerizing as the leaves the leaves falling from the trees along our street this week—- yellow for an instant and then smitten by asphalt — Earthly, a collection of Jean Follain’s poems translated by Andrew Seguin.
Camille Corot’s lithograph, The Gust of Wind (1871), sits lightly on the cover, gesturing towards Canisy, the small village in Normandy where the poet in question was born and fed bread. In the translator’s introduction, Seguin paints a portrait of his subject: this writer named Jean Follain who saw the agricultural lifeways of small towns gutted by the new economy of killing, the human looking for words in the wasteland following World War II, an event sponsored by governments who caused the mass death of young men and starved village economies of the labor required for their continuance. […]
What happens in Follain’s poems?
Things are touched. Things touch back. Subjects pause like objects in a dark painting. Children “dressed in black rags” scamper through ruins.” A man’s smile “vibrates” alongside the spike of wheat in his scythe. Snails sleep as the bread burns. “The protagonist of dreams” savors wine flavored by “myrtle and cypress” as alcohol fuels arguments in the pub. Doors creak through “cold rooms.” The “rustle” of poplars near rivers rouses the blood. A novelist studies the wandering vapors. A glass blushes like a continental sunset. The “already yellow” of lindens in July crosses paths with violins who are napping in their velvet-lined coffins.
In “Landscape of Rural Hardship”:
A small garden of chives
trembles beneath the stars.The hardship is expressed in trembling of tiny chives.
Follain opens his “Eclogue” with a man in a “shattered house” who “plays at the game of existing” as the wind groans through the orchard. With no transition, Follain abandons the man for “the lightning-struck oak” where a bird perches on a limb, singing, unafraid, slowly morphing into a haunting image:
an old man has placed his hand
where a young heart
vowed obedience.Gestures consecrate the movements in Follain’s poems.
Alina Stefanescu, Jean Follain.
It’s a largish distance between [Carl] Phillips’ poems of careful observation to the ‘Post Dada’ world of Tomaž Šalamun as translated by Brian Henry, with its determined undermining of polite expectation:
Folk Song
Every true poet is a monster.
He destroys the voice and the people.
His singing builds the technology that destroys
the earth so that the worms don’t eat us.
A drunkard sells his coat.
A scoundrel sells his mother.
Only a poet sells his soul
to separate it from the body that he loves.This extends from the rejection of conventional narrative:
Stories that have a first scene, a second
scene, a first border, a second border, surrender like
a lump of meat.To the wish to go naked through the desert, even if it means abandoning one’s child:
No, I said, we’ll both go.
What will happen with Ana, Maruška said.
We’ll leave her in the car and give her
cookie. Cookie was at that time
still a drink for Ana.But it would be a mistake to read these poems as simply a kind of teenage desire to shock, there’s a serious, almost political, impulse underlying them, a desire to pare life back to some kind of simplicity. One poem ends with the line ‘A person explodes from too much luxury.’ Šalamun has no wish to share that fate.
Billy Mills, Recent reading October 2025: Part 2
It is a pleasure and a privilege to share three poems from Wendy Klein’s new pamphlet Having Her Cake, published by Grey Hen Press. The pamphlet is dedicated to Barbara Cox (1943 – 2019). Several poems give us vivid details about their lifelong friendship. However, the focus is Barbara’s ‘physician assisted’ death. The opening poem starts: Barbara never knows what time it is in Britain. California calling ends: the kindly California law / on assisted dying / I tell her I’m coming.
