I tend to my hothouse
with hands of ice

enchantment vexes us all
nest or hen

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 16 June 1663.

no keys and I go into the street
and strike a bargain with the tar

after an arson the kiss of ash
like an election without any choice

and you conformists with one mouth
give glory to our lord the raven

a pretty tale for the land to bear
dead bodies appearing up and down

there are books of it but
the drum makes a good argument

and I bury in my closet
the violin I love with all my heart

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 15 June 1663.

This week: a ball and some grass, the uncertain horizon, ghost metaphors, the film of familiarity, and much more. Enjoy.

On this morning’s walk I stopped
to look at a shattered tree trunk
in a sunlit clearing in the woods,
the ground carpeted with fern and ivy,
an audience of light seeking trees
circling it, as if some kind of forest magic
had just happened there, some rite
or ceremony I had only just missed.

Whimsical? Or perhaps just imaginative?
All I know is, in that moment I was my own
blessing in the world, my own giver of gifts.
I must remember this. Stop. Look. Breathe.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Blessing

I am astounded by how much rest I need after a weary semester of teaching two Eng 112 classes on top of my normal work hours, fighting an English department’s compulsory AI use (anyone want some AI-generated sample essays in your course materials?!), publishing seven spring books at River River Books and bookselling at AWP, while parenting a tween and a teen and navigating relationships and small business taxes and—yes. All of it.

Conversation with my partner yesterday:

“I have been so exhausted.”

“It’s always like this for you, your first few days. You need to unwind.”

To resist means to soften into the powerful proposal of thriving right now. Of not waiting for permission from a toxic culture that blocks justice and moves from a spiritually deficient place. […] One day I hope we can all deprogram from the lie that rest, silence, and pausing is a luxury and privilege. It is not! The systems manipulated you to believe it is true.

Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance

The first full day of my residency was also the first day of my cycle, and the gift of only caring for my body on this day was just—oh, indescribable. I took naps. I read in bed. I took long walks in the pine woods. I ate half a melon on the veranda while reading more poems (Susan Briante’s new and selected 13 Questions for the Next Economy, rob mclennan’s The Sentence of the Book, Rest is Resistance—SO. GOOD! Also Sei Shōnagan’s The Pillow Book in the evening, and some Hildegard von Bingen while making coffee in the morning—variety is life!). I watched Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson (2016) in the evening while drinking wine in bed. I watched 12 deer in the evening field. I tried to write, and oh, it was not happening—the essay I planned on working on, the poem notebook. “The best thing you can do for your writing is something else,” I reminded myself. My first night, I started reading Charles Wright’s large collected (not complete) Oblivion Banjo, which daringly opens with “Homage to Ezra Pound.” I took a walk in the pine woods and was drenched by a downpour, despite the weather saying it wouldn’t rain—don’t trust technology. “The rain waters the beans, and it waters me, too,” writes Thoreau in his journal. I think of this line all the time. I didn’t even take a shower that evening, I was so soaked and washed by the rain. It felt a little like a baptism into the woods and rest.

I’m astonished at how empty I am—how much I need to fill back up. Truly, our bodies are not factories, but flesh and blood and soul.

Han Vanderhart, June Residency (at Weymouth Center) & Rest

When you have worked with a group of people once you get a real flavour of what else might be fun to do. I felt particularly excited at the thought of working together to create a group poem. This would be an even more dynamic way to celebrate National Poetry Day together because we would then have our own poem to share on the day itself.

In preparation for my visit I put together a set of my own poems on this year’s new theme of ‘Wonder’, and thought about an appropriate writing prompt. This time I wanted to do away with pencil and paper and stay in the moment whilst we were sharing creative thinking time, so I decided to record the offered responses. With the group’s permission I recorded what they were saying in response to different mini prompts. I then took the recordings away so that I could listen and see how the poem itself would emerge for reveal typing up. I discovered that three poems were emerging and the main one was fully formed itself in the voice notes. I am so looking forward to recording it with them in October.

As we gathered together this time, I thoroughly enjoyed watching everyone settling in.  Anthologies of poetry were brought to the circle as well as poetry journals and individual poems. I felt lucky to be invited back to this creative community. This small group made up of lovely individuals is a wonderful place to be. It is enabling me to hear the poetry sets I put together with new ears. It brings the joy of spontaneous conversation and laughter. It is one of those spaces that is fully in the moment.

Sue Finch, DONNING THE T-SHIRT

Over the weekend I realised I’d missed the deadline to apply for some work I’d have loved to do with the Poetry Library, earlier this year were several residencies I drafted applications for but couldn’t finish in time… It’s a particular quality of gutted when it’s not a case of not being picked, but of not even managing to get your name in the hat.

And as increasingly it’s my peers who are the recipients it feels a little like missing the bus and then spotting my mates grinning together in the top seats as it drives past.

What is there to be done? Obviously not sulk at home or get jealous and bitter – even though I’m gutted I don’t want to cultivate that within me. So it’s a case of being gentle with myself and of practicing sympathetic joy, a concept I first came across as compersion back when I was practicing Polyamory.

What is sympathetic joy? Put simply it’s feeling happiness for the joy and success of others, even when that success is something you wanted for yourself. It’s rerouting your thinking from ‘I wish that was me’ to ‘I’m so pleased that person/poet/friend is getting to take advantage of this opportunity that’ll be really great for their development’.

But it’s more nuanced than just giving yourself a different script; there’s work there in acknowledging your disappointment and allowing yourself to grieve a missed opportunity, and in working to connect with the positive emotion and feeling behind the sentiment you’re cultivating: it’s not enough just to say the words, the meaning comes through embodying that position.

And the other thing? When I stop to think about it I am actually pleased for these friends and peers, it’s not that hard to cultivate positivity for them because it already exists – I like these people and I’m glad they’re benefitting from these wonderful opportunities. And when I acknowledge that, it feels better inside me too – it counteracts the gutted.

I actually suspect this kind of thinking and practice is really useful to cultivate as a writer full stop, not just for someone in my position. It goes hand in hand with the understanding that being in creative spaces isn’t about being in competition but in conversation with each other, and celebrating each other’s successes alongside our own; the arts space is so special because of the multitude of voices and perspectives it contains, and when any of us are benefitting then it’s bolstering the community and landscape as a whole.

Rachael Hill, Missing deadlines and practicing sympathetic joy

For years Dylan has toured constantly, and he has for decades refused to play a show the way you would expect if you were a fan, casual or otherwise. I have no idea whether this was a conscious plan with a long term objective, or innate rebelliousness, or something that he did because he wanted to. Probably some people know, he has probably talked about it, but from my perspective, it just seems like a fantastic mystery.

