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: death stuck in traffic, puritans vs. mermaids, an inflamed labyrinth, rain falling on asphalt, and much more. Enjoy.
Today I prayed upon waking
Kristen McHenry, Lenten Poem-a-Week Project: Week 3
in weak morning light, on this
ordinary day, unkempt
in flannel and cotton.
Peace descended
like a still, insensible animal
laid on my lap, a strange
species I don’t know how to take care of.
To quote T. Swift:
“ All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February.”
But things are happening amidst a world in utter chaos and absurdity, a place where I and I imagine other creatives are holding on white-knuckled to artmaking and routines and fighting the urge to run away into the woods forever. I saw someone quoted the other day that it was important to go on making art and devoting time to creativity, that besides the things like protesting, making calls, writing letters, could be one of the most important things you do. Also a documentation for prosperity.
Kristy Bowen, February Paper Boat
I’ve also been wedging my foot in the door poetically while thinking, like Plath, that there are so damn many of us trying to push up through the earth. The poets are using Canva to design posts summarizing their busy AWP schedules: me too. The poets are announcing their publishing milestones via social media and MailChimp: me too. Mycocosmic was published a year ago this week and the “book birthday” post/ newsletter has become a standard publicity genre. That’s fine, poets deserve any little morsel they can scrape out of the attention economy, but it’s hard to do the work lightly. First and foremost: the US is in the middle of an illegal war because a reckless pedophile president needs to distract people. Even without apocalypse (are we ever?), it would be a tonal balancing act: here’s me putting a very slight twist on a “content” cliché. Now here I am asking you to pay attention to my book in a way that needs to be a little wry and humble, because no one likes a pushy writer. Then there’s the tech: good lord, I’ve spent hours trying to format a simple email, is MailChimp going to make me upgrade to paid now?! Curses.
Lesley Wheeler, So many of us!
I have been home in Hastings, looking after my mum and my kid sister. It’s been a tough winter. I’ve been making soup and feeling time plays tricks, how fast it all catches up with all of us. My lovely mum will be ok, but she gave us a scare. My lovely sister is more than ok, she has got all the sticky toffees and caramel promises out of me she can in mum’s absence. I’m now back at my desk madly trying to catch up with books and admin and stuff. It’s a juggle navigating this time of life, this big scary world, this terrible age of distraction, and all this patriarchal fuckery.
Take a deep breath. Here’s a walk along the beach and something from the archives. A love letter to Hastings and those 1980s teenage years. The poem ‘Under The Pier’ was originally written for a walking tour of Hastings, where you would have poetry playing in headphones at different historical and tourists spots in the Hastings area. ‘Under The Pier’ was also the title poem of a pamphlet published by Nasty Little press in 2011. Then later in 2016 this poem featured on the LIVEwire album, a solo performance poetry album, released with Nymphs & Thugs and Matt Abbott – The video was shot on location in Hastings, East Sussex in 2016, the video was filmed, directed, and edited by Jordon Scott Kennedy of Idle Work Factory, and it accompanies audio of a live performance of the poem recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre.
Time is such a trickster, somehow this all feels like last week, and also so long ago now. Ten years have passed, so much water has passed under the pier. I’m gonna see my friends soon, excited to do a show with Matt Abbott and Toria Garbutt next week, so, if you are up in Yorkshire and local, I’m at Barnsley Book Festival on March 2nd, please come, details below, it will be lovely to see everyone again.
Salena Godden, Under The Pier
Acrobat, by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, translated from the Bengali by Nandana Dev Sen:
Poetry flies away as well,
if you let go of the thread—
it flutters in space like a lost kite.
The poet floats in an infinite void, desolate,
like a spacecraft disconnected from earth,
with no destination.I’ve chosen these six lines from a poem called “And Yet, Life,” which appears towards the end of this volume—a collection spanning a sixty year career—because their subtext, the idea that poetry is that which connects the poet to the world, is the thread around which my experience as a reader cohered. Read carefully, each poem in the book reveals itself as something that needed to be written, not because the world required it, but because the poet’s consciousness and conscience did. “This Child,” for example, which opens with the line “One day this child too will die,” confronts a question with which children by their very presence ask of their parents: Why did you bring me into this world. Dev Sen’s speaker, “Choking with fear, with ignorance,” tells us this question will make her “run away/to a dark cave, numb and empty” because she has no satisfactory answer to give. In “Growing-up Lesson,” she addresses a boy who fears the requirements of manhood—the most interesting line in the poem, to me, is “Are you terrified of plucking virginity?”—and then offers, as (a perhaps ironic) alternative, the kind of strength and maturity and analogous manhood that can be found in the use of words. In some ways those different but related spheres of concern—that of a parent responsible for a child’s life and that of a woman turning a critical eye on patriarchal gender roles—are the poles between which all the poems in the volume move. In her moving introduction to the volume, Nandana Dev Sen, the poet’s daughter and translator, offers a quote from her mother that I think speaks to what makes this book worth reading as more than just an interesting volume of poetry in translation: “I speak of poetry as being central to woman’s freedom. Yes, I am partial, I cannot be and do not wish to be objective…”
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #52
And then the siren gets closer. There’s nowhere for
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Monday traps
the ambulance to go. Cars inch to one side as if the
road is stretchable. As if the vehicle is marshmallow.