Fokkina McDonnell, Having Her Cake
I’m intrigued by this full-length debut by Vancouver poet Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2025), a poetry collection that “invites the reader to take a freight elevator ride into the guts of heavy industry,” and featuring back cover blurbs by Canadian poets Tom Wayman and Kate Braid, two of the originators of the 1970s Canadian “work poetry” ethos (amid those Kootenay School of Writing origins) that also included early work by poets Phil Hall and Erín Moure [see my longer note on some threads on “work poetry” as part of my recent review of Philadelphia poet Gina Myers’ Works & Days]. Shah’s lyrics provide a fascinating patter, one that utilizes the subject matter of labour across scenes of industrial sites and restaurant workers, composing what appear at first glance as first-person descriptive narratives, but one capable of nuanced twists and turns of sound and meaning. “dendrobranchiata,” begins the poem “prawn,” “you throw your roe out / like you remove a cava cage / spill the wine, let life flow / into its briny flute [.]” There’s almost a way her lyric is closer to the language model of poets such as ryan fitzpatrick or Peter Culley than Wayman or Braid, existing somewhere between those two points, offering labour as her building blocks but language as her poem’s propulsion. “here,” begins her poem “fear and probability,” “a woman’s soft body / is found only / in cubicle fabric nests // but I am a huntress / sparkles under steel toes / shuffling between petrochemical rainbows / into open bays / under heavy-lift ulnae / along the riverfront [.]” She offers her perspectives through and around labour, and around gender, a conversation less prevalent than it should be, even despite the high percentages of women working across various industries for decades. The language flourishes, provides flourish. While labour exists as her surrounding subject, much as Gina Myers, Shah sets her poems at the moment of actual, concrete and physical work, writing, as the short poem “ulnaris/radialis” begins: “egret, backhoe— / hand origami’s / carpal puppetry / prepares her for / the work of days / of women; [.]”
rob mclennan, Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress
Through “Darling Blue”, Sarah James has created two complementary threads. One is the doomed (fictional) affair of a woman with a married man that watches her move from the delusion of love to acceptance that she too was complicit in romanticising something tawdry. The wife is outside the frame: it’s not known if she knows of the affair or if the husband is a serial cheat. But there is a strong sense of self-discovery on the speaker’s part. The affair has enabled her to try out a role and learn what love is not. The ekphrastic poems add to the commentary: the speaker’s reaction to Crane’s “Neptune’s Horses” moves from awe at their power to identification where she takes back control after she realises that she was fooling herself. It’s a collection that rewards re-reading, a slow walk through a gallery, taking time to sit with each piece and choose to focus on the whole or a fragment, ask why a particular shade of blue was chosen or marvel at how the brushstrokes direct the light and the viewer’s eye, guiding it to see what the artist wants to reveal.
Emma Lee, “Darling Blue” Sarah James (Indigo Dreams Publishing) – book review
Last week I wrote about a poem that turned out to be a kind of private joke. This produced varied responses — several readers felt annoyed to have been “shut out” in this way, by a literary reference and concealed translation they could not reasonably have been expected to recognise. To them it felt high-handed. But others wrote to say that they didn’t mind this kind of thing — that they quite liked the feeling of “overhearing” something like a private joke, or in-crowd reference, intimate to the poet.
Perhaps this difference in response has something to do with how we think about the balance of power between the author and the reader in determining the meaning of a poem. But sometimes difficulty or obscurity can act as a kind of licence — it occurred to me afterwards that it might in fact have been Longley’s own puzzlement over the obscure names in that passage in Ovid that drew him to translate it in the first place.
There’s a good example of the way obscurity can be a spur to creativity, and even a kind of titillation, in a little Latin poem — little more than a squib — which apparently circulated pretty widely in England for a good couple of centuries. We can start around the middle of its history. In one Cambridge manuscript of the early seventeenth century, a single double-page spread records a series of mock-epitaphs — including poems on Sir Francis Bacon (d. 1626), Sir Christopher Hatton (d. 1591) and a certain Gresham (probably Sir Thomas Gresham, d. 1579, but possibly an earlier one — we’ve met this family in death before). Christopher Hatton’s enormous tomb in St Paul’s towered over the altar and obscured other monuments, which seems to be the point of one of the epigrams, appearing in this case in both Latin and English:
Epitaphs. of Sr Fra: Wal: & Sr Ph: Sid:
Nullus Francisco tumulus nullusque Philipo,
Christoforo mons est, ac tumulus cumulus.Philipe and Fra[ncis] haue noe Tombe,
for Christopher hath all the roome.Sir Francis Walsingham died in 1590, just a few years after Sir Philip Sidney, his son-in-law, in 1586. They were both, like Hatton, buried in (old) St Paul’s, though apparently without much in the way of a monument. The manuscript itself dates from the 1620s, so this epigram had already been going around for a while when it was written down. It can’t date from before Hatton’s death, but the jingly Latin (nullus, tumulus, nullus, tumulus, cumulus) is very unclassical in style and could easily have been written any time between the fifteenth and eighteenth century.
