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 book mess, the ancient netherworld, grey quilts of cloud, a tiny tragic heroine, and much more. Enjoy.
I am entering the season of books. Of walks of a darker nature. Of starkness and brown smells. Of pulling down the sun visor during the commute home from work. The asters age without complaint. The leaves mottle and marble. The roads are stained with walnut or deer blood. Water is louder. Acorns roll along the asphalt. The first hard frost has been ushered in.
I pile my books. So many subjects and always the same amount of not enough time. It is the time of year where I want to get to the substratum of things.
Sarah Lada, Underbirded
With Halloween, All Saints and All Souls Day/Dia de los Muertos falling across a weekend this year, it was easy to see how they function as a Tridium: a set of three days, as if to balance the Holy Thursday-Good Friday-Easter Tridium of Spring.
Living in Pennsylvania many years ago I tried to write a poem worthy of the bright fall colors, ending it
colors of the sun
set, and November puts the world to sleep.In the temperate climate where I live now, nature seems not to sleep, but our spirits still need to crawl into the dark for a bit, all those winter light festivals notwithstanding. […]
Paper made from trees
Ellen Roberts Young, Thoughts at the Fall Cross-Quarter
pages assembled in books:
how can they be turned
to mulch to regain their place
in nature’s pattern?
When I landed in Frankfort and sleepily went through passport control, the border agent took one look at me and my passport and said: “Buchmesse?” You bet, I looked every bit of a book mess.
Despite working in publishing for twenty-five years, this was my first time to the fair. The fair is the largest—and also presumably, the oldest—international publishing trade fair. Its history dates back even before Gutenberg and the invention of movable type (though that, of course, is when the fair really took off), but its origins can be traced back to the 12th century, when handwritten books were sold at the Frankfurt general trade fair, among other kinds of goods.
Throughout my career, I’ve heard tales of Frankfurt, but now that I have seen its full scope, it is truly something that should be experienced by everyone in the book industry. Across five or six buildings (as recently as a decade or so before, I’m told that it extended into as many as ten buildings with shuttle buses in between), it is organized loosely around language and nationality. The result is a kind of Epcot Center feeling—a Korean pavilion over here, an Arabic section over there, two floors of just German-language publishers, and big trade houses and literary agents throughout. I was there mainly in my role as the Promotions Director at the University of Chicago Press (though I was also able to take some Black Ocean meetings as well, including with our good friends at LTI Korea who make our Moon Country series possible—it was a pleasant surprise to see Cold Candies on display in their stand), and Chicago’s sizable stand was located in a row of American university presses.
We were also adjacent to this year’s featured country—the Philippines—which meant that we were privy to their terrific national costumes, deliciously catered parties, and a lot of music. I left before the last full day of the fair, which is when it opens to the German public, who come to buy books, meet authors, and, apparently, at the Filipino stand, engage in all-day karaoke.
What I took home with me—and what I will remember most—is the energy of being surrounded for three days by thousands of people who believe in books and the power of ideas. At this moment in the world, it was incredibly reinvigorating and a reminder of what drew me to the world of publishing as a profession and as a labor of love.
Carrie Olivia Adams, An Optimistic Bubble: Reporting from the Frankfurt Book Fair
We started the weekend by going to the book sale at the library. It is an American custom, twice a year, for libraries to hold large sales of books they no longer need in stock and books that have been donated to them. I was told that some ten thousand books might change hands in Arlington that weekend. Many are given away as well. This raises a significant part of the library’s budget. The prices are reasonable. I picked up some Naipaul, Dickens, Grail legends, Tobias Wolff, and several others. There are discounts for homeschoolers.
These events are models of the American attitude. People arrive early with bags, trolleys, carts. As soon as one of the shelves is half empty, with books collapsing in the middle, someone arrives with a box to re-stack. The whole place was as busy as a hive. It went on and on. Everyone was cheerful. No-one fussed and bothered. Once again, in the country most supposedly dedicated to so-called atomised individualism (a muddle-headed concept), I found myself in the middle of a teeming community. Here is one of Tocqueville’s “civil associations”. Free individuals who can freely associate very often make the best societies and platoons!
And once again, I want to know: why doesn’t this happen in England?
Henry Oliver, The American art of being busy.
I promise I will get back to some picture book and middle-grade reviews in December – but this month I’ve been writing on my work-in-progress poetry collection, so I’ve got poetry on the brain (a bit more than usual) and wanted to share a few favorites from my studies:
Elegy by Mary Jo Bang
I’ve been reading this book to study how it works, since I too am writing a bit of an elegy type of poetry collection. I like that this collection edges up close to the topic rather than hitting it head on—we move in and around and over the Event (death of her son), but there’s no straight up narrative (I tend toward a bit more narrative style than Mary). If you are not used to reading poetry, this may be a difficult book to jump in on—I think this book was best read straight through, cover to cover, quickly, then go back and parse it out. […]The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck
Louise Gluck has the voice of a prophetess. She is grand, distant, a bit cold, pronouncing truth from atop a mountain. I intensely admire her sparse lines, repetitions with variations, way of twisting the poem right into your ribcage. I was particularly interested in how she uses the same title for different poems (“Matins” for example), and how those worked together in the collection. This book is accessible—if you are not used to reading poetry, you will still have no problem with this one, because of her frequent use of vernacular phrasing and simple language. If you are used to reading the bible, you’ll recognize the syntax. […]Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod by Traci Brimhall
Renee Emerson, Three Poetry Collections
This poetry is much more associative than I tend to write, and I wanted that to wear off on me a bit, so I spent some time with this book. It is about murder and being a new mom. For real! She wrote these poems in her son’s early years but also during a trial for the murder of a friend. I get the association actually—how to keep this little person safe in such a scary world? I typically have no patience for long prose poems, but they were my favorite poems in the collection (the forms were varied in this collection). I think that for the most part this is a fairly accessible book to someone new to poetry – sometimes she makes associative jumps but a reread or two and typically I’m tracking.
Recently, I realized that my emotional fatigue and burnout was real, and it finally occurred to me that I needed some time off. I booked myself out for a little over a week, and I’m trying to simply unwind, rather than give into the temptation to Do All the Things: film ten new diamond painting videos, get “caught up” on all of my unread books, write an entire chapbook, clean the apartment from top to bottom, etc. I didn’t realize how tightly wound I’ve become, and it’s been so long since I’ve taken time off that I forgot coming down from massive stress take time. It takes time for a body to get into the rhythm of slow mornings and long afternoons, and it takes time for the mind to calm itself. So far, I haven’t done much at all but play Powerwash Simulator 2 and watch YouTube videos. I consider that a victory.