Someone jumps off a Suzuki and waves his hands about,
directing the melee. The paramedic shakes his head.
The lane clears. Like a break in the clouds. The
ambulance rushes ahead to the next signal. Death
stuck in traffic. Life wanting a better place to die.
I recently spoke with David J. Bauman on the In Three Poems Podcast about Jehanne Dubrow’s book The Wounded Line, how having a “container” (in poetry, a form, like the sonnet) can be helpful when approaching the difficult subject, though it may not stay in that form in the end. And it’s not just the difficult subject that benefits from limits. Other constraints can push language in previously unmapped directions.
Here are a few constraints to try:
- syllabic limitation (for the poem or the line)
- sound limitation (i.e., an alliterative or anagrammic word bank)
- nonce forms (creating your own rules you must follow)
- grammatical patterns (check this post for an explanation)
When I put constraints on myself, I often discover something: a pleasing color palette or a surreal feeling in a collage. A juxtaposition of words or a rhythm of language that are not in my usual wheelhouse. And allowing those limits to sing in their own way opens up so many possibilities, much more so than a prompt that might ask me to write “however I want” or “explore” a topic. In this way, constraint leads to an expansiveness of thought.
In this way, the limit becomes the sky.
Donna Vorreyer, The Limit is the Sky
Again, I was surprised and encouraged. I’d never seen anyone else write like this. I decided to keep going. I wrote pieces where each word started with the next letter of the alphabet, where specific letters could be lined up to make other stanzas, poem codes where each nth word of a poem could be combined to make a new poem, and poetry using music notation letters that could be played on a piano. Some of these are forms that, as of now, AI writing tools can’t even replicate.
I wrote hundreds of symmetrical poems and kept discovering new forms all because of that first day that I tried something impossible and didn’t give up on it until it was finished. These new “impossible” forms opened up new publishing opportunities for me. Dozens of the poems have been published in various magazines, and I won an award and was interviewed for one of them.
Not only that, but my writing style overall has improved. Writing anything else seems easy in comparison to these “impossible” forms.
I heard recently that in some professions, even more important than consistency, is persistency. A refusal to accept ‘no’ as an answer. If you believe in your work, don’t give up on it, even if—especially if—people think it’s crazy or impossible. Sometimes, as the Wright Brothers found out, stubbornness pays off.
Joshua Kepfer, Try Impossible Things
She sits on the cliff watching the water.
He is a rounded head buoyant in the centre.Something on the air tumbled by the wind
Sue Finch, SEAL AT ANGEL BAY
interrupts him;
eyes and nostrils flick open
revealing stone-black depths.
It’s a chemo week, so when I say I’m tired: I’m really tired. In the spirit of “letting myself be tired,” as those zany docs like to suggest, this week I’m sharing a poem that first appeared in The Missouri Review. Its companions are paywalled, but you academic types can get to them via JSTOR if you’re interested. (If you’re an editor, you can get to the whole looking-for-a-home manuscript through me.)
I don’t remember much about the writing of this poem and have never felt compelled to keep anything resembling archives, but my email oracle reveals that I foisted it on my favourite first reader in June of 2018, which sounds about right. I was thinking about power, about who constructs the narrative, about who is left out and why and what a piss-off it is. I’d wager I’d recently read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey: Scheria is where the shipwrecked Odysseus is discovered by the youthful princess Nausicaa, who helps the wanderer on his way.
Vanessa Stauffer, “Scheria”
Dear ***** , Arrived last night, on the anniversary of the funeral, when (and do stop me if I’ve told you this story before) in 1821, a small cortège made its way through these very streets at dawn from Piazza di Spagna to the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome where the mortal remains of ‘the young English poet’ John Keats were interred. Yesterday the sun shone, “for the first time in months,” according to a local. I’m quite sure he was exaggerating but his friends seemed to agree, draining their espressos, adjusting their shades in expectation of better weather ahead.
Today it’s cloudy, overcast, just as it was when Johnny K first arrived. I thought I might be overdressed, coat, jumper, hat, still wrapped for a long London winter. I’m told it’s warmer there now I’ve left. I’ve brought the colder weather with me it seems. The sun comes out when I leave, goes in when I arrive. I pull my collars up, think of John, on these steps, out here, on one of his better days, wondering if he’d make it through, last until the better weather came. He brought the clouds with him too. I wonder if he ever considered if it had all been worth it, if he should have stayed home, done the decent thing, got a proper job, been a doctor, married Fanny, raised some kids, slipped quietly into obscurity.
The Piazza is full of tourists. They are all out filming each other, all trying to manoeuvre to a spot where they’ll just get a shot of themselves on the steps and no one else in the frame. None of them are successful, they are all in each other’s photos while posing for their own. Later they’ll all star on each other’s social media feeds. Some pictures will get one hundred ‘likes’, one may go viral, others will get no reaction at all but they will all look the same, more or less, just people standing around in a crowd, being bland and simultaneously incomprehensibly unique.
