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 murdered poet, a wild god, the silence of pine forests, squawks, trills, and yodels, and much more. Enjoy.
The book knows that, just like humans, it’s destined to be born and die alone. But it also knows (again, just like humans) that it would far prefer to be accompanied in the meantime.
The book trembles with anticipation when the poet finally places it in an envelope and heads for the post office, launching it on a journey to its reader, though that’s nothing in comparison to the feeling of being held at last, its pages caressed and maybe even folded back if one or two of the poems really hit home…
Matthew Stewart, The book knows…
Listen, we say, and I try
PF Anderson, untitled
but fail without knowing it,
layers of sounds untangling
in a mind chaotic with
shattered mirrors. Only later,
in the dark, I hear water,
wind, a single clear tone. One.
Do you remember my plan to take January as a retreat month?
Well, that didn’t happen. But I did try and take December as a retreat month and also that didn’t happen. I was being slightly over ambitious. But I have found that being over ambitious often means you end up with something half way to what you were aiming for. I managed to set some firm boundaries around the Christmas break, and I took two weeks off. This is unheard of for me. I even made the decision not to post on substack, which made me feel sick with anxiety. I don’t think I have missed posting on substack in the very nearly three years since I began posting weekly.
I did not write. Not even my diary.
On Christmas Day afternoon, once the guests had left, I crawled under a blanket and barely emerged again for a week. I read. I dived fully into book after book, the deep, deliciousness of disappearing into another world. I did not post on social media. I mostly didn’t check my accounts at all.
The world didn’t end.
I lost subscribers, plenty of them, (waves sadly at their retreating backs) but I was willing to sacrifice that loss for pure rest and the nourishment of being a reader rather than a writer. I did not plug my books, I did not formulate social media plans, or apply for anything, or answer emails, or submit anything or plan a new-year new me. I just drifted. No To Do list, no alarm, nothing but nothing. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, or rarely.
When I began to prepare myself to come back to work I began to check into social media and interact more. Lots of people, lots of writers, had already gone back to work and jumped on the posting treadmill and my immediate feelings were of dread, of missing out, of being left behind of being not good enough because I was still in my blanket fort with my books and not running with the pack. Interspersed with all of the new courses on offer, workshops, events, subscription plans, posts and book news was the actual news in which it seems the world is already on fire.
Truth, emerge from your well and chastise us with your whip. I can’t cope with the corruption in the world right now, the lies and the greed and hatred and fear.
Wendy Pratt, Truth emerging from her well: on creativity and accountability
When I was 19 or 20, I checked out a public library copy of James Michener’s chronicle of the Kent State tragedy. I was at an age where I was pretty sure I was going to keep studying English Lit and planning loosely on a teaching career, though I would change my mind later when I realized I didn’t have the patience and nurturing temperament that teaching (well GOOD teaching) required. For a moment, though, in the summer of 1993, things opened a little, granting some much needed optimism after the Gulf War and a sense of hope and progress. Clinton had just been elected and the world seemed to be righting itself, even though I hadn’t been all that cognizant of the Reagan/Bush eras of my childhood and teen years. […]
The Michener book formed my ideas of what I surely thought we’d never, as a country regress to. For one, the sort of violence that occurred should not happen when the world was watching far more, be it the availability of news coverage, the internet, social media. People would not be prone to propaganda and state messaging as they were when there were less news outlet to cover things and more incentive to toe the line. I was wrong, In fact, it seems almost miraculous that I could BE so wrong.
Kristy Bowen, the decline of democracy doomscroll
I have been working on a draft of a new poem this morning, “Who Gets to Speak,” which concerns the murder in Minneapolis, Minnesota, of Renee Nicole Good, who was at the wheel of her vehicle, her wife in the passenger seat, when an ICE officer fired into the car’s windshield. Good, shot in the head, died that same day, January 7, 2026.
Since the killing, more and more mayors and governors, elected representatives, celebrities, common citizens of these (un)United States of America have come out to raise their voices in both protest and outrage.
Since the killing, more and more of our so-called executive branch leaders, including our worst president, his lying Wild West sidekick Kristi Noem of the Department of Homeland Security, the know-nothing Kash Patel of the FBI, among others, none of whom dare utter the name Renee Nicole Good, offer up fodder of the day to explain away the wholly unnecessary death of a woman a mother a wife a citizen in her Honda SUV. The truth of how the killing unfolded is not known but many in the government, at all levels, have posited their truths. Everyone has the story. No one has all the facts of the story.
Maureen Doallas, Who Gets to Speak
I care
that this is the story
we teach to our children:
because we knowwhat it is to be
Rachel Barenblat, Our story
dehumanized, we will never.
Raise a cup to freedom.
Because we know the heart
of the stranger.