The extra time has allowed me to delve further into the Jesuit poets I referenced in my last post, and I have settled on a deep dive into Daniel Berrigan. Frustratingly, it was very hard to find a compilation of all of his poetry in one collection. He wrote a number of books, but a lot of them have co-authors and are a mix of essays, articles and poems. The one complete book of his poetry “And the Risen Bread” seems to be out of print, and the cheapest copy I could find at first was $40.00 for the paperback. But after a lot of digging, I managed to find a used hard-back for only eight bucks, so I ordered it immediately, feeling very excited and a bit smug at having beaten the system. While I wait for it to arrive, I’ve been reading his work online wherever I can find it, and reading about his life as an anti-war activist. While I don’t agree with some of his life choices, (firebombing government property and fleeing to avoid arrest, among some), I am impressed at the consistency of his moral through-line. In some ways he was a complicated man, and in other ways, he was simple in his fierce commitment to the protection of all human life and dignity, especially those whom society deems expendable. And his poetry is brilliant. I have started, tentatively, slowly, finding my way into writing poems again, and his work is the inspiration that I’ve needed to jump-start myself.
Kristen McHenry, Burnout Cure, Poetry Deep-Dive, Lilies of the Field
I used to love reading ‘Tam Lin’ with students, which I strove to do at this time of year. With the Scots students, I’d say – drink deep of this strange old Hallowe’en ballad, for this is your culture. For some ancient reason Scotland is hospitable to the otherworldly and supernatural. Even the Scots language has a rich nether-existence. Look out for the influence of the ballads, I’d say, especially the supernatural ones, as it’s come down the centuries. Look to Burns, Scott, John Buchan, Marion Angus, Liz Lochhead, Don Paterson …
With American students, the fun was to ask about alien abduction. Apparently a huge number of Americans believe in alien abduction. Well, I’d say – here’s the original. Your Trick or Treating, your UFO kidnappings, all have roots in Scottish lore and we have the ballad ‘Tam Lin’ to prove it.
So we’d take turns to read a few verses round the table. […]
In her introduction to Scottish Ballads, Emily Lyle notes that the ballad’s rhymed verse forms are datable to the late Middle Ages. That form which we all know, the pacy 4-line verse, that’s old enough. But the actual content of the ballads, Lyle says, especially the riddles, ‘is likely to go back to pre-history’. If that doesn’t give you the shivers, nothing will. What are we talking here? Iron Age, Bronze Age? However, I wonder how even more ancient are the transformation scenes that come next. For here is some extreme guising. Janet hauls Tam down, the Fairy Queen realises what’s happening and battle begins. Poor Tam: he is made to undergo some truly shamanic shapeshifting as Janet and the Fairy Queen fight for possession. Having got him, Janet has to hold on to him and keep holding on, as the Fairy Queen, with all the high magic she can deploy, whips Tam through horrible changes. Now he is a newt, now an adder, a bear, a lion, and a red-hot iron, until at last, he’s an ember, burning through her hand. Into the well with him!
Puir lad. But here he is, naked, dripping and back in the mortal world, ready to be a father to his child who will arrive before Hallowe’en comes round again. A happy ending for the young couple? Maybe, maybe not.
It is still with us. Behind the Hallowe’en tat and plastic skeletons lies the ancient netherworld, thrilling and strange and transformational.
Kathleen Jamie, Tam Lin at Hallowe’en
Other spectral forms have appeared too. Small pale, waxen fungi in ribbons and clusters. They are very different to the autumn-coloured Wax Caps sprinkled across our meadows in bright splashes of red, orange and yellow. This is the first time I’ve seen them. Once again, I asked online experts. “White Wax Caps” came the replies, an edible variety but with one powerful caveat – an expert would need to make sure because it is possible they are the rather poisonous “Destroying Angel” fungi.
It’s Halloween, Samhain, and recent days have been filled with thoughts of comets and shooting stars, folklore and crofting histories, each with their ghosts and spirits and interconnected threads. And strange new organisms. In the last days of October these natural phenomena, both above my head and by my feet, are evidence of heaven on earth, of the cosmos present in a place already filled with histories, myths and folklore, whose human and physical memories are layered in landforms and landscapes. Yes, the veils between worlds are thinning. My grandmother was right.
Annie O’Garra Worsley, Finding Ghosts
I like cemeteries. I like their cool silence, the angels bent over a book, drapes cascading over an urn, the way stone can seem to be soft, how thyme creeps and exhales. I like the old first names we don’t use anymore, the family names echoed in streets in this town. The life notes: devoted wife, golfer extraordinaire. I huff up the slope between tilting stones, pace the paths, ironically, breathing in this field of dead. I like and am chilled by the reminder of all the lives lived that ended in the same way. Some long. Some short. My husband wants to know if I want my name etched on the new gravestone he just bought, alongside his name, his first wife’s name, his sister-in-law’s name. I feel peeved that again I’m to be stuffed in behind his late wife’s family. And feel silly about that too. And I assure him I don’t care one way or the other because I’ll be dead. Which unnerves him. We have no children, and have a hard time imagining that my great-nieces and great-nephew will ever seek out my name on a stone, although husband and I rolled slowly through a cemetery in his old home town looking for his family name, exploding black walnuts like small artillery beneath the tires. And there was something fun about it, discovering the stone he hadn’t known was there, marking an aunt, his own parents having gone elsewhere underground. The whole thing is weird, this desire to have our flimsy lifetimes etched in stone. He bought a new stone for his plot because the old one grew mossy and hard to read. I say it’s only fitting that a long lived moss take over my name when it is said and done.
Marilyn McCabe, like a genie bottle waiting for miracles
Last week James Marriott posted Geoffrey Hill’s poem ‘The Laurel Axe’ on Twitter/X and remarked that he thought it “one of the most profound and atmospheric autumn poems of all time. And perhaps the greatest written in the twentieth century.” This is the kind of obviously slightly-mad remark that is perfectly calibrated to produce a healthy reaction on social media, and I among many others weighed in. The poem is atmospheric for sure but it’s not really profound and insofar as it is profound, it’s not being profound about autumn. Even if we limit ourselves to the twentieth century, both Rilke’s ‘Herbsttag’ and Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ are, I think pretty obviously, both much better and more important poems.
Also in my list of autumn poems obviously better than ‘The Laurel Axe’ — and, I was delighted to discover, in A. E. Stallings’ list too — is Housman’s spectacularly beautiful poem, ‘Tell me not here’ (and especially the ravishing second and third stanzas). Here is the third verse:
On acres of the seeded grasses
The changing burnish heaves;
Or marshalled under moons of harvest
Stand still all night the sheaves;
Or beeches strip in storms for winter
And stain the wind with leaves.There’s a lot you can say about the perfection of what Housman does here, but a word that struck me this week as it had not before was that marshalled. It’s an odd word because ‘to marshal’ means ‘to arrange or draw up’, and sheaves of wheat are of course stationary: they are there because they have grown there. But Housman knows exactly what he is doing. ‘Marshal’ is used very often of soldiers drawing up in formation, and this hint of personification — the sheaves are standing like soldiers in the field — then carries through to the following line: ‘Stand still all night the sheaves’. This wheat-field is standing still and upright — unlike the grasses of the previous line, blown in the wind — and that standing is presented as an act of will. This kind of light personification even (especially) of plants runs all through the poem.