I begin to move around the steps just to see how many pictures I can appear in, how many videos I can star in. I don’t do anything daft, I’m not photo bombing, I’m doing background work, just filling in, milling around, trying to be as natural as I can. I take it seriously. It’s like writing, it’s like finding that line, trying it out a dozen times until it feels authentic, until it floats unnoticeably just above the ordinary. That’s what I’m doing here. This is what I decide I’ve spent a lifetime doing: floating unnoticeably just above the ordinary.
Jan Noble, Nº53 In a region of mists…
Last night, I wrote this Facebook post: “In my younger days, I wanted to be a reporter. In my older days, I am so grateful to have a job where I don’t need to stay up for the State of the Union address, although when I teach “Antigone” tomorrow, I may wish that I could make more specific references to the speech. Nah, it’s probably better to keep that class conversation more general: what do we do when our moral/religious beliefs are in conflict with what our earthly rulers want us to do?”
I didn’t need to make a conscious choice. By 9 p.m., when the pageant started, I was already asleep. Instead of watching the State of the Union address, we watched A Fish Called Wanda. […]
This morning, my brain returned to the State of the Union address and my Facebook post. I also thought about my department chair asking me if I had ever taught a journalism class. I wrote about it in this blog post: “Before she assigned me the Journalism class, my department chair reached out to me by way of e-mail to see if I’d be open to teaching it. Here’s what I wrote back: ‘I am open to that, although I haven’t taught it. But long ago, in my Newberry College undergrad days, I was an essential part of the student newspaper. We went looking for hot stories, a la Woodward and Bernstein. We never found them, but we had fun just the same.'”
This morning, I’ve been trying to write a poem that combines threads of my Facebook post and threads from my blog post. I still need a third stanza, so I’ll let my subconscious brain keep working on it while I get ready for my working-for-pay day, the teaching of “Antigone.”
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, What We Watched When We Didn’t Watch the State of the Union Address
I didn’t set out to write this. I began this piece with the rainless days of 2025 so that I could tell you how they brought a hedgehog to my door, skinny and dehydrated; how I took him to a local sanctuary who nursed him back to health. I intended to tell you how the “Full of Joy Animal Sanctuary” runs on entirely on donations, how I decided to help by running a fundraising poetry workshop to celebrate the more-than-human lives which surround us. On Sunday, 36 participants showed up, raising half of the cost of an incubator for hedgehogs and other small animals – so I decided then to run another online workshop on March 28th, from 10-12.30: click here. In the meantime, “Full of Joy” told me that Lizzie Holden who attended the workshop, had contacted them to pay the rest of the cost. This means that whatever we raise in this second workshop will go towards a second incubator, where owls and hawks and rabbits and other sick creatures can be nursed. I hope some of you can join us.
Instead of the piece I’d planned, on hot days and hedgehogs – and the saving power of poetry, which gives us the means to save small animals, to express ourselves, to understand the world around and inside us, to imagine a different relationship with nature, to bring us together – I wrote this piece on walking through tough weather, and depression, and my regular return to despair. Sometimes the words lead you where you most need to go, and you have to follow them.
I find my meaning in landscape. Every day I walk, and it’s very hard, and rainy, and dark. I am so tired. Some days I simply don’t want to take another step. I want the path to stop. But then there is lichen, that incredible symbiosis of fungus and algae, through which life first crept on its belly onto the land. Then there is scarlet elfcup, and the drowned Ophelia of sphagnum cuspidatum, and the blackbird resuming its song – and yesterday, the first curlew. And there is always my Niamh, my first light, bright star, my green.
Clare Shaw, Rain, rain, snow
Dear god, I renamed one of my current 9 books at editing phase. Continued editing it, then started editing the old version so they diverge. An overlap of poems but changed edits, deletions and additions. I can convert to text files (more versions, goodie) then run through File Merge app to see where changes are.
Is it still a headache if there’s a solution?
Pearl Pirie, I am Forked
I am nervous about writing this post because I also think there is a lot of stigma around ADHD. In fact, when I rang the doctors to have an initial conversation, he actually said to me ‘Well, you’ve done very well for someone with ADHD if you have a doctorate and you are working at a university’. I was so taken aback by this that I said nothing, but of course people who are neurodivergent can ‘do well’ (whatever that means) especially if we are lucky enough to have a job which allows us to hyperfocus on something we love.
I am starting to understand that my ADHD brain has allowed me to achieve so much even whilst it makes things it is not interested in (chores, housework, paying bills, booking doctors appointments, losing things etc) very difficult. My brain, which cannot rest is the reason (I now understand) why so many of the ideas I come up with (16 Days of Activism, January Writing Hours) have this endurance element to them. It’s painful for me to sit still, so I come up with projects that mean I never stop. My brain also means I can hyperfocus all day and forget to eat – a useful trick when you are trying to complete a book manuscript for a deadline.