This post may seem a little bit unbalanced, but I have to describe the good times as well as the bad this week. Let me start with the birthday celebration with my good friend poet Kelli Agodon, in which we had a lot of laughs, some cupcakes, some libations, and some good talk about poetry. I had been feeling a bit discouraged on the poetry front, and Kelli is always good at helping me see the bigger picture on that front. […]
It is impossible to keep my blog apolitical these days. And why try? Not to quote Harry Potter, but as Minerva McGonagal said in the Deathly Hallows, “And his name is Voldemort, Filius. You might as well use it, he’s going to try and kill you either way.” There’s no point in trying to be nice, to not speak up in public, because at this point, they will try and kill us either way, and they proved it this week, murdering a young mother and award-winning poet, Renee Good, in cold blood by shooting her in the face when she was no threat, then lying about it and saying she was a ‘domestic terrorist.’ This evening they were breaking into people’s houses in Minneapolis, where I have many friends, without warrants, brandishing guns in front of children. If anyone is the terrorist at this point, it is the Gestapo-like ICE agents, who seem to face no consequences, unlike our military and police force, for murder. We’ll see if the murderer is brought to justice. There is plenty of video evidence to show that the woman was no terrorist, and the ice agent videotaping his encounter and when she says “I’m not mad at you” he growls “fucking bitch” as he shoots her three times in the head, with her wife and dog in the car. A white, innocent, American citizen – not a criminal, not an “illegal immigrant” but a local, mother of three, Christian housewife. None of those privileges protects us anymore from Trump’s evil personal secret enforcers. We must act to protect our country’s freedoms, or we must leave. It feels very much like the history books, reading about Berlin and Vienna in the 1930s. I remember reading about friends sneaking Jewish Dr. Freud out, and I remember asking myself why he didn’t leave sooner – but now I see, leaving isn’t easy, and a lot of people want to stay and fight to make their country a better place – though I am feeling unsure that that is even possible at this point.
With Trump kidnapping Venezuela’s President and First Lady, installing a puppet President and taking over the country’s oil, and now threatening our NATO ally Denmark by threatening to use military force to take Greenland, well, it sure does look like Hitler’s playbook, doesn’t it? And we know from history that appeasing bullies and dictators – as people and countries did in the 30s – did not protect them. Not being willing to speak the evil’s name does not protect us.
These are serious times, and serious topics. It is easy to feel frightened and helpless and angry, all at once. I am a poet, and so, as we witness these moments, we will write poetry, maybe no one will read it, but we will write it all the same.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Wonderful Visit with a Poet Friend in the New Year, and Then, Grappling with the ICE Murder of a Poet and an Unhinged President
“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”
—Carl SandburgJanuary 6th, formerly known as the Epiphany, now known as Insurrection Day, is Carl Sandburg’s birthday. Sandburg has been one of my favorite humans for most of my life. He was a Democratic Socialist and believed in the strength of America’s diversity. In other words, he was a good moral role model—good enough for the likes of Pete Seeger to admire.
When my child, Serena, was born on that day in 1998, I used the quote on a birth announcement, despite my being a devout atheist who believes the kitchen ceiling fan is a higher power.
Their birthday this year was a great reminder of how many true friends they have, people who called and texted and posted about them, brought them thoughtful gifts and gave them thoughtful cards.
It was the most temporary of panaceas. The next evening, they were crying about this headline from the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Humane Security: “Experts Warn U.S. in Early Stages of Genocide Against Trans Americans.” The article is worth reading.
Of course, trans people are not the only Americans being targeted for “mass atrocity.” First, they came for the immigrants. And now, every day, they are coming for regular people who are terrified of a masked militia disappearing them and their neighbors.
Renee Nicole Good was murdered yesterday by an untrained ICEhole with anger issues—because who would take a job as a paid kidnapper and murderer?
Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Anger Issues
Not long ago, I read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. It’s one of those books you hear about so often that you think you’ve read it. (Maybe I had?) It seems brand new at the moment in the age of book banning. And that first sentence: “It was a pleasure to burn.”
From page 79 of the 50th Anniversary edition:
“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality.”
“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, powerless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.”
*
Have you read Bradbury’s essay (included in the back of my edition) titled “Investing Dimes”? He talks about writing the book in the “typing room in the basement of the library at the University of California at Lost Angeles.” He says, “There, in neat rows, were a score or more of old Remington or Underwood typewriters which rented out a a dime a half hour. You thrust your dime in, the clock ticked madly, and you typed wildly, to finish before the half hour was out.” He goes on to talk about how writing the book changed him. “Have I changed my mind about much that it said to me, when I was a younger writer? Only if by change you mean has my love of libraries widened and deepened, to which the answer is a yes that ricochets off the stacks and dusts talcum off the librarian’s cheek.”
I cannot tell you how much I love the whole idea of putting a dime into a typewriter, forcing the writer to type madly.
Shawna Lemay, Delicious Books, Beauty Shocks
The shades have no names, so delicate,
merged, chilled. Darkly brooding,
wading into my poor mind.I’d understand if there were
Jill Pearlman, Bowl of Mysteries
only darkness. But that gray shines
bright, perfect for cloud bathing.
I find myself in a position where I have met my goals. The logical next step is to work in a full collection, and this is where I’ve stumbled. For a while I’ve noticed a nag at the back of my brain that maybe I don’t love poetry enough anymore. I’ve struggled to feel motivated to take the leap into joining a poetry group, I‘ve noticed I’m reading fewer poetry books and whilst I have a lot of ideas for poetry projects, I’m reluctant to begin any of them. Planning my hopes for the year, I began to write the usual poetry related goals and noticed a flicker of that Sunday night/ Monday morning feeling. Something had shifted and 2026 feels like a time to swerve away from poetry – for a while at least.