When Housman does this he is thinking of Virgil, and probably especially of the Georgics. One of the most arresting features about that poem on the constant labour involved in agriculture and husbandry is the consistent personification (though not romanticisation) of nature, including plants. At Georgics 2.142, part of the section of the poem known as the ‘praise of Italy’, Virgil describes the peaceful fertility of the land by comparing the crop to what it is not:
nec galeis densisque virum seges horruit hastis;
sed gravidae fruges et Bacchi Massicus humor
inplevere; tenent oleae armentaque laeta.[Here, in Italy] no crop of men bristled dense with helms and spears:
but heavy harvests and the Massic juice of Bacchus [i.e., wine]
filled [this land]; olives and flourishing herds hold [it] fast.Virgil’s crop bristles merely with the ears of corn — not with the weaponry of the soldiers in formation that it resembles. But the comparison between soldiers and a crop must always recall that soldiers, too, are lined up in order to be cut down. Housman’s marshalled, that most delicate of touches, reminds us that sheaves, like men, are waiting to die.
Victoria Moul, Harvesting in time of war
Norman Finkelstein & Henry Weinfield, A Dialogue on Political Poetry:
Today, as we slide—or maybe plummet—into authoritarianism under Trump, we have to ask whether poetry can be of use to us: that is, whether the possibility exists for a poetry of resistance, a revitalized political poetry. Auden said that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but this seems unnecessarily defeatist: if poetry is disseminated, there is no reason why it cannot participate in creating a climate of opinion that could stimulate resistance to authority. It can only do so, however, if it is genuinely eloquent and if its words (not just what they say) matter. The question, therefore, is whether we have or can cultivate a poetry of eloquence, a poetry worthy of being disseminated.
Restless Messengers: Poetry In Review, the site on which this dialogue appears—Norman Finkelstein is the editor—is worth knowing about if you are interested in serious discussion of contemporary poetry. I decided to include this epistolary exchange on political poetry between Finkelstein and his friend Henry Weinfield, who is Professor Emeritus at Notre Dame, because it is adjacent to what I had to say about failed political poetry in Poetry Versus Propaganda. The paragraph I’ve quoted above is from Weinfeld’s initial letter, which frames the question of political poetry largely in terms of craft, specifically the mastery of received forms, which Weinfeld understands as that which “protects” (his word) poetry from becoming mere prose:
“When Williams writes, ‘No idea but in things,’ he is making a virtue out of necessity because as soon as it traffics with ideas, a poetry without formal guard rails is in danger of becoming prosaic. Poetry was forced to retreat into subjectivity and/or fragmentation simply to continue to exist.”
What follows is a very interesting discussion of the relationship between craft—Weinfeld even scans some lines by Percy Shelley to make his point—and the degree to which a poem might move people politically. The discussion—I have quoted only from Weinfeld’s contributions here; but Finkelstein’s responses are well-worth considering—is rooted largely in what many today would call the white male canon, a phrase I use here as a description not a criticism of what these two men have to say, since the fact that they argue from the literature they know best does not mean they are ignorant of the broad sweep of contemporary American poetry. More to the point, the relative narrowness of their scope does not necessarily invalidate the overall points they are trying to make, which I think would make useful lenses through which to look at the poetry of—to name as examples two of the poets whose politically engaged poetry had a great influence on me—Ai or June Jordan, not to mention the many poets writing today who presume to claim for their work the mantle of political resistance.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #49
The subject-matter of the early poems is as happily varied as [Claire] Crowther’s syntax is elegant (in Real Lear: New & Selected Poems, Shearsman Books, £12.95). ‘Lost Child’, one of several poems set in Solihull, unspools its curious tale over six couplets, ending beautifully: ‘Pearl was playing quietly alone. / My ear is like a shell the wind swept.’ ‘Nudists’ opens with a killer line, ‘In the home of the naked, glass is queen’; as does ‘Foreigners in Lecce’: ‘Home is rind-hard’. The 23 five-line stanzas of ‘Against the Evidence’ unfold a short story largely also set in and around Lecce, and the phrases of which needs to be slowly savoured:
Saturday. Lemon of winter. Damp charcoal
bramble. Grey quilts of cloud. Wind tumbles
the wrapping from our ciabatta as if future
is the rim of a beaten country
and we’ve reached it.‘Once Troublesome’ begins as a fine Twixmas poem – ‘It isn’t New Year yet so Happy What? / Till then, it’s Boxing Day every morning.’ – then veers off with Crowther’s trademark odd turns. ‘Live Grenade in Sack of Potatoes Story’ is weighed down by its title’s promise.
A number of poems revolve around ‘thikes’, creatures imagined by Crowther, again in Hob’s Moat, Solihull: ‘The number of thikes / casually shot is high. / Celebrities on Channel Five News / have endorsed the policing of thike-baiters.’ (‘The Thike). Whether it’s a metaphor for marginalised groups, or even the position of women, within British society isn’t entirely clear, but it gives Crowther licence to play […]The difficulty quotient is ratcheted up further in Crowther’s fourth collection, Solar Cruise, which explores, via the metaphor of a cruise ship, the world of solar physics inhabited by her partner, Keith Barnham. Yet, among the scientific jargon, these poems are among the book’s most enjoyable, largely because we find Crowther at play again: ‘A sheen of fog curtains our balcony / and into that the captain sends a throaty // ohhhhm // ohhhhm // ohhhhm’ (‘Foghorn with Solar Harvester’). She satirises the domineering men of that world and celebrates the women whose achievements ought to be better known. One poem, ‘Electricity Generation in Germany in a Typical April week’, incorporates a graph showing the relative amounts of solar, wind and conventional power generated.
Matthew Paul, Reviews of Annie Fisher, Kath McKay and Claire Crowther
“Veer, Oscillate, Rest” is an energetic verve of a mood rather than a collection ‘about’. Each poem holds a balance, an exploration of what makes a political system, structural biases, how history holds clues, how, like eco-systems, there is a need for predator and prey and a striving towards fairness. [Carrie] Etter’s poems also have an acknowledgement of imperfection and how self-perception (true or false) forges a pathway through life. Some self-deception is necessary otherwise we may be weighed down by forces/inequalities that are too much for one person to take on. The voice behind the poems is of someone who wants to take life on, drink a full glass of the heavy red wine of experience rather than skip through on a light white in ignorance.