I wish I could have explained to that doctor that I achieved my doctorate because I found a methodology that was perfect for my particular type of neurodiversity, that I found a structure for the PhD that embraced the quirkiness of the way I think and allowed me to connect everything in a non-linear fashion. I should have told him that people with ADHD are brilliant and creative and resourceful and resilient – but at the time, I didn’t feel like any of those things. I felt like I was drowning and he’d just put his foot on my head!
Despite all this, I think getting the diagnosis has been a largely positive one. I have moved past that numbness and sadness and am starting to process and make sense not just of the past, but also my lived daily experience now.
Kim Moore, What is an overshare anyway?
Early March, below zero, but blue at least, and the long winter loosing in drips and a rouging of the forsythia. Difficult days of promise and betrayal, of hope and despair, large and small. I cannot get out of my own way, nor see around the muddle in my head. My brain is noisy and clanging. But the sun is leaking through the trees, and small birds move in the thicket. I know what I don’t know, but that does not make me brave. I try to stay present but spin out into what-ifs. Time is water in my hands, but the skin on the back of my hands is dry. I think of the word slake. An edgy word, knife-ish, as if the end of thirst is painful. But there seems no end to thirst.
Here is a poem by Lawrence Wray full of sound, and something achey, like thirst but not quite, like promise but with the possibility of its opposite inside.
Marilyn McCabe, I listen for fraught accords between soil and stalks
Today’s Poem is an eighteenth-century curiosity by the now-obscure English poet Stephen Duck (1705–1756). Classified as a “natural” or untutored genius, Duck, son of a poor and obscure Wiltshire family, had left his charity school at thirteen to begin a life of field labor. A self-directed reader and self-taught poet, he came to the notice and patronage first of a prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, then of Queen Caroline (1683–1737), wife of George II, who employed Duck as librarian for Merlin’s Cave, her folly at Richmond Park. Both Pope and Swift knew Stephen Duck, liked him personally for his sincere piety, and — when he was rumored to be in the running as the next poet laureate — savaged him in print for his rhymes. […]
Taking holy orders after the death of his royal patron, Duck accepted a series of clerical positions, burying the second of his wives and marrying a third. He continued to write poems. Everywhere he went, as always, he was popular. In 1756 he died by drowning, an apparent suicide, the man whose name had been whispered as a possible poet laureate, only because everybody liked him.
Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: On Mites (To a Lady)
Like the Romantic poets before me, I believe in the primacy of the Imagination to poetry. You won’t find many everyday or slice of life poems in my debut collection New Famous Phrases. Instead, I deal primarily in myth, in fable, in fairytale, folklore, foretelling, and the fantastic, which for me is where poetry is at its most powerful. This poem, ‘Death by Earth’, is part of the wider aquatic and siren mythology that runs throughout the collection, in poems like ‘The Pact of Water’, an origin myth for humanity’s relationship with nature, ‘The Crying of the Gulls’, a revenge tale of the natural world upon the human, ‘Cryptid (The Myster of Water)’, a poem about mystery, curiosity, and what we do when we find an answer, via the Loch Ness Monster, and ‘Lady of the Rock’, ‘The Sea Chain’, ‘Siren’s Throat’, and ‘Scraps to Daub a Siren’s Lips’, which portray the varying fortunes of their speakers in their goddess quests towards the isle of the sirens, and the reasons for their failures to reach this apotheosis.
I wrote my undergraduate dissertation about an aspect of the goddess quest in Ted Hughes’s work. It is this goddess quest that forms a framework for my poetics, and it is something you’re going to see me return to throughout my poetry, as I navigate how to reach this storied isle. ‘Death by Earth’ draws on the ideas of Robert Graves and Ted Hughes about the transition from a matriarchal goddess to a patriarchal god, hence the epigraph ‘the stages of his age and youth’, plucked from T. S. Eliot’s poem, which I use to evoke the history of mankind (and I use this gendered term deliberately here, given the events of the poem). Or, as I like to more succinctly introduce this poem during readings: puritans vs. mermaids.
Drop-in by Daniel Hinds (Nigel Kent)
“With My Back To The World” was sparked by an ekphrastic prompt that sent Victoria Chang to explore Agnes Martin’s art and write about them. Martin once told an interviewer, “…when I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied.” Her art, pencil drawings and paintings, are of grids and stripes often in muted colours. That might suggest regulation, rather than freedom, an imposition of straight lines on a naturally curved world. However, in Chang’s poems, those grids become a way of drawing focus, turning a spotlight onto one small part of a bigger whole. […]
An artist or poet may try to guide a viewer/reader, but ultimately have no control about how a piece is perceived. One person may briefly glance and see a grid, another reads suffering into that grid, someone feeling isolated may only see parallel lines that never meet. Chang is inviting readers to participate in her exploration, to see not the paint or the words but the beauty of the structure and what it might represent.