Some poetry related things will remain. I’ve started a Facebook group for poetry prompts and feedback, a gentle space with no pressure and no competition – just love of playing with words, and I have a Poetry School course that begins next week as well as ongoing commissions for bespoke wedding poetry. Poetry will shift back to being a creative outlet rather than something that drives me and creates the feeling of desperately trying to be as good as all the poets that have numerous magnificent collections out in the world. I’m moving back towards long form writing, winnowing out ideas for short fiction and dare I, dare I say it taking tentative steps to explore ideas for a novel.
Am I just giving up on poetry? No. What I’m doing is allowing myself to be proud of what I’ve achieved and to allow myself to tread a different path and, in a world, where everything is becoming more terrible and terrifying each day, this feels like freedom.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, What I learned from the snow
snowmelt puddle
reflection by tom clausen
while it can
holding a tree
Brandon Kilbourne has a PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago and over twenty years of experience as a research biologist at natural history museums. His poetry has appeared in Ecotone, Obsidian, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.
1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Well, this is my first book, so I can’t compare it to my more recent work, unless I compare it to research articles in biology and paleontology… In that vein though, I would say that Natural History, and the associated award, represent my ability to incorporate my scientific knowledge, expertise, and training into art. While the book, and my poetry more broadly, probably has something of a science influence in the fact that it’s narrative and prosy, it’s a big departure from my science writing in that it brings in human and geopolitical history in a way that my research articles simply can’t. I would say that the ability to probe the links of science and museums to colonialism and slavery—and the uncomfortable questions this entails—is something available to me solely through art. Likewise, using poetry, I can explore perspectives that you would not find in a scientific research article. Of course, the point of view of a near-extinct sea cow would not be found in a research article, but I’m also able to include the subjective experience of field biologists and paleontologists, which usually are not found in research articles but more in field notes or diaries, if anywhere. Ultimately poetry gives me a lens to reflect upon science and museums and my place in these worlds, including in the context of being a Black person in these historically (very) white spaces.
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Good question. I think poetry appeals to me because of its compact form and the challenge of encapsulating in a relatively limited space a deeper reflection or what strikes me as a profound experience. Though some of my poems are admittedly quite long! Beyond this, I’m drawn to poetry given its room for acoustic play (e.g., alliteration, rhythm, rhyme) and the brief mis-directions of meaning or fleeting associations that are available through enjambments.
Another point of appeal is that poetry can generate wonder by renewing and reframing (human) experience, and this might easily go hand-in-hand with natural history museums, which are something of houses of wonder for the natural world. Fostering this wonder is largely a function of their exhibitions as well as their collections—of which usually less than 5% are on display in exhibitions in the larger museums. While I think much, if not all, nature/science writing is geared towards creating wonder toward and appreciation of the natural world, in some ways perhaps poetry is predisposed towards this? Another thing to consider is that science starts from a curiosity manifested as questions (which are then developed into hypotheses). Likewise, poems are often anchored in a curiosity which then begets a question. Though science is pursued with the hope of a clear answer/result, the questions raised in poetry may not have a such an answer (though it’s worth noting that scientific studies also do not always reach a definitive answer or result). Perhaps it’s also that, like science, poetry employs image, comparison, and surprise to develop its insights.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brandon Kilbourne
It may be hibernation season, but I can feel the literary world heating up again–professors building syllabi, organizational emails flying. I’m participating in some of that planning energy toward two local events in the next month: “Writing from the Underworld” at Rockbridge Regional Library branch three blocks from me (1/29, 5:30-7:00, a short reading followed by a free workshop), and, an hour’s drive away in Charlottesville, a panel discussion called “Guardians of Wonder: Writing What We Must Not Lose,” sponsored by the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont (2/6, live music starting at 6:30 pm). Thanks to an NEA grant (what a miracle to win one this year!), the garden is giving away copies of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World to the first 125 people who register to attend. Both were invitations rather than events I pitched or applied for. A nice effect of my 2025 travel seems to be that people think of me for events more often.
“Writing from the underworld”–not just mycocosms but whatever lurks below our visible lives–certainly fits my January mood. I want to be writing, and I feel intensely introspective, but it’s hard to warm myself up into language. To get started after a break, I often circle around like a dog seeking a comfortable position, chasing whatever dim sparks distract me. I had trouble even doing that this week because I’m so upset by escalating political horrors. I’d promised myself to check the news less often–surely morning and evening is enough–but then what’s happened by 5 pm so thoroughly knocks the wind out of me, maybe that’s not the right strategy. It’s almost as if contemporary media is ingeniously designed to bait and hook a person at the neurological level. Consumer, stay in your phone-cave!
At least I’m reading. I’ve spent this week with some terrific recent poetry collections I picked up at the Punch Bucket Lit Fest in Asheville in September, including Sara Moore Wagner’s daring poems about Annie Oakley in Lady Wing Shot and Han VanderHart’s spare and heartbreaking Larks.