Emma Lee, “Veer, Oscillate, Rest” Carrie Etter (Shearsman Books) – book review
Two years ago, I was invited to audit Professor Cristanne Miller’s U of Buffalo graduate seminar focusing on the, at that time, not-yet-released Letters of Emily Dickinson—the first new edition in 70 years, much needed—edited by Miller and Domnhall Mitchell.
I attended the class via Zoom, of course, and my anonymity allowed me to resist buying one more edition of Dickinson’s poems. I got by with Thomas H. Johnson’s 1971 one-volume Selected Letters, his 1961 one-volume Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Franklin’s 1999 reader’s edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson. All of which were already on my big shelf of Dickinson books. After the seminar ended, convinced of their necessity, I bought both the poems and the letters.
I want to emphasize this: An important feature of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them, also edited by Miller, is contained in the subtitle. We can, finally, in a one-volume, reader’s edition, see Dickinson’s fascicles, the little booklets into which she arranged her poems from 1858 to 1865. Dickinson’s variant words, too (see margin notes) are included in this edition.
After these gorgeous new editions sat on my shelf for several months, it occurred to me that I might actually read them.
From there I conceived of a project called “My Year of Reading Dickinson.” Last November, before my year officially began, I told my friend, poet and scholar Jayne Marek, that I had no idea what it should look like. Though I hoped to share the project in some fashion, it felt lumpy and shapeless. Jayne suggested that I just put my boots on and get started. “Read for a few months or the whole year, then decide what it is.”
As you know, this past year a bunch of other stuff took over much space in my haunted brain, but even on the absolute worst days, I have picked up the letters and read a page or two, and I have read at least a few poems—usually more. Because I get up at dark-thirty and my husband rises at 8:00, I had time for this. (More than once I’ve awakened at midnight, realized I hadn’t done my pages, and got out of bed to do so.) I can now report that I’ve finished both volumes, and am circling back to reread and make more notes.
Speaking of that long shelf of books about E. D., I have also tried to keep a biography or critical work going on the side. And I have shared a little. Last winter’s Creative Retirement Institute course on Dickinson, for instance. I will share more, though I’m still not sure what that sharing will look like. Blog posts? A new blog, dedicated to Dickinson? Or will I venture into the Substack world? For now, I’ll be pouring a lot into the class, and mining the discussion for possibilities.
Bethany Reid, Emily Dickinson and the Mystery of the 40 Fascicles
What’s to love here? The epigraph was my introduction to Milton, for starters, and I’m sure I had to look up ‘tenebrae’—I had to look it up again just now; it’s a Holy Week service and, deliciously, Latin for darkness—and it begins in an unapologetically gothic mode that insists on the connection between embodied experience and our cognitive efforts to conceptually apprehend the same. I absolutely did not say any of this at the age of twenty-one; I had yet to dissever—or have dissevered—my thinking parts from my sensing ones and this kind of thing came to me as a given, as a kind of oxygen: you don’t notice it until it’s gone. Though if you’ve acquired yourself enough of a psychic fracture, you also won’t notice that it’s gone.
I digress. Let’s appreciate the turn-of-the-millenium thingitude, how we begin with a kind of situation-funnel that expands outward: from “near the dead,” to “the doors of a cathedral,” to its gates, to: San Marco. Ah ha: here we are precisely placed, though at no point before this were we at sea, wondering where, in what context, any of this thinking was taking place; Millennium Lundberg attends to the literal as we were then wont to do. At the same time, follow the single breath that begins with our speaker considering his own, becomes a breeze that blows through the doors, having wound its way from inner chambers and around stone columns, and finally leaves San Marco as a terrific sigh, disgust and weariness and exasperation all rolled into a single emphatic expulsion of air. The profane contemporary is quickly sketched and the meter enacts its manner, pouring over nearly four complete lines without a grammatical pause, exhaling long past the diaphragm’s limits.
Vanessa Stauffer, “Venetian Tenebrae” by John Lundberg
Eve Luckring is a writer and visual artist living in Los Angeles on the unceded lands of Tovaangar. Her work questions the assumptions, and experiments with the boundaries, defining place, body, and habit. She is the author of Signal to Noise and The Tender Between, both published by Ornithopter Press.
Ig: @thetenderbetween / BlueSky: @thetenderbetween.bsky.social
1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Both my current book, Signal to Noise, and the first, The Tender Between, are accumulations of the fragmentary, contemplations on the incomprehensibility of an elusive whole. The writing approach however is formally quite different in each book.
Probably the biggest way The Tender Between changed my life was that I stepped out of the ever-faster-changing-technological-whir of lens-based media and instead spend more creative energy in words. For years, I integrated text into my artwork; over time, the poetry took on a trajectory of its own and kept going. I still make imagery; however, I love that I only need pencil, paper, and a simple laptop for the writing.
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poetry is a good fit for my non-linear visual thinking, comfortable shoes on a dance floor where words shimmy between thought and sound and image, the body fully engaged. Poetry taps readily into the gap between language’s power and its failings; I enjoy playing in this gap. […]
4 – Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
Signal to Noise was conceived as a book from the get-go, whereas the poems in The Tender Between preceded any conception of a book. For me, poems begin from anywhere and everywhere. For example, in Part 1 of Signal to Noise I construct a refrain out of the word list format used in standardized audiological testing. Additionally, rhyme and sing-song rhythms seeped into the writing from years of nightly reading sessions with my aging mother. After her sight and cognitive abilities declined to the point where even children’s stories were too frustrating for her to follow, I turned to the nursery rhymes she read us when we were little and she enjoyed reciting them along with me. At that time I was struck by something poet and psychologist, Claire Wills, wrote regarding rhyme in relation to loss for an essay on Denise Riley’s “A Part Song” in the New York Review of Books : “Rhyme is substitution: something returns that is not quite the same, but that inhabits and holds open the place of the same.” […]
6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Yes, there are general theoretical underpinnings to my writing (see question 15), as well as more specific musings that come with the undertaking and structuring of a book.
Signal to Noise uses mishearing to show how our interactions with others land inside us as a perception, an impression, an energy field that’s no longer contained by the other and becomes part of us because of how we take it in. I foreground the kaleidoscopic way experiences can radiate deep into our psyches, beyond the discreet boundaries of other selves, beyond the way we might frame one relationship versus another due to preconceived social convention. My aim is to re-create this locus rather than describe it. For this reason, I keep the various interpersonal relationships and “shes” undefined, partly for sound purposes, partly in an effort to plunge the reader into the unmoored emotional space of an overwhelmed nervous system— the “shes” blur and refract out of empathy, anxiety, exhaustion, and grief in order to activate an experiential tension in that slippage. I am trying to hold open for the reader the feeling space of not-being-able-to-fully-understand, not being able to 100% grasp what’s in front of us. It is something most of us have personally encountered, uncomfortable as we are with it, and it seems all the more relevant to the times we are in (especially here in the U.S.)