I won’t go on and on. The show was transcendent. Mostly what I felt was relief. I wasn’t emotional, mostly, though at times hearing him sing reminded me that so many things in my life have happened, and now are gone, and his music was there all the time. This music was not about him. In a way, anyone could do what he did, which was to get up and not to depend in any way on his celebrity, his history, his Dylan-ness, but just to make a space where we could experience something singular. Anyone could do it, but very few can. And that is the difference.

His performance reminded me of what I believe constitutes artistic integrity: if I can ever create such a space (in performance or otherwise) with poems or music, I have not wasted my life.

He was in a cloak, and he cloaked us all in mystery and duende and mortality and timelessness. The only songs I recognized were All Along the Watchtower, Trying to Get to Heaven (a great song on Time Out of Mind), and the closer, Every Grain of Sand. The band was absolutely perfect: they play exactly the way I dream a band of mine will someday play, the sound I have heard in my head a million times. Bass locked down, two guitarists just holding it down with the absolutely perfect edge of breakup natural tones, playing only what is necessary, drummer also locked in, Bob on keys and singing. It was dark on the stage and there was no possibility of seeing his face. But he was there. When he played the harmonica I felt a great wonder in my soul. He is the only one who can play like that, and it sounds just like it did from the beginning.

Matthew Zapruder, A Great Witch

Picture this: a little cockney, looks like trouble, a sickly, druggy type, abroad for the first time, too long holed up in a cheap pensione, hurls a plate of pasta into the piazza and it all kicks off.

You’ve got the image. You’ve seen it in the newsreels. There’s a football crowd. Probably. Water cannons. Possibly. Plastic chairs thrown in foreign town squares. Fat, bald blokes taking swings. It’s ugly. There is a collective national tutting. Commentators say it’s a disgrace, headlines: The English Disease, there is outcry, a blight on our nationhood. England away. Love it.

The incident I describe in the opening paragraph didn’t take place during a World Cup or have anything at all to do with football. But it did happen. In 1820. The little cockney in question, a poet, one John Keats. OK, so he didn’t exactly chuck his spaghetti and start a riot but he did scrape the contents of his dinner plate from a high window onto the Spanish Steps in Rome and it caused consternation. He made a scene. He was a trouble maker. I mean he was brought up above a London pub, he got into scraps in the streets as a kid, was disruptive in class. He was a trouble maker in the best possible sense. He may not have been one of the lads but Keats, oh Johnny Keats he was a geezer.

The World Cup is upon us. You may be doing your best to ignore it. I tried but slowly it’s reeling me in once again. But this year something is off. Perhaps it’s the disturbing rise of nationalistic anger away from the stadiums that’s making me uneasy about participating in the pageantry. Football was always more about belonging than it ever was about jingoism. It was about rooting for the outsider, cheering on the underdog, coming together, celebrating. Yes it got messy. Sometimes it got very messy. I’ll admit I rather liked it when it did. There were times when I got carried away. But that’s poetry, right? That’s what poetry is supposed to do, it’s supposed to carry you away.

Let’s get this straight. I never liked sports. I’m not a sporty type. I dislike competition in general. But I adore football. Or I used to. It was a love affair, a love affair that occasionally turned toxic. I got picked for my school team (once), turned out for a local league side (twice) and played every Sunday for the Cubs where the coach employed a ‘turn up and you’ll get a game’ strategy. I liked his approach. I still like this approach. This is how we make poetry. This is how Keats made poetry. He just turned up, got a game. He didn’t have an expensive education, specialist training or all the fancy kit. You don’t need those things. Just a pen and some paper. A ball and some grass.

Jan Noble, N°68 A game for poets

ELSEWHERE, in a parallel proximity, a triple-tap. The last strike coming a moment later. Just as souls are rising through the dust cloud. The uncertain horizon conflates macabre and paranormal. Reality is the gate booby-trapped at the hinge.

ELSEWHERE, words echo like tambura notes. An unresisting background resonance. The idea that the earth has been helplessly rotating from the beginning’s beginning, recalibrates meaning.

ELSEWHERE, thousands of flecks of light rise like dancers to create new constellations in the night sky. Heads gather themselves, with their feet and waists and hungry mouths, into waiting parentheses.

ELSEWHERE, the day itself is a disquieting monotone. The monsoon sets up percussion and string. Rain is a pendulum in motion. Silence slips into wetness and reflection. Lines are wheels in revolution. Again. Again.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, That which we call a drone by any other name

From April through September of last year, I was corresponding with a poet from Iran who’d asked to interview me. Given the current situation and the fact that I know nothing about the poet’s situation, not even whether or not they are still alive, I am not going to name them here, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the questions they asked me since the beginning of the US-Israeli war against their country, since very few of them had any direct relationship to my work as a poet or to poetry in general. Still, they were all thought provoking, often leading me to articulate things I’d never really thought about before and that I think are worth sharing. Rather than work those answers into new essays, though, and out of respect for the poet who interviewed me, I’m going to preserve the Q&A format and publish my answers as I originally wrote them. You’ll understand immediately why I’ve decided to start with the second question in the series. Looking back, it seems especially prescient.

Q: “I strongly agree with Kafka’s statement that ‘war, in its first phase, emerges out of [a] total lack of…imagination.’ How do you view the main source of war?”

I’m not sure how to begin to answer this question. Since I have never—and I am grateful for this—had to live through a war, I have never been forced to confront face-to-face what it would mean for there to be people in the world who have defined me as an enemy who does not deserve to live. Even as I write that, though, I realize I have begun to formulate an answer. As my use of the word “defined” suggests, I believe lethal violence is rooted in a quintessentially imaginative act: the proactive imagining of another human being or group of human beings as nonhuman and therefore “killable” with impunity.

I have never believed that the default human stance towards others is to see them as so fundamentally, essentially different from ourselves that we also see their lives as inherently less worthy than ours; and I guess I do believe, therefore, that rendering someone “killable” requires willful, proactive effort. Even killing in self-defense requires this imaginative act. If someone is trying to kill you and killing them is the only way to save your life, you have to believe on some level that your potential murderer is no longer as fully human as you are and therefore no longer has the same right to live as you do.