Emma Lee, “With My Back To The World” Victoria Chang (Corsair Poetry) – book review
Clarity and Light by Jesse Baker
I’ve been reading this book of devotional poetry in the mornings – a smooth transition between bible study and poetry writing. “Devotional” poetry sounds flowery, but these poems are earnest and relatable. Jesse is a pastor whose poems arise out of his biblical study and sermon writing process (which you can read about fully in this Rabbit Room article by the author – but an excerpt I cannot resist including:Poetry has helped my sermon writing; but, it has also helped me to experience the whole of the spiritual life as a patient, attentive, and prayerful experience of God and his Scriptures. With that poetic foundation, when I preach, I hope sermons have the same effect on listeners that a poem has on readers, that it is seen as an open door inviting people into an exploration of both the text and the God revealed in the text. I also hope the whole of our worship becomes, not simply a chance to learn, but an opportunity for the church to embody their spiritual lives prayerfully and poetically, that they in turn become living poems through which the world encounters the Maker of all things. – Jesse Baker
The collection is organized chronologically, so you could keep it alongside your bible readings and tuck in to the aligning poems (though most poems include a scripture excerpt as an epigraph, so you could read it on its own and understand the context just fine).
Renee Emerson, Listening so hard to an audiobook I almost ran out of gas but Thankfully Did Not
The world has its unacknowledged legislators – now more than ever – but poetry is the wrong place to look. ‘Unacknowledged’ is still on the money, though. When an AI researcher recently quit his high-powered Silicon Valley job, the BBC reported that he’d decided to ‘look to pursue writing and studying poetry, and move back to the UK to “become invisible”.’ The poetry WhatsApps lit up with the predictably self-castigating glee of the nichist: Poetry? in Britain? That should do the job, aye.
We might imagine the quitter chose poetry as the instinctive inverse of AI. Silicon Valley is everything Parnassus Foothill isn’t: modish, cutting-edge, drowning in capital. When people imagine the meeting of the two, they picture some Bay Area tech bro realising there’s a gap in the market to sweep away all the lazy, complacent poets. That is, what people mostly expect the poetry x AI crossover to involve – getting ChatGPT to write poems about how we’re all numb inside now because of capital, woke and melamine – is in fact the least interesting possible avenue of exploration.
But there are lots of ways the analogical interchange between poetry and AI can be rich, fruitful. Here’s one: the unprecedented tidal wave of investment genAI is receiving is strongly incentivising a whole bunch of maths nerds to think about natural language for the first time, and in so doing presenting strange and novel perspectives which, it seems to me, the poets are currently sleeping on. Why not make use of these odd new materials suddenly washing up on our shorelines? Poetry’s slinking, adaptive omnivorousness has long been one of the reasons it’s never needed to be cutting edge, never needed to drown in capital. It possesses a kind of pre-emptive and instinctual access to the new modes of thinking and feeling which any change in linguistic convention necessarily entails.
And linguistic change is coming. For around 200,000 years, if you came across a sentence, then you knew it had been produced by a human. That changed around 2019. Some believe that the discursive tipping point – at which AI began to produce more new commentary than humans do – came in late 2025. Ways of differentiating machine from human text are becoming paramount.
Joey Connolly, Metrics: Machine-Tooling a New Human Poetry
Birds can learn to fly without studying physics, but poets, it seems, cannot write iambic pentameter on instinct alone. This conventional wisdom accounts for the experts offering to teach the rules of meter, in their many books, The Ode Less Traveled, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, and so on, with helpful examples, and exercises whose solutions are not (alas) always in the back of the book. The puzzle is that the rules in those books are wrong—not entirely wrong, nor entirely useless, but wrong in many details, and wrong in the abstract, wrong in the theoretical framework they employ—yet still the poets who study them often end up writing good verse that scans. What’s going on?
The linguists, who have made the study of language, and of poetic meter, into a science, have an answer. While some people learn to scan verse using “rules” they read in a book, others are able to tell—and more reliably—whether a line is metrical without such training. These others are no elite priests; even children learn to sing nursery rhymes. The training for this ability is the experience of metric verse, that is, reading a lot of it, and grokking, inarticulately, what separates it from prose, and (God forbid) non-metric “free” verse. Then one may use the true rules of meter to sort those categories, but here the rules are not available to us in consciousness; we do go by feel. We know the rules the way native but naive and untutored speakers of a language know that language’s rules of grammar.
Are the linguists right about this? Who are they to tell the poets and literary theorists that they misunderstand a core subject of their own discipline? One answer is that they have, or claim to have,
uncovered subtle properties of meter which are so detailed as to be unlikely to be accidental, and also so obscure as to be unlikely to be conscious.
If there are indeed generalizations about iambic pentameter that Shakespeare never violated, but which no one wrote down before 1977, or even had the vocabulary to write down before the 1960s, then yes those generalizations are rules of the meter, and Shakespeare was following them, but he was not doing so consciously. Ask him about them (oh, to ask him a question!), and he won’t recognize them.
Brad Skow, Iambic Pentameter as Chicken Sexing
Here goes a backasswards way of trying to get poetry published, pitching it out on Substack. To my lovely fellow poets thinking ‘What the..?, Submit like everyone else, there’s a queue, you fuck..’ I get it.