With The Tender Between, the collating of individual pieces was an effort to answer a question: “What do all these short poems I’ve been scribbling over the years tell me about who I am?”— “poetry as the revelation of the self to the self” as Seamus Heaney put it.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Eve Luckring
I’ve been waiting a long time to say this—my poetry collection, A History of Holding, is here! This is the book I wrote, lived, and breathed for years. I still can’t believe I get to hold it in my hands.
It releases on 11 / 11 wherever books are sold, and pre-orders are open now. […]
I’ve found that motherhood narratives often live in extremes, focusing on either the unbridled joy or unbearable weight of it all. The mother becomes a symbol, simplified and smoothed over. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Motherhood breaks you down, yes, but it also cracks you open.
I wanted to write something truer. Something brutally and beautifully honest. A book that looks at the full depth of a mother, and what it means to be a human while raising one.
In this collection, motherhood becomes a mirror for life itself. Rooted between the cosmic and domestic, these poems trace a transformation both physical and existential, revealing how a mother’s world expands and contracts all at once.
The poems in this collection are lyrical yet narrative, craft-driven yet accessible. In the end, this is a book that writes toward the ache of impermanence, the awe of survival, and the quiet truth that what we hold—our children, our memories, ourselves—is never meant to stay the same.
Allison Mei-Li, It’s here!! It’s here!!
Self-publishing is heavier lifting, but the rewards may outweigh the struggles. For instance, you have creative control, both over the finished book itself and the timeline. You also have control over whether it stays in print. Two of my publishers have in the years since closed down, forcing my books out of print (luckily, I’ve been able to self-publish new editions of both.) Another publisher usually keeps books in print only for a decade, so as they’ve aged out, my books with them are no longer available–at least not from the publisher or through distributors. You also tend to make a bit more in terms of royalties. For books I sell through the shop, my profit is really anything above that per/copy rate. For Amazon books, I make around $6 per copy sold after marketplace has taken their cut. Considering my usual royalty on traditional published books (the ones with royalties at all) is around a $1, this is much more financially advantageous to the individual author.) You can also dial in as you are capable with smaller batches. (I financed the first round of copies of FEED in 2021 with money earned from a Poetry Foundation reading, though on books since I’ve done smaller initial batches and ordered more as they sell out, which keeps the initial investment and storage needs much less. Since I do my own design, proofing, and publicity, this keeps overhead low enough to publish about a book a year, two if I am extra productive.
I was curious when I started whether or not releasing the books myself would limit their availability and reach, though my books tend to sell just as many copies in the first few weeks as those I’ve traditionally published according to the royalty statements (and I am a small potatoes poet, so that’s probably as much as I can expect.) It also makes it easier to do things like offer comp copies, giveaways, since the books are cheaper for me to keep on hand.
For self-publishing, I’ve found it helps to have already built some kind of audience–some kind of community of those interested in your work. This can mean physical communities, with people interested in buying your book at readings or events. It can be a blog or other platform like YouTube. It can be social media driven through the communities found there. You may feel like you spend way too much promoting and not enough writing. You may get a little tired of hearing your own voice even. But you do it.
I’ve often heard people ask which is the best path to travel for them, and I think it totally depends on what you want from publishing a book, the type of career trajectory you aspire to. Also the skills and time you have to invest.
Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | two paths
I blummin’ love Michael Sheen – especially since he took to national media to point out that “Today, half of published authors have middle-class backgrounds – but just 10 per cent are working-class” (Daily Mirror 2025). Put simply, the under-representation of working-class people in writing is getting worse.
I thought I knew what class was before I went on my first Arvon residential. I thought the middle class was nurses and teachers – not the company directors and consultants I was about to spend the week with. I’d never met anyone born into money, let alone eaten sausages with them. It was an education in privilege which continues to this day – at a recent literary event, three of the people at my table had been to the same famous public school.
My Burnley school may have produced other writers, but I haven’t met or heard of them. And as Michael says, “We know that kids from all walks of life enjoy reading at school, and working-class people are some of the best storytellers out there, so somewhere, somehow, something’s going wrong.” When writing excludes whole swathes of the population, we all lose out. So in 2021, Michael teamed up with New Writing North and Northumbria University to launch ‘A Writing Chance’ – a programme of support for writers from working-class and under-represented backgrounds.
In a report based on the first year of the programme, Dr Kate Shaw (2021) found that a London-centric writing industry, plus a lack of networks, were amongst the multiple obstacles faced by working class writers. There’s also:
– knowledge and permission: “I don’t know where you get in, or how you get in, or once you get in what’s on the other side of the in. If there is a door to go through, I don’t know where the door is, or how to get to it, and if I do find it, I haven’t got a key.”
– the financial precarity of writing: “This is not a sustainable career for emerging working-class people, especially those with families, dependents, or caring responsibilities.” (Becka White);
– age, health, disability and intersectionality
– and a lack of confidence: “Imposter Syndrome clings to me like a bloody limpet to a rock.” (Stephen Tuffin).
Clare Shaw, A Writing Chance?
I have been frustrated for a long time about how class is discussed in literary scenes (if it ever comes up all). In the same way that domestic violence is only ever talked about when it results in a homicide, class seems to usually only be discussed in terms of extremes of poverty, so it was refreshing to read Clare’s post that leaned into the nuance and the hidden dynamics of class.
I also came from a family that thought teachers were ‘posh’. I remember holding my infant teacher’s hand as I walked round the playground, noticing how soft her skin was and then holding my mum’s hand when I got home from school, and then telling my mum about this.
My mum left school at fifteen and after a brief stint working in a nightclub then worked in a shoe factory (Equity Shoes in Leicester if you’re interested!). My mum’s hands were hardened from the hours of work she did. She used to bring piecework home – what we called interlacing. My sister and I loved ‘helping’ her with it – I distinctly remember her looking over what we’d done and then having to redo it again. It hurt my fingers to do that work and I could only do it for a while. When I pointed out the difference between her hands and my teachers – I knew that she was angry, perhaps upset, and that there was something else beneath that – something closer to shame or resentment, which I didn’t understand at the time.
I’ve never really written about my mum or the work she did, although I have written about my dad, particularly in my first collection. My dad was a scaffolder and came home every day covered in dirt and physically exhausted. One of my older sisters is a dinner lady, the other works in care homes. My brother in law is a plumber, my other brother in law is a builder. There is a vast difference between the hard physical labour that so many of my family do and have done their whole lives, and the labour that I do now – writing poems, teaching.