I have never been through military training, but I remember walking to the post office in 1980 to register for Selective Service. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and the possibility existed that then-President Jimmy Carter was going to reinstitute the military draft in response. He activated Selective Service registration in preparation for that possibility. I was eighteen years old. As I walked, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be trained to kill people I had never met and had no reason to hate. I couldn’t do it, but I knew that, if I ever were drafted, that’s what I would be trained to do, and the thought of what that would do to my humanity terrified me. I would never have been able to articulate it this way back then, but I was struggling with the question of whether and how I could resist the the militarization of my imagination.

Implicit in what I think you and Kafka mean by “a total lack of imagination” is the optimistic belief that the imagination is an inherently good and humanizing thing. That’s the way those of who are artists tend to think of the imaginative capacity out of which our art emerges, but I think we miss something crucial if we define as an absence a world view that is so diametrically opposed to our existence that the people who hold it are willing to go to war with us. I also think that defining their world view as an absence of imagination merely inverts the hierarchy that organizes how they see the world, placing ourselves on top instead of them.

If someone is indeed trying to kill you, though, if someone insists on prosecuting a war of aggression against you, you may very well have to kill them first in order to survive. I just think it’s important to remember that they’re not trying to kill you because they lack imagination, or because imagination has failed them. Rather, they are trying to kill you because of what they have imagined you to be, and they may very well give you no choice but to accept that nothing you can do will change their minds about that.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Source of War

i cease to sleep. i build the robot. i do not
want the robot but here it is. it makes
all the promises i do not want it to make.
it says, “we are gods.” my eyes well up.
the birds scatter into the dark hills.

Robin Gow, building the robot

Now that I’ve given up (temporarily?) the thought of getting a collection published, I’m going through my ‘collections’ and adding back all the poems I edited out. Poems that were removed because they weren’t ‘good’ enough, there wasn’t enough space for them to be included in a realistically publishable book, they retold a story or touched on a similar theme already established or they just didn’t quite make the cut. Poems I love, that tell the story I want to tell, capture the time the collection is about. Poems that deserve to be read, if only by me again. 

I’ve found poems in my first collection, poems in my Retired Poems and Spare Poems folders and in old versions of the collection that were lost over time and brought them together. I’ve printed the first set out, 160 pages. Crazy, I’ve forgotten so many of them. Rereading, stepping back into those moments is a wonderful way to waste a rainy afternoon. The pubs that I visited, people I’ve lost touch with or just lost, solo journeys I took, times before I was a partner, a mother, my youth, my inexperience. My glory days merging into real life. 

I’m boring so at the moment I just have them separated into the Scotland poems, the Finnish poems, the love poems. There are probably other exciting themes I haven’t delved into yet like My Childhood. The themes are so loose which allows me to collect more poems together. I’m not looking for something sellable, just a version of how I see my life and my work. It feels like a biography or another diary. Between my journals, my writing notebooks, my poems and their drafts I write so much. I’ve been writing obsessively for 30+ years, and it piles up.

Oh, how I want to edit some of the ones published in my first collection. My style has changed a lot. I used to love piling on the adjectives. I probably still do, I just hope I’m more subtle. I’m making notes on the print-outs, but I’m unsure if I’ll change much. I love to edit, but these feel like they should stay in my old voice. There’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just not me anymore. 

Gerry Stewart, Collecting the Collections

Today is the birthday of my friend Kathleen Kummer. After several falls, she is now very frail and housebound.

Kathleen and I met on a writing week with the poet Lawrence Sail at the beginning of the century. She had lived and worked in the Netherlands. We became friends. I visited her in Dorchester and in Devon where she moved, aged 79, to be nearer her two daughters.

Kathleen had a body of work when she moved to Devon and sent a manuscript to Alwyn Marriage at Oversteps Books. They published her debut collection Living below sea level (2012).

I am deeply grateful to Kathleen for our friendship and our poetry connection. Today I’m posting her poem Birthday Party, showing her empathy and eye for telling detail.

Fokkina McDonnell, Birthday Party – poem

I’ve been trying to read my sermon less, which in some ways is good, primarily in the more lively energy.  But I don’t like that I get tongue-tied, and I worry about my sermons getting longer.  I try to limit my discursive comments so that they don’t become a wandering tangent where I can’t easily get back.  I want a sermon to be 9-12 minutes, so if I’m going to continue this experiment in not looking at the manuscript as much, maybe the manuscript needs to be shorter.  

Now it’s time to shift my attention back to poetry writing.  My various writing projects do feed each other, while at the same time demanding time, which requires constant balancing.  Last week, I returned to a May rough draft of a poem, “A Song Both Familiar and Strange.”  In the poem, I connect my visit to my friend who had a catastrophic stroke which means she now lives in the skilled nursing unit to Julian of Norwich.  I did some serious revising, moving stanzas, taking out material.  I think it’s done, but before I started last week’s revisions, I thought it was done. […]

Last week I even made some poetry submissions. In some ways, it’s easier in the summer when many journals aren’t taking submissions. In September, when most journals are “open,” and most for a very short time, I find it overwhelming.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sermon Revisions, Poem Revisions

I’m thrilled to share that poem “Confession to a Woodhouse’s Toad” appears in Whale Road Review Issue 43, a summer issue full of sharp, resonant work from writers I deeply admire.

One of the things I love about Whale Road Review is how intentionally they support their contributors. Each author page includes a direct tip link, so if a poem or essay moves you, you can thank the writer directly. It’s a small gesture that makes a meaningful difference in sustaining literary work.

If you’re curious about the editorial vision behind the journal, you might enjoy revisiting my earlier conversation with them: My interview with Whale Road Review. It’s a look at their ethos, their approach to submissions, and what they hope to champion in contemporary poetry.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Confession to a Woodhouse’s Toad” published in Whale Road Review + NO FEE call, Deadline: 6/15/2026

I wrote this on Arran, thinking about previous times on a variety of islands, and only once I had committed fully to this title [“The Misty Isle”] did I realise that it is the vernacular name for the Isle of Skye. In this poem, the Isle itself is Britain, and the mist is manifold. It represents, metaphorically, the mysterious sub-Roman era of British history, which has proved a fecund ground for my imagination. It is also, at its essence, true mist, to coat the landscape, obfuscating objectivity and creating endless interpretations of events which, were you to investigate yourselves, you would see have a huge swathe of differing opinions around them.

Drop-in by Hadley-James Hoyles [Nigel Kent]

Third person gives objectivity, distance, observation. First person gives subjectivity, close range, self-analysis. Third person can seem judgemental, first person can seem confessional. Using the same words except for his/my or I, here are both versions of the poem.  […]

While the man in the first version comes over as seedy and pathetic in his loneliness, which is the way the narrator wants us to see him and which may not be accurate, the narrator of the second version, because of the intensity of his self-awareness, becomes arrogant and much more menacing.