Victoria Moul, The evergreen obscenity
a chatbot tells me:
mother has a Proto-Indo-European root word
that sounds almost the same
so does love
though its Sanskrit cognate — lobha —
can translate to greed
one of the six enemies of the mind.the brain watches itself process the threads
Rajani Radhakrishnan, The square root of family
its recursive algorithm
offers a carousel of images:
picture of a woman #*méh₂tēr
picture of a night sky #thebenignfaceofchaos
picture of a rocking horse #metaphorforsomethingstilled
picture of an unidentifiable object #cellmemoryfromadifferentstateofmatter
wheels skid on ice #noimagefound
Introduction to Cloud Care – Laura Theis
maybe i’ll call gillian anderson – Rhian Elizabeth
I bought these collections from Broken Sleep Books a few months ago, during a phase when writing at least one review a week seemed like a task I had more than enough energy for (seriously, what was I thinking?!). But even though this review is not incredibly timely, I have been reading and re-reading them the whole while, and they have remained grouped together in my mind, despite their apparent differences in style.
In fact, I think they have more in common than first appears. Both have gorgeous covers (typical of Broken Sleep), with striking, glossy images against a deep blue background. Both are from poets with many accolades and awards to their name. Both are tender and vulnerable, but while maybe i’ll call gillian anderson half-hides its vulnerability within a spiny lobster shell, Introduction to Cloud Care lets its layers of softness and ethereality cloak a deeper toughness and resilience.
Both collections also deal in humour and more than a little dash of the surreal, providing moments of levity that underscore the more serious ones. […]
If I could draw another thread between Elizabeth’s and Theis’ work, it’s a sense of how we continue to be haunted by our past selves, but also a desire for reinvention. As Elizabeth tells us, in the most pleasing of things, “memory is a contemptuous old bitch”.
Victoria Spires, Memory, magic, and the art of reinvention
If you’re anything like me, the news of the congressional testimony by major publishers that, among a sample size of 58,000 books published in 2020, 50% sell fewer than 12 copies, utterly shocked you. According to this data, the average publishing run sells six units (six individual books). This isn’t quite true, but such views offer a window into the cynical state of affairs in contemporary publishing circles.
The dissolution of Small Press Distribution in 2024 was likewise an earthquake in an already unstable literary ecosystem. It was during this tumultuous period that my literary organization, Sybil, set out to transition from an online-only press to an organization with the capability to execute print projects. What came next was something few might have predicted, and which we certainly hadn’t prepared for: success, on our own terms.
The most recent testament to this success came after we published a chapbook of poetry by Megan Williams, entitled Window Person. While our organization was (and, at least in a public-facing capacity, remains) not quite open for full-length submissions, we solicited a collection of her writing, making note of the prominence of the pages we had previously published featuring her work. These had become some of the most visited on the entire site. Over a period of 2-3 weeks, we exchanged emails and editorial feedback, she added poems to the collection, and the entire project was “stress-tested,” (that is, the formalistic qualities of certain poems were questioned, ensuring intentionality). The end result is a powerful chapbook, which combines the ethos of confessional poetry with a sharp satirical edge, and contains references which place it in a literary tradition that is explicitly aligned with our goals as a publisher.
The pre-order for the collection (which was as many as we initially planned on producing) sold out in nearly two hours. After expanding our print run, the collection sold out again after only ten hours. For the moment, only digital copies are available! What more could a lit mag ask for?! How is it that, in the midst of all of this unsettling news and anxiety, we found publishing success? This is the question that I will attempt to answer here.
Despite the click-bait-y title of this article, there is no ‘secret’ to publishing success (sorry!). If there is, the average working writer (like myself) may not want to hear it: work with someone with an established platform, and brand recognition, and create an authentic collaboration for a well-drafted, meaningful project. This was the case here. Sybil’s success in this context is in large part due to the popularity of the author we published. We seek to promote work we sincerely believe in, impacting every decision at every point in the publishing process, but, like any press, we also want our work to succeed, to be read, to matter. This was our aspiration going into this collaborative publishing project, and will be our approach moving forward, as we might expect of any organization we worked with as writers.
It is as essential for small presses to find their ‘niche’ as it is for authors, and for many literary organizations, success entails operating within your network, in a complex dance of circumstance, trust, shared values, and goodwill.