But hear me out. One problem I have is that what I’ve written here is a heroic crown of sonnets, or sonnet redoublé, which is too short for all but the most left-field and blue moon random pamphlet subs. Even with a title page and epigraphs it’s 17/18 pages thereabouts. I could wait for the next one in-a-million pamphlet call outs that’ll consider something so short, or I could do what I’m doing here.
Faint heart never won fair maiden. Gah, the dreadfully important nonsense that is poetry, that it should come to this.
The other problem might be the subject matter, stained by stigma, and riddled with ridicule, that is, until fairly recently. You may be forgiven for not noticing that UFOs and ‘aliens’ are having a bit of a moment, sufficient to permit their institutional rebranding as UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) and NHIs (Non-Human Intelligence). Arch-bozo Donald Trump has even waded into it with promises of revelations, no doubt to divert attention from the Epstein files.
What snagged my interest, and left me wondering why it was met with a cultural shrug, was the dread word uttered by senior intelligence whistle blower David Grusch in the US congress, when asked, “If we have recovered craft, do we have the bodies of the pilots?” To which he responded that yes, non-human biologics had been recovered. There have been three congressional hearings and multiple attempts at transparency legislation since the 2017 NYT article that set this current kerfuffle in motion.
I would urge anyone to avoid the rabbit hole that I threw myself into. At best it’s a bewildering hall of mirrors, with bad actors, a desperate counter intelligence operation losing its grip, a weird coterie of wannabe messiahs, grifters and charlatans. On the other hand, we could be on the brink of the most ontologically significant moment in all of human history. Steven Spielberg certainly seems to think so, his upcoming summer blockbuster, ‘Disclosure Day’ looks set to make our collective skin crawl with gnawing unease. Surely poetry could layer the confusion and ambiguity inherent in what’s referred to as the topic’s ‘high strangeness’ in ways no other form might be able to attempt. That was my brief.
James McConachie, A Straight-up Poetry Pitch.
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?
This might be unusual, but the titles often come first. I love titles. I love the act of naming something. It’s like a generative exercise. A perfect example of this is my poem “Antediluvian,” which is the last poem in Citronella. I was curious about the period of time in the Bible between the fall of man and the Great Flood — what I came to know as being called “antediluvian” (or “pre-flood”). I began asking myself, what happens in a moment of banishment? How does one feel looking back at a place called home while simultaneously seeing some strange land on the horizon? It was the first poem I wrote for Citronella, but in doing so, I knew I’d already written its ending. I wrote towards that closing with the other poems; led the speaker all the way to the edge of that cliff.
I don’t think I’ve yet figured out how books “happen.” But I can say this: the more I write, the more I understand how my poems interconnect. It was clear to me when I had enough poems for my chapbooks, and it was clear to me when I had enough for my full-length collection. […]
What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
This is a big question, and one that could be answered in no less than a hundred different ways. I see my own role as a writer as being a sort of truthteller. In Shakespeare’s plays, the truthtellers often operate on the margins and in the fens. Think of the Fool in King Lear or the witches in Macbeth. These are queer, weird (wyrd) characters. I feel similarly as a queer writer. I write to reveal uncomfortable truths. I write frankly, and shy from writing fiction, because there is so much happening in the real world. Fiction is an interesting genre. I read a lot of it, and I value the way it can offer escape or confront me with difficult truths. But in my experience, contemporary poetry doesn’t allow for distraction — it cuts straight to the bone.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Loch Baillie
meditation
Tom Clausen, footstep
i remember i left
the lights on
My son is still small enough that, when I put him to bed, I can hear, briefly as I hug him, his heartbeat. It is a beautiful but also a baleful moment. Frank Kermode said, in The Sense of an Ending, that although the clock goes tick, tick, we hear tick, tock; bounded, as we are, in this little life, by a birth and a death, we hear the inevitable everywhere, giving to all things a beginning and an ending. And so the haunting tick, tock echoes in our lives, as it does in my son’s heartbeat.
It echoes through literature, too. It is the ageing Captain Hook, not the ever youthful Peter Pan, who is rendered insensible with fear at the approaching sound of the crocodile’s clock. Barrie’s finest stroke of genius was to have Peter himself make the ticking noise, unconsciously imitating the crocodile, as children do, which sends Hook crawling along the deck, only to plead to be hidden from Fate. ““Hide me!” he cried hoarsely.” And all the while, insouciant, loveable, innocent Peter keeps on ticking.
In a sublime moment, Barrie mentions that Peter “had seen the crocodile pass by without noticing anything peculiar about it, but by and by he remembered that it had not been ticking. At first he thought this eerie, but soon concluded rightly that the clock had run down.” It is terribly funny to read this after Hook has been crawling helplessly along the deck of the Jolly Roger, but it also makes that scene, for the reading parent, far more poignant. It means nothing to Peter that the clock has run down; it is all in the joke; but to the reading parent, faced with their own children and the tick, tick of their little heartbeats, it means all too much.