Maybe the second one works better, but it was an either/or choice and, for right or wrong, I plumped for the first, objective take on it. Perhaps it’s just an example of the way we need to step back, ask ourselves ‘what if’ I altered third person to first, or the other way round.

Bob Mee, OBJECTIVE OR SUBJECTIVE? WORKING OUT WHAT’S BEST

When I became a mother, I spent much more time in the house than I ever had before. On one of the endless nights of early motherhood when I was breastfeeding my daughter, I felt a wave of the most visceral panic wash over me as I realised I could not leave. I was tied there not just by the practicalities of breastfeeding, but the reality of love, which was as visceral as the panic I felt in that moment. I wrote about this in a poem in my recent collection The House of Broken Things called ‘Dear Wordsworth’: “I did not know / what horror love could be, how it keeps you / tied to one town, one house, one room, / one chair, one life”.

Later in the book I wrote about women who were found murdered and remain unidentified in a poem called “The Black Notices”. These women were found in the places women are often found, in bodies of water, in wasteland, in car parks, in forests. But once upon a time they lived in a House, and for whatever reason, they were not safe, they were pushed out, or driven out of a house, or they were kidnapped or lured away, or tricked on the way home, and now they are nameless.

The figure of the House and our expectations of it keeping us safe continues to haunt me. Writing The House of Broken Things has not exorcised the contradiction of the House from my mind or my desire to make sense of what it means to live with another – the gestures of love and the tiny acts of violence we inflict on ourselves and each other, and then if we are lucky, repair.

I’ve been doing quite a few readings recently and most have been followed by a question and answer session of some kind, and most of the interviewers (all apart from the one who didn’t bother to read my book in advance!) asked what the House was, what it represented to me, why I wrote multiple poems under the same title.

It’s taking me time to work out an answer that is in any way articulate, and part of the answer at least is that I don’t know, or I don’t know yet, or I am only beginning to know now. I know that the House is both the house of my childhood and the house of my motherhood, it is the house where I was mothered, and it is the house of my giving up, and the house of my enduring, it is the house of violence that I lived in once, and it is the house of my marriage, it is the house of loneliness and it is the house I escaped to, and I didn’t know until I finished writing this collection that I’m carrying all of these inside myself, that time means nothing inside the House.

Kim Moore, Inside the House of Broken Things

We were consumed? I keep on saying we.
Let’s talk about my own consuming passions,
the matter I’ve amassed for sixty years,
I and my spouse. At least our progeny
have flown, trailing their jettisoned possessions,
yet overnight we crammed space that was theirs
with things: books that seemed vital in the moment;
music, its living soul encased in vinyl.
What happened to the frugal hippie bride
I thought I was? What if it had to go—
everything, by some deadline, settled, final?
Fervent recycling wouldn’t stem the tide.
The angel might as well begin recording
the worst: I am a hoarder. This is hoarding.

Maryann Corbett, Stuff: a meditation

Jide Salawu is a Canadian-Nigerian writer. He is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland, published under the African Poetry Book Fund, and the co-editor of African Urban Echoes, published by Griots Lounge Canada, and Contraband Bodies, published by NeWest Press and Narrative Landscape. He is currently a Black postdoctoral scholar in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario. 

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Thank you, rob. My first book, Preface for Leaving Homeland, was published in 2019. I had received an invitation from the African Poetry Book Fund for their chapbook series, headed by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. The series has become a new cultural venue and has already produced new-generation African literary stars such as Gbenga Adesina, Gbenga Adeoba, Afua Ansong, Adedayo Agarau, Nour Kamel, Leila Chatti, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, Momtaza Mehri, among others. So, as I was saying, I was nominated to submit to the boxset series. Before then, I had written individual poems addressing a variety of subjects. But my first sustained work that explores the precarity of mobility in Africa and beyond would be the chapbook. The overwhelming experiences of African migrants moving through trans-Saharan and Mediterranean routes become daunting archives that will inform most of the poems. In Contraband Bodies, I was thinking about African migrant within Africa as a racialized figure; this includes the xenophobic rage in South Africa now; I was thinking about migration from below and what I mean by that is rural/urban migration; I was thinking about my private memories as a Black African migrant moving across different diasporic spaces, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and within Africa. But I don’t own these memories alone. I have described Contraband Bodies as a personal record—I think this work imbricates other public experiences of the Black diaspora.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

It is a personal story that I am always glad to credit to my grandfather, who I would call a Yoruba poet, for his skill of oriki, a genre of oral poetry in Yoruba culture. He introduced me to the gift of literature and the sublimity of the Yoruba language. Yoruba is a highly tonal language, and quite musical. This does not mean all Yoruba people are poets, but the language is the first linguistic resource point for someone interested in literary culture. From that background, we can pick one or two things about my growth as a young writer. As a student, even when I was interested in poetry, and I had read literary greats such as David Rubadiri, Oswald Mtshali, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Kofi Awoonor, Jared Angira, I didn’t know how to begin writing. In 2005, Gabriel Arishe, a teacher in my secondary school in Shao, who had taken it as a duty to mentor me in English grammar, told me I could also write poetry. I thought I needed some celestial power to do so. That day ended with me writing a poem I titled, “Moonlight Days.” I wish I still had that scrap of paper on which I wrote the first poem. […]

7 – 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?

Arts, as you know, can be perverted. Arts have been in the service of oppression. rob, let me tell you about what is going on in the case of Nigeria. The politicians, after their tenure, are writing hagiographies (life-writings of sorts), and they are getting reviewed by professors who praise them. In the books, they glorify themselves and talk about their good deeds for the masses. That is how terrible it is. Globally, too, you know, there are writers who side with horrendous leadership and even justify their need for the governance. Writings were first used to service colonialism itself; I recall now Achebe’s “The Image of Africa” where he is in dialogue with Joseph Conrad. I think as a writer, I want to reject grand narratives. Speaking against tyranny and oppressive structures has been a whole duty, and this is my pure sentiment given my own background, appearance at the margin, as a person from a country like Nigeria. Tell the counter-story.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jide Salawu

I recently read a New Yorker article about misophonia that referred to the sound of “fingernails on a chalkboard.” Chalkboards. They were in every classroom throughout my schooling, but by the time my own children were in sixth grade, a middle-school remodeling push had replaced them with whiteboards. The college where I taught had whiteboards, as do most boardrooms, meeting places, etc. An occasional squeak of a too-dry marker is about as aurally annoying as it gets. Who uses chalkboards anymore? Maybe the occasional cafe for daily specials?