Lesley Wheeler, At the lip of the cave
As I head back to a more regular work schedule, let me capture a few last snippets that I haven’t so far.
–As we traveled, we saw a lot of wildlife. Of course, we often see a lot of wildlife, a lot of dead wildlife by the side of the road. But Christmas Eve, as we drove back across the mountain from Bristol (TN) to Arden (NC), we saw a wolf. You might ask how we knew it was a wolf and not a dog/coyote/fox. It was a large animal, with a face that wasn’t like a fox or a coyote. It was far from any house where a dog might have gotten out of a fenced yard. We also saw an eagle on our trip back from Williamsburg. At first I thought it was your average vulture, but it had white wings and a white head as it swooped up away from the road kill he had been eating. […]
–Before yesterday, I might have written about how I didn’t do much poetry writing, but Tuesday, I came up with a pretty good rough draft. I saw the foggy weather and thought about the early December forecast for freezing fog, and came up with an interesting Epiphany poem.
–Even if I haven’t done a lot of writing, I’ve done a lot of quilting. My spouse and I made 4 quilt tops for the local Lutheran group that creates quilts for Lutheran World Relief.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Few More Snippets from Winter Break
I think of shadows —
shadows of fixed length
people shrinking and expanding with the light
and disappearing altogether at the end of the day
to a place where the disappeared gather
you and I at opposite ends
unable to move in the darkness.
What should I call it?What should I call the reading
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Nomenclature
of the last word of the poem
and the inability to go back to the beginning
to go anywhere
because that devastating silence that follows
is the poem.
And that is the reading.
That being rooted in the debris for as long as it takes
for the universe to stop shuddering.
What should I call it?
What are we to say when we encounter the line “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk”? This was what struck the public ear when Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) published “Hurt Hawks” in his 1928 collection Cawdor and Other Poems — the memorable line, opening the second part of the poem, declaring that a fierce, alien view of the world was the deep, true way to see the human relation to nature.
It was also the line that, for some years, kept me from fuller appreciation of Jeffers. The poem is certainly widely known. Anthologies of American poetry typically choose “Hurt Hawks” as a selection from Jeffers, setting it beside “Shine, Perishing Republic” and (slightly less commonly) “Be Angry at the Sun.” But something in the poem’s most striking line always put my back up, seeming a cheap pose: tough-guy Nietzscheanism, as Nietzsche was understood in those days. “I’d sooner . . . kill a man than a hawk,” really? No sense of hesitation for the human? And that I’m-a-no-nonsense-man interpolation, “except the penalties”?
But in recent years, I’ve found myself coming back to Jeffers and the long rhythmic lines, often nine or ten stresses, that became his trademark. And that has meant facing up to “Hurt Hawks,” trying to understand the interaction of the poem’s two parts: seventeen and fifteen lines of uneven verse.
In the first part, Jeffers shows us a red-tail hawk with a shattered wing that trails the bird “like a banner in defeat.” Even were he to survive, the hawk will never again be able to fly — never again deploy the freedom of the sky and the deadly power of its talons. Death would be “salvation,” of a kind.
That picture leads the poem to a meditation on Nature and the “wild God of the world.” Like, say, Robert Frost in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” Jeffers rejects the pathetic fallacy, the ordinary human reading of human emotions into animals. But where Frost rejects all human projection, Jeffers suggests that extraordinary men — ah, Nietzsche! — or those in such extraordinary circumstances as “men that are dying” can perceive the god of nature that has been forgotten by “you communal people.” That god can sometimes be merciful to animals but “not often to the arrogant,” which in the context of the first part of the poem seems another sneer at the comfortable “communal people” so distant from the “beautiful and wild” — from the natural state to which they must return in the moments of their dying.
Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Hurt Hawks
In the monotheistic traditions, the created world emerged from a single, self-contained and self-sufficient, perfectly unified, divine source; and everything those traditions teach us about how to live in the world follows from the belief in that unity. What would change, I asked myself, if we started instead from the belief that the creative act itself requires the tension inherent in a preceding disunity, in the differences between two forces that need to come together for creation to occur?
As the list of all the different “manifestations of attraction” given by the Kāma Sūtra commentator shows, that tension need not be understood as sexual by definition, though it can of course be that as well. Instead, to me, it feels akin to what Audre Lorde talks about in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power:”
[T]he first [way] in which the erotic [functions for me] is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding…and lessens the threat of…difference.
Lorde, of course, was writing out of a Black lesbian feminist sensibility, not the desire to achieve mystical enlightenment. Her essay was specifically about the need for women to reclaim the erotic within themselves over and against patriarchy’s pornographic narrowing of that capacity. Nonetheless, her position has in common with the Hindu thought I quoted above the notion that there is no such thing as a relationship that does not involve the negotiation of power—that all relationships, in other words, whether between people or between humans and the divine, are in that sense political.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Power We Pretend Not To See – 2
i reject the idea that any of us are here
Robin Gow, nail in the coffin
for some heroic reason. i think at most i was put here
by the soil to be a headstone carver. to find the skull
& perfect it. there is always a need for
more dead inside the dead. no ending is complete.
even the headstones are licked by rain. fade until
the names are whispered in the stone.