To the poets, time and death are as commonplace as toast and tea. “I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker”, wrote T.S. Eliot, four years after Peter Pan, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In that poem, we hear echoes of Marvell, who wrote one of the most famous lines of English poetry about the swift passage of time—“for always at my back I hear/time’s winged chariot hurrying near”. A few years later Noel Coward had hints of Shakespearean “golden lads and girls” in the lyrics to ‘The Party’s Over Now’: “The candles gutter,/ the starlight leaves the sky;/ It’s time for little girls and boys to hurry home to bed,/ For there’s a new day waiting just ahead.”
Those lyrics are from 1932. Perhaps I am fanciful in hearing an echo of T.S.E. in them.
Henry Oliver, The night cometh
Intense vertigo of the spinning variety, hearing loss, tinnitus (ringing in the ear), nausea, vomiting, and imbalance.
These are the symptoms of a condition caused by an ear infection or a virus attacking a particular part of the ear known as the bony LABYRINTH, a delicate complex located inside the inner ear that includes three specialized structures: the vestibule, the semicircular canal, and the cochlea.
The labyrinth converts mechanical signals transmitted by the middle ear into electrical signals, which are then relayed on to the auditory pathway in the brain.
The labyrinth also detects motion and position in order to maintain balance.
An inflamed labyrinth.
A hidden snail snell with oval handles.
A series of letters in which Samuel Beckett mentions his ear issues, and how motion is displaced by vertigo.
Alina Stefanescu, The thigh of the mind; or a few words that delight me.
In the autumn of 2013, I was invited to the Library of Congress for a celebration of the newly acquired Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan papers. There alongside Sagan’s drafts of Pale Blue Dot, his hand-drawn diagrams of space and time, and his list of children’s book ideas (“Why do birds fly?” “Why do we cry?” “What is it like to be a tree?” “When I talk to myself, who’s listening?”) was a 1974 letter to his friend Timothy Leary, whom Sagan was about to visit in prison. After some thoughts on evolution, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the logistics of the upcoming visit, he added a postscript:
P.S. The enclosed poem, ‘The Other Night’ by Dianne Ackermann [sic] of Cornell, is something I think we both resonate to. It’s unfinished so it shouldn’t yet be quoted publically [sic].
I immediately wondered about this poem, this poet, and down the rabbit hole I went, to discover that Carl Sagan had been Diane Ackerman’s doctoral adviser at Cornell and that she had gone on to publish a collection of astronomy-inspired poems. It was out of print. I managed to procure a surviving copy and instantly fell under its spell — here was a kindred spirit just as wonder-smitten by reality, “knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm,” passionate and playful, “stricken / by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain / everythingness of everything, in cahoots / with the everythingness of everything else.” Here was someone who could see the “light engrossed in every object,” could fathom the “molecular / grit” of that light, could feel “the cold compress / of the universe” against this burning mortality impelling us to make meaning and make poems on a planet of such irrepressible aliveness, encircled by such inhospitable bodies as “Pluto, rock-ribbed as a die-hard comet,” “Neptune, whose breath is ammonia,” “Mercury, pockmarked / by the Sun’s yellow fever,” and the “agitated fossil” of Jupiter with its “whirlpools and burbling / aerosols little changed since the solar-system began.”
What emerges from these ravishing portraits of otherwise, the way a sculpture emerges from the marble cut away, is a love letter to this particular world, this improbable flotsam of the possible. “How shall I / celebrate the planet / that, even now, carries me / in its fruited womb?” Diane asks, “full of stagefright / and misgiving,” then goes on to sign the celestial body electric, arriving at the most fundamental question:
How can any system
observe itself?And the poems answer: with systematic wonder.
Maria Popova, A Cosmic Pastoral: Diane Ackerman on the Intimate in the Infinite and the Responsibility of Rapture
And if you are
Luisa A. Igloria, Little Essay on Disorder
tender to yourself, you’ll hear and
maybe even smell the rain falling on
asphalt, unroll the waxed and wrinkled
map of this life which shows you there
are still wildnesses left unexplored.
I have a few friends bringing out books soon, and they have told me how they struggle to continue to write, to even dare to post about their new books, or do readings, or any normal things.
I feel this pressure and anxiety as well—how do you write through the most stressful times I’ve ever experienced in my life? How relevant does poetry (or AWP, or a new book) feel in the face of women losing their rights to their bodies, facing a new war, facing threats to our voting rights? Can women in particular be expected to just go about business as usual? How can we deal with personal crises on top of political stress?
I try to spend time noticing nature, spending time reading, trying to deal with each crisis as it comes and just do the best I can. Friends are also a huge support. And can poetry save a country, save women’s rights to vote or use birth control, help us heal our own bodies or those of our loved one? Writers are storytellers, and storytellers have an important role to help people remember moments in lives, in history. If the American mythology seems to be teetering on the edge of insanity right now, how can we set that right? Can writing our own versions of mythology sound a note of hope, of justice, or reason? I hope so. I certainly don’t think it helps the world for artists to silence themselves in the face of so much uncertainty. Reading books about apocalypses helped me process the anxiety of the nuclear war threat of the eighties as a kid—perhaps something you’re writing right now will do the same for some other person? Speaking your truth—whatever that is—seems more important in a world where false information spreads like wildfire and hate tries to suppress everything kind, joyful, empowering. Is what you and I have to say about our daily lives, our work, our love lives, our disappointments and hopes important right now? I would argue, perhaps even more important than we know.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Spring on the Way, Writing Through Hard Times
— It’s perhaps an evergreen statement these days — I know the news of the world is harrowing today.