And therefore, why do we still use “fingernails on a chalkboard” when we want to describe something extremely irritating? Like many other phrases and images, that phrase is frozen into our language–there are hosts of them if you stop and think about it. 33rpm albums may be back for some niche music listeners, but most people under 20 have never actually heard “a broken record.” Pop culture moves so quickly; what do young people think it means when Blondie’s Debbie Harry says she’s in a phone booth ringing the telephone off the wall? (If they even happen to hear that song.) I think of these as ghost similes or metaphors, still haunting our language long after the origins have gone out of date. Some of them hang around for decades, maybe centuries; others fade like last year’s popular lingo.

I consider these things when I’m working on a poem. What will the words mean decades from now, or to a person in another culture, or to a very elderly reader? It’s not that I think my poems will be read decades from now–heck, they don’t have a lot of readers even today–but, because poems convey information and imagery in order to evoke interpretation and to create pleasurable sound and rhythm, poets need to think about the words we employ and why we use them. Allusions, metaphors, the lively sounds of slang or dialect, popular culture or political references, scientific terms, various kinds of jargon, words from languages other than English: they are all words, the writer’s main tools. And it can be harder than you’d think to get the right tool for the job.

At the same time, I don’t want to overthink. It gets in the way of writing poetry. I seriously doubt that Emily Dickinson gave a second thought about being picked up in a carriage by Death; horse-drawn carriages were a part of everyday life. When Whitman wrote of fishermen seining for menhaden on the Long Island shores (“A Paumanok Picture”), it’s unlikely he thought the word “mossbonkers” would send readers running to a dictionary. If we have to look up some words today to get a clear idea of what’s happening in a poem, I see no problem with that. Besides, the Whitman poem is so clear in its description, we don’t really need to.

Ann E. Michael, Ghost metaphors

Where are you now, Mama?

I want you to know that
I keep my hunger
under my bed
in the box
with the starving
baby.

I kept her bones.
I gnaw them sometimes
when all else fails.

I want you to know
that only a
silver of me
remains.
Starving.
An open pit,
a coal mine.

Rebecca Cook, Because My Hunger Has No Voice

Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected and introduced by Alex Wong, is the latest (and second) pamphlet from Headless Poet.

Alex was kind enough to answer a few questions — on embarrassment, ‘bad’ puns, questionable taste, and the Victorians — over email. Some Poems is available for order here, and in stock now at the London Review Bookshop.

Jeremy Wikeley: I thought we might start by putting Hood in some kind of context, but every time I do this, I’ve no idea where to start. This is partly my own ignorance, but also because he straddles so many styles or concerns. There’s a romantic Hood, there’s a comic Hood, there’s a polemical Hood engaged in Victorian debates about poverty. The romantic, ‘Keatsian’ Hood was the biggest surprise to me. Is it fair to say he falls between the gaps?

Alex Wong: I think it is fair, if we’re talking about the gaps in current understandings of literary history. I mean the gaps between what have become the most familiar categories and groupings. For a start, when W.M. Rossetti called him ‘the finest English poet between the generation of Shelley and the generation of Tennyson’ he was placing Hood in a gap, and I think it’s still a gap in most people’s sense of the history of English poetry. It’s a small gap, almost not a gap at all unless you’re thinking in terms of ‘generations’, but in its small way it’s a little like the reign of Mary Tudor, or the gap between Chaucer and Malory: ask the average intelligent Eng Lit graduate who was writing in those periods and you’d be lucky to get more than one or two names. Very lucky, I should think.

And then he muddles our distinction between serious and ‘light’ verse, and between high and popular culture. Humorous poets who are basically doing something quite serious, though inconsistently and a bit under cover, tend to be hard to place … Stevie Smith for instance. But Hood muddles it further, because he also delves so deeply, and so obviously, into topical moral concerns — ‘big issues’ — without giving up the trappings of his light verse. And he muddles it all even further still, by also having written those comparatively highbrow ‘romantic’ poems you’re alluding to.

But I don’t think you could say that he fell between the gaps in his own day. A lot of people were reading Hood when not very many were reading Keats. Hood sold a lot of books, a lot of magazines and annuals. And also we sometimes forget about the reading rooms and circulating libraries that allowed people across classes to access these texts. He was truly popular. He found a gap in the market, and in the culture, but he filled it pretty effectively; he didn’t fall through it. […]

JW: Punning must have something to do with writing from the unconscious? Could you say something more about the way in which Hood shaped that appreciation (for puns) at the time, or in perhaps in the poets he’s influenced? You mention Auden was a fan in the introduction — so much of Auden is in terribly ‘bad taste’. And Moul recently spotted that J. H. Prynne’s first published poem seems to have been a translation (into German, I mean really) of ‘Silence’.

AW: Well, the Lacanians say the unconscious is structured like a language — but we won’t get into that. Anyway a mind that is habitually punning is a mind that is letting associations range pretty freely, you could say. And I think Hood, not only when he’s punning, does tend to be open to the associations of things – erotic, violent or scatological associations, awkward afterthoughts – and he’s happy to run with them. It’s part of what makes his writing seem a bit overcharged for some tastes, the O.T.T. quality. As with the puns and ingenious rhymes, so with other things; there’s an opportunism, if you like, or just a huge openness. He goes for it. But Empson makes an interesting point in Seven Types of Ambiguity, when he argues that Hood’s comical verse seems to use punning to pull back from things that could get really awkward, to dispel the tension somehow. Which is almost the opposite point of view. And I guess it does relate to what I was saying about ‘Bridge of Sighs’ and the impulse to make something tolerable, even though that’s a poem in which he does get seriously involved in something genuinely challenging.

Of course, the puns are also embarrassing when you don’t get them. That’s another important aspect of the embarrassment of puns. And I suppose it connects with Prynne, about whom I can’t say very much because generally I don’t ‘get’ him. I mean I haven’t reached a satisfactory accommodation with what he’s doing, at least after the earliest poems. And I’m somewhat embarrassed about it. But, well, I suppose it’s not surprising that Prynne should have had an interest in Hood. Although that particular sonnet isn’t a punning one (it’s about ‘silence’, so in a sense it’s about the terrifying void that’s left when the punning has to stop), still there’s conceivably a relationship between Hood’s almost maniacal aliveness to double-entendre and Prynne’s — I would call it rather intellectual — love of etymological and phonetic play.