This morning a light wind tickles the leaves and drops of rain, held there temporarily, fall. No bird song yet in the faintly herbed air.
Alt Text says this week’s photo is a moon in the sky, and this makes me chuckle because I wondered if this might be the suggestion. I say it is actually a photograph of a balloon flying freely in the sky back in 2014, and when I photographed it I was loving its flight and its brief moonlike quality.
I did a happy poet dance this week in celebration of the publication of My Sister Went to Live on the Moon. It was wonderful to see this poem on the Atrium site and to remember the joy of writing it. It was one of those intense writing experiences where the thoughts come tumbling out like a waterfall into a fast flowing river. The kind that has me eager to see what has been created when I can finally pause the writing. The kind that when that pause comes I feel as though I have been a conduit for the words and their journey onto the page.
My recent reflection that this might be the year I howl at full moons rather than include them in my poetry isn’t quite accurate now! I have opened the year with a moon poem and followed this up by writing another where the moon is centre stage during Kim Moore and Clare Shaw’s January Writing Hours! The one currently in the notebook is a little rough round the edges, but I reckon some tender editing and a few visits to Poetry Corner will have it seeing the light of day.
Sue Finch, THE MOON POEMS ARE WAXING LYRICAL
In November, I went to London to take part in a showcase for my publisher. It was a really lovely night, which I was extremely nervous about before I went and then when I was there I really enjoyed it. I met my publicist for the first time, hung out with my publisher and various authors under the Little/Brown imprint, including the always lovely Hollie McNish.
I’ve never taken part in a publisher’s showcase and was struck by the different requirements and expectations for poets versus novelists. Poets read one or two poems – novelists either gave a kind of speed pitch about their novel or took part in a quick fire Q & A about their work. It made me feel very relieved as a poet that I could hide behind my poetry! I was struck by how much more novelists have to rely on their personality to promote their work, and quick wits to come up with answers…
Kim Moore, A late November and December Reads Post
Everything about starting Red Hen was a risk, and I often ask myself whether the risk was worth it.
There is no complete answer to that question, but when I think about strategy for the press, I think that we wouldn’t have started Red Hen if I were not the kind of person who leaned into risk. Red Hen Press got to thirty years on a wave of risk-taking. There is a dream that goes into building a press, and then a lot of hard work and labor gets you to the first twenty-five or thirty years. But to sustain a press, you must do a lot of planning, marketing, team-building. The phrase “what got you here won’t get you there” certainly applies to us.
I can still enjoy the occasional risk: a high dive, a long swim, a cold swim, a drive with no gas, arriving in a city with no place to stay, going for a week with no food. I can experiment with degrees of risk personally, but Red Hen is going for the building blocks of sustainability. Our next thirty years are going to center on strategic thinking, planning, inviting more thought partners and fundraising partners to the table.
In the risk of starting a press, there are going to be a lot of hard parts that you aren’t ready for, and you will want to throw in the towel. You are often working largely unpaid during the time you could be writing or making biscuits. But the risk leads to moments of joyful work—finding a great author, editing a brilliant book. This is why I started the press.
The swim this morning reminded me that, in my own life, I will always have the joy of risk. When I swim out a long way, because I believe in risk, I have never kept anything for the swim back. I give it my all; I keep moving forward.
In 2026, as Red Hen Press turns thirty-two, we are entering our next level of success. Our team has a plan for sales, marketing, and publicity. Risk to strategy is a leap from the top of one building to the next, but we have been practicing our jumps for years, and for us, with the ground far below, the leap feels like flying.
Kate Gale, Leaving the Shore: On the Cold Plunge of Risk
These impediments to moving books, this idea of small press as part of the real commodities economy jostles me about.
It reinvigorates in me the idea of poetry as shared life process, not saleable goods. Is poetry 50% hustle? Sholn or share alike?
Conceive hook and impact of a poem or work to place it in “the market”, as a frame, makes a poem an interchangeable widget. This is problematic. It objectifies something tender, careful, playful, vulnerable, ephemeral. An auction block doesn’t honour the spirit of poetry.
Saw an ad for how art is not the main act if one is to “succeed” as a gallery — it has also taken the kool-aid of capitalism. Capitalism, which is to say to siphon money from working class to the rich, to accept hierarchies as is, to be isolated, specialized, part of the amused, obedient masses.
Poetry isn’t always sticking it to the man. It is grown within systems. Selling and buying it seems shamefaced somehow.
So many conundrums to solve.
Pearl Pirie, Digital Chapbooks
It’s true that wintry walks offer quiet splendor (sometimes) and a chance to reflect, but mostly winter affords the chance to stay inside, curled up with a book or browsing through garden catalogs. Theoretically, it’s a good time to revise and submit my work; often, however, I don’t get to that process because winter is also a low-energy time for me. I powered through a fibromyalgia flare two days after New Year’s Eve because loved ones were visiting, but there’s a bit of fallout as a result–worth it, though; and I’m chuffed about taking poetry workshops later in the month. Meanwhile, reading books! I got a Samuel Hazo collection from my local library, I’m reading Wendell Berry and Richard McCann, and Ada Limón’s You Are Here is on my to-read pile. I’ve also felt inspired by the start-of-a-new-year blog posts Dave Bonta has curated on his Poetry Blog Digest. Many writers and books there I want to check out, and many writers and poets feeling some of the same things I’ve been feeling about the past year and what to make of the years ahead.