— Because the news of the world is harrowing and because the world is full of sorrows, we hold a place here for joy, for when you can get to it, for when it is needed. We lay down some hope and some beauty when we can. Sorrow is not the whole story. […]
— I’ve been reading Fernando Pessoa’s poems, enjoying all his pseudonyms. So many of his poems contain lines that will get in your head and stay. “The astonishing reality of things / Is my discovery every day. / Each thing is what it is, / And it’s hard to explain to someone how happy this makes me, / And how much this suffices me.” He says, “All it takes to be complete is to exist.”
— An oft quoted poem by Pessoa:
To be great, be whole: don’t exaggerate
Or leave out any part of you.
Be complete in each thing. Put all you are
Into the least of your acts.
So too in each lake, with its lofty life,
The whole moon shines.— His book A little Larger than the Entire Universe seems to know things about the universe all the way into the future.
Shawna Lemay, The Entire Universe
Once, when I went to see my mother, we climbed a mountain above the tree line. It was Mount Monadnock, a massive peak in New Hampshire. Partway up, a thunderstorm began, bringing rain and lightning. My mother, already haggard-looking in the eerie lightning, said, “Once you have begun a thing, it is fatal not to finish it.” We climbed to the top and started coming down in the rain to the crack-crack of lightning hitting the rocks. She was slow.
“Leave me up here,” she said.
I, too, believed in finishing a thing. I took my mother off that mountain.
This sense of hiking through the storm is my approach to the press, too, but getting a conversation going about a book is harder than ever, considering the other noise in our culture. Even those authors who have hit the ground running—like Luke Goebel or Rebecca Chace—still have to fight for review space. Poetry is even harder to get into people’s hands. We have a book in Spanish and English coming out from William Archila, an El Salvadoran poet, who walks through the world quietly; I don’t know how many people will have the exquisite experience of his gentle footfalls across their kitchen floor. […]
When I was growing up in the cult, we learned a lot about the building of the Christian churches, and I was interested in the construction of cathedrals. Germany’s grand Cologne Cathedral required the participation of the whole city, and in my classes, they made a big point about everyone participating. We all had to carry wood and take care of the animals in the afternoon, so maybe their lesson was a hint to us that we needed to be ready to participate in work.
But the part we didn’t learn was that the Cologne Cathedral took 632 years to build. That’s many generations of laborers, of dreamers. I like to think that by the time Red Hen is a second-generation press, it will have grown into a stronger, sturdier organization. We are taking firm steps, like building a new website, but I’m also working hard to build a stronger support network. I like to imagine that right around the corner, there are thought partners—those with expertise in marketing, finance, and law—ready to join our board and help us get to the next stage. I feel sure that this spring, we will find these helpers.
Kate Gale, A Cathedral of the Mind: Sustaining the Arts Through Community
When I heard about the attack on Iran
Rachel Barenblat, Many things
I thought, look how far they’ll go
to keep the depredations of powerful men
off the front page. How can I just
shower, make breakfast tacos, listen
to Bach while the world is on fire?
The world is always on fire.
It’s not a new war. What can I do
but clean out the ashes
and kindle my little light?
What will the weather be like on March 7th? I’m planning to attend the book fair day at AWP in Baltimore that day, but always “weather permitting.” Last year in Los Angeles, I liked having the option of just attending one day of the event–sans panels and such, which overload my introvert personality. But Baltimore is a 3-hour drive from here, so weather must permit! The past five years, March 6-8 has been mild and reasonably fair; so says my garden journal, so maybe I will get there. If so, I’ll return bearing poetry collections…
Ann E. Michael, Comparisons
Down at the shore I thought again about the sparrowhawk and adaptation. About how wildlife finds ways of coping, even thriving in nature depleted places. In front of me, amidst all the bustling of oystercatchers, ringed plovers and rock pipits, wrens were flitting back and forth. They slipped in and out of view amongst the boulders. Like the birds of coast and shore, they were finding food in the seaweed piles. I wondered where they shelter on this wild windy coast, where they nest. There are short stretches of tumbled walls but no hedges or bushes or clumps of bramble.
How might we have to adapt and make do as our familiar places change and weather patterns shift? Could I be as adaptable as a sparrowhawk or a wren? As resilient? Unlikely; me, with my stiff bones and slow gait, bad habits and old ways.
News of bombs falling in Iran, retaliatory strikes and mayhem found me at the sea-log-seat as I watched plovers whirl about the sands. But just as my spirit quailed, the most joyful sound rose up from the dunes and crofts. Skylarks! Heralding spring.
Annie O’Garra Worsley, February flight, flood, light