The really fundamental difference for me is that Hood’s poems always create the illusion of a real utterance, a person speaking, with the bonhomie that comes with that; he’s appealing more directly to our ways of reading small adjustments of tone in our everyday communications. Auden is closer to Hood in that respect, although in some ways … I think you could say that where his debt to light verse is most apparent, his urbane wit probably feels closer in inspiration to other predecessors, like Praed. But it’s been a long time since I’ve spent much time with Auden, so I may be wrong.

Jeremy Wikeley, How much depends on the exactness of the spell

The publication of Michael Laskey’s Collected Poems by Smith/Doorstop coincides with his receiving the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry at the beginning of this year. As well as consistently publishing his own poetry across four decades (he is now 81), Laskey is well known for co-founding and directing the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, co-editing the magazine Smiths Knoll for twenty-one years, as a poetry tutor, and as publisher of The Garlic Press, which mainly features work by poets from Suffolk, where Laskey lives.

This edition combines Laskey’s six existing collections and fifteen new poems. Until his recent royal accolade (which ‘completely astonished’ Laskey), his poetry had not gained the public recognition some felt it deserved; an endorsement on the back of the book by Stephen Fry says: ‘Michael Laskey is one of England’s finest poets you’ve probably never heard of.’ Typically, a Laskey poem is a quiet one – and quiet work is often unjustly overlooked or sidelined. This is a pity: Laskey’s poems, I feel, have real lasting power.

I read almost the whole of this 385-page collection outside on a sunny April day, the setting enhancing the poems, and vice versa. I found I then wanted to read the collection again more slowly – as an ‘off-duty’ reader rather than a critic – simply because the poems were a pleasure to engage with and I wanted to spend more time with them. Laskey is a poet who celebrates, even ‘thrives on’, he explains in ‘Quotidian’, the ‘everyday, the humdrum, dull for some’: ‘small’ pleasures; humble, ordinary experience. Craig Raine has called him ‘our poetic Alan Bennett – a genius of, as it were, biscuit barrels and wry grief.’ As Andrew McCulloch has pointed out though, on introducing Laskey’s poem ‘The Lawnmower’ as the TLS ‘Poem of the week’, ‘The world Laskey describes may be familiar […] but its images are far from cosy’ or complacent: the interplay of real familial emotions and failed connection that he often depicts, especially between parent and child, is (in McCulloch’s brilliantly exact observation) ‘softly tragic’. He is like a more domesticised Larkin – a poet who also had the sensitivity to see, and to reveal, the beauty and the interest in the so-called ‘dull’ moments of our lives. As Larkin remarked in an interview with John Haffenden: ‘I don’t want to transcend the commonplace, I love the commonplace, I lead a very commonplace life. Everyday things are lovely to me.’ Laskey’s own attention to the commonplace extends to the word itself: he wittily points out in ‘Quotidian’ that he doesn’t like this ornate, Latinate synonym: ‘not a word / I’d choose, actually one I avoid – / […] it contradicts / what it means’. Obfuscation is not part of Laskey’s poetic project.

Nicola Healey, Thriving on ‘the humdrum’: Michael Laskey

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), wrote Arthur Symons in 1904 in the Atlantic,

was twenty-six, the age of Keats at his death, before he wrote any original verse. He then wrote two poems to two ladies: one out of a bitter personal feeling, the other as a passing courtesy; neither out of any instinct for poetry.

From inauspicious beginnings, how strangely things fall out. Through the last three years of the eighteenth century and into the first decade of the nineteenth, Scott followed these first amateur attempts with translations from Goethe and collections of traditional ballads in two volumes of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. His narrative poem Lay of the Last Minstrel — begun in 1802, published in 1805 — was followed in fairly rapid succession by the 1808 Marmion (of which “Lochinvar” remains the best-known section), The Lady of the Lake in 1810, and four other long narrative poems. All this output made him, temporarily, the most famous poet in of his era.

What rendered Scott’s poetic fame so temporary? Short answer: the appearance, in 1812, of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. There was, Symons wrote, “a more popular poet in England,” and his name was not Scott, but Byron. Though Scott continued to write verse — his final long poem, Harold the Dauntless, would appear in 1817 — he turned his energies to prose and the completion of the story that became Waverley, the first of his historical novels, published in 1814.

At this juncture we could ask, as Symons did, whether Scott hadn’t really been a novelist all along: not a poet after all, but a mere “improviser in rhyme,” whose true charism was prose narrative. Certainly the verse by which he had made his name had narrative as its first end — though as we might reflect, casting our minds back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, poetry was telling stories almost before it was doing anything else. It’s not as though the narrative impulse somehow canceled out the poetry; Scott’s own narrative poems drew directly from the tradition of the medieval romance. And yet if Scott’s poems were as popular as they were, it was because

they were so like novels. They were, what every publisher still wants, “stories with plenty of action;”and the public either forgave their being in verse, or for some reason was readier than usual, just then, to welcome verse.

Scott’s turn to the novel, then, simply dispensed with the need to go through the motions of verse — at which Byron was better, anyway — in order to deliver what the public really wanted: “stories with plenty of action.” No need to make those stories rhyme and scan, if the musical pleasure of verse wasn’t the first principle of composition and integral to the generation of the narrative.

If those narrative poems of Walter Scott had been successes, then — in dispensing with the effort of poetry altogether — Scott with his gift for a rousing good tale could and did make the novel popular, in a way that even his own action-packed poems, as poems, had not been. “The fact is,” wrote Symons, “that skill in story-telling never made any man a poet” — not, again, that “skill in storytelling” ever made any man not a poet, either. The question is one of priority and proportion, and of what the indispensable element in a given literary work actually is, for both writer and reader. For Scott, and for his readers, that indispensable element was action, not music.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Proud Maisie

Those trained up in civics and classical political theory — which, with the decline of philology, may well be a good majority of intellectuals with a leaning toward the traditional — would tend to take Yeats to be describing something akin to thumos, the kind of drive toward that Tennyson’s Ulysses has. Major Gregory seeks some reward, even if it’s a hidden fame, and such rewards are of necessity defined by the social order. “Man is by nature a political animal,” as Aristotle put it, and nobility is found in the polis, and the virtues of the great soul are in life lived among others.