D.M. Rice, On Literary Citizenship and the Secret to Small Press Publishing Success
Zeugma, an ancient city in what is now Türkiye’s Gaziantep Province, is near where we began our tour of a 2000-km section of the Silk Road trade route. The city’s name comes from the ancient Greek word for “bridge,” (it means to join or yoke together); the city was located on the Euphrates, where there was likely a floating bridge, like a barge or pontoon bridge, that enabled people, largely traders, to cross. Most of the ancient city is now left to underwater archeologists to examine, alas, since it lies beneath the new Biricek Dam. […]
Our tour guide was excited when I told him that the word zeugma is used in poetry terminology. It’s a figure of speech in which words or images in a phrase are connected, often for humorous or ironic effect, as in a sentence such as: He lost his heart and his wallet at the stage door cafe. The word “lost” joins both heart and wallet. It acts as the bridge. It’s an intriguing little literary device that’s seldom the first thing I notice in a poem, but when I do identify it, I appreciate it. I like knowing the etymology, and I like knowing that I’ve been where the city was.
Ann E. Michael, Zeugma
I understood my own words, but no one else’s.
Rachel Barenblat, Understand
With all of us yelling and waving our hands
construction ground to a halt. Who even cared?
We left the work site like plaintive baby birds
with our new call, can anyone understand me?
why do I feel so alone?
I was listening to Robert McFarlane read from his new book, Is a River Alive? and he was saying that considering humans are mostly made of water, if we sit down, we’re a pond, and if we run, we’re a river.
I’m thinking of place like that. If a place changes, that place is a still the same place. Like a river, that place is fluid. And so one’s home is fluid.
In this way, all of us humans are not diasporic, we’re metamorph-poric. Our place, our home is change. It’s not to take rights from people who have a relationship with a particular place, but to think about that place as flow. If as Heraclitus said, you can never step into the same river twice, these days you can never belong to the same place because place inherently changes. The world is always already changing.
Once the sky was filled with birds. The sky is no longer filled with birds. Our place is birdless and heating up. So we have to think of this kind of change as a working paradigm for the world. And we have to consider how to think about that.
Gary Barwin, Sex with a river; a forest instead of a saxophone: change as a constant, music like the woods
I remember reading about bowler superstitions: Lucky shoes, towels, and socks or prayers and chants. We just saw “Baby Boom” – executive Diane Keaton saddled with unexpected baby altering her corporate ambitions – and since Diane has been good in everything forever, I chose her. On every approach, perfecting my four-step, under my breath – Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton – and the ball lightens, rolls straight, connects dead center on the headpin, then it’s strike after strike all night. Four decades flown, and I don’t bowl often, but Diane is still the mantra. And when she dies, I find myself in the supermarket aisle, doctor’s office, subway, watching hellish newscasts – Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton. A charm against the inconceivable, the bowling gods giving and taking away, another cursed split in a year full of gutters.
Collin Kelley, Bowling with Diane Keaton
This week while tuning in to POETs Day live with Kate Jenkinson (Fridays at 12:30 via LinkedIn) I found myself drawn to the Venn diagram image in the Poetry In Business Logo. It resonated with my recent thinking around how two of my favourite things (poetry and coaching) intersect. Whilst wondering about this I had also been toying with the thought that people might find it strange that my social media presence often flits between poetry and coaching. My answer to myself was that I am a poet and a coach, and sometimes I am a coach and a poet, and sometimes I am only one of these, and sometimes I am neither, but even when I am neither I still carry their vibrations. And that was my way of saying that like the honeysuckle that grows through the hydrangea in the front garden I see them as entwined. So rather than thinking about separating them as two binary elements my answer seemed instead to focus on dialling up and dialling down (thank you for extending my thinking about this, Kelley). Even with this realisation, the Venn diagram was still drawing me back to its intersection and giving me the hint that there might be something to consider about this part of it. I enjoyed a little wonder about what exists there, and here’s what I found in my intersection of poetry and coaching: Setting something down, trying something out, viewing it from different angles, hearing what it sounds like out loud, seeing what it sounds like out loud, time and space to think, time and space to reflect, moving a thought forward, adjusting it, leaning in to emotions as they resonate in real time, trying on different lenses, wondering what it’s telling you, playing with it, considering different endings, recognising your own threads and patterns, deciding which ones to continue to weave.
Sue Finch, POET, COACH. COACH, POET.
it begins with a november rose. shadows stirring a bowl
of milky blood. wholeness and wild honey die slowly.
remembrance, our permanent home.
Grant Hackett [no title]
yeast of my day
Jim Young [no title]
on the way to the bread shop
the sun rises