So to recharge, as it were, I’ll do small, refreshing things this January: take photos, doodle with watercolors, read books, tromp about in boots, meet pals for morning coffee, draft poems, play with images, as per Johan Huizinga–“To call poetry, as Paul Valery has done, a playing with words and language is no metaphor: it is the precise and literal truth…What poetic language does with images is to play with them.”
Ann E. Michael, Small, refreshing
Sanskrit poetry uses quantitative metres based on the patterned alternation of long and short syllables, similar to those of classical Latin and Ancient Greek. This particular poem is in the metre known as Śārdūlavikrīḍita, which is by far the single most common metre in the collection. In this case, the poem consists of four metrically-identical sequences of nineteen syllables each, arranged in two couplets. These are sometimes printed as two long lines, and in Sanskrit poetics each of the four metrical sequences is in fact conceived of as a ‘quarter-line’, meaning that the whole poem, though consisting of four repetitions of the same metrical sequence, is understood to be a single unit.
As the poem is in a metre which would be familiar to any experienced reader of Sanskrit lyric, I thought it was important that the style and form of the translation should be readily accessible to an Anglophone reader. For this reason, I made no attempt in this instance to reproduce or even suggest the original metre in my translation, as this would be likely to produce quite an unusual-sounding poem – the opposite of my aim. On the other hand, a free verse translation would set aside entirely the considerable formal constraints of the Sanskrit poem, which are a considerable part of its beauty, memorability and, for Sanskrit readers, its familiarity. Instead, I tried to combine ordinary English diction and word order – to create a sense of accessibility – with stanzas, end-rhyme, half-rhyme and also quite a high degree of assonance to suggest a formal structure: in the first stanza, for example, there is a concentration of words containing similar vowel sounds (first, is, this, evening, nights, I, filled, moonlight, Vindhya, hills, thick, jasmine, first time). Here is my translation of the poem:
The first man I lay with is my husband now
And this evening is just the same
As those nights when I felt filled
By moonlight, and the breeze came
Down from the Vindhya hills thick
With the scent of jasmine opening for the first time.And I too am the same. So why
Does my heart so yearn again to lie
Behind a screen of reeds, in pleasure
So tender and so long to take
On the slope of the bank, on the rise of my waist.In my translation each couplet has become a whole stanza, one slightly longer than the other. Within the stanzas, I have attempted to reproduce the order of thought of the Sanskrit and something of its effect. In the original, for example, the first half-line refers to the husband and the next line-and a half to the nights they spent together when courting: so in my version only the first line of the first stanza describes the speaker’s husband, and the rest of the stanza deals with the nights.
Sanskrit poetry of this type achieves particular density and concision in various ways all of which create a challenge for the translator. One of these is by assuming knowledge in the reader of the wider cultural and literary tradition to which it belongs. Sanskrit lyric is particularly rich in erotic verse, which is divided into many different types and typical scenarios: there is no real parallel for this in any Western literary tradition. Similarly, several elements of the poem assume specific cultural knowledge. There are, for instance, many different Sanskrit words for different types of jasmine, each of which has its own cultural and literary connotations. The type mentioned here, mālatī, is known for its strong scent, abundance of flowers, its use as a woman’s hair decoration, and for flowering in the evening. The Anglophone reader is very unlikely to be aware of different types of jasmine, let alone their different possible associations, so to introduce a qualifying adjective here would risk alienating the reader. On the other hand, jasmine is, I think, familiar enough even to an Anglophone reader – and its strong scent sufficiently obvious and evocative – that I was not tempted to replace it with a more familiar flower with broadly similar connotations, such as honeysuckle.
Victoria Moul, In the translator’s workshop: a poem from the “Subhāsitaratnakosha”
I am honoured and delighted to have taken part in the BBC Radio 4 programme Artworks celebrating 40 years of Poems on the Underground.
You can listen to the episode here.
With thanks to producer Mair Bosworth for inviting me to talk about my encounter with Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Words, Wide Night’ somewhere between Swiss Cottage and St John’s Wood.
Anthony Wilson, Poems on the Underground is 40!
I was happy to appear this week on David Bauman’s poetry podcast In Three Poems. I love the format which focuses on (as the name implies) three poems. One of mine chosen and read by Dave, one of mine read by me, and one I select by another poet–Tom Hennen’s “From a Country Overlooked.” We talk about birding (Dave’s an expert, I’m a hack), hiking, the silence of pine forests, and what all that has to do with poetry and my new book Temporary Shelters. You can listen to it at this link or find it on Spotify or Apple.
Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.