That is, on its face, absent from the Irish airman. He confesses a social location: “My country is Kiltartan Cross, / My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor.” But he’s deliberately left them behind, willing to fight for the British with whom he feels no connection, to seek some entirely individual experience — not just an impulse of delight, but a lonely impulse of delight.

He lacks, for example, the virtue of bravery we think expressed most clearly in self-sacrifice, the willingness to give up one’s life to save another. Oh, he’s obviously brave in the sense of having willingly entered the sphere of war, where life and death are brought to the sharpest point. But the thing he finds therein is sheer experience, as felt by someone with the rare gift of sensibility — a figure great enough to feel the heightened sense of the moment. He wants not fame, I think, or glory, but the perfect balance of the now:

I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

This is not a social claim, a placing in a political order, but a metaphysical thing, new to humanity in the modern order — born of the highly self-conscious self of modernity. He seeks not Tennyson’s newer world but the sheer perfection of the experienced now in the life and death of war.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I dreamed of a dead friend.
We did not touch. We spoke.

I was deaf. We looked at art,
though I was blind. This morning,

the roses are pink and smell
of rain.

Sharon Brogan, Snapshot Poem 10 June 02026

“The Intentions of Thunder” is a collection of new and selected poems from Patricia Smith. It is deliberately substantial, both in terms of the number of poems and the depth of poetry. The collection draws from “Life According to Motown” (1991), “Big Towns, Big Talk” (1992), “Close to Death” (1993), “Blood Dazzler” (2008), “Shoulda been Jimi Savannah” (2012), “Incendiary Art” (2017), “Unshuttered” (2023) plus uncollected poems. It is nearly impossible to provide a flavour of the range of poems that the collection covers. Picking favourites is easy but would render this review far too long to read. […]

Patricia Smith is a poet of witness, determined not to let her community go unheard or unrecorded. That doesn’t make her worthy or dull, on the contrary, she has a playfulness and a deft control of form, whether that’s a ‘choose your own adventure’ choice of sonnets on Emmett Till or recording the aftermath of Katrina without letting politicians off the hook. “Intentions of Thunder” is a book to return to, each visit bringing a new reward. It’s lazy to describe her as heir to Gwendolyn Brooks. Smith has long stepped out from that useful mentorship and found her own strong, compelling voice. But it’s useful to let Brooks have the last word, writing that Smith’s work is “direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome.”

“The Intentions of Thunder” is available from Bloodaxe. If you’ve not read any Patricia Smith, this is an excellent place to start.

Emma Lee, “The Intentions of Thunder” Patricia Smith (Bloodaxe) – book review

Still Life with Sorrow & Joy, Lana Hechtman Ayers, The Poetry Box, 2026

What a lucky thing to have poet-friends.

I had two big deadlines at the end of May (didn’t quite make them, but almost);  I’m teaching another Creative Retirement Institute Class (on William Stafford, and it’s going beautifully); and I seem to have forgotten all about being a blogger. But then comes this package in the mail, two books from none other than the Lana Hechtman Ayers, managing editor (and one-woman dynamo) of the Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, MoonPath Press, and World Enough Writers. […]

Penelope Scambly Schott calls Still Life with Sorrow & Joy ” a joyous celebration,” full of both grief and delights. The collection plays with form, pays tribute to other poets, dreams wildly, and blends paeans to beloved pets with longing for lost two-legged loved ones. The poems are all about love, though at times they keen over our failure to love enough. In the very short, “Night Vision Goggles,” we get these three bare lines: “All we do not understand / could fill battlefields — // and does.”

Bethany Reid, Lana Hechtman Ayers, STILL LIFE WITH SORROW & JOY

Near the end of Eclogue 9, Lycidas, who is keen to continue singing despite Moeris’ obvious sorrow and reluctance, points out that they’ve reached the tomb of Bianor, the half-way point of their journey, where the farmers are stripping the foliage. He suggests they should put the kids they are carrying down here and pause for a song.

hinc adeo media est nobis via; namque sepulcrum
incipit apparere Bianoris. hic, ubi densas
agricolae stringunt frondes, hic, Moeri, canamus;
hic haedos depone, tamen veniemus in urbem.

Here’s Heaney again:

We’ve come half-way.
Already you can see Bianor’s tomb
Just up ahead. Here where they’ve trimmed and faced
The old green hedge, here’s where we’re going to sing.
Set that creel and those kid-goats on the ground.
We’ll make it into town in all good time.

Once again, what sounds pragmatic is also allusive. In Theocritus 7, a tomb — in that case of Brasilas — similarly marks the half-way point of a journey. But the name Bianor itself comes from Homer (Iliad 11.86-92), where he is, like so many of those words in Callimachus’s epigram for Heraclitus, a hapax, a name that appears only once. His death, which sets off the battle that ends with the death of Patroclus, takes place, we are told, at that hour in the day when woodsmen at work cutting trees in the forest feel the longing to rest and eat. In his enthusiasm, Lycidas is, as it were, suggesting a Homeric pause.

Moeris refuses: he says they have to get on and there’s no time to waste. In that, he is rather like Meliboeus in the first eclogue, who is being cast out in such a hurry that he has had to leave behind two new-born kids, twins who are the spes gregis (“hope of the flock”), forcing the mother goat to go on without them. There is no solace there of the kind offered by Heraclitus’ poem, in which one twin accompanies the mother in death and the other stays with the father. Here in the ninth eclogue, though, they are carrying the kids with them; and though Moeris does not want to sing any more himself, he hopes that Menaclas will yet take up the song.

Virgil is not sure that songs endure. As Heaney says himself in his fine essay on pastoral, the question of the Eclogues is that of Shakespeare:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

He’s not sure, but he hopes it might be so.

Victoria Moul, All these songs I have forgotten

— One of those books I own and will never let go of is Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebooks by W.S. Di Piero. In some ways, it doesn’t look like much, it’s a slim volume, but some of the thoughts it holds have changed me, helped me, opened me up. The style of writing, the form, these too have been useful.

— I’ve quoted from it before at length, but today this:

“The offices of poetry. To use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity. To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumour, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic vicious wind tunnel ideologies. To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, over against opportunistic mendacity. If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it really is marginal or beside the point.”

— Published in 2017, that could be from yesterday.

— Everywhere you look, enshittification, mediocrity. (For this is what degenAI is). But good poetry is the opposite of that, good art of any sort. I think, and I’ve said this before and should probably just stop, that there is no point in talking about the lousy stuff, but to just give space to great art, great literature etc.