My mum and dad never talked about class to me when I was younger – and they only talk about it now when I bring it up. I told them I was writing this post, that I’m trying to talk about the nuances of class. My dad says that to him, working class is when you physically work for a job. That would mean, I say, that I was never working class then – but why then, do I feel working class when I go into certain spaces? But also, why do I feel as if I don’t belong when I go back home to my wider family? My brother-in-law has jokingly called me the tax dodger since the age of eighteen when I went to university.
I remember once being told that I couldn’t be working class because I played in Leicester Schools Symphony Orchestra between the age of 16-18. But that discounts the nuance of class – that the only reason I learnt to play an instrument at all was because my mum and dad took me to a brass band and A-Levels, my trumpet teacher lent me his spare trumpet so I could play in the orchestra. When I think of this now, it’s not the words that I remember but the scoffing of the person, the laughter when I tried to talk about the impact of class on my life. That I don’t speak with a Leicester accent because I tried to cover it up after the other brass players laughed at the way I spoke. The shame of that, of realising for the first time that not only did I have an accent but that it was the wrong accent. My A-Level teacher telling me off for not being able to attend an orchestral concert because I was working behind a bar. She said is that what you want to do for the rest of your life? She said this with such disdain, as if this was the worst thing in the world that could happen, not knowing that many people in my family worked jobs like this, that in fact I was glass collecting whilst my older sister worked behind the bar.
My mum and dad never took us to art galleries or readings, but they attended concerts because we (my sister and I) played in them. My mum only ever read magazines – Take a Break and Bella – but my dad loved reading. Our house was filled with books – my dad loved horror and fantasy fiction, and we all went to the library every Saturday morning. My mum and dad never went to any events at school held during the day because they were at work, but they never missed a parents evening, and drummed into us that education was important. […]
Yesterday when I told my mum and dad I was writing this post, they told me how uncomfortable they feel at readings. My dad said ‘I like listening to you, but it’s not my world’. It isn’t enough for me as their daughter to have access to those spaces – that isn’t enough to make them feel as if they belong. I felt really sad then, that I’d never thought about how they felt, being brought into this world of poetry readings and concerts (when I was a musician). How as a parent, you don’t know what kind of child you are going to get, and what places you have to follow them into.
If I was going by my dad’s definition of class, I would have no right to talk about it at all. He says I was brought up working class, that I have working class roots. I want to be able to be working class and be an academic or a writer or both, but I also know my lived experience now is worlds away from my family, worlds away from how I grew up, and how people living on those council estates are living. If achieving what we dreamt of makes us no longer working class, what do we turn into?
Kim Moore, A working-class chance
Is it problematic for editors to emphasize that a writer’s background will be considered in the cover letter? Well, it certainly solves some problems—the lack of diversity in literary magazines. But it does create new ones.
One pitfall is that it’s not clear how certain writer’s identity affiliations will factor into the decision-making. If the editors M. inquired about are trying to decide between two outstanding stories, it is safe to assume they will choose the one from the writer belonging to a marginalized and underrepresented group. What if, though, there is a third writer with an outstanding story whose identity falls into more than one category? And even a fourth, who identifies into six different groups? How will the editors decide?
At what point does all this cease being a sincere effort to diversify a lit mag and an absurd exercise in reducing human beings to various identity-affiliated parts? This writer is Black, but oh, this writer is Black AND gay. But wait, this one is Black, gay AND an immigrant. Okay, let’s go with that one…This decision process would seem ridiculous, if not outright offensive, to many writers. But where is the line at which it becomes so? Does that line, in fact, start at the very first moment when a writer’s identity becomes an important consideration in the work? We can wonder.
Additionally, many writers may feel that tying their work to their identity affiliation is a step backward. Long ago I recall Joyce Carol Oates declaring she never wanted to be a Great Woman Writer. She wanted to be a Great Writer, period. Compelling writers to state their identity affiliation in their cover letter may make many writers bristle.
And we should be clear: compelling writers to state their identity affiliation is precisely what is happening here. Gate-keepers have power. When writers know that identity matters to gate-keepers, they will be understandably inclined to lean into that aspect of themselves. They may do this even if it makes them uncomfortable.
Percival Everett explored this to incisive and hilarious effect in his book Erasure, which later became the movie American Fiction. Here, a Black writer named Monk struggles to find his way in the largely white, well-heeled New York publishing world. Why the struggle? Because in these gate-keepers’ pursuit to “uplift” marginalized voices, Monk finds himself routinely put into a box he does not feel he belongs.
In one particularly poignant scene he is in a bookstore looking for one of his own novels. When he cannot find it, he asks the clerk for help. He soon learns his book has been placed in the African-American Literature section. But this is not what he wants. It is not how he sees his own work. It is, however, how presumably well-intentioned gatekeepers insist on seeing him.
From Erasure:
While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing. I have heard this mainly about my novels, from editors who have rejected me and reviewers whom I have apparently confused…
In this sense, is a double harm not being inflicted upon certain writers? This first harm is the very real historical institutional exclusion. The second is subtly coercing certain writers to categorize themselves in ways they may not wish to be categorized.
Becky Tuch, Q: How do some editors consider writers’ identities when evaluating submissions?
Just like, I suspect, many other poets, I sometimes reach an impasse; sick of my shtick, sick of myself, of the stale repetition of leaning into commonplace but unremarkable vices, sick of my desk and all its ‘documents’. But I’ve also learned to love these interregna, prefacing as they so often do, a poetic transmogrification into something else.
Dropping my son off at work, waiting tables at a lavish wedding at the impressive sanctuary of La Virgen de la Fuente, in Peñarroya de Tastavins, I decided on a whim to take a long walk. Peñarroya, despite its ugly fringe of pig farms, is a handsome mountain village with some well-preserved and grand houses overlooked by a colossal massif, and I had a mind to hoof it up to the top.
I was ill-prepared, rather shamefully. I had water, a rucksack, a coat, some old and friendly boots, but nothing for lunch. I stopped in the bar for coffee and heard someone ordering hot sandwiches to go; pork loin cooked in garlic with green peppers and tomato. Madre mía. But this threadbare end of a threadbare month in all these threadbare years doesn’t permit such indulgences. I would be walking and fasting. Muy mal.