Grant Clauser, Grant Reads Tom Hennen and Talks About Birds on In Three Poems Podcast
Today I’m happy to share with you an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change, which was just published on AGNI’s blog. It’s from the first chapter of the book, “A World Bewildered,” which explores how creative writers and artists can lean into their negative capability—their capacity to be with uncertainty and contradiction without grasping after clear answers—as an approach to both our lives and our work during these bewildering and tenuous times. This particular section reminds us that the writing process is not just about expressing feelings and ideas or causing transformation in the minds and hearts of the audience, but also—if we let it—a process of self-transformation: an opportunity to change our own minds and see previously-hidden truths and connections.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, You Are Not the Choir – or, Seeing the Matrix
I wrote “Document” last spring at a cabin in the woods in southern Ohio. I call it my happy place, and at least part of every book I’ve ever published has been written there. I remember sitting in a chair by the fire, looking out the window, and noticing sunlight coming down through the leaves. (The word in Japanese is komorebi, meaning “sunlight filtering through trees.”) I’d been thinking—and writing—a lot about memory and the way the self is revised over time. These are themes that come up again and again in A Suit or a Suitcase.
I’ve been going to that cabin, or one neighboring it, for 22 years. I’ve been watching sunlight (or rain, or snow, or high winds) through those trees for 22 years. It’s a repeated experience and yet a new experience every single time. Even if the trees and the view are exactly the same, the light is not, and the season is not, and the time of day is not, and I am not. The perspective changes because the viewer changes.
Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “Document”
When Elizabeth Bishop sat down on her bed to put on her shoes on the 6th October 1979, she was preparing to go out for dinner and due to be picked up within the hour. She certainly wasn’t expecting to have a cerebral aneurysm and die. She was only sixty-eight.
If her death hadn’t come so early and so suddenly, I very much doubt that Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke Box, Alice Quinn’s controversial book of Bishop’s uncollected poems, drafts and fragments, would have seen the light of day. The book is entirely out of step with Bishop’s meticulous quality control: Bishop published only 101 poems and translations in her lifetime. I feel miserable that her legacy has been forced to carry this book of failed poems, private fragments and early drafts that go nowhere. Although the book was published twenty years ago, I’m writing about it now because I only read it for the first time while preparing my recent North Sea Poets class on Bishop. I’d known of its existence, but had been – wisely, it turns out – avoiding it. And I can’t believe there wasn’t more sustained outrage on her behalf.
At least there was some. At the time, Helen Vendler, in a scathing review in The New Republic, called it a book of ‘repudiated’ poems. I would argue that they aren’t poems at all. The most charitable interpretation is ‘raw material’: ideas that didn’t work or go anywhere, and were rightly abandoned. A poem isn’t a poem until it’s ready to make its own way in the world as a finished, polished piece of art; its publication represents its formal gift to the reader. Before then, it’s the – often very – private property of the poet in whose notebook it took root and grew (and indeed often died). Surely this rule especially applies to Bishop, a poet not only with a track record of award-winning books, but also famous for her astonishing rigour – someone who could wait for years to find the right word or phrase, and finally deem a poem ready for publication. Bishop is the opposite of a freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness writer; there is something even more violating and upsetting not just in seeing her process on display, but in the false claims for its ‘finishedness’ made to justify the act. Increasingly it feels to me like an act of vandalism.
Lisa Brockwell, Burn Your Notebooks
I’ve tried to understand what makes ‘angels’ and ‘rain’ seem so radio-actively evocative in their context. Of course there’s sheer surprise at the sudden entry of a Judaeo-Christian metaphor, and the incongruous fusion of the bright, sunlit idea of angels with that of rain. However, I think it’s above all a matter of sound and rhythm. The ‘a’ sound stands out phonetically because it’s much more heavily stressed than the only previous occurrence in ‘decaying’. It’s also emphasised by the way the speaking voice moves into it. It seems to me to drop on the unstressed second syllable of ‘Ocean’, at what might well have been the end of a sentence; to gather itself in the following line and stanza break; then to explode into the marvellous ‘ANGels of rain and lightning’. Meter emphasises how ‘An-gels’ divides into two syllables, making us register the n and the soft g as separate consonant sounds, so that the voice seems to hang suspended for the fraction of a second in the middle of the word. This greatly heightens its sonic force and so underlines the leaping way in which disparate ideas come together or explode out of each other in the metaphor.
Edmund Prestwich, Such dazzling genius
This poem appears in Tzara’s 1946 collection le Signe de vie (Sign of Life), but was written between 1938 and 1945. During that time, Tzara stayed in occupied France and participated in the resistance. As he was both Jewish and an active communist, his life was very much in danger, and at one point a hostile newspaper doxxed him to the gestapo. You can read more about Tzara’s war-time activity here.
Before on this blog, I’ve translated sections of Tzara’s epic poem of 1931, L’Homme approximatif—a work that itself shows an evolution into Surrealism from his earlier Dadaist style. Where that early style was absurdist and almost nihilistic, his more surrealist approach introduced something akin to sustained dreaming on the page. A very wide range of emotions, thoughts, and imagery courses through that work. Here, in the poem of 1946, his style has tempered quite a bit stylistically, as he moves from epic to something more or less lyric. Instead of lines that pile up with images and fragments, here he uses stanzas and, at times, relatively straight-ahead prosody. But as in the poem of 1931, he never uses punctuation, he deploys fragments and discontinuities—even if they make the poem awkward—and his imagery and diction are, thankfully, still volatile.