Shawna Lemay, The Offices of Poetry

Wordsworth began his “Ode” in 1802. It’s a poem that embodies his philosophical stance on childhood vision and its eventual loss, implying that what has been forfeited must first be named before it can be recovered.

Could there be a more problematic condition for a poet? If it’s the poet’s job to pay tribute to states of feeling (as Wordsworth writes in the Preface, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquility,”) then their success hinges on the ability to see and sense deeply, to recollect clearly and attentively.

And these are the poem’s opening lines. He’s set high stakes for the rest, which documents Wordsworth’s departure from a world of wonder to a world worn smooth by sight. Adulthood strips away that “freshness of a dream,” leaving the poet feeling less able, maybe even less inclined, to write about the world with the same appetite and astonishment.

Coleridge, Wordsworth’s longtime collaborator, talks about this risk in Chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria. He praises his friend in Preface to Lyrical Ballads and credits him for tuning Coleridge’s own sight “to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarly and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”

I love the phrase “the film of familiarity,” which suggests that time dulls the senses, reducing one’s sensitivity to the world’s wonder, yes, but also reducing one’s capacity for empathy, “ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”

I’m sometimes asked why I chose to research wonder—saying my PhD was on the role of wonder in poetry does sound slightly like I apprenticed myself to a unicorn paddock for four years. Here’s why: the potential and incentive for renewing wonder is serious business. It transcends the individual and speaks to the larger human project, to the belief that deep inquiry into individual experience may lead to greater appreciation of collective experience, and that this appreciation is vital for humanity’s survival.

The more we wonder, the less of an appetite we have for destruction, Rachel Carson argued. Poems are the perfect wonder vehicles. They are wonderfully efficient and cost-effective wonder delivery systems.

Maya C. Popa, What Adulthood Forgets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Fate of Wonder

I went on a long hiatus from writing, a sort of starvation, somewhere around the start of the pandemic. I can’t tell if this was a totally conscious choice, but I knew my writing life needed a deeper anchor.

I am slower now. I rarely submit my work. And when I do, it’s because I feel truly called to the journal. I speak and read when it feels aligned. I write because I want to. I work on projects that feel like I am alive. I say no to opportunities that are extractive and dulling, even if they are shiny.

I spend a lot of days not writing. I read a lot. I live. I celebrate other writers. I write books and pieces that have no intended publisher and no end goal. I am working on a memoir in a time when “no one wants memoir unless you’re a celebrity,” bla bla bla.

I am doing it because I would rather die than not.

Some of this is also about being tired, older, chronically ill, and overstimulated without social media and expectation. Some of this is that my life has expanded, and I am nourished beyond art. But most of it is that I burned myself out on myself.

Writing is a gift. We don’t have to do it. Literally, we don’t have to be here. Like, we can quit. We get to do it. We want to do it, right? We get to be the arbiters of pure and total consciousness. We get to reach into the river and feel the current. And we get to translate it. What a joy to crawl back into the creative self as a joy and not as a form of proof or punishment.

Lisa Marie Basile, There are two writers within me—and they are eating each other alive

Just write it out of you. Write anything, don’t even try to get to the new. Have no goal to heal the the pain you think is in you through the writing. Just write any damn thing that comes before your eyes. Fictionalise it. Steal. Be the bad guy for once, but just write and in a while as you keep writing it will start to be enough. I don’t know or care why. Nor do I want you to write a book or monetise your pain in some way. Just fucking write, and forget healing, forget being a writer, a poet, a thinker, someone with an opinion. Let the writing fill up the page without all these things you think you are and it will raise you up just by you having written, and without you getting in your own way.

John Siddique, Write It

I remember crossing out poems in the school booklet because we weren’t doing them.

I remember “Bean green over blue”.

I remember the poetry editor who said of a rival: “We must crush them.”

I remember the poet who paused mid-reading to savour the word “ontologically”.

I remember the poet who was sarcastic about skiing holidays to the festival organiser.

I remember finding rhymes.

I remember fridge poetry, but not fridge poems.

I remember the poet stuck on a bus texting about what it meant to send a text saying “I am here”.

I remember “Fire-fangled feathers dangle down”.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, I Remember Poetry

That was the invitation of the final prompt: to imagine a future self, ancestor, spirit, object, animal, place, or other presence watching over a moment from our lives. What might they see that we could not see then? What language might they use for our seeing? What might their gaze loosen, bless, protect, question, or refuse?

During the session, I found myself writing about the “birdbath” visible from our apartment balcony. I say “birdbath,” but what I really mean is the sizeable dip in the parking lot asphalt that becomes a watering hole after rain. Birds gather there for hours, splashing, pausing, lifting off, returning.

The prompts kept asking us to shift perspective, to let looking move from the self to elsewhere and back again. Here’s a haiku that came from that space:

robin in a puddle
my eyes from there
an afterthought

I like that the poem lets the looking happen away from me. The robin does not need to become symbol, messenger, or metaphor right away. It gets to be there first: in the puddle, in the after-rain, in its own attention. My eyes arrive later, almost beside the point.

That feels like one lesson I’m carrying from the workshop: sometimes looking as a way of writing means letting the self become secondary, decentered long enough for the world to look back.

José Angel Araguz, post-workshop thoughts: my eyes from there

Morning light tints the walls
the same color as what leaks into the streets.
You swing your feet over the side of the bed
and they look for slippers, as if they had that
small, separate autonomy. What does it mean
to live without asking, or expectation? Your arms
slide into sleeves, lift a cup of water to your lips.

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

I reckon as necessity
every day to curse

though the devil
never attends

being so fine a poet
he is in our prayers

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 14 June 1663.

in the city is a city
missing bread
for an old swan

a public faith made of fear
begins to decay
like a body in a car

voices of money not yet known
expect to be done
with disputes

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 13 June 1663.

in heat beyond imagination
a falcon I could not see

and all night a cold wind
blowing through my head

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 12 June 1663.

measuring pleasure
I have found more aches

wine that may not last
the afternoon

cushions that are too little
for any use

friends that I am not
so fond of now

on the longest day in the year
unpleasant to visit

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 11 June 1663.

going into the country
one could land

in the little life of a clown
for old women

the half moon so moveable
as they play at cards

every day in the cellar
with the wine of the house

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 10 June 1663.

after some war
the rules come out
and I learn to walk at night

after my appointment with the door
I stand still and dance
in my mind

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 9 June 1663.

the right to be other
than I used to be

depends upon having
nothing that is mine

and some may think
a place is missing

when it is only put
in another place

a walk in the garden
becoming sea

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 8 June 1663.