The previous night I’d watched the beautiful film ‘Bab’Aziz’ by the Tunisian writer and director Nacer Khemir, in which a blind and elderly dervish wanders with his granddaughter, hoping fate will lead them to a desert reunion of Sufi musicians, as of course, it does. It’s an astonishing film, similar in some ways to Tony Gatlif’s transcontinental epic of Romani music, ‘Latcho Drom’. Without lapsing into slushy orientalism, Bab’Aziz is a sumptuous and sinewy creation, in Persian and Arabic, with a narrative form redolent of Persian Sufi poetry, and you’ll do yourself a great kindness by watching it. The whole movie is available on YouTube, but here’s a clip:
In many ways I’ve come to regard walking as a secular form of what the Sufis would call Dhikr, amongst the various goals of which are a renunciation of the self and worldly concerns. As I started to sweat with the steep ascent I took a wrong turn, drawn off the path by an uncanny familiarity. I’d been this way before, on a horse, and found myself remembering every canyon, every scree slope and precipice. Here we had to dismount, here is where I saw sparks off the shoes of a horse in front, as it scrambled for traction. Here we stopped for the horses to drink.
james mcconachie, Walking as a secular ‘Dhikr’
First up, we had another Rogue Strand Night. There were excellent readings by myself, Fiona Larkin, Jonathan Davidson, Philip Hancock, Hannah Copley, and his nibs. NB not being snobby, this was the reading order. We had at last 30 people there – it was wonderful to read with everyone. Despite a last minute technical hitch when I discovered the mic wasn’t working due to a broken cable, it felt like a top night was had by all. It was lovely to see some friends from various works there – non-poetry pals, work pals and poetry pals…and I met some new folks too. Bravo us. And, I think in a RS first we fail managed a full team photo at the end of the night. […]
Then a few days later I was reading at The Torriano Meeting rooms with Louise Walker and Neil Elder. I’ve read with both before so i knew it would good. I’ve long wanted to read at this venue, so that’s a poetry bucket list venue ticked off. A damp night and the Forwards being on means I think we could have had more folks there, but we didn’t do badly. The place wasn’t empty by any chalk of any length. The 3 open mic readers did us proud, and new poems were given a run out by all involved. […]
Lastly, I was back on the road yesterday to read in Canterbury as part of the Canterbury Festival. It was great to be invited back again by Christopher Horton. He puts on a. good event. The big was great – Again, I was first (after 4 excellent open mic readers – inc Jess Mookherjee), then Jessica Taggart Rose, Connor Sansby, Poppy Cockburn, more open mics, Rosie Johnston, Katy Evans-Bush, Barry Fentiman-Hall and Maggie Smith.
Mat Riches, A School for Gifted Horses
It’s fair to say the event overran a bit, but I think it went well, everyone certainly got plenty of poetry for their £7. Poets got paid (and that’s rare), books were sold and/or swapped. I got to meet some new folks (Hello, Kevin) and then spend the evening catching up with my old mate, Paul (write the fucking book, Paul)…Some lovely wine was drunk…Ah yes, I did nearly brain myself leaving the venue after the reading when a door jumped out at me and attacked my forehead.
The main point of my trip was to attend “The Sampler” (part of the Canterbury Festival) with Barry Fentiman Hall, Jessica Taggart Rose, Maggie Harris, Katy Evans-Bush, Rosie Johnston, Connor Sansby, Poppy Cockburn and Mat Riches. There were some good poems but I didn’t stay to the end because the event looked like it would last 50% longer than I expected. The open-mic readers weren’t the only ones with time trouble. Not for the first time, the ones whose introductions went on longest were the ones whose poems I wanted to fast-forward through. In a competition where poems can’t be longer than 40 lines, winning poems can be a lot shorter than the maximum allowed. I think the same might apply at open-mics.
Tim Love, Margate and Canterbury
There’s a wonderful new Free Little Art Gallery in Hopewell Borough, and it’s packed to the rafters with tiny art! :- D
As the founder of the Poetry in Public Places Project, I couldn’t resist stocking the FLAG with a dozen of my 2″x2″ poem/art prints. Poetry to the people!
Mercer County (N.J.) friends , if you’re in the area, I hope you’ll check out this latest landmark on the Borough landscape. Give some art, take some art, or just stand and stare with awe (like I did) at this cozy little home for miniature arts and crafts of all types! The gallery stands at 35B East Broad Street.
Bill Waters, Free Little Art Gallery @ 35B
When I heard that Hedgehog Poetry Press was discontinuing at the end of the year, I must confess to being devastated. Partly because I was losing the publisher of my own work, but mainly because in the eight years of its existence, I have had the joy of reading so many quality poets published by editor, Mark Davidson. Judith Wozniak is an example of such a poet. Once I read her latest pamphlet, Case Notes (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024), I knew I had to write a review to share my pleasure.
Case Notes, as the title suggests is a pamphlet that focusses on the lives of doctors’ patients with a range of conditions. This, however, is no medical textbook: it is a compassionate examination of the human costs of debilitating or life-ending illnesses. For example, in Changeling we meet a mother experiencing post-partum psychosis who is convinced that her newborn is not hers; in Sparrow a teenager suffers from anorexia; in Surveillance an ageing woman has paranoia; and in A Routine House Call another patient has cancer. Different people with different disorders, whose suffering is treated in the poems by Wozniak with great humanity, empathy and consideration. Typical of this approach is Peggy and George which provides a doctor’s first-person account of a home visit to the vulnerable, ageing couple named in the title. Their fragility is established through closely observed, significant detail and imagery: the breathing difficulties experienced by George are described as ‘The tug and heave of his breath;’ Peggy’s ‘loose dentures/ oscillate to their own rhythm;’ and the couple are depicted as having ‘shrunk over time/ to fit their sheltered home,/ squashed together with their trinkets.’ The speaker in the poem is sadly conscious of the fact that illness and ageing have robbed the couple of their agency, their community and their quality of life. She responds not only as a doctor but as an intimate, a friend, accepting the hospitality of ‘the cup of tea’ and by wearing the gift of the ‘Rimmel lipstick’ at the couple’s ‘golden wedding buffet’ which she attends as a ‘guest of honour.’
Peggy and George ends with a symbolic description of the doctor and her colleague at the celebration. Wozniak writes: ‘Guests of honour, the district nurse,/ unrecognisable, loosened from her tight bun,/ and me with my sunset orange lips.’ The images of the tight bun being loosened and of the ‘sunset orange lips’ with their association of the end of the working day suggest a freeing up, the emergence of the person from the constraints of the profession, thereby reminding us that doctors, for all their professionalism, are human beings too, an idea that underpins every poem in the pamphlet.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Case Notes’ by Judith Wozniak
I heard about Laika, the first dog in space, many years ago when I was a child; but on a recent visit to The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, CA, I learned more about the early space programs in the USSR and the USA and the (mis)treatment of animals chosen for experimental flights. These animals are lovingly portrayed in portraits on the museum’s third floor.
I don’t think I’ve ever written an elegy for my own beloved dog, gone many years now. But I felt moved to write this one. We’re in the All Souls Day period; I don’t know whether dogs have souls, or whether people do, but it seems a good time to do some remembering.
~
Dog in Space
Ann E. Michael, Elegy (dog)
Constrained
while trained,
you kept
your hardworking
heart, your
trusting lack
of expectations.
If you knew
you were to die
it was no different
from the street
except instead
of death from
city’s cold
it was due
to module’s heat.