Above the style itself, what captures me in the following poem is the complexity of Tzara’s reaction to the war’s end and the Allied victory. Tzara gives us a blend of gratitude, irony, anger, dread, despair, belief, trauma, longing—a complete disorganization of values and affects, all threaded together in a single imaginative gesture.
R.M. Haines, Four Poems of Petty War
What about this poem reached out to me? Which part of my existence felt apprehended in (or by) its being?
An elegance in the stanzaic construction. An intertextual friskiness in the speaker’s engagement of motifs and phrases hatched while marveling over the work of another. An alluring ghost-presence of images from Yeats’ poem, “The Sorrow of Love”, with its repeated conjunctions:
And then you came with those red mournful lips,
And with you came the whole of the world’s tears
And all the trouble of her labouring ships,
And all the trouble of her myriad years.Or maybe a gist of Yeats’ “Broken Dreams” — though it seems too dedicated, too intent on cherishing what has aged rather than what was empty.
I can’t remember.
The way I imagine it has nothing to do with its reality, or with Tate’s realization. And I like that in a poem. I value being being strung out on a line, trying to locate my affective response on a range between disappointment and fascination. Two friends chew over edits in their overly-meaningful poems. They go out for drinks and leave each other with words. Riddling words that want definition. Poems excel at riddling the definitive parts of language, and — in my imagination — Tate writes “Two for Charles Simic” in dialogue with the possibility of defining the sky or nothing.
Alina Stefanescu, James Tate
You come in from your early walk, tell me you saw a dead swan frozen in reeds at the edge of the iced-up river. Bird flu’s here again. I drive to our land. Black ice on the hill road. A car coming the other way skids and swerves. I pull on to the verge to avoid it. The look of panic on the driver’s face stays with me as I drive on to our track. It takes a minute or two to free two frozen locks on gates. Our smallholding’s three hundred yards up the track, which is white with snow and frost. I park the truck, haul water from the back. The woods are quiet in the freezing fog. Frosted leaves, grass. I know even now carbon is moving, tree to tree, as each one rests. Roots are exchanging nutrients. We are clearing ground for a new pig-barn. The bonfire from the dug-out debris smoulders. Smoke blends with fog.
Bob Mee, EARLY MORNING, JANUARY 8, 2026
The squawks, trills, and yodels of alarm and demand come from the bare branches when us bipedals walk about. Continuously we siphon seed into the feeders, toss the peanuts, slide cakes of suet into their holders.
We know about those deceptive, bullying jays, tantalizing us with their false blues. We can imagine every shade of red that met the hawk’s beak. We know about the House Sparrow’s vandalism and murder within bluebird boxes. We monitor. We maintain. We press roots into the soil. We raise worms. We let the grasses grow. We raise abundant flowers. Everything for you, my friends and yet the birds blow up into the sky like a bomb when we step outside. Donna retreats. The squirrels climb their cursive up the trees and jump their serifs from bough to bough, all the while trilling their loud song. The chipmunks dive into the earth like it is water.
And here we stand, hands on our hips on the patio, scanning the barren canopies where birds huddle like hooded monks on the high branches.
Sarah Lada, Come to This Place Where Only We Are Violent
My daughter and I were walking in the forest in early November. Hamilton, Ontario, just below the Niagara Escarpment. Light was filtered amber through the yellow leaves. The way it reflects bright off snow, it reflected from the leaves fallen on the forest floor. We were walking through a woods suffused by golden light, a continuous late afternoon honeying, as if walking through a leaf itself, some kind of Magic School Bus science trip.
If I believed in heaven, I said, it wouldn’t be the bright green technicolour spring of the Christian right. it wouldn’t be Webern’s boundless, directionless, infinite twelve-tone heaven. It would be this fall. The end of an age. Elves leaving. The mortal forest. The peat smell. No gaudy bursting of flower buds or impetuous birds. This lager-coloured light in a shuffling forest.
I don’t understand those who don’t like all the seasons, my daughter said.
Then we wondered about borders. Where are the borders of colours, when does red become orange, and when does grey darken into blue?
Other places, there are only two seasons. Rainy and dry. And why four? What about the metric system. Maybe there should be five.
We could invent another season, try to find its source in our memory, associations, hopes.
What would we call it? When would it be?
A before-fall, an after-spring. A season of in-between days.
Perhaps it is there already like a silent letter, inexpressible and unspoken. A subtext between father and daughter. The dry season between drops of rain.
Gary Barwin, The Metric Season: walking with my daughter in 2011
What was the question that nudged
me awake, that I know still
has no answer?I have a memory of pork
smoked over embers, the mumbled
prayers of mambunong, ricewine scattered on the ground
for blessing; knives slicing meat
to dress in a bowl with lime and pepper.My tongue is always bathed
Luisa A. Igloria, Hunger Wakes Me
with longing.
rain falls without clouds. without sky. without judgment. timber
Grant Hackett [no title]
by timber the old structures are brought down. a poet of white flowers,
lying near death, discovers salt in the depths of heaven.