Re-entry sent
you everywhere,
cosmically dispersed.
Of all the objects
and beings
our kind has
pitched into
outer space
you, Laika,
are most
beautiful
for your
willingness.
Look at me, he says, his thoughts almost clear as speech. I do. I look into his eyes and wonder what he’s thinking and say a few sweet words to him and rub his little body, then go back to what I was doing.
No, he says. Really look. So I do, I really do.
I look and see a little ways beyond looking. I sink into the quiet awareness he offers any time I can settle myself into it. He’s not demanding attention, he’s giving it. He’s not seeking love, he is tutoring me in love’s mutuality.
As we gaze at each other I can’t help but draw in a deep breath and let out an even deeper exhale. This is what presence feels like. It’s an entry into the space/no space between us that Buber called I and Thou.
We’re all aware terror is being stoked and terror is happening in the US and around the world. I pay attention to news from a variety of sources. I do what I can to push back. But I simply can’t face it constantly. I find refuge in the powerful healing energy of stories written and shared in my writing classes. I find refuge in family gatherings, with the faces and voices of the people I love filling our home. I find it in quiet rituals of morning coffee with the spouse, taking walks, preparing meals. I find it in good books and good conversation. I find it sitting quietly with my guru.
Laura Grace Weldon, My Guru
I typically draw an animal totem card (also something Larry and I did together during and after his treatment) to ensure we were carrying some inspiration into the day: lion medicine, raven medicine, fish medicine, heron, puma, etc. All have significant or purposeful directives attached to them—reminders to stay curious, patient, grounded, vigilant, joyful, etc.
I draw a tarot card next, mostly for myself to amplify my thoughts or emotions that day. The tarot is for me (I somehow spontaneously determined in the third month after his death) while the animal totem is for us (or him, more specifically).
It’s also been a solid way to identify and delineate the signs I see, say, if I draw a hawk card and then see a hawk, it is him communicating to me. […]
Then there is the nightly ritual of lighting the altar candle and reading a large stack of his unpublished poems to him. These are poems / gifts he left behind. I continue to read them one by one, about 5-10 each night (I started in March with a stack of 2,500, rough estimate). I’ve now begun sorting them, editing some of them to type up then compile a collection of his work to publish in 2026 / 2027. […]
There is a definite pull to continue his legacy. Sometimes, maybe more regularly (weekly mornings), I post a poem or photo on his IG (I memorialized his FB page soon after he died). For five months, I was posting nearly daily in addition to my own “grief posts”.
There was the Sunday morning ritual of playing records, which has, as of late, become less frequent, but I commit to reviving this winter. Music is so necessary to putting to grief a sound that we cannot utter. I was making playlists for every month since he left, and still often do, however, as of late, I listen to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 12.
There were weekly readings from The Daily Stoic. Sometimes readings from a bible his mother gave him. Those have become a monthly occurrence.
I’d even tried a couple of times to use a shortwave radio that his father gave him to try and pick up any stations or messages through the vast universe of soundwaves and static. This didn’t make the ritual cut. I may try again soon. This is the time of year the veil between worlds is thin.
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Grieving through rituals.
Imagine a female fig wasp,
Rajani Radhakrishnan, A case of nirvana under a Ficus Mysorensis
a tiny tragic heroine.
Imagine her, breaking into
a little fig to lay her eggs.
A fatal journey
that she is hard-coded to take.
Is it foolishness or choice?
Is she mother or martyr?
Life feeding death feeding life.
Nature performing a macabre dance.
The female wasp lives just a couple of days.
Males even less. Never seeing light.
A tree this glorious, demands a million sacrifices.
I love Halloween, the kids are always adorable and we had neighbors over pre-trick-or-treating for wine and appetizers, which reminded me of pre-pandemic days, when we’d have tons of neighbors in the driveway for drinks and food and the kids would run around like crazy. We made one last visit to Bob’s Pumpkin Farm the night before Halloween, when it was clear and cold and the moon shone down. Farms at night are really beautiful.
Also this week I had a chance to talk to students at the University of New Orleans. The students were uniformly intelligent and asked great questions, questions that took on the difficulties of publishing, the state of the world of poetry, questions that were larger than perhaps I could answer. It reminded me to be hopeful, because the world is going to be in their hands soon, and perhaps they will do better than my own generation, or the one before that. Do I sound old when I say that? Perhaps.
How are you doing, my friends? November can be a tough month of shadows. Remember to donate to your local food banks as they are stretched thin with the end of SNAP benefits, and maybe invite someone you think is struggling over. It feels like a month to be kind, when the government is failing to do its job and the false king is building a guilded ballroom while people in his country go hungry and while the GOP doubles people’s health insurance premiums. I am angry, yes, but also I remember that we each have a responsibility to vote, yes, and also to our neighbors, and the community. How can poetry make this better? I don’t have the resources the tech billionaires do, and making a living as an artist or writer in this country is harder than ever. But I can still do something. It’s good to remember.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Beginning November: Time Changes, Halloween and Talking with Poetry Students
The poetry app spins its magic
dial, peculiar and profound. The poems
slide over the screen of my dark-modephone, echoing the dots and dashes
of the new day: a sapphic sonnet,queer bar, straight … or not, queer dance party.
PF Anderson, Sleepless
I’m in that weird jet lagged space so I’m sure I’m not going to be saying anything profound here, but is it just me or did the internet bump just one more notch upward in the weirdness category? Or is it just social media? Or maybe it’s that we’ve all collectively decided to take a step back from it all and it’s throwing all the algorithms for a loop. I mean, it’s exhausting. We all get that. We don’t want to lose our connections and friendships or our tiny little hits of dopamine. Posting vacay photos, I admit, has felt very odd. I get that it looks a certain way, and that people are weary. I’m weary. The world is much. Too hard. Too brutal. Our heads spin — all the hot takes, the people pushing the importance of beauty every day, the people who are traumatized and distressed, do this don’t do that, look at me. All in one swipe. Meanwhile people you know IRL ignore you and even though you know it’s like the weariness or the algo or one of a thousand other possible things, it still feels like they hate you now. (Which is the evil trick of it all right?) Meanwhile do we stop feeding the sloppola machine our lives, our “content.” Leave instagram? Go to SubStack? Where HAVE all the good people gone? All that said, I still believe that the world is made up mainly of good people. And so many people are doing beautiful, meaningful, brilliant things.
Shawna Lemay, Staying Receptive to Beauty
i sometimes consider if there was
Robin Gow, extinction
a universe before this one. if those creatures
had dreams of permanence.
if they wrote their histories in
some kind of stone. if when i open my mouth
there are fragments of their longing.
their poems & their catastrophes.
Is there a star that can still be named
Luisa A. Igloria, Maps
after your beloved?
A telescope sits on the nightstand, pointed
at a corner of the ceiling.